The ultimate blue sea

Chapter 47- A Door

Each person's life is like a river. Its upper reaches are like the water droplets running off a snow-capped glacier, slowly collecting into a rivulet carrying the air of the highlands, passing through mountain ranges and flatlands, now rapid and now slow, now stopping and now starting, bringing along sand and grit as it goes. Its middle reaches become muddy and furious; then, as it flows on, this fury wears away, and it passes through cities, being structured by their clamor, becoming placid and silenced.

Until at last it reaches its end in the great sea that joins the blue sky, stretching as far as the eye can see.

The River God meets the North Sea, comically exposing smallness in the face of greatness, henceforth coming to an end, yet also henceforth beginning; the wheel comes full circle, continuing forever.

Heaven and earth are the guesthouses of all living things; time is the sojourn of hundreds of generations.

And our fleeting lives are like dreams; how long can happiness last?

Each person looking at another person sees only a brief span of his life. Who knows how far he will have gone when you turn to look again? It seems that one person can never truly understand another person, unless he curves his own life into an arc, adjusts to the same tempo as that other person, from birth to death, not parting for an instant.

But how hard would this be? An old saying tells us that "you can't take a book a thousand leagues"; on a long and cold road, even a notebook half an inch thick is a burden that can be carelessly mislaid or lost, let alone walking a road several decades long taking another person with you.

Hu Bugui leaned quietly against the doorframe of Su Qing's room, separated from him by a bathroom door. Neither understood the other.

Su Qing didn't understand why Hu Bugui insisted on making him stay. He thought that if the RZ Unit were high quality government products, then he himself was a counterfeit "Notorola" cellphone. While his functions were complete, he wasn't precisely fit to appear in public view. But he didn't have a sense of inferiority, either; the work of the revolution didn't make distinctions between the high and the low. High-end goods had their high-end market, and counterfeit goods had their benefits. He thought that even compared to the government's group of superstars, he could still be counted as a specialist in his arts and profession.

They could cooperate, but it would be very miserable to stay here year-round.

How could a fish's eye pass itself off among pearls?

Su Qing looked at the super luxurious bathroom full of steam and thought that this really was a good place. Though it didn't amount to corrupt opulence, at least it reached the level of a developed country. It made the down-at-heel Su Qing, who had crawled out of the sewer, feel like a floating immortal. But however comfortable it was, what did it matter?

As soon as he thought of the enormous organization in the RZ Unit headquarters, the scrupulous and methodical military personnel, the superiors coming to deliver orders now and again, and the ceaseless "serve the people," he simply felt that it was a pain from the stomach down to the balls.

At first, when he had taken Tu Tutu and obstinately left the RZ Unit's treatment center, he probably had been nursing a slight fit of pique, though he would have died sooner than admit it and had hypocritically put on a magnanimous front. But now Su Qing thought that there wasn't anything bad about the way he lived. He had even developed a sort of objective point of view and could observe his own chaotic life with detachment.

Today surnamed Zhao, tomorrow surnamed Qian—he had gone through The Book of Family Names one by one, wandering through every corner of the cities and the countryside, but he hadn't left a trace. Cutting up an ID card was like throttling a person. When he realized that that person was himself, he would have a feeling approaching warped pleasure.