Dow and Carbon-Based Monkey Breeding Guidelines

Chapter 995: Snail Horn (Part )

The next afternoon, Luo Binhan returned to Lihai City. He found a spot near the exit of the mall's underground parking lot and went in to buy a new coat, a locked metal storage box, and several bundles of nylon rope. He also bought door blockers, flashlights, binoculars, candles, paper and pens, etc. He had no clear use for the latter items, so he just took whatever he saw, and he even took a stack of colored paper. Nowadays, there are not many indoor activities that can kill time without electrical appliances.

He went downstairs again, went to several different banks to withdraw 200,000 yuan in cash, put it in the storage box he had just bought and locked it, and then threw all the sundries into the trunk of the car. After doing all this, he looked around and there was no one nearby, but the camera on the ceiling was facing the exit, and he couldn't avoid it anyway.

Robin Han walked out without paying any attention. When he passed the bakery, he realized that he was hungry, so he went in and bought two sandwiches. There was a drink stand next to the cashier counter. When he reached out to get the mineral water, he looked back and saw a young man standing outside the store, concentrating on his mobile phone. This man was tall and thin, and his figure was a bit like the speaker Herma, but he was younger, his skin was darker, and he had a very bulky headset on his head.

The man with headphones was immersed in his own melody, slowly moving forward while browsing his phone. Luo Binhan almost hit him when he pushed the door open. He stopped in time to avoid it, still concentrating on browsing his phone.

"Sorry." Luo Binhan said. The other party probably didn't hear him at all, and continued to swipe his phone and move forward. On the flower bed to their right, a girl in a baseball cap was holding her phone high and shaking it back and forth, adjusting the lighting angle for the selfie.

There were a few other people in the square, but they were either too far away or in groups. Seven or eight college-looking people came out of the mall entrance, laughing and joking as loud as the sound of a concert, and disappeared at the subway entrance with a thunderous echo. A few sparrows hopped between the checkered tiles, looking for grass seeds and insects in the cracks. They jumped like a group of happy children.

Luo Binhan suddenly had an idea, he opened his phone to check the weather data of Lihai City over the years. In fact, Lihai City was not always gloomy as he remembered, and it rained only about one-third of the days each year; and Regenberg was not always sunny and windy, and last year it rained more than half of the days in that area.

He was surprised for a moment by the illusion brought by the stereotype, but he soon accepted the fact. Everyone has their own perspective. The Lihai City described by others must be very different from what he had in mind, but today he suddenly saw the part that he had ignored before.

He held the phone still, then suddenly looked up at the sky. The girl who was pretending to find the angle for a selfie immediately followed suit. The man with headphones did not respond, still shaking his head and staring at the phone. Luo Binhan first smiled at the girl, raised his finger and shook it twice, then took out the black box from his backpack. As soon as he put his hand on the lid of the box, the man immediately took off his headphones and looked at him unfriendly. Luo Binhan slowly put the box away and whistled "I Can't Help Falling in Love with You" at him, and the other party walked into the mall without saying a word.

There were no other suspects for him to test. He walked to the green belt on the east side of the square with the bag of sandwiches. The turtle statue in the wishing pool was still frowning, and three new coins were shining at his feet. Luo Binhan looked down for a moment and found the golden and red marbles stuck in the mud. He wiped the marbles with his sleeves, stuffed them into his pocket, and then sat down to eat the delayed lunch.

He had just torn off the outer wrapping paper when the phone in his pocket rang. It was the ringtone of a social app requesting a call. Nan Mingguang and Yu Xiaorong would not do that. They were more used to calling him directly.

"Good afternoon, Li Li." He continued to tear the wrapper of the sandwich. "Just talk directly. I'm busy here."

The ringing stopped. Li Li's voice said, "Good afternoon, sir." Then she fell silent. Luo Binhan was not sure if there were any cameras nearby that could capture him. Probably not, but she could set up spies in nearby high-rise buildings.

He took a bite of his sandwich. "Those two guys are yours, right?"

"Yes."

"Why did you find two such young people to follow me?"

“There is a shortage of staff.”

"What are they all sent to do? The wetlands should be fine by now, right?"

Li Li fell silent again. She might be dealing with hundreds of small problems at the same time, and Luo Binhan didn't dare to say that his side was the most important. "Are you busy?" He asked while chewing, "Why don't you do yours first? I'm not in a hurry anyway."

"No, sir, I'm not doing a lot of math right now."

"But you haven't said much today."

"Just assessing the situation. Perhaps this is not the time to speak to you."

"Now is the time for us to talk," Robinson said, "but, alas, you won't believe it anyway. I'm sorry I left alone last night. You know, it's not appropriate to greet your people in that situation."

"Did you take anything with you?"

"Ah, that's what you were thinking. I turned off my phone when I left. But you should have sent someone to the scene soon, and the traces there are quite clear. So, I don't think you need me to explain too much."

"I am very sorry, sir."

Luo Binhan nodded and unscrewed the cap of the mineral water bottle. "You two are friends too."

"——But to be honest, I am more worried about your situation."

"Li Li, as you can see, I'm fine. This isn't a superhero comic book story. I'm not going to put on face paint and blow up a hospital just because I had a bad day."

Li Li didn't respond again. Luo Binhan thought she must have arranged for someone to work in a nearby high-rise building. She had to find a window to observe his expression and body movements.

"Well," Li Li said, "if you'll excuse me, I must ask you a few questions about what happened last night."

"I have a few questions for you, too." Luo Binhan said calmly, "Li Li, this is why we messed up before: no one had a full grasp of the situation. You, me, and Zhou Yu, each of us did our own thing. Now it's just you and me. As the old saying goes, together we stand, apart we fall, we should reconcile our accounts."

"What do you want to ask?"

"That's a lot. I don't even know where to start. Let's be fair. You ask a question first, and then I'll ask a question in turn until we're both satisfied. How about that?"

"I agree."

"Ladies first. What do you want to ask me?"

"What did you see last night in the limewood?"

"I knew you would ask this. But you can guess the answer: I found Zhou Yu there. His chest was shot through, and the wound was very strange. I don't know what weapon made it. The diameter of the hole is about 0206 centimeters, which cannot be made by ordinary bullets, and there is nothing like artillery debris nearby. At first, I suspected that the hole was dug by Feng Chuxing with a long knife or something like that, in order to cover up the real fatal injury, or it was purely revenge, because I heard that 's fatal wound was also in the chest. But then I checked carefully and overturned this hypothesis. The edge of the hole is too smooth to be cut by human hands. I think it should be some kind of kinetic weapon."

"Is the injury in the chest?"

"Yes. Right in the bull's eye. Took out all the heart. And part of the lungs and ribs, but I don't know where else. I'm not an expert on this."

“I’m sorry we didn’t make it.”

"No, Li Li, I caught up with him." Luo Binhan laughed strangely twice. "The wound was at least half a day old. You can tell from the bloodstains nearby. The body should have been cold. But when I got there, he could still talk, as if nothing had happened. That must be some kind of witchcraft of his. We just talked for a while, and suddenly he stopped moving, just at the moment when it got dark. It's weird, isn't it? It's a bit like the magic that disappears when the midnight bell rings, but it happens six hours earlier."

"Did he tell you the details of the attacker?"

"Oh, he knew who it was. But we didn't talk about it. It was a short time, a few minutes, I think. In those last few minutes we had a quarrel."

Li Li was slow to respond again. Luo Binhan guessed that she was considering whether to express comfort. But she finally skipped the procedure: "Would you mind explaining the topic of your argument?"

"Sure. But that's the second question." Robinson unwrapped another sandwich. "Now it's my turn, Li Li. I've been thinking about what happened yesterday evening. Before I saw the bee, we were talking about the bodhi tree, and then you started to persuade me to leave. Something similar happened once before. When I first went to No. 206 Dongyun Road, you advised me not to pay attention to those white houses because there was nothing special about them. Of course, now I know that you didn't ask me to check it out because Zhou Yu was inside. So, when you asked me to go to bed yesterday evening, you already knew he was in the woods, right?"

"All I can say is that I'm concerned about that possibility."

"How on earth did you come up with that idea? There are no bodhi trees in that forest."

"That's the answer, sir. The lime tree is the bodhi tree. That's the only area of ​​the wetland that has lime trees."

Robin Han took a bite of his sandwich, a little puzzled. "Is the lime tree a member of the genus Ficus in the Moraceae family?"

"No, they are not close relatives in biological classification. In the original story of "The Rose Spirit", the victim was buried under a linden tree. The confusion between the two trees is a cultural concept: since the spread of Buddhist broadcasts, local believers often plant similar linden trees as bodhi trees because bodhi trees are not adapted to cold. This phenomenon also affected early translators, causing us to translate linden trees in many foreign languages ​​as bodhi trees. You may know that there is a famous Bodhi Street in your sister's hometown, but in fact it should be Linden Street." "So this is actually a problem of wrong translation?"

"You can understand it this way, but it is not a mistake caused by sheer carelessness. In cultural terms, the linden tree is to your sister what the bodhi tree is to us. Translating it into bodhi tree is to make foreign readers like us closer to the story."

“But at the end of the day, it takes us further away from the answers.”

Li Li was silent. Luo Binhan ate his lunch slowly and thought about the matter again. "It's much clearer now that you explained it this way." He said happily, "No wonder you suddenly wanted me to leave when the Bodhi tree was mentioned. Now I'm surprised why you didn't think of it at the beginning - I don't mean to blame you, Li Li, it's just that you have always been very foresighted, and you are almost omniscient and omnipotent in this area..."

"I'm not, sir. If we look at it from the perspective of a truly omniscient person, I'm afraid we've all made many mistakes. I took the Bodhi tree as a pure hint to the fairy tale, which was just a trivial one. There were too many options and possibilities in front of us at the time. From a common sense perspective, a bee farm close to human habitation is not a very suitable ambush site."

"Perhaps we over-estimated Feng Chuxing's methods," said Luo Binhan. "He didn't need to drive a towering combat robot to seek revenge... Maybe he just walked up to Zhou Yu with a suitcase-sized object and shot him in the chest. I can assure you that no one knows this better than me: Zhou Yu has always been slow to react when it comes to fighting. But I didn't expect him to be so good at solving puzzles - how could he guess so quickly that the bodhi tree refers to the linden tree?"

"Didn't you ask him?"

"No. We were busy arguing for those few minutes."

This answer was definitely not perfect. He could imagine Li Li sitting alone in a secret base, with a huge screen covering the entire wall in front of him, meticulously analyzing his every micro-expression and tone of voice. However, he felt that she would not gain anything at the moment. He had not lied.

"We can only make assumptions," Li Li said. "There are many possible ways for Mr. Zhou Yu to find the ambush site. Solving the riddle of the Bodhi tree poem is just one of them. Another possibility is that after searching the wetland center fruitlessly, he chose the same place as us to rest, and then noticed the abnormality of the woodland - you should remember that Radumos reported that he had shown some ability to detect underground remains, and I think that when he approached the slope, that ability was enough to help him lock the location. And since we admit that he has some supernatural powers beyond common sense experience, it may be far more than the kind of detection we understand. I don't mean to excuse the mistake, sir, but in the sentence "The Enlightenment of Jasmine and Bodhi Leaves", we only found the second half after all. No Jasmine plants have ever been planted in that area, and it is this point that makes me think that the whole sentence is just pointing to a fairy tale rather than reality. But now that we have found the answer to the riddle of the Bodhi leaves, the meaning of Jasmine must be re-examined. Since it cannot correspond to the actual ambush site, perhaps it points to some ability of Mr. Zhou Yu himself."

"Maybe." Luo Binhan shrugged. "Does the answer matter now? But Li Li, I want to know, if you really persuaded me to leave yesterday evening, what would you do next?"

"That's your second question. But I can answer it first, if you allow me to do so later."

"Sure. No problem."

"I'll send another party to search the limewoods."

"No wonder Zhou Yu said he thought you would find him first. But what next? Are you still going to inform me of this news?"

"Yes, sir, I will tell you. But at the time I thought that if we were really a step slower, it would be better not to let you face the scene alone. This does not mean that I am against you meeting him for the last time."

"It's normal for you to object." Luo Binhan said nonchalantly, "He really made me very angry."

"Your comments make me more curious about what you actually said."

Luo Binhan unscrewed the water bottle and took a sip. "He knew Feng Chuxing. Li Li, he knew it a long time ago. He didn't go there because he believed Zhou Wenxing or Chilabin were not a threat to him. He knew from the beginning that the person waiting for him was Feng Chuxing."

"Did he admit it himself?"

"No, but he didn't deny it."

"Then maybe he's not sure."

"Then he should have been more careful, right? But he wasn't. He got a riddle of a poem claiming to be Zhou Wenxing's relic, and the answer happened to be what he wanted, so he rushed over alone without telling anyone, not even leaving a note. When I got there, he said he had found the thing, and that 'it was his turn'. Of course, I ignored his words and asked him how to summon the thing that resurrected Zhou Wenxing... You know what I mean? Sorry, I didn't have a choice at the time."

"I understand your point of view."

"But you don't agree." Robin Han said casually, "I know you are actually on his side. But it doesn't matter, he told me right after that that he had abolished all the rituals, and no one could enter that place anymore. I don't know how he did it, but since he said so, I think it must be true. So, you have already won. I can't make another 'wrong decision'."

"Sir, you are just too sad."

"Sad? Actually, I don't feel sad. Li Li, didn't you see the way he said that? He was so confident. He was waiting for me right here!"

Luo Binhan burst into laughter again. "He knew what I would say to him! After all, we are old friends. It is easy for me to guess what he is thinking, and vice versa. Although he is not capable of avoiding the hidden arrows of outsiders, he is very accurate in dealing with me. Therefore, for such a long time, he has not thought about how to deal with Feng Chuxing, but how to deal with me."

"Is that why you quarrelled with him?"

"Shouldn't I scold him?" Luo Binhan asked back, "Have you ever seen someone who points his gun inward like this? He doesn't think about how to deal with his opponent, but how to prevent me from ruining his top priority. But do you know what the funniest part of the whole thing is? He might actually win. He beat me, and also Zhou Wenxing - if Zhou Wenxing killed him in order to wake up his immortal brother, Zhou Yu had already blocked the way first. You also said that he was sleeping 80% of the time, and now it seems that he is catching up in his dreams. So, Feng Chuxing killed him in reality, but he won everyone in terms of strategic goals. Oh, except you, you two are in the same group."

"I must state that Mr. Zhou Yu and I have never reached any agreement on this matter."

"But your strategic goals are quite consistent." Luo Binhan said sincerely, "But you are indeed different from him, Li Li. You are a reasonable person. You know how to strive for it with all your strength. Those who seek the best will get the middle, and those who seek the worst will get nothing. This is your motto."

"I remember last time on the beach, you disagreed with this statement."

"Yes, I have never liked this sentence, because it completely ignores the risks. You see, our case is simply the best counterexample of this sentence: those who seek the best may lose everything; those who only seek the worst can easily achieve their goals. This is Zhou Yu's strategy. He is unwilling to take any unnecessary risks, not even for his own life. If you were Zhou Wenxing, what would you do with such a coward?"

He crumpled the paper bag into a ball and threw it into the trash can beside the lawn, with a little smile on his face: "He can only come to me. He can't provoke Zhou Yu at all, so he can only come to me. Unfortunately, Zhou Yu also understood this. A normal person would think of using me to catch Zhou Wenxing at this time, but his thinking is different from that of a normal person. He chose to make me, and everyone else, lose value to Zhou Wenxing."

"Sir, you don't have to blame yourself."

"I don't blame myself." Luo Binhan stood up and walked to the open space. He raised his head slightly and turned around towards the nearby tall buildings. "Do you see self-blame on my face? I'm almost mad at him. What's your next question?"

"I want to know what you did last night."

"I drove out of the wetland with a body," said Luo Binhan. "I turned off my phone and hid it in the bushes at the entrance of the wetland park. I took it back after daybreak. You understand. I don't know if you installed any backdoors on my phone. Then I drove along a county road without surveillance until I reached a random field I thought was suitable. I can still find that place now, but I can't tell you where it is. I dragged Zhou Yu out of the car, found a secluded place to check the wound, and then started digging a hole. At first, my mind was a little unclear, so I So I dug it with my bare hands, but after ten minutes I realized that this was a stupid idea, because the land was full of...ah, sorry, it's better not to tell you the characteristics of the soil. Anyway, I went back to the car and thought about it, and used a walking stick, a machete and the engine cover to make a small shovel. The trouble was that I didn't bring any big suitcases or pockets, so I made do with my coat and car seat covers, which were covered in blood anyway and I couldn't use them anymore. Anyway, I basically wrapped it up in the end. The pit is very shallow, and I tried my best to cover it with miscellaneous items, so it should be fine for two or three days."

"With all due respect, this isn't the most appropriate way to say goodbye. Besides..."

"And he might have the same problem as Zhou Yu. I know. I've thought about this, so I also wondered if I should just burn it down. But to be honest, I still had hope at the time. After I solved the problem with the pit, I didn't start to cover it with soil right away, but sat there and waited."

"I suppose you are not expecting me?"

"That's not the case. I didn't know what I was waiting for. Maybe Zhou Yu would suddenly sit up like a zombie, or a voice would get into my head and talk, or maybe I would see a wild dog with flaming eyes walking out of the darkness? I also wondered if I would dream about something. So I risked sleeping for half an hour while it was still dark, but I didn't dream at all. Nothing strange happened until dawn. Li Li, at that moment I realized that he had really won, he had defeated both me and Zhou Wenxing. So I started to fill the soil. I don't plan to keep him there forever, this is just a temporary measure. When it's over, I will hand him over to you and see how you plan to deal with him. Cremation? Or hiding in a secret laboratory? Are you going to dissect the body to see what's going on?"

"Sir, as you said, I am also Zhou Yu's friend."

"He won't mind."

"I'm your friend too."

"I don't mind either." Luo Binhan nodded and reached out to touch his face. "It's strange, Li Li. When the sun rose this morning, I didn't feel sad at all. In fact, I felt pretty good. For so long, there have always been a lot of noises in my head, as if I was arguing with myself. But now, things have become much simpler. I feel very quiet in my head, or you could say that now I have finally become coordinated."

He calmly walked back to the pool and sat down. "It's my turn to ask questions," he said, "Li Li, did the people you sent out find Feng Chuxing?"

(End of this chapter)