“If it’s nothing important, I’ll be on my way.” This was not a place worth lingering in.

“Diao Zhuo!”

“Call me Uncle.” He didn’t look back.

“Are you going back to the mining zone?” Meng Xiao’ai ran up and blocked his path. “Look — I came all this way, and I don’t know anyone here. Your colleague said you’d be off work once you got back from the fieldwork. Why not take me around for a couple of days?”

Diao Zhuo didn’t answer and walked straight toward the elevator.

“Diao Zhuo!” Meng Xiao’ai caught up and grabbed his arm. “I’ve checked — I know you’re not married, and there’s no child in the picture. Master Ba was lying to me. You saved me from the desert. I’m grateful to you, and also! I… I’ve realized I’m quite fond of…”

“Master Ba?” Diao Zhuo repeated the name, a faint smile appearing in his eyes.

Four o’clock in the afternoon, on the shores of Ranwu Lake, Tibet.

Another heavy snowfall had come down on the road back from Renlong Ba Glacier, covering both sides of the route in white. The towering mountains were sealed tight under ice and snow, forming a stark contrast with the black asphalt road below. In the distance, the surface of Ranwu Lake was frozen over with a thick layer of ice, and through the slightly thinner ice at the center, the clear, jade-green water beneath was faintly visible.

“When you come in autumn, the lake water is murky. After spring, once all the snow melts and the water from the glaciers and snowfields flows into Ranwu, that water… looks like fruit jelly dyed blue-green.” Ba Yunye said, talking as she drove.

The three passengers in the car had just hiked through Renlong Ba Glacier and had been frozen to the bone, crying out in the cold. They were still shivering now and had almost no attention to spare for her introduction. They asked, trembling: “Why is it so cold here…”

“Look around you — high snowcapped mountains on all sides. If you come in October, you have to run the electric blanket halfway through the night just to keep from freezing awake.”

“Achoo!” One of the passengers let out a thunderous sneeze. Clearly, it was genuinely cold.

“You three really are something. Started the hike at ten in the morning, didn’t get back to the starting point until three in the afternoon. The slowest passengers I’ve ever taken. If I were walking by myself, I’d probably have made it back in time for lunch.” She laughed and teased them, while unobtrusively glancing in the rearview mirror. The black Jeep Cherokee that had been trailing behind them all the way from Lhasa was still there, a distance of two to three hundred meters, vanishing around each bend only to reappear at the next.

Compared to the nearby and more well-known Laigu Glacier, Renlong Ba Glacier sat inside a small uninhabited zone. It required crossing a river, and after snowfall the roads were prone to slipping and getting stuck. Even during the National Day Golden Week, very few people made the trip — let alone now. From morning to afternoon, their vehicle had been the only one that had gone in. With the bitter cold and the Tibetan New Year approaching, the Tibetan locals who normally set up checkpoints to collect tolls were nowhere to be found. And that Jeep Cherokee had been following them since morning — it was clearly not tourists.

The car stopped in front of a hotpot restaurant she was familiar with. Ba Yunye bustled about like a mother hen, filling disposable cups from a thermos of hot water. Cold and flu powder gradually dissolved inside, each cup turning coffee-brown in color, with faint wisps of white steam rising above the rims. The three passengers, frozen through, teased one another while puffing out their cheeks to cool the liquid in their cups, taking small tentative sips.

“You all drink up first — you absolutely cannot let yourselves catch cold. Before we arrived I told the owner to stew a chicken for you. Look —” she gestured toward the steaming kitchen. “The chicken is one they raised themselves, stewed in a Motuo stone pot. Have a taste later. Whatever else you want to add to the pot, just tell the owner yourselves. I’m… going to the bathroom.”

As she spoke, Ba Yunye moved quickly into the restroom and locked the door. Above the restroom was a small window, about halfway up the wall. With a light spring, she pulled herself up and peered out just slightly. The three men who had gotten out of the Jeep Cherokee were looking in their direction for a good while before walking into a small Sichuan stir-fry restaurant across the road, where they took seats near the window.

Ba Yunye climbed out through the window. It was all done in one fluid motion, without a single pause — as easy as a child playing make-believe.

She had already scoped the area out. The shop next to the restaurant was being renovated. She went in, picked up two planks of wood, trimmed them to shape with a saw, hammered two iron nails into them, and trotted out to crouch down and place them under the rear wheels of the Jeep Cherokee. Then she moved to the front wheels, pulled out a small knife she had hidden in her pocket, and thinned the sidewall of the front tire.

When it was all done, the corner of her lips curved upward in a silent, cold smirk. A flash of brazen edge showed through — dare to follow me, and you’ll pay the price. She retraced her steps, leaping and scrambling like a monkey — nimble as ever — and climbed back in through the small restroom window. She rejoined her passengers, eating and chatting as if nothing had happened.

After eating haphazardly for a while, Ba Yunye finally thought to check her phone, which had been without a signal for several hours. There she found a message from Diao Zhuo sent at midday, saying he had arrived and telling her to open the door.

She blinked, instinctively looked outside, and then — after a long pause — her mind snapped back, and she gave a darkly indignant guess: What the hell, this man wouldn’t have cheated on me, would he?

An image surfaced in her mind: Diao Zhuo, his back to her, holding a woman in his arms. The woman was holding him back too, her fingers slender and delicate, nails painted red. Diao Zhuo was kissing her neck. The woman was smiling. Ba Yunye couldn’t see her face — only her small red lips, slightly pursed, entirely soft and coquettish. Ba Yunye’s mood plummeted as though a bucket of ice water had been poured over her from head to toe. She wasn’t someone who hadn’t been through the highs and lows of relationships before, but there was one principle that never changed: when in a relationship, both feet had to stay on the same boat. If the distant water couldn’t quench the nearby fire, it was better to part on good terms sooner rather than later.

As if sensing her thoughts, the phone rang in the very next second.

Ba Yunye dropped her chopsticks, stepped away from the passengers, and walked to a corner before answering. Without waiting for him to speak, she fired off questions in rapid succession: “Did she open the door for you? What’s happening now?” She checked the time — it had been more than three hours since his message. “All done, I assume?”

“Where are you?” He didn’t answer a single question, and instead turned it back on her.

“What does it matter where I am?” she replied irritably. “Where are you? Who opened the door for you? Whose number did you accidentally send your little hookup invite to?”

She was angry.

Diao Zhuo: “Apart from you, who have I ever hooked up with?”

“Don’t give me that — empty words prove nothing.” Ba Yunye pushed back, pressing down a bellyful of fury. She felt like a soldier about to charge into battle, spear raised, aimed straight at the enemy line. She was just about to launch her attack when she heard him recount the whole story of Meng Xiao’ai coming to find him at the work site. She was so astonished that she couldn’t process it for a long moment. “— You couldn’t get through to me, thought I was waiting for you in Kashgar, rushed off like a man possessed, and then came crawling back empty-handed?”

“Remove those adjectives for me… over a hundred kilometers round trip, wasted for nothing.” Through the phone, alongside Diao Zhuo’s voice, came the sound of machinery and the grinding scrape of falling rocks. It seemed that after his wasted trip, he had thrown himself back into work’s embrace.

Ba Yunye was stunned. The indignation in her heart gradually faded. “You… left her sitting alone in the hotel?”

“Are you suggesting… I should have had a good time before leaving?”

Ba Yunye automatically imagined Diao Zhuo and Meng Xiao’ai together. A wave of tingling ran up her scalp and the heat rose to her nose — she nearly got a nosebleed. She pinched her nose. “That’s… not what I meant. What I mean is, she came all that way to find you — I’d hate for something like going missing or getting lost to happen again, and then the police would come knocking, and that ‘Driver Diao’ of yours would become famous nationwide.”

He gave a quiet huff. “Since I have no interest in her, the more I stay and the more I say, the more time I waste for both of us.”

“She didn’t cry?”

“She cried.”

“And you?”

“I didn’t cry.”

What a pointless question! Ba Yunye was caught between tears and laughter. “You really don’t consider a girl’s feelings at all.”

“If I tend to her feelings, who tends to yours?”

Ba Yunye was stumped. She knew his handling of the situation, though harsh, was best for everyone — especially for her, beyond any objection. Still, she fumbled out: “At least… treat her… treat her to a meal?”

“Is that why she came — for a meal?” The uncompromisingly direct man spoke nothing but plain truth.

Ba Yunye’s mood brightened. She couldn’t help teasing him: “True enough. Given that you’d already wasted over a hundred yuan on petrol, buying a meal would just be throwing away another hundred.”

“You can reimburse me.”

“What does any of this have to do with me?”

“It does.”

“Master Ba! You need to come back, we’re almost done eating!” The passengers called out to her. She quickly called back “Coming, coming!” and then said dismissively: “It’s just a hundred yuan. I’ll send you a red envelope later as a reward.”

“Pay me back? Hmph…” he said, “When we meet in person, we’ll settle this properly.”

“…”

Ba Yunye faked a cough to cover her embarrassment, hung up the phone, adjusted her expression, put on a deliberately serious face, went back and sat down, and pretended to stir the food in her bowl. In truth, she had no idea what she was eating — her mind was completely occupied with the few lines she had exchanged with Diao Zhuo. Thinking about how he had believed she was waiting in the hotel and driven straight to Kashgar, she couldn’t help but lower her head and smile secretly.

“Master Ba, it’s clearly winter outside…” One of the passengers blinked and pointed at her, “…but looking at you right now, it seems like spring has arrived.”

The second blown tire — Li Haozhang slammed his palm furiously against the steering wheel. “Damn that Ba Yunye!!”

After watching Ba Yunye drive away with her passengers, their car had barely pulled out of the restaurant when both rear tires went flat simultaneously. On inspection: an iron nail in each side. After managing to find someone to patch the rear tires, the sky had already turned dark. Then, on a mountain switchback road, while swerving to avoid an oncoming vehicle, he had slammed the brakes hard, and the front tire blew as well. Getting out to check again, he found that the sidewall of one tire was extremely thin — nothing like normal wear and tear, but clearly done deliberately.

They had never taken their eyes off her the whole time, yet from the moment she had walked into the restaurant, she had never been seen walking out. How on earth had she managed it? Nobody could say.

What else would go wrong with the car next? Nobody dared to predict.

Ruthless. Absolutely ruthless.

Only now did Li Haozhang truly understand what He Zhengren had meant when he told him “don’t treat Ba Yunye like an ordinary woman.”

“You lost her?” Over the phone, He Zhengren’s tone was entirely calm, as if he had expected this all along.

“I’m sorry,” Li Haozhang said, full of shame. “We were spotted by her. She… is truly not an ordinary woman.”

“Go directly to Lijiang and wait for her there. Be discreet this time. The Spring Festival is almost here — keep watch for whether she goes back to Pu’er. According to the Hippo, she goes back every year without fail.”

“This year… the usual arrangements?”

“As usual.” He Zhengren said. “After all these years, someone with Ba Yunye’s temperament — why has she put up with ‘bereaved family members’ coming to her door to make demands? Because she’s not sure in her own heart whether her elder sister got involved in an affair. The day she starts fighting back is the day her thinking has changed, and we’ll need to give her more ‘attention.'”

Li Haozhang nodded. “Understood.”

“Boss, do we move out now?” The other two men in the car asked.

Li Haozhang waved his hand. “We’re done following her. Get the car sorted and head straight to Yunnan. Once we reach Lijiang, we split into three groups. I have something to take care of. You two keep an eye on the two guesthouses run by Renlong Duoji.”