The Lost Tomb Vol. 7

Chapter 35: Running Water

I didn't know what he meant by "nest" and thought that maybe I had misheard and what he had said was "slot" or some other word [1]. It started to rain at this time, and the people were busy at the delivery office. We didn't want to wait long, so I helped load the goods onto the pickup truck without asking any questions, and then we drove into Chengdu in the rain.

The pickup truck was smaller than my Jinbei car and its wheels were only the size of a washbasin. Once it got going, it even tended to drift. Xiao Hua told me to endure it until we got to the city. The mud road at the back of the mountain was soon replaced by yellow dirt that was still hard to drive on. I told myself that it was really in line with this kind of work. No matter how flashy you were in the market, you had to be like a thief when you got to the property. In the hustle and bustle of the business, this line was like a seesaw, and it was rare for everyone to be able to balance it.

Chengdu was a wonderful city. When I was in college, some classmates came from here and talked about Sichuan's beautiful women and snacks, which made us drool. One word that best described this place was "comfort", but I was afraid I wouldn't have the chance to enjoy it this time.

The truck took us into a small alley in the north part of the city, where the main entrance of Sichuan University could be seen from the street. The inside was full of old yellow cement houses and their appearance seemed to have undergone the transformation of the old city. They were embellished in several places, which made the old buildings seem usable but congenital. But when you looked carefully, an old house was still just an old house. There was a small guesthouse at the end of the alley that was lacking the usual signboard. The only thing it had on the door was a simple board with the word "accommodation" written in red letters that was stirring in the wind.

We stopped the truck and walked in, bypassing the shabby front desk (if that thing could be called a front desk). I suddenly found myself in a bright corridor lined with very elegant European decorations. The floor was all solid wood and both sides of the corridor were covered in oil paintings. Xiao Hua told me that this was their base in Chengdu. The guesthouse wasn't open to the outside world, and if anyone were to ask, there wouldn't be any rooms available at all. The signboard was just a cover, and this place was actually full of people from all over the north and south.

We went to our room, took a bath, and relaxed. That evening, a local Sichuan Tangkou man took us to eat Korean steamed buns and stroll through the old streets. We had butter hot pot as a midnight snack, but it was my first time eating it at night and I ended up gargling six or seven bottles of beer to get rid of the spicy feeling. The back of my head soon felt numb and I almost passed out.

The most interesting thing was that I couldn't find the toilet in the restaurant. I asked a girl, but maybe I had drunk too much and my words were slurred, because I said "Here's the toilet" instead of "Excuse me, where's the toilet?" The girl immediately became angry and cursed in the Sichuan dialect: "Fucker, I'm not a toilet!" Xiao Hua busted out laughing.

This was a typical tour-style experience, and I got to enjoy the local sights in the fastest amount of time. Plus, since I was a guest and Xiao Hua was the host, he had to quickly take me around his usual haunts.

We left Chengdu early the next morning and got on the freeway without saying a word. It was during this period of time that I realized that I enjoyed this kind of long journey. I wasn't sure why, but even though Xiao Hua didn't deliberately talk to me or anything, I didn't feel as if the atmosphere was strange or awkward

Maybe it was because our backgrounds were so similar, but I felt as if he was a reflection of myself.

Like this, we closed our eyes and slept, or stared out the window at the mountains, the clouds, and the sun. The scenery changed slowly, the mountain got higher and higher, the road narrower and narrower, and every time I woke up, I found the scenery around me was more and more rural. That night, we stopped and switched to a Jeep with better cross-country performance, officially entered the mountain path, and drove another night in the dark.