Ding Panling had other matters to attend to and needed to leave first. Before departing, he reminded Yi Sa to prepare her luggage for Qinghai in the next couple of days, saying he would arrange for a car to pick her up at the hotel.
He also invited Zong Hang: “You’re the most special one. With you there, things related to ‘them’ should be easier to handle.”
Zong Hang grinned: “If I don’t go, will you kidnap me?”
Ding Panling smiled back: “Of course not, we’ll just keep asking nicely. How could we use force?”
Zong Hang watched him leave, then revealed his little scheme to Yi Sa: “I said that on purpose, to test his attitude—from his response, it seems I have to go whether I want to or not.”
Yi Sa was still dwelling on her earlier setback, her mood deflated: “I just realized how sharp Ding Panling’s mind is. Compared to him, my intelligence is embarrassingly low… Am I a bit stupid?”
She perked up her ears, waiting for Zong Hang to defend her.
Zong Hang responded with surprise: “Who says that? You can’t compare like that. Look how much older he is, twenty or thirty years your senior. Having eaten that many more years of rice, of course, he should think more thoroughly. This has nothing to do with intelligence. When he was your age, he was probably completely clueless—you can tell from his face, there’s no cleverness there.”
Yi Sa glanced at Zong Hang, feeling that no matter what she said, he would always find a way to side with her.
She cleared her throat: “He said my story was third-rate science fiction…”
Zong Hang asked: “Have you ever written a novel before?”
“No.”
“Well, there you have it,” Zong Hang found another angle for awkward praise, “You’ve never written a novel before, and right off the bat you can write a third-rate one—that’s pretty impressive. Some people’s writing doesn’t even make any rate at all.”
Yi Sa almost laughed despite her irritation.
But thanks to his interference, her dejected mood had indeed dissipated by about eighty or ninety percent.
That evening, Yi Sa received notice that departure was set for two days later.
The two days were busy and tense. Besides shopping for supplies, Yi Sa had several other matters to handle.
—Her motorcycle wouldn’t be needed for now, so she temporarily stored it with Ding Yudi, saying she’d retrieve it when she had time, though this “when she had time” would likely be far in the future. After all, air shipping it back to Cambodia wasn’t cost-effective, and buying a new one there would take just a minute.
—Wu Gui had also become a burden. Originally intended for opening Jin Tang, it ended up being useless. The Three Rivers Source region was high-altitude with low temperatures, also unsuitable for its abilities. She had to contact Ma Jiu to arrange a complicated smuggling route back for it.
—She spent some money to get connections at a pet hospital and bought two bottles of animal anesthetics. Though not as good as Chen Tu’s product, it would have to do.
Zong Hang wasn’t idle either. He practiced more diligently than usual and made time to visit Jin Xiu twice, asking about her plans.
Each time, Jin Xiu just silently shook her head.
Zong Hang was anxious but helpless: he had always thought Jin Xiu was the type who could take things up or put them down easily, acting freely and decisively. Now he realized her free spirit was just talking—in reality, she was very indecisive and could drive people crazy with frustration.
She probably wasn’t naturally good at handling difficult situations with no clear solution. When stuck, she didn’t know which direction to take, so she simply didn’t move at all, like a cat frozen in the middle of a balance beam, dazed and waiting for someone else to lead her, waiting for others to make decisions for her.
On departure day, the weather wasn’t good.
It had started raining at midnight, a steady drizzle that hadn’t stopped by morning but had grown heavier instead. Inside and outside the building, everything was permeated with the damp smell of rain-soaked dust. Jin Xiu got up early to see them off downstairs. Probably due to rain-caused traffic, they waited a few minutes before the cars arrived.
There were two SUVs. One carried Ding Xi and Ding Panling, while the other had only a driver, specifically prepared for Yi Sa and Zong Hang.
Surprisingly, Ding Changsheng wasn’t there. When Yi Sa asked about it, she learned that there were over ten cars departing from Taiyuan, and Ding Changsheng was in another vehicle. They would all meet up later at a gas station outside the city.
This arrangement itself wasn’t problematic, but shouldn’t Ding Xi be closely following Ding Changsheng? Why was he suddenly attending to Ding Panling?
While she was puzzling over this, Ding Xi got out of the lead car and first handed Yi Sa a manila envelope: “This just came from the ancestral hall. Uncle Ling asked me to give you a copy.”
Then he turned to Jin Xiu: “I need to go out for a while and probably won’t be back for some time. Do you have any plans?”
He’s asking about Jin Xiu’s plans too.
Zong Hang almost held his breath.
Jin Xiu smiled: “Haven’t decided yet. Might stay here, might leave.”
“That’s good. Have you decided where to go?”
“Not… yet.”
Ding Xi glanced at her, then looked down and unhooked a key from his belt keychain to give her: “The hotel isn’t very convenient. You can stay at my place, everything’s there. If you decide to leave, just put the key in my mailbox.”
Jin Xiu hesitated for a moment before reaching out to take it.
Zong Hang was extremely disappointed. He turned and went around to the other side to get in the car, slamming the door hard.
When the door slammed, Jin Xiu’s face suddenly turned bright red.
After the cars left the hotel entrance, Zong Hang was still fuming: “When I asked about her plans before, she said she hadn’t decided—what do you mean hadn’t decided? She’d already made up her mind, hadn’t she?”
Yi Sa looked down to untie the string on the manila envelope: “Not necessarily. I think she just decided… Can you see what makes Ding Xi so clever?”
Zong Hang was so angry his temples were throbbing: “He’s clever?”
“You both asked about Jin Xiu’s plans, but you asked an essay question where Jin Xiu had to come up with the answer herself. Ding Xi gave her a multiple-choice question—he directly gave her a key, and she could change her mind anytime. Didn’t you hear him say that when she wants to leave, she can just put the key in the mailbox?”
“He gave her a path, and also gave her absolute freedom, no constraints. It’s natural for Jin Xiu to be tempted—who wouldn’t like that?”
Is that so?
Zong Hang hesitated: “Do you… like that kind of thing too?”
How did this turn out to her? Yi Sa snorted: “I’ll walk whatever path I want to walk, and I’ll be free when I want to be free. I don’t need him to give me anything!”
As she spoke, she pulled out the materials from the manila envelope.
The materials were very detailed, with annotations on each page.
It said that there weren’t any new discoveries in the family genealogy: This made sense—people like Jiang Shehu who were obsessed with drifting caves and impulsively stayed in the river source region for three years were extremely rare. Most people from the three families never thought about drifting caves unless they encountered Jin Tang overturning, let alone going to explore in person.
So the people assigned to research in the ancestral hall changed direction and began studying the old objects left by their ancestors, such as pottery shards, wooden slips, and textiles.
This stack of materials was sent by people who were working on pottery jars and shards: They tried sorting through, piecing together, and restoring a pile of broken pottery and made some progress.
The first photo showed a restored but still incomplete pottery jar, its body covered with oval-shaped vortices.
Yi Sa and Zong Hang exchanged glances: This shape looked very similar to the marks left on the ground after a drifting cave “ground door” opened.
The second photo showed three crude line-drawn figures prostrating and worshiping around a central vortex.
The number “three” was too sensitive—three figures, three families, three founding masters, could these three figures be the origin of the three families?
The third photo was also of a pottery jar, but the pattern was somewhat disturbing and quite inconsistent with pottery-age aesthetics: The jar’s body was densely covered with eyes, and some techniques were used during firing to make the pupils of the eyes protrude.
This crude and unrealistic three-dimensional effect was quite physiologically uncomfortable.
Moreover, why specifically emphasize eyes?
Zong Hang shuddered and lowered his voice: “Yi Sa, could it be that ‘they’ are covered in eyes all over their bodies?”
When he was young and watched “Journey to the West,” there was a Hundred-Eyes Demon Lord who, when he took off his clothes, was covered in eyes all over his body. It was creepy and scared him so badly that he couldn’t sleep well for several days.
Yi Sa said: “Don’t make wild guesses, let’s keep reading.”
The fourth photo was also of a pottery jar, with a huge eye drawn on its body, and that wasn’t all—as if afraid people wouldn’t recognize it as an eye, there were several eyelashes above the eye.
But below the eye, it seemed to be connected to… legs.
Zong Hang swallowed. These days, probably because he had experienced so much, his ability to imagine had improved. He could only see a bizarre, large eyeball running around on legs flashing before his eyes, feeling extremely disturbed.
Just a few days ago it was science fiction, how did it turn into a “Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio” style with just a few pottery jar images?
Yi Sa repeated: “Don’t make wild guesses. Ancient people didn’t draw things realistically, they preferred symbolic expression. This image probably means something else.”
After that, there were no more images. The annotations said that the exact date of these pottery shards was unknown, only that the early three families all lived in river valley areas, and these might have been daily utensils from that time, collected and preserved by later generations. Some shards were too worn to make out the patterns, and some, when pieced together, expressed the same meaning, so they selected the four most completely restored ones.
Yi Sa pulled out the photo of the jar covered in eyes again to look at it.
She felt the appearance of these eyes was too abrupt.
She had heard that patterns appearing on ancient pottery were either decorative patterns, life scenes, or totems—she had never heard of the three families having any eye worship.
She hesitated for a moment before dialing Ding Panling’s number.
Looking through the windshield, Ding Panling’s car was speeding through the rain curtain ahead, appearing and disappearing.
Ding Panling’s voice was very gentle: “Sa Sa, have you finished reading the materials? Any thoughts?”
“I don’t understand about these eyes.”
Ding Panling chuckled: “I don’t understand either. Our three families don’t emphasize eyes, and there’s no mention of eyes in any of the Jin Tang opening rituals, yet in the early pottery jar images, two out of four show eyes, and two show drifting caves. It’s quite intriguing.”
“Could there be some connection between things in the drifting caves and eyes?”
Zong Hang beside her made a chopping gesture with the water ghost to “cut” her: She told him not to make wild guesses, but her guess was similar to his.
Yi Sa held her breath waiting for Ding Changsheng’s answer, too busy to deal with him.
“Long Sheng and I received this material first. Initially, we thought the same thing, but later, we had a… very unsettling idea.”
Ding Panling rarely spoke in such a tone, and Yi Sa’s heart immediately tensed: “What idea?”
“I’m very worried that these pottery jar images are in sequence.”