The morning breeze stole a moment of summer coolness. As Li Zhuiyuan brushed his teeth by the water vat on the second floor, he happened to see Tan Wenbin, clad in a vest and athletic shorts, run down the dam with high knees, beginning his morning jog. Tan Wenbin had maintained this habit for six months. Humans truly are creatures of endless potential.

A year ago, Tan Wenbin was still a restless young man who stole money from his mother for game consoles, tucked adult comics into his textbooks, hid explicit magazines under his covers, and liked to tuck a cigarette behind his ear to feign maturity. Now, he was a disciplined youth who studied diligently during the day, practiced martial arts devotedly at night, and considered his forty-minute morning jog a form of meditation and enjoyment.

Due to his illness, Li Zhuiyuan sometimes felt a sense of disorientation and unreality looking at himself in the mirror. If Tan Wenbin could see his year-ago self through a mirror, he would likely stubbornly claim that the person inside must be an illegitimate child his father had left behind due to his youthful indiscretions. He’d probably add, “Look at that ugly mug, definitely impure bloodline.”

After washing his face, he returned to his room. Ah Li was standing at her drawing table, painting. The girl was painting a landscape, featuring not only grand natural scenery but also a large dam. This wall was covered with paintings; there were four or five versions of just the cross-river bridge from Nantong to Shanghai. One version depicted the bridge bustling with traffic above the river, while below, Baijia Town was eerily spooky, a perfect blend of reality and the ethereal.

At the other end of the drawing table was the boy’s desk, piled with professional books, and below it, several cardboard boxes filled with research materials, plans, and design blueprints. These were only the ones currently at hand; many that Li Zhuiyuan had already finished reading and studying had been sent to the east room to enrich Ah Li’s collection boxes.

For the past six months, Xue Liangliang had essentially served as Engineer Luo’s secretary. Engineer Luo himself had been in a project development phase, frequently attending symposiums and presentations across various locations. Whenever he came near Nantong, Xue Liangliang would take a day or half a day off from Engineer Luo, under the guise of delivering study materials to his junior brother. Tan Wenbin’s pager only received messages from two people: his father, Tan Yunlong, and Xue Liangliang. Brother Liangliang would always page Tan Wenbin, then leave the items by the Yangtze River. Runsheng would have to ride his tricycle a long way to retrieve the materials and design plans, and also bring Brother Liangliang a clean set of clothes. In this way, the more frequently Xue Liangliang came to Nantong, the more materials Li Zhuiyuan accumulated.

Additionally, Engineer Luo would periodically mail Li Zhuiyuan journals, magazines, and other non-confidential, higher-level reference documents. At the same time, he would give the boy assignments, asking him to create his own designs. For convenience, multiple tasks were assigned concurrently and mailed together, and then Li Zhuiyuan would grade them and send back his replies. It was as if both sides were competing: one desperately “absorbing” and the other frantically “pulling sprouts to help them grow” (an idiom for pushing too hard for quick results). Li Zhuiyuan had reason to suspect that the “university major courses” he was previewing were already a bit beyond the scope.

No matter how brilliant a genius, achieving mastery in any field requires deep engagement. For the past six months, “studying” had indeed consumed too much of Li Zhuiyuan’s time and energy. But there was nothing he could do about it. As long as the entity under the peach orchard remained undead, he would have nothing to do in the village. Now, whenever a normal drowning victim surfaced, Runsheng, Tan Wenbin, and Yin Meng would all rush to retrieve the body. Even Great-Grandpa had become a hands-off manager. As for those walking corpses that could come ashore on their own, they truly hadn’t been seen for a long time. Had he not experienced it firsthand, he would have wondered if it was merely a delusion from a past period of mental instability.

When he grew tired of drawing blueprints, Li Zhuiyuan would stand up and go to the girl’s drawing table, while she would leave her drawing table and come to his desk. Li Zhuiyuan would pick up a paintbrush and relax by drawing, while Ah Li would look through the design blueprints. The girl could understand them; otherwise, she wouldn’t be able to paint what she did. Furthermore, she seemed to possess a natural, special sensing ability, transforming cold data blueprints into dynamic flowing water in her paintings.

Li Zhuiyuan had even created a painting using Ah Li as his muse. However, the boy still couldn’t paint Ah Li’s front, so he only depicted her back. In the painting, the girl stood at a mountaintop, facing a turbulent river, with ancient common folk below and behind her. This composition would be very suitable for a mural depicting a water burial. This was the boy’s way of entertaining himself during his tedious studies. Then, upon waking the next day, a boy’s silhouette had been added next to the girl in the painting. They were even holding hands. The art style instantly transformed into a kindergarten wall painting. In reality, they were still just children, fundamentally no different from other village kids playing with mud, except their “mud” seemed a bit more advanced.

Li Zhuiyuan had finished deciphering the *Qi Clan Spring and Autumn Annals*. The further he progressed, the more difficult and time-consuming the deciphering became. Li Zhuiyuan later realized that the book likely had a cipher key. Otherwise, if it required such immense effort even with his deduction and calculation abilities, it would be impossible for ordinary members of the Qi clan to understand the characters, let alone study it, without half a lifetime of dedicated research. The cipher key was likely a fundamental inherited item of the Qi clan, similar to the Liu clan’s *Liu Clan Qi-Gazing Art*. Because he lacked this item, Li Zhuiyuan had to resort to the most laborious method of brute-force deciphering.

The book itself was a kaleidoscope of mechanisms. Once deciphered, it contained records of mechanisms and spatial techniques, skills that the Qi clan ancestors relied on for their livelihood. Even within the clan, it had to be kept secret, passed down only on a small scale, because it involved the secrets of countless tombs. If leaked, it would surely incur the wrath of ancient authorities. The book was valuable, but for Li Zhuiyuan currently, it was somewhat useless. His major was hydraulic engineering, so he didn’t need to design “security” or “anti-theft” systems, as large hydraulic projects were always guarded by troops. Compared to ancient times when tomb-robbing gangs were feared, today’s defense concerns were against aerial missiles.

However, while it seemed useless now, it would certainly be useful in the future. The old professors at the faculty compound had helped him decipher the coordinates in the bamboo slips. Although three locations were still ambiguous, their approximate positions had been determined. From the Northeast to Yunnan-Guizhou, from grasslands to deserts, from the Hundred Thousand Mountains to the Thousand Island Lake, from basins to plateaus, and even in rivers and the sea. The vast geographical span of the coordinates astonished Li Zhuiyuan as he looked at the map. Yet, the masked man from the Spring and Autumn period, even after becoming a walking corpse, had carried these bamboo slips with him, which surely implied a secret.

Moreover, one of the coordinates on the bamboo slips was surprisingly close to the *Ji’an 572 Civil Defense Project Survey Report*, very likely referring to the same location. This meant that Engineer Luo’s cherished “white moonlight” was also one of the nine coordinates recorded in the bamboo slips. This made Li Zhuiyuan wonder if the three documents Li Lan had given him half a year ago in Beijing, which corresponded to the sea, Ji’an, and Fengdu respectively, also held some deeper meaning. Li Lan, who had fully succumbed to her illness and believed she had shed her humanity, was still continuing her work. What kind of purpose could she be harboring? Li Zhuiyuan found it difficult to empathize with her way of thinking, and he dared not try. But from an indirect perspective, there must be something deeper attracting Li Lan to pursue it.

Unfailingly, Aunt Liu was the one who kicked off each day: “Breakfast time!”

Li Zhuiyuan, holding Ah Li’s hand, went downstairs. A small blackboard hung by the living room door on the first floor. It was originally used for temporary bookkeeping, like how many tables and chairs one family needed, or how many paper figures another. Most of the time, it was unused. But three months ago, Li Sanjiang solemnly wiped the blackboard clean with water, picked up a piece of chalk, and very seriously wrote “Pot Hundred Days.” After being told “壹” (one in formal Chinese) was written incorrectly, Great-Grandpa simply erased it and changed it to “100 days,” continuing to decrease it with Arabic numerals thereafter. This board, of course, wasn’t for his great-grandson to see, as his great-grandson had already been admitted early, and the relevant proof had been enshrined by Li Sanjiang under the statue of a revered sage in the small partitioned room. Li Sanjiang had written this for Zhuangzhuang (Tan Wenbin’s nickname). Today, the number “3” was newly written on the blackboard.

Tan Wenbin returned from his morning jog, showered by the wellhead, and changed into clean clothes. It must be said that even if his corpse-retrieving martial arts only amounted to physical fitness, that was only in comparison to a prodigy like Runsheng. He came from a family of police officers, his physical genes were already good, and combined with diligent training and a hearty appetite, when shirtless, he was no longer a scrawny chicken but noticeably strong and compact. Yin Meng’s coffin-making skills were impeccable; sleeping inside was truly warm in winter and cool in summer. Every night, Tan Wenbin and Runsheng slept in coffins, one belonging to Li Sanjiang and the other to Grandpa Shan. The reason Grandpa Shan’s coffin was still kept here was that Li Sanjiang worried if it were sent to his home, Shan Pao (Grandpa Shan’s son) might gamble away his money and sell the coffin. Anyway, it would be soon enough to have Runsheng deliver the coffin when Shan Pao kicked the bucket. Runsheng wholeheartedly agreed with this.

“Why is there still a holiday tomorrow?” Li Sanjiang asked, puzzled, as he puffed on his cigarette. “The college entrance exam is just around the corner.” Tan Wenbin replied, “Great-Grandpa, our school isn’t a test center for the college entrance exam. We have to go to a test center school. We’re getting two days off to prepare, and then the day before the exam, we’ll all go to the test center school together and stay in their dorms.” Li Sanjiang asked, “Can we bring you food?” “Yes, if we don’t stay in the test center dorms, we can even go home.” “That’s good then,” Li Sanjiang flicked his cigarette ash. “I’ll have Ting Hou prepare rice cakes and zongzi that day, and I’ll bring them to you on the morning of the exam.” “Hehe,” Tan Wenbin didn’t decline, just smiled. “Do well on the exam!” Li Sanjiang patted Zhuangzhuang’s shoulder. “Studying is good, truly, studying is good.” “Don’t worry, Great-Grandpa, I’ll be fine. I put your address for the acceptance letter. After you’ve seen it, I’ll take it home for my parents to see.” “Haha!” Li Sanjiang laughed heartily. “Zhuangzhuang’s good. He didn’t waste all the food I fed him.”

After breakfast, Runsheng rode out the tricycle, and Li Zhuiyuan and Ah Li got on.