"Oh, that wide-laughing fox. When I told him about it this morning, he wasn't particularly interested." His mother also grew interested. "Does Qinglian like it too? It's a worthless little item anyway. How about you place it on your desk as an ornament? I'll have Shutong bring it to school for you tomorrow?"
"Tonight," Zhang Shutong interjected. "Just give us the keys to the office."
"It's already seven o'clock..." His mother glanced at her watch, feeling exasperated that iron couldn't turn into steel. "You should let people sit down and rest a bit after finishing their meal, yet you're rushing to run outside again!"
This isn't my own intention.
Just as Zhang Shutong was about to shoulder this black pot, Lu Qinglian spoke up instead:
"Sorry to trouble you, it is I who wanted to go see it."
"In that case..." His mother hesitated for a moment before nodding. "Alright then, you two eat some fruit first. I'll go change my clothes, and we'll drive there."
Yet Zhang Shutong hadn't prepared to bring his mother along:
"The two of us going will be enough."
His mother lost her color once more.
She carefully studied him for a moment but didn't speak, instead turning around to head out to the balcony:
"Come help me grab something, I can't reach it..."
Zhang Shutong knew this meant she was looking to question him alone.
"Tongtong, have you suddenly seen the light lately?" It was as if his mother was getting to know him for the first time.
"There's official business," Zhang Shutong had no choice but to say. "Both of us are very interested in that fox, just treat it as archaeology."
"How can you..." His mother was clearly a bit reluctant. "How long has it been since the plaster cast on your arm was removed?"
"I'll definitely be careful. But," Zhang Shutong observed his mother's expression, "isn't our house a bit far from the company..."
"Then I'll drive to send you two."
"Too much of a hassle."
"Out with it if you have something to say."
"Could you give me the keys to dad's motorcycle?"
"In your dreams." His mother flatly refused. "Alright, alright, come quickly to help me find something."
It actually turned out to be looking for something.
At the far end of their balcony was a small utility room, its shelves piled high with items. Zhang Shutong stood on his tiptoes to hug a box down. Before he could open it to look, his mother spoke up:
"Don't look, it's that girl's shoes. I washed them long ago."
"Oh." Only then did Zhang Shutong recall that ever since the time she sprained her ankle, Lu Qinglian's shoes and socks had been at his house all along.
"Why is it so heavy?" Zhang Shutong weighed the box.
"You actually discovered it so quickly? Then take a look."
His mother folded her arms with a proud look.
Zhang Shutong opened it to look; besides Lu Qinglian's original cloth shoes, there was actually a brand-new pair of cotton boots inside.
Needless to say, his mother must have bought them matching the measurements of the cloth shoes.
"When did this happen?"
"Bought them at the mall today. I felt Qinglian would look very cute wearing them."
Yet Zhang Shutong had a bit of a headache. He wanted to say that Lu Qinglian was a bit different from ordinary girls; in fact, she had mentioned to him more than once that she wasn't particularly willing to continuously accept other people's goodwill.
Furthermore, what did they say when topping up the phone bill? Accepting this one would make it easier to decline if there were others. He hadn't expected to dig a pit for his mother instead.
He related these matters to his mother, and his mother also found it a bit difficult:
"Then what should we do? I originally wanted to give her a surprise, and a pair of shoes isn't considered particularly valuable, right? I even wanted to buy her a coat..."
"How about you go tell her it's to thank her for saving me last time or something?" Zhang Shutong said casually. He had always held great confidence in his mother's emotional intelligence.
His mother thought about it, but extended her hands to directly hug the box back:
"Let's hold off on gifting it for now."
She quickly made a decision.
"What's wrong?"
"You don't understand." His mother merely rolled her eyes at him. "That pair of old sneakers of yours can suffice for now, and there will be opportunities sooner or later."
Zhang Shutong felt his mother's move was very clever, and asked her why she didn't mention the avalanche to Lu Qinglian, wouldn't it make their family seem ungrateful?
Yet his mother said:
"Mention it? Why wouldn't I mention it? But who brings up this kind of thing right off the bat? Do you really think your mom is stupid, making the atmosphere so heavy from the very beginning? How can anyone enjoy a meal happily then? She would absolutely never come next time."
She expressed her disdain again: "In the future, seek more guidance from your dad. Your dad wasn't like this back in the day either... Alright, let's go, don't keep people waiting for long."
"The office keys," Zhang Shutong reminded behind her again.
"Did you two discover that rock relief from underground?" his mother suddenly asked.
"Yes," Zhang Shutong had initially thought she had some clue, asking hurriedly, "Is there any correlation with the statue?"
"The correlation is that you, this brat, never let me stop worrying." His mother glared at him. "The frame is so dark, if it's not underground, where else could it be? Where did you run off to explore again?"
"At any rate, it's not the middle of nowhere, there's no danger."
Yet his mother cast a deep look at him, without saying anything.
She didn't forcefully keep Lu Qinglian at home to drink tea, instead packing the fruit well just like last time and sending the two of them down to the building's entrance.
Zhang Shutong went to push the bicycle, because his mother wanted to exchange a few words with Lu Qinglian alone and told him to be tactful and stay away. Zhang Shutong could only shrug his shoulders. When he pushed the bicycle to the entrance, he heard the woman speak in a low voice:
"...Qinglian, Auntie has always been very grateful to you. I am his mother, yet at this moment I don't know what's best to say instead. At that time, I originally intended to bring some items to the temple to visit you, but he absolutely refused to let me go. This child has been stubborn since childhood; as long as it's something he's set his mind on, even I can't pull him back. Don't look at how tall he's grown now, he was actually a crybaby when he was little..."
Before Zhang Shutong could feel touched, his eyelids jumped:
"Mom!"
"Shut up!"
his mother said furiously.
"I won't speak further, speaking more makes me seem like a nagging old woman." His mother muttered a sentence, before saying softly toward Lu Qinglian:
"It is Auntie who was a bit selfish... but I will have to trouble you to expend more care in the future."
Zhang Shutong couldn't help but want to speak up again, but his mother raised her hand:
"Catch."
She had just hurriedly wrapped herself in a trench coat before heading downstairs. At this moment, she pulled something out from her pocket and tossed it casually, her long, wave-like hair swaying along with the movement, looking somewhat dashing.
A parabola traced through midair. Zhang Shutong instinctively extended his hand; it turned out to be a cluster of keys, which he knew were the office keys.
But it wasn't just the office keys; there was actually another one, which Zhang Shutong was all too familiar with—it belonged to the motorcycle.
He froze for a moment, initially wanting to ask his mother why she had changed her mind again.
"Be careful on the road."
The woman waved her hand and stepped up the stairs.
Without turning her head back even once.
...
"Say, do you think my mom guessed what we are about to do?"
The motorcycle had been chugging and rattling a moment ago, but fell silent in the next second. Zhang Shutong pulled out the key and took off his helmet.
"Perhaps." Lu Qinglian also took off her helmet, shaking out her long hair.
Zhang Shutong thought after the fact that she was truly his birth mother; even if you told a lot of lies, she could distinguish the truth from the false based on a single feeling alone.
"You shouldn't have said those words to her." Zhang Shutong referred to the matter of the anxiety disorder. "It made her start getting paranoid along with you."
He instinctively carried a touch of a helpless tone, and Lu Qinglian naturally didn't take up the words.
Now they had arrived outside the office.
Though called an office, it was actually a research institute-style building, right next to a construction site.
There was a security booth at the entrance of the institute. The sound of the motorcycle alerted the old gatekeeper inside, who came out to shine a flashlight:
"Oh, Little Tong."
Zhang Shutong shielded his eyes:
"Coming to retrieve an item, sorry to disturb your rest."
He had come to deliver items to his mother plenty of times in the past.
The two entered the main gate smoothly. The interior of the institute was pitch black. Despite being a newly constructed building, it was paved with granite flooring that carried a great sense of age. Following his memory, he located the third room in the corridor.
This was a single-occupancy office. The moment one entered the door, the desk could be seen. Zhang Shutong first scanned it, finding an item about the size of a beverage bottle, which should be that fox statue, but his mother's desk was too messy, making it difficult to confirm.
He groped around again to find the light switch, flicking it with a clack.
The fox was smiling directly at them.
Zhang Shutong's heart instantly skipped half a beat.
That fox was placed on the desk but faced toward the door. He couldn't help but complain about his mother's wicked taste—was it to scare others? It was something she was fully capable of doing, or did she herself find it eerie too?
A wide-grinning fox, a completely silent room, the fallen night sky, and the pale white lamplight... it was indeed very eerie.
They came before the desk, studying the statue for a brief moment.
The species couldn't be discerned—to be honest, analyzing the species of a fox statue was also quite strange—a statue just a bit shorter than a forearm, made of some sort of stone material:
"Can you see anything?"
Zhang Shutong picked up the fox and inspected the base, which likewise bore no markings.
"The measurements are a very good match though." Lu Qinglian compared it with the photo.
"Looking at the appearance of this thing... no matter how I look at it, it doesn't look like a guardian beast."
He felt a malevolent god was more like it.
But this was strange. If it really was some malevolent god, then the legend of the green snake should be a story where the green snake suppressed the malevolent god to protect the small island...
This thought surfaced in his mind once more, and Zhang Shutong asked again:
"Was there any record of this in the temple previously?"
"If there were, I would have told you long ago."
"You've also raised five foxes, right?..." Zhang Shutong said with deliberation. "What do you think of this number?"
"A coincidence," Lu Qinglian said. "When they were very small, I ran into them."
True enough.
Zhang Shutong immediately recalled that on the night they captured the poachers, the police had indeed recovered the carcasses of the other few foxes.
But this number still made him feel strange.
Zhang Shutong hadn't felt much about the deaths of those few foxes at the time, but only later did he understand what it meant to Lu Qinglian.
He shifted the topic:
"It feels smoother than anticipated... what I mean is, I even thought that when we arrived, the fox might have just been stolen by someone."
"You indeed ought to have a good night's sleep." Lu Qinglian had already gripped that statue. "Let's go."
"If we put it back, can it be understood as returning it to its original place?"
Lu Qinglian nodded her chin slightly.
"If it's returning it to its original place, then why were they separated in the first place?" Zhang Shutong knit his brows before relaxing them again. "Forget it, thinking about this now is a bit like crying over spilled milk, since it's only one after all..."
At 7:30 PM, they parked the motorcycle at the entrance of the hospital.
Lu Qinglian still walked in front while Zhang Shutong followed behind her, continuously studying that statue. This object had been buried underground for too long, its surface long since covered by a layer of soil.
Zhang Shutong sniffed it; an earthy scent, but no other odor.
Lu Qinglian had already walked to the side of the tunnel. Zhang Shutong placed the statue on the ground, stepping forward to lend a hand.
At this moment, the phone rang; it was a call from Qingyi:
"Hey, Shutong, where are you right now?"
"What's up?" Zhang Shutong wedged the phone with his face.
"The two of us have come down to Ruoping's building, how come there's no one at her home? Are you guys together?" Du Kang's voice echoed through the microphone again.
"No." Zhang Shutong was a bit dazed. "What do you mean no one?"
"I brought Qingyi to find her, but her home clearly has the lights on, yet nobody answers when we knock..."
"Is her family's car downstairs or not?" Zhang Shutong thought of it in a flash.
"Driven away. It shouldn't go so far as having an accident inside the house, right? Maybe they went to the commercial street to eat? Forgot to turn off the lights, but it's already seven o'clock..." Qingyi said in bewilderment, "Sigh, if I'd known, I would have come earlier. I'll hang up first and try calling her again."
Only then did Zhang Shutong recall that he hadn't called Ruoping to offer an apology yet.
He looked at the fox beside his hand and let out a sigh. Composing a message on his phone, he walked into the underground depths with Lu Qinglian.
Pressing the send button, the chat bubble kept spinning in circles.
There was no signal underground.
When he raised his head again, Lu Qinglian's figure had already vanished at the fork.
Zhang Shutong tucked away his phone and quickened his pace.
Lu Qinglian held the flashlight up front while he lagged a few steps behind, scanning his surroundings.
The footsteps of the two echoed through the tunnel.
Logically speaking, they had already visited this tunnel several times, so there was nothing to fear, but bringing a bizarre fox statue down here caused his back to feel a bit chilly.
Although he knew it was because the wind had picked up at night, the night breeze pouring into the entrance of the tunnel, allowing roaring sounds to be heard in his ears.
Silently, they made their way.
A few minutes later, Lu Qinglian brought her footsteps to a halt before the platform.
Zhang Shutong had assumed she was preparing to hand the flashlight to him so she could free up both hands to climb inside, but she stepped her body sideways instead.
That meant letting him go first.
"You go in first," she said calmly. "I will help illuminate the way for you."
Zhang Shutong didn't think too deeply about it. When he established a footing inside the cavern and turned his head back, the beam of the flashlight was merely lowered a bit, and Lu Qinglian remained standing in place without moving.
"You're not coming in?"
"A single statue, it is enough for you to go in."
Zhang Shutong nodded. If some strange anomaly were really to occur, he actually didn't harbor much expectation either; it amounted to nothing more than drawing a full stop to a busy day, so he could also get a good night's sleep after returning home.
He glanced at the rock wall again. The positioning for placing the statues should follow an order. That wide-grinning fox was the third one on the rock wall, which meant he just needed to place it into the third pit hole.
He couldn't help but look back at Lu Qinglian once more.
The young girl was merely focusing her stare intently on the statue in his hands, completely unlike the lack of interest she claimed.
Zhang Shutong's hand paused briefly.
It seemed...
Some parts weren't quite right.
One had to know that every time they came down, Lu Qinglian was always the first—the first to walk down the tunnel and the first to climb onto the platform. Yet during this instance alone, she had said nothing, simply standing calmly outside the platform.
And she refused to take even a single step further forward.
"...You really aren't coming in?" Zhang Shutong verified once more.
"Do not tell me your courage is small to this extent." She remained unmoved.
An incredible conjecture surfaced in his mind—
"You couldn't possibly..." His gaze fell upon Lu Qinglian's lower abdomen, and he asked strangely, "be stuffed too full to want to move, right?"
The beam of the flashlight instantly shot toward his eyes.
This happened to be an ultra-high-powered flashlight. Zhang Shutong only felt a flash of white before his eyes, hurriedly shielding them with a hand:
"Hey—"
Yet that flashlight relentlessly followed his face to illuminate, dropping down only after Zhang Shutong turned his body completely away.
"You had better be quicker." Lu Qinglian said in a cold voice.
"Just livening up the atmosphere, apologies, apologies."
Zhang Shutong muttered. He had indeed held a sort of ominous premonition just now, but it felt much better now.
Forget it, school was starting tomorrow, so it was better to place it in early. Following this, he still had to send Lu Qinglian home to conclude this busy day, and he could just snap a photo for Su Yunzhi's side to ask if she had any other clues.
With these thoughts, the two exchanged a look. Zhang Shutong aligned the fox statue with the third pit hole and placed it down straight away.
Silence.
Silence.
Still silence.
"It seems nothing..."
Zhang Shutong let out a sigh of relief, yet midway through his sentence, his heart gave a sudden jolt.
The world before his eyes began to tremble violently, as if mountains were collapsing and the earth was splitting. A familiar sensation rushed over, but Zhang Shutong knew this wasn't an earthquake, but rather—
The regression!
It was triggered!
...
"Dear passengers, hello. Welcome aboard this train. This train travels from Island Station to Ji'an South Station. Please take your personal belongings and prepare to disembark..."
Zhang Shutong snapped his eyes open, the cold air enveloping his entire body causing him to shudder.
He raised his head blankly, but what lay before his eyes was no longer a narrow, deep passage, but rather...
A train carriage?
But the greatest problem did not lie here.
Zhang Shutong looked at his own arms, feeling a chill radiating from the bottom of his heart.
Because the chill was being emitted by the air conditioning inside the high-speed train carriage.
This was a summer.
He reflexively looked at the time displayed on the train screen:
August 6, 2017.
This was...
Five years later?
Where was he going again?
But before he could ponder the reason, the train door before his eyes suddenly slid open. It turned out the train had already entered the station. A wave of heat rushed against his face, and people behind him began to squeeze forward. Zhang Shutong froze for a moment, recalling the keyword he had just heard:
Ji'an South Station.
This was the name of the city.
So he was currently traveling to the city?
Thinking of this, Zhang Shutong quickly stepped forward, following the flow of people down from the train. People came and went on the platform, and unfamiliar faces flooded into his sight. The summer heat of August was stifling, making one feel dizzy and lightheaded.
He couldn't care less about finding a shaded spot; only a single question remained in his mind—
Why wasn't it eight years later?
And for what reason did he return to the city five years later? In the original timeline, he should have never returned at all.
Find someone first, right, find someone first to ask a question.
Zhang Shutong immediately opened QQ, but damn it all, QQ wasn't even installed on his phone. He flipped back and forth through several pages before confirming this fact. He flipped open his address book again, but at this moment, a WeChat message suddenly popped up at the top of the screen—
"Have you gotten off the train? My dad has already finished cooking dinner at home."
Who was this again?
The nickname belonged to a complete stranger.
He clicked open the message, his fingers pausing on the keyboard for several seconds before retreating back to the chat list, ultimately offering no reply.
Might as well just ask his mom; he should still be a student right now, so she ought to know something.
Zhang Shutong was just about to exit WeChat, but his gaze lingered on a name, causing him to freeze once more.
The contact's remark name read:
"Qinglian."