Chapter 29: CH 29

OCTOBER 1, 2021~ 8ONI

Editor : reii

“What are you two talking about?” Li Sinian appeared behind them, holding two bottles of wine.

Fang Daichuan didn’t turn back but Ding Zihui did, and lowered her head and said, “Brother Chuan’er is feeling a little uncomfortable. I’m just accompanying him for some small talk.”

Li Sinian raised his eyebrows and smiled, sat down on the other side of Fang Daichuan without a word, and opened the two bottles of wine. He didn’t console Fang Daichuan, just stuffed a bottle in Fang Daichuan’s palm, and clinked his bottle slightly with his own.

The orange wine inside the glass bottle swished, showing the bottle was full. Fang Daichuan’s scorching gaze landed on Li Sinian, the flames in his eyes becoming brighter. Li Sinian didn’t explain nor thank him. He raised his head and took a sip of the bottle of wine, raised his chin at Fang Daichuan, and motioned him to drink too.

“Join us?” Fang Daichuan shook the bottle at Ding Zihui.

Ding Zihui shook her head quickly and refused. Seeing that they each took a sip of wine, Ding Zihui hesitated, and said to the two of them, “I saw something, I don’t know if I should tell you, but my gut tells me that something will happen if I withhold this information.”

Li Sinian raised his right eyebrow and looked at her.

“Last night, I was actually going to look for the item card outside. But because I was alone, I was scared. When I opened the door and came out, I hesitated for a while and decided to head back to the room.” Ding Zihui had a look of fear on his face. “Later, when I heard noises in the corridor, I became even more frightened. I took a peek from behind the wall and didn’t dare come out.”

She must have seen something. Li Sinian and Fang Daichuan looked at each other. Fang Daichuan took a sip of wine and asked, “What did you see?”

Ding Zihui swallowed her saliva, and lowered her head to play with her fingers. “I saw Du Chaosheng knocking on Niu Xinyan and her son’s door.”

“Du Chaosheng?” Li Sinian raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Not Liu Xin, but Du Chaosheng?”

“It was Du Chaosheng,” Ding Zihui confirmed, she carefully recollected, hoping to restore the scene at that time.

“Du Chaosheng stood at the door of Niu Xinyan. He was wearing a shirt. Niu Xinyan was wearing a white silk nightdress and a shawl. The door was ajar, and Niu Xinyan was standing in the door, holding the door handle.

Du Chaosheng said to Niu Xinyan, ‘I heard about brother Niu back then, my heart goes out to you and your family, please accept my condolences.’

Then Niu Xinyan did not speak for a while. After a while, she lowered her head and murmured, ‘It already happened so many years ago ’

After a while, Du Chaosheng asked again, ‘Can I come in? ’

Niu Xinyan said, ‘No, it’s late at night, it’s improper for you to come in. ’

Du Chaosheng said, ‘What’s so bad about that? Brother Niu has been gone for so long. It is not easy for a widow to raise an orphan for so many years. It is time to find someone to take care of you, especially on this island. You can’t trust anyone else.’

Niu Xinyan seemed to smile, but I didn’t see it clearly. She replied: ‘What happened to the secretary you personally ‘cared for’? She has worked with you for nine years, but didn’t you ‘personally’ take care of her? I dare not be taken care of by you. ’”

“This old bastard, already one foot in the grave, yet he’s still knocking on the widow’s door at night.” Fang Daichuan sighed.

Li Sinian was holding the wine bottle, frowning thoughtfully. “Brother Niu? Is he Niu Nahan, the Director that Old Lady Song mentioned? Is the relationship between Niu Xinyan and Niu Nahan, not a brother and sister, but a husband and wife?!”

But that has nothing to do with the killing game. Fang Daichuan followed Li Sinian’s line of thought for a while, then shook his head and ignored it.

The wind picked up again, a huge dark cloud slowly moved in from a distance. It looked like it would rain again.

Ding Zihui looked at the sky, then got up and said, “I’ll go back first, and you two, you should go back as soon as possible. There is no medical treatment nor medicine here. It will be troublesome if you get sick.”

Fang Daichuan nodded and watched the girl walk away. The wind blew the girl’s hair and clothes, her body in a sharp contrast amongst the bleak rocks.

“She has it hard, such a young girl.” Fang Daichuan said with emotion.

Li Sinian sneered, “Why? Do you feel sorry for her? Although the method of selling pity is old-fashioned, it works at critical times, doesn’t it?”

Fang Daichuan squinted at Li Sinian, “Did you eavesdrop on us?”

“I don’t need to eavesdrop to know what she said to you.” Li Sinian smiled and shook his head. “It couldn’t be anything more than that her father or mother was dead, either by suicide, murder, or an accident… You comforted her and she said it was alright, it’s all in the past.”

Fang Daichuan was astonished because he guessed too accurately. He blinked his eyes twice, “Did you guess that too?”

Li Sinian hooked the corner of his mouth. “Isn’t it the same old song? Niu Xinyan’s husband died, she said that after so many years, it was all in the past; Yang Song’s father died, she acts like she is over it. Du Chaosheng’s “secretary” also seems to be the same… If everyone truly has let it go, who would come here to this killing game and risk their life?”

You are reading story Witch, Open Your Eyes at novel35.com

“What about you?” Fang Daichuan turned his head and asked, “Have you gotten over your father’s death?”

Li Sinian stopped smiling, he silently gazed at the dark clouds and the sea in the distance. When he was not smiling, there was a melancholic expression on his face, giving him a far-away look, making people wonder if it was the unique aura that came with the mixed-race appearance he had. He turned his head, stared into Fang Daichuan’s eyes, and said, “If there is no past, there would be nothing to remember.”

Fang Daichuan hesitated, raised his hand and shook Li Sinian’s shoulder, gently touching the wine bottle in his hand to quietly comfort him.

“How did your parents meet?” Li Sinian asked, turning his head.

Fang Daichuan was stunned for a moment: “They… just happened to know each other. My dad was the most handsome detective in the team, and my mom was the most beautiful woman, so naturally they got to know each other. Later, someone became the matchmaker and formally introduced them to one another. Then they got married. The marriages in that era were nothing more than those old routines.” Fang Daichuan then asked, “How about yours?”

“My parents were much more romantic,” Li Sinian looked up at the sky smiling. “They met when they saw the aurora in Mohe*.”

https://www.chinatravel.com/mohe

Li Heng, a geological prospector, followed the exploration vehicles and went to Mohe.Young Miss Flores* was traveling around the world and happened to visit mainland China on the same day. In the polar snowfields, the two young people perceived the vastness of the universe and the mysteries of nature under the dazzling aurora borealis, then got trapped in the valley during the snowstorm, cuddled up to each other for warmth in the snow hut and shared the last bottle of wine the girl brought.

(T/N: Flores is on English in raw)

Just like how it was in all romance movies, the two people justifiably fell in love. A young girl who dared to sail across the Pacific Ocean to travel in a strange land with a foreign language was bound to yearn for danger and thirst for romance. Was there anything more dangerous and romantic than kissing and making love in the Mohe snowy plains?

After that, the girl still traveled around the world, only to give up the tour group and follow the exploration team.The exploration team took on whatever project they got, and the girl followed the exploration vehicles and traveled around the world in a different way.

They rode on horses in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, their saddlebags filled with instruments for exploration, to huge pits containing the fossils of some ancient predators. They also hiked in the deep mountains of Guiyang*, where the mountain was foggy, and girls dressed in silver jewelry walked past them, tripping over the flowing water of the mountain stream barefoot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guiyang

“That’s beautiful,” Li Sinian’s few sentences painted a vivid picture, Fang Daichuan, immersed in that kind of wonderful love, felt moved. “Sometimes when I go to film, I also see amazing scenery and take hundreds of photos. I don’t know who to share it with so I can only edit the picture and post it on Weibo. Your parents are so lucky to be able to watch the scenery with someone they love.”

Unfortunately, just like any other couple, eventually there came a day when their love could no longer withstand the trials of time.

Li Sinian stopped talking, and Fang Daichuan thoughtfully didn’t ask any more. Did the couple break up after getting fed up with each other during the trip? In the fragmented bits of childhood life Li Sinian told him about before, his father died young, he was bullied, and was taken away by gangs to learn petty theft. It was a very difficult childhood, although he was calm when he retold it. In that story, there was no mention of his mother.

“When my mother died, I personally sent her into the crematorium. I looked at her, a 68-inch* person, squashed into a palm-sized box. At that time, I thought of only one sentence: ‘For we are like olives: only when we are crushed do we yield what is best in us.’* .'” Li Sinian looked down at the small silver ring that brightly adorned his smallest finger. He concluded the story by saying, “Therefore, there are things you can’t let go. I can’t do that and I don’t believe others can either.”

(T/N: 5’6 feet, this quote is by Bohumil Hrabal from the book Too Loud a Solitude)

“So you don’t trust Ding Zihui.” Fang Daichuan did not say it like a question.

Li Sinian’s expression was a bit frosty, he shook his head. “I don’t trust anyone. The human heart is too unpredictable. I don’t want to die just because of this so-called trust.”

“Maybe we can change that? The human heart is a very vague and subjective thing, but it can easily change the cold reality. We should have more faith in it.” Fang Daichuan breathed out a stream of smoke, and recollected the script that he’d read before coming to the island.

A futuristic urban script about the struggle between AI and humans, the position he wanted to fight for was the third male lead, who had an emotional scene of unrequited love with the beautiful and attractive female AI under the villain boss. The other party was a killing weapon, the perfect combination of human brain and AI machinery. She was mature and beautiful, superb in martial arts, but bore no human feelings at all. In the end, when the third male leapt and was buried in the cloud of stars, the AI was finally awakened to his inner soul.

“Look,” Fang Daichuan said, “Human beings might look like something small and powerless but sometimes they can be extraordinary. They can shake a lot of evil thoughts and change the cold reality.” He was convinced of this.

Li Sinian shook his head and smiled. “What a good story.”

“Don’t you believe it?” Fang Daichuan looked at him with wide eyes.

Li Sinian replied, “Wittgenstein once said, ‘The sense of the world must lie outside the world.’ ‘If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts–not what can be expressed by means of language.’”

(T/N: From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus)

“Human hearts cannot be expressed in words, but facts can be said. What cannot be said can never change what can be said. This is one of the most important deductions of the 20th century logical philosophy. Relying on faith, love, or any good human nature to endow the machine a soul and change the ways of the wicked is an arrogant fantasy of mankind. Not to mention using these ethereal concepts to change the malicious nature of humans? The facts of the world can never be changed by human beings, the most malicious things are deeply rooted from the moment it appears. We are the descendants of Homo sapiens, with the cruel gene of killing and exterminating more than a hundred biological species in our blood, what even religion and the so-called universal values have not been able to do, and you want to change that with an illusion of passion? How is that possible?” The corners of Li Sinian’s mouth quirked up a mocking smile.

He patted his butt and stood up, walked on the reef, looking out into the boundless sea, silently muttering in a foreign language. The sea replied with an eternal tide and wet his trousers.

That sentence was not English, it was a bit tougher and richer in intonation than English. Fang Daichuan could not understand. He just sat where he was and watched Li Sinian’s back, that image engraved into his memory for a long time. Li Sinian’s back was full of secrets, fighting the world using an unspeakable amount of will and one’s own strength. Like a deity or a beast, very powerful, and very lonely.

(T/N: You can read more about Wittgenstein’s book here : https://www.d.umn.edu/~dcole/phillang/TractatusExerpts1999.htm

About what Sinian said, on how we as homosapiens are murderers, well, you can read it below yourself. I personally have gotten to know this fact years ago, oh humanity~~~

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