The Lost Tomb : Extras & Special Stories

(Extra Story: 2016 Chinese New Year Special) Chapter 5: Running Account

I hesitated for a few minutes, but didn't click on the message. It wasn't that I was afraid, I just felt that there wasn't a need to open it at this time. I had spent most of my previous life eager to explore all kinds of possibilities so that I could prepare myself before I met my fate.

When Fatty asked me what was wrong, I smiled and said that Lei Benchang had sent us a New Year's blessing text. Fatty let out an exclamation and said that the old man was really pitiful.

I turned my cell phone over and put it on the stove as I went to keep busy.

With Xiao Hua's help, we set a table full of dishes that were steaming hot and emitting a delicious aroma. I had put a lot of thought into every dish so that they would look like a sunflower after they had been placed, with the yellow in the middle and the green in a circle around it. Although they were all local products with similar tastes, everyone was starving after the long journey and climbing the mountain road. They moved their chopsticks and started shoveling the food in.

The Spring Festival Gala was playing on the TV. When my parents were in the city in years past, they would watch it in the living room. I went into my room to surf the internet and wait for the sound of the firecrackers to pass. This time, the Spring Festival Gala would have to be background noise.

During the dinner, Fatty asked Xiao Hua about his business while Xiuxiu waited on the elders who were talking about family affairs. Poker-Face was just staring at the TV, seemingly mesmerized by the Spring Festival Gala (or maybe it was all irrelevant to him).

How did he spend his previous years? Or, since he had such a long life, did he have a larger unit of measuring the passing time than just a year? Maybe our lives were set out in a large grid, and it was the second hand of his life that had just ticked.

I speculated that the Zhang family probably didn't celebrate the New Year. The year was the biggest step forward in our lives, and we had lost so much of it, so we had to savor it and leave an impression. But that didn't necessarily mean anything to the Zhang family.

I was feeling very emotional when I thought of this, but I had learned not to get entangled in these unchangeable things.

My parents were very quiet in the beginning, and only said some polite words. As the younger generation, we all toasted our elders. My mother got a little wine in her and started channeling the director of the local committee of the Women's Federation. At an extremely slow speed, she began to summarize the mistakes she made when educating me, and then slowly shifted the topic to me. Uncle Two was very smart and quickly found a topic to interrupt my mother's speech, saying that he was incompetent as an elder, and the previous generation left me with all kinds of problems. But those who needed to apologize the most were gone, so he could only say it instead. He drank a glass of wine and looked at me. "You have so many friends here, you can also say something."

Everyone looked at me eagerly with a bit of sick pleasure on their faces. I looked at Uncle Two and thought to myself, the last time I performed in front of people was when I was eight years old. Now that I'm almost forty, what am I supposed to say? We all know each other so well at this point. I stood up, picked up the wine, looked at the roof beam, and said, "I'm sorry. Thank you." Then I drank the wine.

In fact, these were the only two sentences I wanted to say, and they were the only two that could represent all my thoughts. Xiao Hua patted my back to show that he understood.

After drinking, I looked at Fatty. He was afraid that I was going to make him give a speech, so he immediately stood up and said, "Today is a really happy day. Let me sing you all a song. But since the elders are here, I won't sing something from my repertoire. I recently learned a new song called the 'Song of the Five Rings' [1]."