SES Chapter 201 Part 2

Yan Hongsha ignored him.

In fact, since that morning, she hadn’t said a single word to him. Even after Uncle Zhang spoke up and he turned pale, hurriedly saying, “I’ll write, I’ll write, right away,” she had only replied, “I don’t want it. A gentleman does not eat alms given in pity.”

A relationship can fracture in an instant, but rebuilding it is incredibly hard.

Thirteen Thousand plastered on a grin. “Hongsha? Little Two-Flames?”

As he called out, he waved his hand in front of her eyes. Yan Hongsha slapped his hand away with a sharp smack and turned in the opposite direction.

Over there, the fortune-teller was practicing with a slingshot, aiming at a scarecrow stuck high up. Clods of dirt and small stones whizzed through the air, passing above, below, left, and right of the scarecrow.

It was truly impressive—he didn’t hit it once.

In the distance, Luo Ren was on the phone, with Mu Dai beside him. They had thought they were far enough away, but the fortune-teller always managed, with a sharp whoosh, to send a stone flying close to them.

Every time that happened, Luo Ren would pull Mu Dai farther away. So the fortune-teller wasn’t completely without achievement—Yan Hongsha felt that at the very least, he had driven Luo Ren and Mu Dai more than half a mile away.

She was curious: who was Luo Ren calling?

He was calling Zheng Mingshan, asking him to have his friend look into what Leopard’s subordinates had done when they first entered the country. He specifically told Zheng Mingshan to be tactful—to act as though he already knew everything and was just testing how honestly they would confess.

Zheng Mingshan gave a dry laugh. “Luo Ren, you don’t need to remind me. My friends aren’t inferior to you.”

Luo Ren felt a little embarrassed by that. When he hung up, he smiled at Mu Dai. “The regulars really look down on us ragtag crews.”

Mu Dai fed him a cracker dusted with fine grains of peppered salt. It smelled wonderful.

After a while, someone called back. It was an overseas number.

The caller sounded Southeast Asian, his Chinese stiff and awkward. “Mr. Luo, Mr. Zheng gave me your number and asked me to speak to you directly.”

That was just like Zheng Mingshan—if he wasn’t interested, he couldn’t be bothered to act as a go-between and would rather have people talk themselves.

Luo Ren acknowledged with a hum.

“What Mr. Zheng asked about—we had already interrogated them earlier. There were indeed some strange things. But Leopard was of Chinese descent, and we consulted East Asian studies scholars. They believed it was just an ancient and ignorant Chinese ritual, with no real significance. You should understand—China is vast, customs vary every ten miles. This isn’t something we’re concerned with.”

Luo Ren glanced at Mu Dai, signaling that there was indeed something there, then put the phone on speaker. “I’d like to hear the specifics.”

Mu Dai waved to Thirteen Thousand and the others, calling them over. When they came closer, she raised a finger to her lips and pointed at the phone, meaning: just listen carefully.

According to Leopard’s subordinates, after Leopard was injured, the organization fell into internal strife and chaos. She was as good as dead, and when a wall collapses, everyone pushes—there had to be a new leader.

Some even considered putting her out of her misery completely to eliminate dissent.

Leopard’s inner circle acted first, secretly sending her overnight to the rear base on Samal Island.

Doctors came and went in the hidden seaside residence—local and foreign alike, some hired with money, others kidnapped. Leopard’s great-grandfather stood there trembling with his cane, his cloudy eyes watching everyone.

Eventually, Leopard’s life was saved. But her spine was severely damaged, part of her brain injured. She could no longer speak, and one eye was completely blind, leaving her with only a single eye.

Someone like that could never again dominate Medan. When the tree falls, the monkeys scatter. One by one, people sought their own paths, until in the end, only about a dozen remained.

Leopard’s great-grandfather began spending long periods in her room, muttering incessantly into her ear. Old people speak with air leaking through their words, their speech unclear. No one cared what he was saying.

Then one day, he summoned everyone to Leopard’s bedside and told them to go to China and do something—to pray for Leopard, to ask for a miracle from God.

A dying old man’s wild fantasy. Besides, most of them had never even been to China.

But Leopard’s great-grandfather said this was Leopard’s order.

Luo Ren was puzzled. “Leopard’s order?”

“Yes. She couldn’t speak and was paralyzed, but her eyes could move. There was a keyboard with the twenty-six letters beside her bed. When a letter was pressed, it would light up. To prove it was Leopard’s order, someone would press the letters. If it was the letter she wanted, she would blink her remaining eye once.”

“What was her order?”

“Very simple. Four letters, two words: do it.”

Seven people were selected. A nurse drew a large tube of Leopard’s blood. Her great-grandfather dipped a pen into the blood and drew seven pictures.

Luo Ren pressed, “What kind of pictures?”

“They were all burned. We can only provide a simple description.”

“There was an eye in the sky. The pupil was strange—twisted and elongated, like a ladle. Beneath the eye were scenes of various kinds of death.”

“Killing with knives, pushing people into rivers to drown, hanging with ropes, burying alive to suffocate, burning to death, and so on.”

“Each death scene supposedly had characters in it. But they didn’t recognize them. We showed them Chinese characters, but they didn’t match. There was no way to identify them.”

“Each person took one picture and went to one of seven different places, spread across nearly half of China, from west to east. On a night when the stars were bright, they burned the pictures—but they had to retrieve the ashes.”

“Finally, the seven gathered in a small town in the east—according to what we know, it’s connected to Leopard’s Chinese ancestors. They mixed the ashes in a glass container, left it open, and placed it in a room.”

Luo Ren’s gaze tightened. “And then?”

“They said they waited. On the seventh day, someone happened to go into the room and saw that the ashes in the glass container had undergone a strange change. Many of them had stood upright and gathered into a rectangular shape. Once the change occurred, they immediately sealed the container and brought it back to Samal Island.”

“What happened afterward, they don’t know. Mr. Luo, Leopard, later suddenly regained normal mobility. We never understood why. Perhaps it truly was the miraculous power of your country’s sorcery.”

Luo Ren smiled faintly, not knowing how to respond.

Before hanging up, the caller seemed to remember something else. “Oh, one more thing that might be useful to you. Leopard’s great-grandfather died not long after they returned to Samal Island. Natural causes. When he died, he was holding that now-empty glass container, smiling. According to his caretakers, he kept saying, ‘It’s open. It’s really opened again.’”

…

Fields. Villages. In the distance, scattered farmers—perhaps discussing this year’s harvest. Nearby, the group stood, just emerging from a twisted and eerie story.

Luo Ren said, “The sixth ferocious slip appeared on its own. It came to us.”

Perhaps they had already sensed that something was wrong and were no longer willing to stay bound in place.

The fortune-teller suddenly murmured, “Heaven opened its eye.”

Yan Hongsha looked puzzled. “What do you mean, heaven opened its eye?”

Did he mean that heaven had a conscience? Leopard obtaining a ferocious slip was practically heaven going blind—how could that be called heaven opening its eye?

But the fortune-teller stood there dazed, his gaze unfocused, staring blankly at the Hummer parked in the distance.

“That day, when Little Pocket brought back that copy of Zi Bu Yu, I said I wanted to study it, so I read through it again.”

“There’s a very short story in it called ‘Heaven Opens Its Eye.’ It says a scholar was sitting idly at home one day when he suddenly heard a thunderous boom. He looked up and saw a crack open in the sky—wide in the middle and narrow at both ends, shaped like a boat. Inside it shone with clear light, round like an axle hub. After a long time, it finally closed.”

“The caller just now said the old man’s drawings had an eye in the sky. It really sounds like… heaven opening its eye.”