Daomu Biji: Restart

I looked at the turbulent sea and couldn’t help thinking that the storm clouds hovering just off shore were very scary. They still looked like a black line now, but once they hit shore, they would look like huge, dark tsunami clouds. We could clearly see the clouds’ boundaries due to the rain and lightning hanging under them and the sunshine at the edge.

Liu Sang looked at his watch and grabbed the air with his hand. "There are still ten minutes."

"What the fuck are you trying to do? You want to lie to us again?” Fatty asked angrily.

Liu Sang didn't look at him, but quietly continued, "Do you think I'd bother coming if Wu Erbai only paid me to lie to you? You guys are really used to thinking you're so special. Those thirty hours were merely dessert. I have serious things to do."

Fatty looked at me and grinned, "This pretentious prick is definitely your Uncle Two's son. Otherwise, he wouldn't dare act like this in front of you."

I looked at Liu Sang. He was sitting upright and still, his whole being exuding an extremely calm aura. I waved my hand. Liu Sang seemed to be in his element, so I wanted to see what he was up to.

Fatty and I sat next to him, but Liu Sang never turned his attention to us again. He watched the storm clouds approach bit by bit and then slowly removed the tarp that was sitting off to the side. It had been covering a shrine with a god inside.

Liu Sang stood up and put the shrine where he had been sitting just now. He then lit three short incense sticks and knelt down. Countless lighting strikes exploded from the dark clouds behind the shrine.

"Little Brother kneels to the mountain and he kneels to the thunder. This is fucking plagiarism,” Fatty started to whisper to me. But just before he finished, a loud crack of thunder drowned out his voice and the heavy rain came pouring down. The sound of the rain hitting the sea was so loud that it distorted any sounds that reached our ears.

Liu Sang finished paying his respects and then took out a clipboard from under the shrine and walked to the beach. Oil paper (1) sat on top of the clipboard, which he used to shield his head.

Fatty looked at me, but I shook my head. I wanted to stay here and keep out of the rain.

As the dark clouds continued approaching, more loud thunderclaps soon began reaching us at the hotel. The clouds were hanging very low over the beach, the windows were shaking, and it felt so good to see the lightning like this. The thunder was rumbling in such a way that people needed to be in this kind of environment in order to fully understand what "rumble" actually meant. It was completely dark now.

I looked at the dark clouds and remembered the countless times when I had focused my attention on listening to thunder. Then I looked at Liu Sang in the heavy rain and suddenly felt a kind of empathy well up within me.

Fatty was praying on the other side of me, "Strike this grandson to death, strike this grandson to death."

I walked into the rain and headed for Liu Sang, which startled Fatty a little bit.

The distance was only thirty steps, but the cold rain immediately soaked my neck as I rushed out into it. It was my first time seeing the dark clouds so low, and I almost felt as if I could reach out and touch the lightning. I looked up and let the heavy rain hit my face.

The impact of the falling raindrops as they hit my face one by one was so heavy that it actually hurt. At that time, I suddenly understood something.

I walked to Liu Sang's side. Every time the thunder sounded, he tilted his right ear to the sky and then immediately turned and tilted his left ear up. His eyes were vacant, and when the lightning flashed, I couldn’t see a trace of spirit in them. His hand moved quickly over the oil paper, leaving a lot of marks that I couldn't make sense of.

I looked at him and also began listening to the thunder in the sky. The thunder sounded strange and was completely unlike anything I had heard before.

I continued to listen as I looked at Liu Sang standing amid the huge flashes of lightning.

I realized that it wasn’t weariness that made me lose my original caution and fear, but an imperceptible conceit that made me look down on life and death. I could no longer feel the compassion and empathy from the old days. In fact, it was what I had been trying to find in recent years. Too many memories, too many experiences, and too many reincarnations made it easy for to me calm down in any situation.

My grandfather said that wise men were always confident that mountains weren’t mountains and water wasn’t water just because that’s what they looked like. At that time, I just thought my grandfather was idolizing Zhang Qishan too much.

Later, I realized that this was on a whole different level. It basically meant that people always resisted the bad things and tried to see through the truth. But some people said that mountains were mountains and water was water because that’s what they saw.

I suddenly hugged my head and fled back to Fatty's side at the hotel. "What are you doing?” He asked me. “Why’d you come and go like that? Did you get scared?"

"You have to take cover when it rains," I said.

"You’re practically beaming. When you were listening to the thunder just now, did you hear a cry of ecstasy?" Fatty asked.

"Where’s the nearest vegetable market?" I asked him. Fatty was bewildered for a moment, so I had to explain myself, "We’ll cook dinner for Uncle Two and the others."

****

TN Notes:

(1) Paper made translucent and waterproof by soaking in oil.