"It seems like the voice appears directly in my head. Do you remember Ivan Joe we met a few days ago?"
"Sound transmission?"
Chu Jiu curled his lips, muttered that Master Qin's friends were all great people anyway, put on his coat and walked out the door.
In the cave dwelling next door, Mr. Zhuan was still sitting cross-legged on the kang.
After seeing me and Chujiu, he pointed to a wine bottle on the bedside of the kang.
"Drink half a bottle per person!"
Chu Jiu took the wine bottle and turned it over and over, looking at the small print on it: Hengshui Laobaixin Dry Alcohol 69%.
"Drink, you are freezing to death in the river, Qin De and Ji La can't you fight for me?"
It turns out that high alcohol can drive away the cold. I still understand this knowledge.
After all, in Lijia Village, when adults went hunting in the mountains in winter, they would carry a small bottle of 52-degree Fenjiu in their arms.
"Holy crap! Guo Guo, is this the soju you northerners drink?"
Chujiu took a sip, and the hot taste made him stick out his tongue. Mr. Zhuan showed a weird smile and said that the young man still has a long way to go.
This must be the strongest wine I have ever drunk. One sip made a burning sensation run from my throat to my stomach. I even doubted whether this alcoholic beverage would burn my esophagus.
Mr. Zhuan urged us to continue drinking quickly until we had finished half a bottle before setting off.
The hardest thing to swallow is actually the first sip, but there is no burning sensation when you drink it later.
After half a bottle of high-strength wine, beads of sweat began to appear on his forehead. Chujiu told us that he felt heat coming out of his hair roots.
Mr. Zhuan nodded with satisfaction, threw two cotton hats to us, jumped down from the kang, and strode out the door with his hands behind his back.
We put on our cotton hats obediently, knowing that this was to prevent us from catching a cold when we went out.
There is a path in front of the brick factory that leads directly to the bank of the Yellow River, but Mr. Zhuan did not take this road, but walked along the road in the direction of Dawang Village.
When we were still one mile away from Dawang Village, Mr. Zhuan stopped, pointed to a path full of hay next to him, and said he was waiting for us at the end, and our mission was to find a big rooster that was more than two years old.
"It's midnight, where can we find a big cock?"
Chujiu showed a troubled expression. Looking for a big rooster in the wilderness was too difficult for us.
When I went out, I looked at the time on my pager, it was eleven ten.
Zhuan Ye ignored Chujiu and just raised his finger and pointed at his head, meaning he would find a solution by himself.
"Let's go to Dawang Village and have a look."
I pointed to the big tree a mile away. I had been chatting with Zhang Jun before, and he told me that the symbol of Dawang Village was the giant tree at the entrance of the village.
There is a courtyard next to a big tree at the entrance of the village. Even under the moonlight at night, you can clearly see the dilapidated appearance of the courtyard wall.
"Is this the courtyard where the female corpse was staring at in the mission information?"
Chujiu looked around, asked casually, and asked me to look for places with more houses.
I passed several houses and found no fences with chickens.
Just when I was about to make a hexagram to calculate the direction, Chujiu showed a wicked smile and asked me to give him ten dollars.
It turned out that there was a wooden fence behind a house directly in front of us, and we heard a faint crow of a chicken.
On the ninth day of the month, he asked me to wait for him where he was, so as not to scare the chickens if I got too close.
Three minutes later, Chujiu appeared in front of me with a big rooster in his arms. The big rooster was so well-behaved that it didn't make any sound.
In fact, not only the big rooster, but also the entire flock of chickens enclosed in the wooden fence did not show any abnormalities.
Chujiu casually said it was just a Taoist trick, and he pressed the ten dollars with a stone on the feeding trough.
"Master Zhuan, are you sure we want to take this boat into the water?"
Having lived on the banks of the Yellow River since childhood, I have seen all kinds of ships, but I have never seen the one in front of me.
This is a legendary canoe that has only appeared in stories told to me by adults.
Such hulls were eliminated long before the founding of New China. Even in Lijiacun, one of the poorest mountain villages in the country, the boats in the village are much better than this.
The canoe that Mr. Zhuan dragged to the river bank was indeed made of a single giant log.
The hull is about one meter wide, and is as simple as hollowing out the center of a tree, just enough to accommodate three people.
Following the traces on the river bank, it is not difficult to find that Mr. Zhuan's boat was hidden in a corner of the rocks.
"Oh, you really should ask your grandfather about the origin of this ship. You are the first person since the Tang Dynasty to suspect that it is useless."
Mr. Zhuan once again showed an expression of disdain and disdain on his face.
Chujiu walked to the river, put his hand into the water and made a gasping sound. If he fell into the river at this temperature, he would probably die half of his life.
"There's so much nonsense, come up quickly! After the time has passed, you have to come back tomorrow. Whether I am willing to send you two little bastards to the water tomorrow night is another matter."
Mr. Zhuan's bellows-breaking voice sounded, and you could tell he was really angry.
Chujiu and I helped push the canoe into the water. After jumping on board, we discovered that we didn't see any wood pulp in the boat.
"The last time this boat was launched was more than 20 years ago, and the person sitting on the boat was your grandfather Qin De."
Mr. Zhuan glared at Chujiu who was about to speak, but Chujiu closed his mouth strangely.
Judging from the helpless expression on Chujiusheng's face, he must have already made plans to swim ashore from the cold river.
"My grandpa? What is he doing on the boat?"
Grandpa Zhuan heard my question and hesitated for a moment. He let me ask Grandpa myself when I had time, and then jumped on the wooden boat.
A strange scene happened immediately. Ever since Mr. Zhuan jumped onto the wooden boat, no movement was seen from him. The wooden boat actually floated slowly towards the center of the river.
"This? This? Isn't it so magical? Our Taoist wind-controlling technique requires a curse after all."
The person who answered the ninth day of the lunar month was Mr. Zhuan who laughed at him. Didn’t he tell the people who fished corpses from the Yellow River in the afternoon that they have noses and eyes? How come he doesn’t even know the most basic knowledge now?
Chujiu touched his head in embarrassment, changed the subject and asked Mr. Zhuan if he used sound transmission when he called us to wake up, and why Zhang Jun and the others were not woken up.
Mr. Zhuan snorted disdainfully again. It would probably be noon before the two of them woke up.
"The firewood you threw into the stove was tampered with?"
The clever Chujiu quickly thought of the reason.
Zhuan Ye laughed and said that Chujiu was smarter than his uncle, and then added that it was just a little trick.
"Eh? Mr. Zhuan, what kind of material is this wooden boat made of? I have never seen wood with such texture."
Chu Jiu seemed to have discovered a new world. He put his head close to the eaves of the boat and dug his eyes into the grain of the wood with his nails.
"Zaomu!" Mr. Zhuan replied casually.
"No wonder I don't recognize it. There are no jujube trees over there. Besides, what is it? You just said it was a jujube tree? Such a big jujube tree?"
Chujiu screamed and stood up suddenly, and the wooden boat began to shake. I was so frightened that I quickly pushed Chujiu down.