Tu Tutu abandoned his studies once again, sending thanks up to the heavens. Anyway, he was only six and had just started first grade; it wasn’t very urgent. In the end, Su Qing didn’t give the old swindler the promised two hundred and even blamed him for trying to eat out of the communal pot. Requiting kindness with enmity, he used force to make the old swindler take him out of C City. 

He thought that his words now were more and more full of hot air. His name was false, his identity was false, everything about him was false. When he flapped his lips, nine and a half out of ten sentences were cooked up. 

Oh, yes, we forgot to say, the old swindler’s name was Ji Pengcheng. He had wandered the jianghu for a long time. He had no rival in deception; there was no swindle he wouldn’t stoop to. He could have been called the pinnacle of shamelessness, though when he met Su Qing, he learned the meaning of the new generation excelling the previous one. 

That night, they boarded an illegal passenger transport and left, and Su Qing bid farewell to his last normal days, beginning his lengthy wanderings.

The ramshackle bus spat exhaust as it whistled along. A slightly cold night wind leaked in through a window with half a pane of broken glass. Su Qing turned to lean against the window, shielding Tu Tutu from the wind, and for the very last and very first time, he voluntarily contacted Hu Bugui. 

Hu Bugui had sent Fang Xiu to search everywhere for traces of Su Qing while he himself quietly kept an eye on the other unknown force searching for him. When he found that they were suddenly moving towards C City, he had realized at once that Su Qing was likely there, and that he had revealed himself. 

Hu Bugui had moved like lightning, personally taking people to C City, not anticipating that Su Qing would have another fortuitous encounter and move too quickly, leaving just as he arrived. 

The RZ Unit was extremely efficient. Following the clues, they quickly found the internet cafe owner, Liu Daqing and his family, and even the construction team Su Qing had worked with. But none of these people could tell them where he had gone. Mrs. Liu, however, remembered Ji Pengcheng picking up Tu Tutu. But when they reached his humble home and had a look, only a bloody bandage and some yellow talismans drawn with cinnabar remained; the premises had been vacated. 

Su Qing had chosen the right person. This old fox Ji Pengcheng had plenty of means for vanishing off the face of the earth. 

Hu Bugui squatted on the floor clutching the bandage Su Qing had removed, staring blankly at the blood-stained places. It was as if there was something blocking his chest. 

It seemed that for a very long time, the center of gravity of his life and his work had been concentrated on a single person. At first it had been to find him. When he had found him, Su Qing had insisted on returning, leaving him anxious once more. Later he had been injured, and before his injuries had been fully healed, he had left without saying goodbye. 

Hu Bugui remembered how Su Qing had looked the first time he had seen him. The young man wearing just a dark-colored sweater was sitting in a corner of the bar. The dim lighting outlined his features like a drawing. He was extremely beautiful. Quite a few people had their eyes on him, and he took no notice, seeming naturally dim-witted. When someone came over to take advantage of him, he didn’t know it, even happily launched into conversation.  

Some nerve of Hu Bugui’s was struck wrong then. He meddlesomely stepped in to defend him. The young man drunkenly raised his head and smiled foolishly at him, stood up swaying, put an arm on his shoulder, and whistled lewdly. “Nice figure. Are you…coming with me?” 

Hu Bugui thought that at the time Su Qing had been like an exquisite but empty bag of skin, and in all that had happened afterwards, it was as if he had watched a soul fill up that bag of skin bit by bit. So vivid, lively, even inspiring respect…and a sudden other indescribable feeling—when one person for some reason always, always thinks of another person for a period of time without stopping, they come to understand that feeling. 

Just then, his earpiece sounded. It wasn’t the channel for headquarters or for any of the field personnel. In that moment, Hu Bugui’s heart actually stopped. 

Wherever Su Qing had gotten to this time, the sound coming through the earpiece was very noisy.

Probably because Hu Bugui’s aura was so strong, Su Qing never felt entirely natural speaking to him. Like the first time when he had woken up in that little hotel room, he had an impulse to deliver a report. 

He gave a dry cough, clearing his slightly tight throat. “Ahem, Captain Hu, you can hear me?” 

Hu Bugui quickly stood up and gestured to all the field personnel searching Ji Pengcheng’s room attempting to find some clues, making them be quiet. 

“Where are you? When did you leave? There’s blood on the bandage, where are you hurt?” 

Su Qing stared, understanding that in such a short time Hu Bugui had already found his final stop in C City—Ji Pengcheng’s home. A little uncertainly, he asked, “So you really are looking for me?” 

If Su Qing had been in front of him, Hu Bugui thought that he would have punched him. This scoundrel hadn’t noticed at all his own importance as the world’s only possessor of a double core. So many people with different motives were searching for him all over, and for him it was a casual “you really are looking.” 

Su Qing gave a soft laugh. His voice was actually very pleasant, especially when he laughed softly. It was like a little brush swiping over the heart. He said, “Stop looking, don’t hold up your proper business.” 

The veins stood out on Hu Bugui’s temples. “We currently have no way to know how large Utopia is, how many people it has. Do you know how much danger you’re in on your own?” 

“Oh,” said Su Qing, “it’s all right, really. I think I can deal with it. In the future there will come a day when even if they don’t come to find me, I’ll go to find them.” 

Hu Bugui’s heart tightened. “What are you going to do?” 

Su Qing was silent for a while. After a long moment, he quietly said, “I’m just calling in on you, and then I’ll go. I won’t contact you again. If something happens, I definitely won’t reveal any information about the RZ Unit—of course, I don’t actually know any information.” 

He paused, then added, “Thank you for taking care of me for such a long time before.” 

Hu Bugui clenched his teeth, suddenly unable to speak. 

After another moment, as though feeling a little awkward, hemming and hawing, Su Qing said, “Actually…what happened at the grey house, don’t take it to heart. It doesn’t mean anything to me, really.” 

As though he was afraid Hu Bugui wouldn’t believe him, he continued: “Actually, you were all fulfilling your duty. And back then, I was the one who wanted to go back for Uncle Cheng. It doesn’t have much to do with you. Anyway, everything was so confused, there were so many people…” 

Su Qing paused once again as though considering what words to use. After a long moment, he inarticulately squeezed out the sentence, “Well…let’s say to each his own destiny, life and death depend on heaven.” 

When he had brought the unconscious Su Qing back to the grey house and watched him go to his death, Chen Lin had concisely used the words “to each his own destiny.” Around and around, and now these words had once again come out of Su Qing’s mouth, but they carried an unspeakable air of ease and self-mockery, with a precise drop of petty complaint. 

“Anyway, thank you very much, Captain Hu. Catch you later in the jianghu.” 

Then, not waiting for Hu Bugui to respond, Su Qing didn’t even turn the communicator off, simply took it out of his ear and threw it out the window. He watched it bounce a few times, burst into a tiny shower of sparks, then disappear into the night. 

He turned his head to lean it against the remaining half of the window, letting the wind blow the hair in front of his forehead. 

The place where he had been shot in the leg still hurt, but it was already much better. Su Qing knew that his body was repairing itself. After tonight, he would probably be able to manage walking on both legs. 

When he remembered himself from a year ago, he suddenly thought that it was like a dream. 

When I set out, the willows were stirring. Now I return, the snow falls heavy¹.

He pulled a little blanket up over Tu Tutu, then closed his own eyes. Su Qing thought, he had experienced life and death, poverty, even having nothing. Whatever hardships lay on the road ahead, he could go on ahead—go on…on his own. 

Ji Pengcheng, who was already snoring, suddenly opened his eyes and looked at him with a thoughtful expression. Whatever he was thinking, he smiled slightly. 

After leaving like this, the three of them traveled for three full years, their steps covering almost the whole country—the coldest places, the hottest places, the most remote places, the most bustling places. 

From beginning to end, Ji Pengcheng continued to fight on the front lines of fraud. In an exchange of pointers with his forced disciple, in what could be called the teacher profiting as much as the student, his skills in the arts of trickery ascended another level. 

Su Qing went to many places he had never been and began to study all the books he had never studied before with all his might. All around he went through around ten IDs. He used fake diplomas, fake residence registration booklets, fake work histories, and so on… He tried out practically everything that could be faked in this world; he falsified so much that he was about to forget what his own real name was. 

He did heavy labor on construction sites; relying on a fake diploma, he wormed his way into a company—even, with the ability to talk to anyone in their own language that he had perfected with Ji Pengcheng, into a division management role, though sadly they had to change places again before he could get his fill of power; he worked as a bodyguard in a night club and got mixed up in drug trafficking during the course of it; he took part in illegal boxing matches and made his living in underground casinos; he acted as an informer for the police, passing a period of time as a sort of bounty hunter; for Su Qing, the most bizarre experience of all was when he, a person who had started out by paying someone else to take his university English exam for him, spent a month as a substitute teacher for New Oriental². 

The nutritional capsules he had brought from the RZ Unit soon ran out. Su Qing was worried that his eating would scare people, so he ate candy by the handful. He was always crunching on a piece of hard candy—anyway, his current body wasn’t readily susceptible to tooth decay. 

He put himself through demanding training. In three years, he never slept over an hour and a half in one day. Su Qing didn’t want to spend the rest of his life fleeing and hiding. He thought that one day he would have to stand up and go uncover Utopia to get a look at its true face. 

In this, Ji Pengcheng unexpectedly helped him quite a bit. From some unorthodox school, he scared up quite a few bizarre props—palm-sized “little stones” to tie on the body that in fact weighed over a hundred pounds; wearing a few of them, Su Qing could spend a day living a life worse than death; or a little taser the size of a flashlight—the old man would sit quietly in a chair drinking tea and press the button, sending Su Qing fleeing all over the yard with bolt after bolt of electricity. 

He never got a clear answer about what Ji Pengcheng had done before, and he hadn’t worked out why he had saved him—if there wasn’t cold hard cash in front of the old fellow, he really would give off a slight air of a lofty individual who saw through the world’s scenery. 

Tu Tutu was nine now and had grown up looking presentable. He still didn’t like going to school. Every time they came to a new place and he had to transfer to another school, he looked pitiful, and every time he quit school on leaving he was cheerful—in school he was a tree-climbing, wall-scrambling troublemaker, though on the other hand he had learned very well from Ji Pengcheng how to imitate a blind person. 

After Su Qing hardened his heart and gave him a spanking a few times, he at last developed a bit of reverence for his rather weird guardian. Over the course of three years, most of his Chinese, math and English had actually been taught to him by Su Qing. 

At last there came a day when Su Qing saw a news item on the second-hand TV in their temporarily rented little apartment: during the grand opening of a certain commercial building in a certain city, dozens of people suddenly became delirious; they seemed deranged and were suspected of having caught an unknown illness. Experts were being organized to investigate the exact circumstances. 

There followed footage of some symptoms of the “patients.” 

Su Qing watched and watched, frowning. He knew that his wandering way had reached its end.