Dow and Carbon-Based Monkey Breeding Guidelines

Chapter 1000: Great Joy (Part )

Luo Binhan lowered the bird skull a little and looked over its top at the new kid. She showed up alone, wearing a half-new light pink cotton pullover with a pirated cartoon cat wearing a red bow on the chest, holding a 10-inch tablet in her arms, looking around as she walked, as if looking for someone who was supposed to be there.

She had seen Luo Binhan a long time ago, but she did not show any special interest. Instead, she deliberately avoided the yew tree and wandered under the eaves of many workshops. Obviously, her adoptive parents taught her how to deal with strangers on the roadside. Luo Binhan saw that her high pigtails were swinging behind her head, and her neatly cut bangs on her forehead were shiny and smooth, which was very common for rural girls of this age. In terms of appearance, she had the round cheeks and bright eyes that her peers generally had, which was quite pleasing. In addition, her skin was slightly dark, her nose was slightly wide, and she walked with a little bow legs. Judging from the standards of the various children he had seen in the past, she was probably not as cute as jade, nor did she show any characteristics of superior intelligence in her appearance. However, no one stipulated that child prodigies must have their identities written on their faces.

He didn't ask Li Li if this was the person he was looking for. He just looked at her as if she were a wild animal. She was also waiting for someone, occasionally looking down at the tablet device in her arms, or craning her neck to look at the fields in the distance. Once or twice, she was obviously observing him, and when she did so, she was always standing by an open window or door. Several minutes passed, and the person she was waiting for never appeared.

Luo Binhan roughly understood what was going on. He picked up the phone and asked Li Li softly, "Did you do this?"

"This is to provide you with some convenience for observation."

"That's her? Then who does she think she's waiting for now?"

"She thought that within half an hour, a regular customer of her parents would come to check on the goods and she would be needed to answer the call because her adoptive parents had to go out for an emergency."

"This kid is in charge of reception?"

“She’s experienced.”

Neither Xide nor Azmao followed him, but the girl had a camera on her device and was very wary of him, which made Luo Binhan realize that he probably had no chance to take advantage of her. But he was not in a hurry to leave, but immersed in studying the bird skull he had just picked up: it was so delicate yet complete, far better than the carvings made of ivory by artists; the eye sockets were large and deep, occupying most of the skull; the beak was as sharp as a knife for prying oysters, and it still maintained a slightly downward arc.

He stared at the weathered remains in fascination. The skull did not look like any bird he was familiar with, though he knew it was probably just one of the most common species, a sparrow, a pigeon, or a chicken. But death reveals deeper secrets; it strips away feathers first, then peels back flesh, revealing layer by layer the true nature of things that could not be learned from living things. He had never realized how big a bird's eyeball was. In a living bird, the part of its cornea that peeped out from under its eyelids was always as small as a black bean. Who would have thought that a bird's eyeball could actually take up more than half of its cranial cavity? To have eyes of that size, you would have to stuff apples or tennis balls into your eye sockets.

But now the answer was right in front of him. This little skeleton with empty eye sockets looked like an alien creature, white as jade, light as a feather, and the separated lines of its beak converged from the middle to the sides, as if it was smiling at him mischievously and innocently. They were all little monsters that had lurked from the dinosaur era to today.

How can you be happy when you are such an unlucky little guy? He asked in his heart. How did you end up in the mud? Maybe you were a chick that fell from the nest and had your neck bitten by a passing cat or dog? Or maybe you were so old that you couldn't even see the road clearly and bumped into a tree trunk? Was it spring rain, autumn frost, summer thunder, and winter snow? Or was it because you lost your parents and had no one to rely on? When your fellow birds saw you fall to such a state, didn't they react in any way? Would they take this as a warning and stay away from this inhabited place? Did they sing elegy around your body?
He was so absorbed in the story of the lonely bone that he ignored someone approaching. When he finally noticed, the girl had already walked out of the eaves of the workshop and was almost stepping on the short shadow of the fir tree. She behaved very naturally and was not a timid person. Her eyes were only fixed on the bird bone in his hand.

"What are you doing?" she asked. Her voice was a little hoarse for a girl of her age, and her tone was not shy at all, but straightforward and rough, which made people easily overestimate her actual age.

Luo Binhan looked down at her, then looked at the bird bone in his hand. "I'm talking to it."

"The bone can't talk. It's dead."

“How do you know it won’t?” Robinson said. “It just won’t talk to you.”

His answer puzzled the little girl. Her thick black eyebrows were furrowed, and her eyes were flickering with dissatisfaction. She was confident in her common sense, but she didn't know how to deal with adults' sophistry. This part of the skill depends more or less on experience.

She did not walk away, but continued to stand there thinking. Perhaps her desire to win made her forget that she should be wary of strangers, and she had to find a flaw in this issue. "So what did you say to it?" she asked angrily.

"I'm wondering how it died," said Robinson. "Did it die alone? Or was it abandoned by its parents when it was born?"

The phone vibrated slightly in his pocket. Li Li must have felt that it was rude to speak to a child like that, but the kid standing in front of him—he had completely forgotten her name in such a short time, because she really didn't look like Feng Chuxing at all—didn't care about his vicious question at all. She might not have known it yet, and her whole mind was thinking about how the bird bones spoke. "Did it answer you?" she asked provocatively.

"No. It doesn't like to talk about that."

"I told you, bones can't talk."

"But it told me something else," said Robin Han. "Bones don't talk to you because you only see them on the dining table. Why would it talk to someone who ate it? This one in my hand is different. Anyway, I'm not from here, and it knows that I won't have any grudges against it, so it's willing to talk to me when no one is around. Although it refused to mention how it died, it talked a lot about what happened after death: after it died, its soul left its body, and although its bones are still here, its spirit has gone somewhere else. That place is not like the Yama Palace we talk about - don't you think it's funny to ask a dead bird to kneel and kowtow to the King of Hell in official uniform? The place it goes to after death is a place that birds like it would like, and its life is better than when it was alive; there it is not bound by its body, it won't grow old, it won't get sick, it doesn't have to worry about food, and there are no wild cats or dogs to covet it. It couldn't be more comfortable living there, and it doesn't want to come back to our place at all."

The girl looked up at him, her face showing an expression of concentration and thought. This was the first time she had shown some unique qualities since she appeared, but it might also be his preconceived illusion. He was trying to find the performance of a child prodigy in her, but in fact he knew very little about geniuses and children, so it would be better to say that he was looking for similarities between her and some acquaintances.

"It's not even here anymore," she said, "so how can it still talk to you?"

Luo Binhan held the lychee-sized bone in his palm: "Because I have this. It didn't want to come back at first, but I have its bones, and it has to continue to be disturbed even if it dies. I kept asking questions to its old body, and it got so annoyed that it came back to tell me to stop."

"Are you going to put it back?"

"I haven't decided yet." Luo Binhan said. He saw Azkaban by the wooden bridge with his hands on his ears, as if he was wearing miniature headphones. "Would you put them back if it was you?"

He expected some kind of condemning response, the kind that Yu Xiaorong or Luo Jiaotian might have said at age six, telling him to stop tossing the poor bird. But the one in front of him said, without hesitation, "No."

Luo Binhan bent down slightly, lowered his head and approached her and asked, "Why? It doesn't want to stay here."

"It knows so many secrets, we need to make it spill them all."

"What does it know? It's just a bird," Robinson reminded. "It only knows what happens after it dies. It knows nothing else. What do you expect to learn from it?"

"What if I die too?" the girl asked calmly.

At first, Luo Binhan was a little confused and could only stare into those extremely wild eyes quietly. Then he finally remembered how a six-year-old child would view death: it was a bad luck that only happened to other people. Yu Xiaorong thought that the dead were captured by ghosts because of some weakness, just like the characters in adventure stories and mythological epics; Luo Jiaotian would also ask his dead grandfather when he would return home, as if he naturally believed that the dead would come back sooner or later, and he didn't care much about whether it was the Day of Wrath or the Day of the Dead. They have all been evaluated as "smart kids", but they all have all kinds of strange ideas about death; and when they grow up a few years later, they will forget all the strange ideas they once had. Until now, Yu Xiaorong would never admit that she once firmly believed that she would never age and was not the same as the adults around her.

He himself might have been like this before. When he was six years old, the biggest disaster in the world was just the occasional quarrel between his parents, a little hostility from his peers, or even the harmless neglect of adults. These alone were enough for a six-year-old to think he was miserable. As for death, it was insignificant. Children often become anxious about death after the age of eight - do I have to die too? Yu Xiaorong asked him this in disbelief. He didn't lie to her at the time, but she didn't give up. She solemnly asked them to properly preserve her body after her death, and not to burn it or sink it into the sea, in case she could defeat the monster and resurrect on the spot one day.

Now he was looking at another wild animal, a baby that had evolved from an ape but had not yet gotten rid of its nature. Although she was gifted, she did not know the qualities that led to a higher realm, only the infinitely dignified self and the greed to plunder external things. Or was the younger side right? Adults are timid and confused because they are approaching the end, and they only care about enjoying themselves in front of them, and dare not look up at the height of the stars - dying people! In the past, joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness were in vain, and now the day of destruction is coming. Once the delusion and infatuation are thrown away, I will no longer care about the distant sky and distant dreams!
He dropped the bird bone to the ground and kicked it deep into the cracks between fallen leaves and tree roots.

"It can't help you," he told her simply. "It can't tell you what happens after death, because you and it don't go to the same place. You may not like the place it likes, and there is no big garden here that can satisfy both of you."

"Where will I go when I die?" the girl asked.

"I don't know." Luo Binhan said, "I only know where some people will go. I heard that the conditions there are not bad, but I can't go there anymore, and I'm afraid you don't have the chance either. But if I were you, I wouldn't rush to think about what happens after death, and I'd just live my life well first. You have to know that even if you go to the best place after death, with enough food and clothes, some things you can experience when you are alive will no longer be there."

"What's missing?"

Robin Han stood there motionless. "Pain," he whispered, "There is no pain after death. Even if you are immersed in lava or oil, at least the situation is under your control and will not get worse. If there is only nothingness, then there is no need to fear the unknown. You will only feel pain when you are alive."

"Are you feeling unwell?"

"No, I'm in good health now. But if you've never been sick, you don't know what 'health' means, right? If you've never suffocated, you don't understand why you have to keep breathing. So if you've never felt pain once in your life, you don't really know what true happiness is. You can only understand the value of having something when you lose it."

"Didn't you know that when you bought it?"

"I don't know. Sometimes it's quite cheap when it comes to you, and you don't even know why it's yours. But if you want to verify its value, you can usually only do this once. If you get a fake, it's not a big loss. You can say that you finally see through it; if you find that it is indeed valuable, then... at least you can be sure that you once owned something precious."

"I don't understand." The girl asked bluntly, "What did you lose?"

Luo Binhan smiled at her slowly. "You will understand when you grow up. Then you will find that what adults say and what is written in books are just the surface... There are many things you have not seen before."

After he finished speaking, he remained silent, and suddenly hesitant. "But," he changed his words, "this is just what I think now. If you just deliberately seek pain and excitement, or keep going back and forth between extremes, I think it will only make you more numb, just like eating spicy food all the time will only dull your taste buds, but will not make you feel that the food itself tastes better. Maybe some people are born without the need for these things to inspire them, and can always be satisfied with the most ordinary life - they probably call this 'natural wisdom' or something like that. If you are such a person, what I just said is worthless to you."

It was hard to tell how the child understood his feelings, but she listened carefully, her eyes seemed to weigh the words, assessing whether he was mentally ill. She did not care about the bird bones anymore, but asked, "What are you doing here?"

"I almost forgot." Luo Binhan said, "I'm here to do business. I heard that you are good at making pine furniture and ornaments. I want to customize a batch of goods to decorate the store."

"Decorate your home?"

"Decorate a theme hotel. My family owns it."

The girl looked at his clothes and shoes, her face shrewd, showing the true talent of a child prodigy. She looked satisfied when she looked at his clothes and watch, but looked suspicious when she saw the old shoes. Luo Binhan observed her with interest, imagining what it would be like if she talked to Li Li. "What does your family do?" he asked deliberately, "Selling clothes? Running a restaurant?"

"None of them are right." The girl said. Her eyes wandered, and she quickly thought about whether she should take this unexpected job for her parents. But her parents were not at home at the moment, and it might not be safe to bring a stranger in alone.

At this point, Luo Binhan finally felt that he had had enough fun. He even dared to bet his life with Li Li that this kid was definitely not Feng Chuxing. It seemed too much to involve such a child in their affairs, so he decided to let it go.

"Forget it, I'm too lazy to guess." He waved his hand cheerfully, "Let's go."

He walked towards the wooden bridge, while Cid and Az cat stretched their necks to look at him. They should know what he just said, especially the pointy ears. He was thinking about how to deal with this big-eared cat next, when the girl called him from behind.

"We sell pine furniture," she said simply, "and our craftsmanship is the best around here."

Luo Binhan turned his head to look at her, with a teasing smirk on his face: "The best?"

"If you don't believe me, just go ask around and ask if Yuan Zemiao's furniture is the best."

"Who is Yuan Zemiao?"

"It's my dad."

"Then who are you?"

"My name is Yuan Xiaoxian."

"The Xiao of dawn?" Luo Binhan asked instinctively, and saw the other party shaking his head, "The small of big? The current present?"

"No, it's the amaranth. It's the wild vegetable with thorns. Haven't you ever eaten it?"

"Ah," said Robin Han, "how did you come up with this name?"

"Because I found it when I was picking amaranth."

She didn't seem sad when she spoke, as if she was proud of the fact that she was born after three years of pregnancy. Luo Binhan couldn't help but feel a little puzzled, and it was difficult to guess what she thought about her life experience. He decided to go and see what kind of family she was picked up by.

"Okay," he said, changing his tone. "Since you are so confident, I will go and see what you have at home. Is there an adult at home?"

"Yes. But they are all taking a nap in the house right now. I'll take you in quietly first. If there's anything you want to buy, I'll go wake them up."

Luo Binhan smiled knowingly. He really wanted to comment to Li Li about the kid's cunning. These statements about adults were obviously false, and her advocacy of the quality of the goods was also quite suspicious. There must be some tacit understanding that the neighbors could speak well of her. But in the end, doing business is nothing more than this. No matter how true the words are, as long as you can get customers into the store, it's fine. Anyway, it's hard for an outsider like him to become a regular customer.

"You'd better be careful that someone will do the same to you in the future." He warned sincerely, "Those guys who say they offer the best job benefits..."

She certainly didn't understand his warning, and the buzzing phone in his pocket indicated that Li Li was also protesting his description, or just felt that he shouldn't reveal too much. So he pretended that he hadn't said anything, and just urged her to lead the way quickly. Before leaving, he also waved to his two travel companions: "You two don't have to follow."

"You spoke too quietly. They couldn't hear you."

"They can hear it," Robinham said. "These two people have super vision and super hearing. They can hear everything you say here."

The girl glanced suspiciously at the wooden bridge, but she was used to his unintelligible speech, so she didn't want to bother him any more. She led him deep into the crowded workshops, where the paths intersected the streets and alleys, and the sheds built of wood and bricks dazzled strangers. He didn't know how many circles she led him around, but she must have taken unnecessary detours, and there was a chance that many neighbors would witness her leading strangers through. Now it was difficult for them to kidnap each other, otherwise the police would immediately identify the suspect.

The three sheds in a row surrounded by greenery were where they finally stopped. The floor in front of the sheds was covered with sawdust. The shed on the right was the smallest, but there were paper-cut paintings on the windows. In front of the door, there were a few white quails squatting in the cage, resting in the thick pine sawdust. The little wild vegetable that led him wanted to lead him to the big shed on the left, which was not a warehouse or a workshop. Luo Binhan deliberately stopped in front of the shed on the right, pretending to be interested in the nest of quails that looked like a pile of snowballs.

"I haven't seen many white quails." He half squatted down, his face close to the gray window. Behind the bed was a desk, and on the opposite wall was another bed with a pink gauze curtain. There was no one between the pillows and quilts, only a folding table for the bed in the corner. There were many white and gray posters on the wall. Before he could see the content of the posters clearly, the girl was already calling him to come over quickly.

"I think I heard some noise in this room." He knocked on the window maliciously. "Is your master sleeping in there?"

"This is my room." The little girl lowered her voice, "Don't make any noise! ​​If you come here to hang out and not buy anything, don't wake them up."

She pretended to be serious. Just as Luo Binhan was about to cooperate with her, he heard a scratching sound behind the door. The sound was not made by a person because it was too close to the ground. But he pretended not to notice the difference and shouted in surprise: "Ah, your master is awake!"

He rushed to open the door, and a cat as fat as a piglet jumped out from the crack of the door and ran away between their feet. Yuan's little wild vegetable was so angry that she shouted loudly, but unfortunately she couldn't catch up with it.

"What are you afraid of?" Luo Binhan said insincerely, "It will come back on its own when it's hungry. This is not a busy road."

He stuck his head into the door and looked at the narrow room that seemed to be a child's room. He had no detailed idea of ​​the life of a rural family, but from what he saw at a glance, this family cherished their adopted daughter very much: this whole small room undoubtedly belonged to the child, the cabinets were full of reading books and picture albums, the table was lined with a variety of pinewood statues, and from the pink gauze canopy hanging above the hanging bed was a thin steel wire with a thick cloth wrapped at the tip, on which were hung fresh white orchids.

It was hard to say whether this room was exquisite or simple, because he didn't often have the opportunity to appreciate other people's children's rooms, and it would be unfair to compare it with Yu Xiaorong. But at least he could assert that the pinewood figurines on the windowsill were all carefully crafted by careful and loving craftsmen: a mushroom house, a squirrel chewing nuts, a hill with a few pine trees, a group of quails, an elephant with its trunk wrapped around its cub, and a little man who looked like he was wearing a space suit. He wanted to tell whether it was a space suit or armor, so he took two more steps into the room.

"What are you doing in there?" the owner of the house shouted angrily outside the door, "Come out!"

Luo Binhan did not do so. His attention was drawn to several drawings on the wall. He had originally thought they were posters, but now he saw that they were star maps: a black circle on a gray-white background, symbolizing the dark dome that people see at night, with various constellations shining on the universe within the circle, and their names were marked next to them; however, each map was different, with constellations appearing and disappearing, their positions fluctuating, and the density of the stars varying.

He remembered. Li Li said that the little genius picked from the wild had a unique hobby. It was unknown where this hobby came from, but it was true that the little wild vegetable studied the stars. He stopped to read the mark carefully, and the angry owner of the house yelled at him to get out. She must have regretted letting the wolf into the house, but she didn't dare to run in rashly and be locked in a narrow room with a strange adult. Luo Binhan waved her to come in, but she blocked the door in front of her, ready to escape at any time.

"I'm looking at the star maps on your wall," Robin Han said. "Are these all yours?"

"They are all mine," she said loudly and emphatically. "Mine!"

"Do you really understand this?"

She didn't like his questioning and pushed the door open a little. "What don't you understand?"

"Why are the constellations in these pictures different? Some look sparse, while others look dense?"

Onoya raised her chin silently to show her disdain for outsiders. "You don't even understand this."

"I don't know much about the stars in the sky," said Robinson. "I just occasionally see them busy in the sky, and I never think about who they are. Why are the stars in this picture so dense?"

“That’s the summer star map.”

"Oh, so these pictures are divided according to the four seasons?"

"Of course, you don't even know that?"

"So the one on the far right is winter? I saw you drew a triangle on it."

“That’s the Winter Triangle.”

As she was talking, the owner of the house had already approached the wall. She probably had few opportunities to explain her hobbies to others, so she had to point out the stars nearby so that she could count each star clearly: in winter, Orion is the king in the middle, with Taurus in front and two dogs, three balance stones hanging on his waist, and it is brighter to the left, with Sirius, Canopus 4 and Nansan, these three friends spend the cold winter together; in spring, the Big Dipper turns its handle to the east, and Virgo is the Minister of Agriculture, with a deep and cunning palace like a black hole, accompanied by lions, bears, snakes and dogs; in summer, the Milky Way is countless, and people and snakes fight bitterly, and the Taurus and the Virgo look at each other from afar, and when the Shang star moves, Canopus disappears; in autumn nights, nobles gather, the charioteer leads the fairy king and queen, and the fairies swim with Pegasus, and Cetus carries Perseus on his back. This beast can never forget its old grudges, and the fickle star is at the top of its neck, and its name is -

"The number of wormwood increases by two." Luo Binhan said softly.

He stared at the small ink-penciled characters on the star map. They were covered in dust over time, yet they looked familiar.

(End of this chapter)