When Meng Ziqiu returned, he found that his little darling was acting strangely, looking extremely downcast and quite pitiful.
"What's wrong, brother?" he asked with concern.
“By the way,” Xu Qian raised his deep gaze, “does your line of work make money?”
“…Huh?” Although Meng Ziqiu didn’t quite understand what he meant, he still answered honestly, “If we don’t make any business for a year, we can live off it for a year. It depends on fate.”
Xu Qian sighed again.
"...No, what's wrong?"
"It's nothing, just a thought."
Meng Ziqiu rolled his eyes and tentatively said, "Hey brother, I have another card here. My dad originally told me to save it up for my wedding, but it seems like getting married is a long way off. If you need it urgently, feel free to use it..."
"Your self-awareness is quite 'honest'," Xu Qian laughed.
"Well, everyone has to have some self-awareness. I'm used to it." Meng Ziqiu smiled honestly. He already had the appearance of an honest person, and this smile made him look even more 'honest'.
The two chatted for a while, and before they knew it, it had gotten dark.
Xu Qian lay on the soft bed, turned his head to look out the window. The starry sky outside was almost the same as before, as if he had been fishing and slacking off on Wuqi Mountain just yesterday. But in the blink of an eye, the whole world had changed so dramatically.
"Huff... huff..."
"..." Xu Qian turned his head and laughed. So your snoring is the kind that goes up and down.
Early in the morning, the two set off for the camp.
Xu Qian still used the Meitai alias. He always felt unsafe using the Hua Ge alias, which only allowed him to rest and heal. He felt that if a fight broke out, he wouldn't even have a chance to fight back. After thinking about it, he decided to continue using the Meitai alias.
Fifth Master was an extremely thin old man with layers upon layers of wrinkles on his face. He looked to be at least sixty years old, but his eyes were very powerful, no less so than those of the young men.
When Fifth Master saw Xu Qian, his gaze lingered on the black cloth on Xu Qian's back for only a second longer, but he didn't say anything. Perhaps he trusted Meng Ziqiu, or perhaps he was just being cautious.
A few minutes later, the team that was about to set off to cross the desert was complete.
Xu Qian sat in the passenger seat of the SUV, driven by Meng Ziqiu. There were two other people in the back: a young man nicknamed Fox, and a man in his forties or fifties called Uncle Shui, who was also someone Fifth Master had brought on this trip.
Xu Qian had heard Meng Ziqiu explain that the Dusha Desert was an uninhabited area, a no-man's-land. Their team was there to rescue people. The boss who paid them was a young man surnamed Shen, who was sitting in the second car. He was around 25 years old and wore gold-rimmed glasses. He said he was Shen's uncle or great-uncle. Shen had gone to Dusha with an archaeological team a week earlier and hadn't been heard from since, so they organized a group of people to search for him.
Of course, this is the official explanation, but in reality, their motives are probably not so simple.
Before crossing the border, you could still see some sparse poplar forests outside the car, but once you cross, it's all sand and sand, a real desert.
Xu Qian, indulging his childlike curiosity, took out his newly bought phone and snapped photos incessantly. Anyone unaware of his true nature would genuinely believe he was a minor.
Sure enough, Uncle Shui, who was sitting in the back, spoke up. His voice was inexplicably hoarse, as if something was blocking it, "So young and already out selling goods? Aren't you afraid of dying halfway there?"
Meng Ziqiu glanced at the rearview mirror, smiled, and said, "Everyone needs to gain experience. If I stumble now, the older ones will take the fall."
"Times have changed now, cough." Uncle Shui took a drag of his cigarette, coughing as he smoked.
"Of course, it's not as tough as it was back then."
Uncle Shui didn't reply to him again. Instead, he asked the kid in the passenger seat, his tone unusually kind: "Little kid, are you in high school yet?"
"No," Xu Qian put away his phone, his smile utterly innocent. "My dad said I wasn't cut out for studying, so he sent me out to hang out with my uncle, right, Uncle?"
Meng, suddenly becoming an uncle, from Qiu: "..."
Uncle Shui stubbed out his cigarette, his voice even hoarser, and said, "What's there to talk about! What can you do at this age if you don't study? Are you really going to come out and sell goods with your uncle?"
"Hehe, I think smuggling goods is pretty fun. I'm not going back to school. What's the point of studying those books!"
"You ungrateful brat..." Uncle Shui suddenly laughed, his deep voice making a 'hohoho' sound, which was extremely unpleasant.
Meng Ziqiu glanced at Xu Qian and thought to himself that this little rascal was really good at acting. He himself did not know that he actually had an older or younger sister.
Around 1 p.m., the convoy stopped in a relatively flat sandy area. By then, there was no greenery around, not even a single seedling. After a while, Brother Sang, one of Fifth Master's men, announced over the radio that they should rest and eat on the spot.
Xu Qian jumped out of the car, found an open space to take care of his personal matters, and was packing up to walk back when he unexpectedly saw a familiar person.
[Name: Shirakawa (fake)]
Good heavens, it was you!
The man had changed his appearance; he was now a middle-aged man in his thirties, with a greasy, receding hairline.
Xu Qian was quite curious about when this person had sneaked in. He had scanned everyone before setting off, and there was no one named Bai Chuan back then.
Shirakawa seemed to sense something. He looked up and met a familiar face. He didn't freeze or make any sudden movements, but simply turned his gaze away naturally.
Clearly, this person has excellent self-control, so much so that it's ingrained in their very being.
Xu Qian didn't want to expose him, at least not now. He put his hands in his pockets and walked past the middle-aged man with a very relaxed gait.
"Old Guan, is it ready yet?" a voice came from afar.
Shirakawa said "Hey" and walked over to the person who had spoken.
...
Xu Qian got back into the car. As soon as he got in, Meng Ziqiu handed him a bag of bread, which was a caterpillar-shaped bread topped with a layer of meat floss. From the moment they entered the desert, the food quality would gradually decline, and in the end it would probably be things like compressed biscuits.
After resting for half an hour, the team had eaten, and the vehicles were ready to go.
Xu Qian closed his eyes, pretending to be dozing off, but actually opened the large map of the desert. On the map, Yan Jiudu was standing in a place that looked a bit like a rocky hill. In the lower right corner of the rocky hill, there was a small light green dot, which looked like a lake.
Before coming, Xu Qian had been given a brief introduction to the desert by Meng Ziqiu. This light green dot was likely the "Haizi" that Meng Ziqiu mentioned, a movable lake in the desert that moves with the sand dunes.
After a while, Xu Qian saw Yan Jiudu's icon move again, this time directly to the edge of the light green dot. His large map had a time delay, from the hill to the lake... It seemed that they had encountered some trouble before.
Xu Qian looked at his friend list again. Yan Jiudu's health bar had dropped considerably, but he was still relatively healthy. Meng Liangchen 9 was in a worse situation, with his health bar nearly half of what it was at the beginning. It seemed that their situation was worse than he had imagined.
It gets dark late in the desert. It was almost eight o'clock at night when Xu Qian 'woke up' and the sun was still hanging outside the car window. Looking at it like that, he really had the feeling of "a lone plume of smoke rising straight from the desert and the setting sun over a long river".
"It's getting dark soon, the camp is ahead," a voice came through the intercom.
Xu Qian got out of the car and looked up. The sun, which had been hanging there just moments before, was getting dimmer and dimmer. In a little while, it would really disappear without a shadow.
"Xiao Mao, come and lend a hand!" It was Uncle Shui who spoke, and for some reason, he seemed to care a lot about Xu Qian's alias, Xu Xiao Mao.
“…Oh, he’s here.” Xu Qian pursed his lips, unsure of what to say, after all, respecting the elderly and caring for the young is a traditional Chinese virtue.
"Oh dear! Where should I chop this?"
"……oh."
Seeing his little darling being bossed around by Uncle Shui, Meng Ziqiu found it somewhat amusing. Over the past few days, he had come to understand Xu Qian's temperament a little better. In most cases, Xu Qian was very easy to talk to, and would even occasionally show a silly expression, just like he had just done, like a child.
Before darkness completely fell, a simple but fairly tidy campsite was finally set up.
Meng Ziqiu brought over a small pot containing a white, rice-paste-like substance. Xu Qian could smell the milky aroma from afar; it smelled alright, but he didn't know how it would taste.
Xu Qian took a bite, and... well, the taste wasn't very good. To be honest, it didn't have any special flavor; it was a bit sweet and a bit salty.
"Not eating anymore?" Meng Ziqiu saw that he only took one bite and then stopped eating, so he knew that the milk curd was definitely not to his liking.
Xu Qian shook his head, showing a disgusted expression, and then started eating the caterpillar bread again.
Uncle Shui saw this and grumbled that he was a picky eater! But anyone with eyes could see that he was very happy.
The desert temperature was very low at night, so a stove was lit in the camp, and four or five people sat around it. Basically, whoever got out of the vehicle, a few people would gather around.
Xu Qian and the other two were alone. The fox in the car hadn't spoken to them the whole time, nor had he spoken to anyone else; he always kept to himself. And now, in the blink of an eye, he'd vanished.
Just then, a cry of surprise rang out from the camp.
"Fifth Master! There's something here!"
Almost everyone gathered around with flashlights, and suddenly an oval-shaped stone tablet appeared on the sand, covered with many incomprehensible inscriptions that looked like scribbles at first glance.
"It seems it was covered by sand before, and then it was exposed again after the dunes moved," a middle-aged man wearing glasses explained.
"What does it say on this?"
“Well…” The middle-aged man took out a magnifying glass and a small brush and examined it. “If you look closely, it does resemble the script of the ancient Danzhu Kingdom. However, due to the years of wind and sand erosion, the characters are not very clear. I need to… study it some more.”
Xu Qian suddenly squatted down and reached out to clear away the sand under the stone tablet. The deeper he cleared, the more of the inscription was revealed.
Seeing this, Meng Ziqiu also picked up his tools and followed along to clear the area.
Several young people also came to help.
Several people worked for almost half an hour, but the stone tablet was like a bottomless pit, standing resolutely no matter how hard they dug.
Suddenly, they unearthed another hard object—a camera.
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