Around midday, Ba Yunye walked out of the Lianhua Supermarket alone, hauling two cases of mineral water, a case of yogurt, and a large bag of fruit and snacks. Passersby couldn’t help but stare — which female powerhouse was this mighty?
She set everything down one by one, then pulled out her phone to check. No messages from Diao Zhuo — he probably hadn’t found any useful information in the local chronicles yet. Not wanting to dampen his spirits, she didn’t press further. She slung Fu Yingtao’s backpack over her shoulder, grabbed the yogurt and fruit, and headed to the city hospital. She found the ward; sure enough, there was no one keeping him company — only a nursing aide who appeared to have just delivered his meal. Seeing that a visitor had arrived, the aide simply left on their own.
Fu Yingtao was poking at the food the aide had bought with his chopsticks, wearing the expression of disdain that Ba Yunye knew all too well. In just two days apart, he had lost a great deal of weight. His eyes were deeply sunken, his stubble unkempt — he looked considerably older.
Ba Yunye had barely set her things down when a bespectacled doctor pushed the door open, turned sideways to check the IV drip bottle, scribbled something in a notebook, said nothing of significance, and turned to leave.
“Why did you come.” Fu Yingtao was sullen, not a trace of a smile on his face — he didn’t seem particularly welcoming.
“Your backpack is in my car. I’m returning it to you. There may not be anything particularly valuable inside, but at least this way you won’t suspect me of making off with it.” Ba Yunye sat down on the edge of the bed and matched his cold expression. “I’m leaving tomorrow — we probably won’t meet again. I heard Chief Fu is recovering reasonably well. That’s something, considering we practically carried you down the mountain ourselves. More exhausting than giving birth.”
“You don’t need to keep reminding me of that, as if you’re my savior.” Fu Yingtao was completely ungrateful, appearing to have given up on all pretense. “I heard it was your man who called the police. I just want to ask — since you both discovered early on that someone was trying to harm me, why didn’t you tell me? Why did you allow it to continue the whole way? If I suffer any serious consequences from this, I’ll sue both of you together.”
“Old Fu, do you know why I got into a fight with you?” Ba Yunye raised her fist, her form of address shifting. “I wanted to keep you at base camp — stop you from summiting. We’re not the police. We heard a few scraps of hearsay and couldn’t just declare you were in danger, then go stirring up trouble in front of you. You wouldn’t have believed us anyway — you’d have gone back and sued us for defamation. I once told Fu Xingyue: when a person is determined to walk a crooked path, and fate pulls them back with everything it has but still can’t stop them — when they walk straight into a dead end — that’s destiny. What a pity. Her temper is just like yours. Ten bulls couldn’t drag either of you back.”
Fu Yingtao gave a hollow, mirthless laugh, wearing the look of someone who no longer cared about living. “I know exactly how you’re mocking me in your heart. I worked so hard to raise her, devoted so much effort to her education and career, terrified she wouldn’t turn out well enough. You probably don’t know this — she’s not my biological daughter. If it weren’t for me, she’d still be suffering in some rural village, unable to even get into university. Not only does she feel no gratitude toward me — she actually tried to harm me! I exhausted myself for all these years and raised nothing but an ungrateful wretch. I deserve to be laughed at by someone like you.”
“Someone like me?”
Fu Yingtao’s gaze was vacant, but his words were vicious — “No upbringing. No manners.”
“I don’t know what your idea of upbringing and manners is. I wasn’t raised by you, and you have no right to concern yourself with whether I have them or not.” Ba Yunye felt she had done more than enough. There was no point in prolonging a conversation going nowhere. She stood up and said, “There’s no rule that people owe each other undying loyalty or a lifetime of gratitude. She never asked you to take her in. What makes you think you’re owed gratitude? To put it bluntly — right now, you owe all of us your life. Since you didn’t die, you’d do well to seriously think about why so many people wanted to take it!”
“Who do you think you are, lecturing me?!” Fu Yingtao erupted in fury. “I won’t be spoken to like this by someone with no education and no respectable employment…”
Bang!! Ba Yunye had already walked out of the ward and slammed the door shut behind her with force, cutting off the rest of his words. “If your backpack weren’t still in my car, why would I put up with this…”
She hadn’t even finished her grumbling when Diao Zhuo’s call came in. Her anger evaporated in an instant.
“Hey there, handsome!”
“1974.” He went straight to the point, the figure landing before she had time to brace herself.
Ba Yunye was stunned. “You… you’re certain?”
Diao Zhuo had photocopied the relevant pages from the local chronicles and explained everything to her. “On June 24, 1975, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake struck near Tosun Lake. Because the affected area was quite remote and sparsely populated, there were no casualties, but it altered many rivers and lakes. The terraces and floodplains of a tributary of the Chumar River east of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway shifted left-laterally, forming a small lake. That tributary is the river we saw in the photograph. Afterward, although several other earthquakes occurred in Qinghai, none of them affected the Chumar River or its tributaries. From this, we can determine that Yuzhu Peak was photographed before 1975.”
Ba Yunye had completely forgotten Fu Yingtao’s tirade. Her heart leapt with excitement. She asked as she headed downstairs, “How do you know it’s specifically 1974?”
“In October 1973, the Chinese Academy of Sciences established the first glacial monitoring station on Yuzhu Peak. It wasn’t until August 1982 that a second one was set up, on the north face. On the route from the south face base camp to Camp 1, you can’t photograph a station located on the north face — so the monitoring station in the photograph is precisely the first one, established in October of ’73.”
“The monitoring station was established in October 1973; the earthquake that displaced the river occurred in June 1975 — so when the photograph was taken, ‘July of such-and-such year’ must be July 1974!” Ba Yunye’s eyes lit up. “In that case, the message conveyed by the three photographs is… 7440417? What is that? Could it be a phone number?”
He lowered his voice. “Not convenient to discuss over the phone. We’ll talk in person.”
“You’ve worked hard.” She said sincerely.
He gave a quiet laugh. “Think about how you’re going to reward me.”
Judging from Diao Zhuo’s tone, he seemed to know what the numbers meant. Ba Yunye was heading cheerfully toward her car when she realized her hands were empty — she must have left her car keys in the ward along with the backpack, the fruit, and everything else. She turned back, pushed open the ward door with great reluctance, crept inside, and braced herself for a fresh round of shouting.
Complete silence.
She looked carefully. Fu Yingtao had his eyes closed, half-reclining on the bed. The bespectacled doctor who had come to check the IV drip earlier had his back to the door and was adjusting the flow regulator of the drip bottle. She headed straight for her things — found her car keys pinned under the plastic bag of fruit — grabbed them without a word and turned to go.
Something wasn’t right.
She glanced back. Fu Yingtao lay with his eyes closed, as though deliberately ignoring her, or perhaps deeply asleep. Her gaze instinctively dropped to the meal the nursing aide had brought earlier. Though Fu Yingtao had poked it into a mess, it was clear not a single bite had been touched.
From everything she had observed and come to understand about him over these past few days, this old man would never fall asleep without eating something first.
“Old Fu?” She called out to him.
Fu Yingtao didn’t move. The bespectacled doctor suddenly turned and walked briskly toward the door. “Fu Yingtao!” Ba Yunye raised her voice — even a sound sleeper would have woken at that. Seeing him still motionless, her heart lurched. She rushed over and pressed the call button, then spun around and charged out the door. The doctor’s footsteps were hurried — he disappeared quickly around one end of the corridor.
Fu Yingtao’s attending physician and several nurses came running. Ba Yunye thought to herself: that bespectacled man really was suspicious. The moment the doctors and nurses entered the room, urgent calls for emergency rescue rang out.
Without any doubt — Fu Yingtao had been struck again.
Ba Yunye stood outside the emergency room answering police questions. The corridor surveillance footage showed that after Fu Yingtao had been admitted, a doctor wearing glasses and a mask had loitered outside his ward multiple times, seemingly waiting for the right moment. The instant Ba Yunye left, finding no one else in the room, he entered immediately. When Ba Yunye came back, he fled in a hurry.
All of it was like something straight out of a television drama.
Ba Yunye overheard the officers murmuring among themselves — they had traced a man named Han Mu, who had arrived in Golmud a few days prior, and the doctor on the surveillance footage was highly likely to be him. She didn’t know who Han Mu was, but from the practiced ease with which she’d seen him handle the IV bottle, he was clearly someone with a medical background. On further thought, this Han Mu was probably the mysterious figure pulling the strings behind Fu Xingyue and Jiang Ao’hang.
No one knew what Han Mu had covertly slipped into the drip, and Fu Yingtao was still in emergency treatment. The police cast their net wide, and by the time Ba Yunye left the hospital, word had it that they had already pinpointed Han Mu’s location.
Ba Yunye filmed a short clip of police cars howling away from outside the hospital building and posted it with the caption: “The net of justice is vast; though its meshes are wide, nothing slips through.” Almost immediately, likes and comments flooded in. Many former clients asked where she was; the other drivers at the club crowed gleefully, asking whether she’d landed herself in some kind of trouble with the law.
In the past, A’Shui would have been just like the other drivers — teasing her relentlessly, never letting a single post of hers go unacknowledged. But now, every one of his accounts was utterly silent.
“You useless River Horse — if you’ve got the nerve, come out and face me!” She fired off a furious message to him.
Two crisp knocks on the car window. Ba Yunye snapped back to the present, unlocked the door, and Diao Zhuo climbed in holding a large envelope. She gave him a vivid, embellished account of how Fu Yingtao had been poisoned again and was still not out of danger, and Diao Zhuo shook his head. “…Either the family falls apart or someone ends up dead, and in the end everyone loses — no one comes out of it with anything.”
“From what I hear, everyone who needed to be arrested has been arrested. We don’t need to worry about that anymore.” Ba Yunye pointed at the large envelope in his arms. “Is that the material you brought back? What does 7440417 actually mean?”
Diao Zhuo unhurriedly produced a pencil and wrote on the envelope:
CAS: 7440-41-7
“CAS…” Although Ba Yunye was no scholar, this particular combination of letters felt strangely familiar — she had a memory of seeing it written all over her eldest sister’s notes. “Isn’t this… a chemical identification number!”
He gave a nod. “Every chemical substance has its own unique CAS number. I had always assumed the separators in ‘YN, N, M’ were simply Chinese pause marks — until I had all the numbers and began thinking differently. My grandfather had been paralyzed for many years. When he was dying, he summoned every last bit of strength to write, but his force and precision were limited. Apart from the few legible letters, those separator marks that resembled pause marks might not have been straightforward punctuation at all. I tried replacing them with other similar characters, and bearing in mind his field of research, I realized what he had written as ‘YN, N, M’ was actually YN-N-M.” Diao Zhuo tapped the tip of his pencil lightly on that row of numbers. “CAS 7440-41-7 is the rare metal—”
He pressed down hard and wrote a single character: Beryllium.