The ultimate blue sea

Chapter 35 - Su Zecheng

The point about man being a social animal at last became obvious at this inconvenient moment. If it had only been a matter of not having money, Su Qing was a young man with his arms and legs intact. He could have made enough to eat on even if he had to go work as a miner in a coal pit. But he also didn't have an ID.

After unilaterally breaking off the connection with Hu Bugui, Su Qing sat in the train's hard seat compartment, no longer sleepy.

It was just time for the post-Spring Festival surge of farmers going to find work in the cities. The compartment was seriously overcrowded. Even the bathroom was packed. The air was awful. He tilted his head back and looked at the compartment's dim lighting. Narrowing his eyes that had turned into small telescopes, he began to look ahead towards the unseeable future.

When day was about to break, Su Qing and Tu Tutu arrived in C City. The two of them loitered around the train station until it was light. Su Qing now still had 92.5 yuan. He placed Tu Tutu in a little restaurant, spent five yuan to buy him breakfast, and instructed him: "Wait here for me. You're not allowed to go with anyone who asks you to. Do you hear me?"

Tu Tutu, seeing that there was food to eat, behaved. He nodded obediently.

Su Qing took him to sit in a seat by the window. "Sit right here, eat slowly. I'll be able to see you, don't be afraid. I have something to do, and then I'll come back. If someone asks if there's anyone sitting next to you, you say that there is, your dad's just gone to the bathroom, understand?"

For Tu Tutu, whoever had milk was mom and whoever bought him food would be obeyed. Without another word, he nodded again.

Then Su Qing left him and walked out with his remaining eighty-some yuan. From time to time he looked back at the child sitting by the window. He went to a little internet cafe across the street that didn't look especially up to standards, ready to do a bit of something illegal.

The pudgy internet cafe owner was just flirting with a girl online. Hearing someone come in, he only raised his eyelids and looked at Su Qing indifferently. "Show your ID, how many hours?"

Su Qing didn't answer. He saw that there was no one around, then drew close to the internet cafe owner, saying with familiar ease, "I'd just like to ask, do you have 'that' here?"

He mimed the shape of a card with his hands. The owner looked up at him warily. "What? What are you talking about?"

Su Qing gave a gentle cough and leaned his whole body forward. Lowering his voice, he said, "Zhang-ge recommended that I come." Based on his experience, if you said a common surname like Zhang, Wang, Li, Zhao, or Liu, ten to one you could pull off a deception—unless this internet cafe owner didn't know enough people.

As expected, the owner narrowed his eyes and considered. "That's Zhang Xiaoliu?"

He'd pulled it off. Su Qing nodded at once. The owner looked him up and down. "Are you a minor? You don't look like it?"

Su Qing gave a sigh of deep bitterness and resentment. "I've been brought to this against my will. See, I've got a wife in a game, you know how it is, and somehow it got out at home."

The internet cafe owner gave an absent-minded "yeah," his ten short, thick fingers click-clacking on the keyboard.

Su Qing watched this forty-something oily-faced internet cafe owner with a quivering belly type into the chat box: "We rove all over the world for the sake of pursuing art. We have nothing but a bellyful of experience and loneliness." He was instantly astonished into calm. His heart and breathing were steady.

He gave a dry cough and adjusted his situation a little, continuing to invent: "So guess what, the harpy actually hired a private detective to tail me. Wherever I go, there are people watching me. I feel like a member of the underground Party, like I've gone back to before the liberation."