The Tale Never Ends

Lin Feng, Chongxi, and I shared a quick look. “It’s been so long,” Chongxi wondered and said aloud, “We won’t know whether it’s the same spot she had mentioned as we’re going to. How about a look then?” Lin Feng nodded and said, “Might as well. Since we would be nearby anyway.”

Hearing this refilled Yuanyuan with excitement. She screamed to come along and so did Edelweiss and Xiao Yu. “I’m coming along too, since all of you would be going,” Big Sister added. “Come on, all of you,” I pointed out and said, “Look at the time. It’s not that we’re going now.” Only then everyone realized that it was already six in the evening. The debacle at the police station had taken up so much time that we hardly had any drop of water the whole day.

However, for Chongxi, something else came to mind: food. He jabbed a finger at the clock on the wall. “All right, enough talking. It’s time for dinner! Let’s settle that first! The food in ancient times is nowhere near as delicious as anything here! I’ve been waiting for so long!”

Big Sister turned to Chongxi with an applauding look and nodded, looking just as she had long starved herself. Big Sister and Chongxi together were a force so formidable that nothing would be able to stand between them and food and it was imperative that we settle their dinner before we could look into doing anything else.

I took out my phone from a drawer and plugged it to a portable charger and switched it on. Lin Feng produced a set of car keys from another drawer. “Well, I do hope my driving skills are still intact. It has been years since I was last gripped a steering wheel!” he said as he took the lead to move towards my old Volkswagen parked outside.

A flurry of pings and rings came just as soon as my phone flared to life. They were unread SMSes, WeChat messages and so forth, numbering to at least a few hundreds of them. Among them all which included Zheng Shuang’s, I saw even a few from Lu Shengnan.

I took my time during the ride to the restaurant to take a look at the messages Lu Shengnan sent me. She had been trying to get a hold of me since the second day we left on our quest through Time. After getting not even a dial tone which indicated my phone was off, Lu Shengnan tried bombarding me with barrages of WeChat messages. The first few ones were asking why my phone off was, and the ones later urged me to return her call as soon as possible. Those came after told me nothing I did not already know; that Huang Li has lodged a police report against me and so on. I began scrolling down without reading most of them until the last few messages caught my notice. They came from three days ago, saying, “What’s happened to you? Huang Li has come looking for me. She wanted me to go somewhere with her but I refused. I was scared. I told her that I was busy and we should talk tomorrow.”

Then another pair of messages from her said, “There are people from Huang Li’s family coming for me! I’m so scared, help! They are coming!”

Then the last message from her, which came yesterday, the night just before we returned, carried only one word: Help!

I bit my lip as I re-read the word again and again, my heart thumping with dread. Edelweiss noticed the foreboding expression on my face and asked, “Why? Is there anything wrong?” I handed my phone to her and gestured to the message Lu Shengnan sent me. She looked at it and gave a yelp of fright.

Lin Feng and Yuanyuan, both sitting upfront, jerked their heads back in unison, shrieking, “What’s wrong?!” “It’s Lu Shengnan,” I replied, “She’s been taken by Huang Li. Her last message came yesterday, saying only one word: HELP.” “Ah?!” Lin Feng gasped, so shocked that his foot nearly stepped on the brakes. “For so long we were in the past, I have been thinking. Was Lu Shengnan an accomplice of Huang Li’s? No matter how I thought, I could find no way to prove that she was. Until now, everything is still obscured. I have no way of knowing if she’s really in trouble or not.”

“At anyhow,” Lin Feng nodded and said, “We’d be busy in no time.” He depressed the brakes, applying more and more force as the car began to slow. Xiao Yu’s car had come to a halt just in front of the barbeque skewers restaurant that we used to frequent so long yet not so long ago.

Big Sister has been riding with Chongxi in Xiao Yu’s car and they got down when they reached the restaurant. Lin Feng hurried right up to Chongxi and said, “The Lu Shengnan girl is in trouble. Divine what’s happening to her and whether anything she’s said is true.” He took my phone from me and passed it to Chongxi.

Chongxi read Lu Shengnan’s messages and asked me, “Do you know her birthdates and time of birth?” Fortunately for her, Lu Shengnan’s particulars regarding her birth were quite special; a most unique detail about her that I would never forget: she was born on April 1, 1995. April Fool’s Day. Oddly, in some ways, Lu Shengnan herself was a bit of a doltish character, a fool even. I gave Chongxi the details he needed and he began to work on his divination calculations.

The Chongxi today was no longer the Yuan Chongxi of old. Seasoned by our quest of pilgrimage, he could now make calculations swifter and more accurate than before and while his fingers flexed nimbly as he calculated the fate and fortune of others when he worked his magic, he no longer has the clumsy bearing of a halfwit but rather the sage presence like a true master of mystic arts.

It took only a couple of minutes only and Chongxi lowered his hand. “Let’s go in first,” he said, “We’ll talk about her over dinner. She can suffer our absence for a while longer.” I nodded with assent. We followed his lead into the restaurant where the proprietor of the joint saw and recognized us. He made a quick headcount and smiling and nodding, disappeared into the kitchens.

We settled into our seats and Chongxi began saying, “Well, Lu Shengnan is in a heap of trouble, that’s for sure. But she’s nowhere near mortal danger yet. At least not now. And since Huang Li has taken her, I guess that means she’s not in league with her. During the time when we’re gone, Huang Li had not dared to step into Wu Zhong to find out. But Huang Li did try to approach Lu Shengnan and Huang Li discovered her trying to contact us. I think that is why she was taken; Huang Li believes she knew where we’ve gone to. So she could be tortured for answers.”

Nodding my head in agreement, I added, “That is very, very likely. But there’s also the possibility that this is all one bloody play. A show that both Lu Shengnan and Huang Li are both participants in order to lure us in. We still cannot be 100% sure of Lu Shengnan’s trustworthiness. Everything you just said is only from your divination without any concrete proof about Lu Shengnan’s loyalties.” Chongxi nodded. “We believe what we see,” he conceded and said, “We’ll have to find out everything ourselves to make sure. But we’ll need to first go for my thing before we can.” Lin Feng and I bobbed our heads again.

Yuanyuan and the others were only looking at us with blank faces. They had not even an inkling of what Chongxi meant by “my thing”. Yuanyuan was the first to burst out with curiosity, “What is it that you want to take back! Tell us!” “Yeah,” Big Sister quipped, “Tell us! What is it so important that you need to get it first? Stop being mysterious!” With nothing more than a cryptic grin and a shrug of my shoulders, I muttered, “You’ll see when we go there tomorrow.”

Big Sister was about to open her mouth to ask prod further when her nose twitched suddenly. Then again, and her eyes flashed with exhilaration! She twisted to the back and saw the proprietor of the restaurant emerging with a huge handful of barbecue skewers, beaming broadly as he came to our table. “Well, I see you have a larger number today, so I’ve made your customary amount with additional tens of them more,” he said, “Let me know if you need more.” Then he heaved and laid something heavy on the table: a one-dozen stack of canned beer! “It’s been so long since you’re here,” he added, “Business is brisk these couple of days, so we’re celebrating! This beer is on the house! Enjoy!”

We thank the restaurateur for his generosity. “Boss, let’s have some more ribs and chicken wings! I’m on an eating spree tonight!” An excited Chongxi bellowed with fervor at the proprietor who remarked, “Look at you! You can really eat, eh? All right then, the food will be coming just right up!” And he scampered back into the kitchens.

With the season slowly turning warm outside and it was dinner time, more and more people flocked to the restaurant. Barbecue joints like these often enjoy bustling business during the tepid season and so was this restaurant. Before long, the entire restaurant was boisterous with the din of customers talking and eating.

Big Sister had her way with all of us, being the most eldest among us. She never stopped swiping every skewer that she could find, cramming them all into her mouth and chewed rapaciously. “God, Big Sister. Slow down,” I chuckled, “You’re going to eat even the bamboo sticks too!” Everyone burst into laughter. This was the first time Big Sister had barbecue skewers and she loved them so much that she ignored everything we said and laid siege to every ounce of meat she saw. Like a little kid utterly satisfied with snacks, she devoted every shred of her attention to the food with complete disregard for everything else around her. It did not take long for the few bamboo sticks in front of her to be replaced with a huge mound of them.

The sight of Big Sister wolfing down the food ignited the flame of competition in Chongxi. Refusing to surrender, he pawed at a handful of barbecue skewers and devoured them in one gulp. Another peal of laughter rang across the table. We were grabbing our stomachs, guffawing so badly that our dinner stopped abruptly to give way to the impromptu eating competition between Big Sister and Chongxi.

With one hand snatching any barbecue skewers he found and another hand upending more beer into his mouth, Chongxi gobbled one skewer after another. On the other hand, Big Sister stocked her mouth full of barbecued meat with both her hands scooping up food like octopus tentacles. Suddenly they stopped, both opening their mouths wide to burp so loudly that they sounded like a pair of war horns.

In the midst of our merriment, a figure came close to our table. The person drew up an empty chair from another table and spun it around to face the table and sat on it, sitting just right beside me. His hair was frayed and disheveled like that of a beggar’s and so were the tattered clothes he was dressed in, even though there was something about his dressing that looked oddly familiar to me.