Chapter 192
Chapter 192
Naturally, when Qin Ying said she’d heard something strange had happened, she meant the conversation she’d just overheard between the train attendant and those hoodlums.
The part about wanting to “look into it,” though, was pure posturing.
Qin Ying noticed the attendant stealing glances at her.
She put on a cold expression and tightened the strap of her backpack. “May I ask your surname?”
Still trying to guess what organization she belonged to, the attendant immediately straightened and replied, “Zhao. Zhao Jixian.”
He extended his right hand to Qin Ying.
She gave it a perfunctory shake, then said, “I overheard your conversation with those hoodlums just now, Mr. Zhao. You seem to know something about it as well. Could you tell me more?”
Zhao Jixian hesitated before making an inviting gesture. “This isn’t the place to talk. Why don’t we go to a rear carriage and discuss it in private?”
Qin Ying paused, then asked, “How long until we enter the Qingzhai Tunnel?”
Before Zhao Jixian could answer, the train squealed to a halt.
His hand froze halfway to his watch. He gave Qin Ying a wry smile. “There must be a rockfall in the mountains. We’ve made an unscheduled stop.”
“We would’ve reached it in seven minutes if we hadn’t stopped. Now, there’s no telling how long it’ll take.”
Qin Ying glanced in Zhang Yuqin’s direction, then nodded. “All right. Let’s talk in the rear carriage.”
Her attitude was arrogant, but Zhao Jixian, or perhaps people of that era in general, responded well to precisely that sort of behavior.
He led Qin Ying toward the back of the train, saying, “There’s an empty compartment at the rear of Car No. 2. Follow me.”
The little girl beside them looked back and forth, torn between staying and following.
Qin Ying said to her, “You come too.”
People had always considered rooms at the very end unlucky, even on a train.
No one had bought a ticket for this rear compartment, so Zhao Jixian brought Qin Ying and the little girl selling edamame inside.
No matter the era, wealthy people always knew how to travel in comfort. The compartment was trimmed in walnut and furnished with two upholstered seats, while red velvet curtains hung over the windows.
There were no obvious odors inside, though it was a little stuffy.
It was the little edamame seller’s first time in such a place. She stared around in fascination and did not dare sit down for quite a while.
It was Qin Ying’s first time too, but she was much more composed. She sat down with the lordly ease of someone who owned the place.
After showing them to their seats, Zhao Jixian stepped out. When he returned, he was carrying a wicker thermos and two porcelain cups.
There were only a couple of tea leaves in each cup, and the water was not hot enough for them to unfurl.
Even so, the little edamame seller cradled her cup in both hands as though it were a treasure.
Then she seemed to remember something. After bustling around for a moment, she wrapped a handful of edamame from her basket in newspaper.
Seeing that Qin Ying had not touched her tea, Zhao Jixian smiled apologetically to smooth things over. “I didn’t know what you liked to drink, so I just grabbed some tea leaves.”
Qin Ying took a bottle of mineral water from her backpack, kept one hand over the label, unscrewed the cap, and drank half of it. “My doctor says I can’t drink tea because I have kidney stones.”
The lie rolled effortlessly off her tongue, leaving both Zhao Jixian and the little edamame seller completely taken in.
Zhao Jixian nodded in agreement. “That’s right. You shouldn’t drink tea if you have kidney stones.”
He said that, but his eyes remained fixed on the clear bottle of mineral water in Qin Ying’s hand.
Qin Ying coughed lightly to draw his attention back. “What exactly happened in the Qingzhai Tunnel?”
Her blunt question made both Zhao Jixian and the little edamame seller shudder.
“What’s wrong?” Qin Ying asked.
The little girl hunched her shoulders and whispered, “Big Sister, don’t talk about things like that at night.”
Meanwhile, Zhao Jixian rose and pulled the gold-red velvet curtains shut, blocking out the pitch-black darkness outside.
Putting on a convincing show, Qin Ying took a little red booklet from her backpack. On her shoulder, Thunderbird fidgeted restlessly, eager to hop down and eat the edamame.
There was no way Qin Ying dared feed it edamame that had been sold more than a century ago. With no other choice, she tore off a piece of compressed biscuit from her backpack and let it peck at that instead.
Spotting a chocolate bar as well, Qin Ying thought for a moment, then took it out and split it between Zhao Jixian and the young girl selling edamame.
“This is chocolate. Give it a try.”
Qin Ying tucked the empty wrapper away, only to find the two of them staring at the dark lump of chocolate as though they were afraid to put it in their mouths.
In the end, Zhao Jixian spoke up. “Chocolate… I remember now! It’s a kind of candy sold by foreign trading houses. It’s very, very expensive!”
Pleased that he knew what it was, he handled his half as though it were a priceless treasure and bit off a piece no bigger than a fingernail.
The girl selling edamame followed his example and took a tiny bite. At first, she frowned. Then her eyes suddenly lit up.
“It’s sweet!”
Smiling, Zhao Jixian asked the girl for a sheet of newspaper used to wrap the edamame. He told Qin Ying, “Something this good ought to be saved. I’ll take it home and let my son and daughter have a taste.”
The girl copied him, carefully wrapping up her chocolate after only two bites. “I’ll take mine home for my little brother too.”
How they chose to handle a piece of candy was none of Qin Ying’s business. She merely tapped her red leather notebook and asked again, “Now, why don’t you tell me exactly what’s happened recently?”
“I’ll…” She paused almost imperceptibly. “I’ll write it up and have it printed in the newspaper. I might even be able to get both your names in print.”
At that, the girl selling edamame was the first to raise her hand. “Me! My surname is Feng. I’m Feng Meiyu!”
Feng?
Qin Ying couldn’t help looking up at her. Her stare left the girl so puzzled that she touched her own face.
“Is something wrong, Big Sister?”
Qin Ying shook her head. “No. It’s just that you have the same surname as someone I know.”
Once Zhao Jixian heard that this might be published in the newspaper, he clearly began treating Qin Ying as some sort of reporter.
After asking Qin Ying to come up with a pseudonym for him, he finally said, “You know about the Tunnel Collapse Incident during the construction of Qingzhai Tunnel, don’t you?”
Qin Ying gave a noncommittal “Oh?” and put on an expression inviting him to continue.
In truth, how could she possibly know anything about a tunnel collapse? Once she learned the incident had taken place in Qingzhai, she had looked through the available records.
But there had been nothing at all about the place.
The archive that might once have held relevant records had burned during the war, taking all the old newspapers and county gazetteers with it.
Later, she had heard Fatty Wu mention something about the Yellow Springs Eye Stone and a Foundation Sacrifice, but she genuinely knew nothing about the collapse.
Seeing that she apparently wasn’t familiar with it, Zhao Jixian explained, “Five years ago, while this railway was being built, there was a cave-in. Fifty or sixty laborers were buried inside.”
“No one bothered putting much effort into recovering their bodies afterward. They simply paid the families some money and blasted the tunnel open with detonators.”
Qin Ying raised an eyebrow slightly. It was certainly an appalling thing to do, but in an age when people were treated as less than human, it could hardly have been rare.
“Those laborers…” Zhao Jixian clicked his tongue, seemingly unsure whether he should continue.
Feng Meiyu had no such reservations. Her small hand shot into the air. “I know! It wasn’t a cave-in at all. They were deliberately buried in there as victims of a Foundation Sacrifice!”
“My family is from around here. I heard the elders at home talk about it.”
“They said those so-called laborers had all been tricked into going there by the foreman.”
“Strange things kept happening while they were digging the tunnel, and they couldn’t get through. Someone was afraid it would delay the schedule, so they suggested to the people in charge that the tunnel could only be completed if they performed a Foundation Sacrifice.”
Zhao Jixian’s expression shifted several times. He did not refute her, merely lowered his voice and told Qin Ying, “Now, none of that came from me!”
Yet everything about his response amounted to an admission that the story was true.
More than fifty Able-bodied Adults had been murdered inside Qingzhai Tunnel.