Sudden Rain Falls, Night of Listening to the Tide (2)

The god-king Odin from Norse Mythology?

Had he wandered onto the wrong set or something...

Lu Mingfei stared stiffly at the god on the overpass. He was no foreign mythology enthusiast, but the figure before him was so thoroughly marked by Odin's traits that he had recognized him at a glance.

The god radiated an unparalleled pressure. An eight-legged steed trod upon thunder, and the might of an ancient deity made mortals struggle to breathe.

Sensing each other's presence, the wind and rain around the god had likewise come to an abrupt halt. A sovereign's spiritual domain had likewise appeared, black currents forming a barrier.

The pooled water on the ground roared like ocean waves, flooding the low ground and tearing through the curtain of rain. The sea-like momentum faintly confronted the god's thunderous presence.

His expression cooled without his noticing. Lu Mingfei raised his head slightly, his Golden Eyes answering a challenge that demanded retaliation, dark molten-gold light flowing through their depths.

An invisible wall of air. Exactly the same.

A Stand user of the same type.

Did Odin not know that his "Forbidden Domain" was merely an immature imitation, so he had chosen not to attack? Or was there another reason?

Their Golden Eyes met, and the atmosphere nearly froze solid.

The pressure was immense.

Should he... just go all out against the guy opposite him?

He was someone who occasionally... often went crazy too.

His gaze flickered, and Lu Mingfei's throat bobbed twice.

If he downed all two hundred-plus bottles of Evolution Potion and that vial of Ancient Dragon Fetal Blood Serum... he would probably lose himself immediately and break through the bloodline threshold. He had no idea what his odds would be against the god before him.

The moment that thought surfaced, it took root and sprouted, growing wildly like weeds. The dragon part of his blood was eager to move, and the steel shackles of his bloodline seemed as fragile as thin paper before the violent heart of a dragon.

He did not move an inch, and Odin opposite him stood equally immovable, like a mountain rising over an abyss.

Second by second, time passed. The two unmoving figures stared at each other like opposing armies, while the thunder in the low sky became a host of charging troops.

"I burn my boats,

Afraid that when the night grows dark,

You'll carelessly miss it.

I wait with a burning heart,

And I can no longer turn back.

Will heaven help me?

Where are you drifting? Whom are you holding close?

My distant horizon and dreams still need you to save them."

The alarm on the watch in his backpack rang at just the right moment. Its tune was "Fool's Wharf" by Xiong Tianping, which Lu Mingfei had once loved listening to while sitting on the rooftop.

It was time for his match with Old Tang in StarCraft.

The tension eased somewhat.

As though giving each other a way out, god and man turned at the same time amid the endless rain curtain and left in entirely opposite directions.

Inside the internet café.

"Boss, a free cup of plain water, five free tissues, half a scallion pancake, and is ketchup free? Give me two free packets."

The Windows XP blue sky and grassy field appearing as the computer booted up made Lu Mingfei breathe a sigh of relief. He felt as at ease as if he were at home... by home, he meant the warm home he had had in elementary school. Anyway, these watchers' paychecks depended on him, so he could relax.

Under the internet café owner's expression as though he had seen a ghost, he raised his cup of plain water with grand confidence and gulped it down. Since things had come to this, he might as well play a round of StarCraft with Old Tang to relieve some stress. This time, he would give it his all out of respect for his opponent.

He had stood Old Tang up, but it seemed Old Tang had stood him up too—the evidence being that Old Tang had only just logged onto QQ as well.

If they had both stood each other up, didn't that mean they had both kept their appointment?

The panda avatar flashed.

"Mingming, there was a reason I broke our appointment. You definitely won't believe it when I tell you."

"Old Tang, I just ran into some trouble. You probably won't believe it when I tell you."

The two of them sent QQ messages almost simultaneously. Fate really was something strange.

"Huh?" Curiosity stirred in Lu Mingfei. "Old Tang, you go first. Didn't your profile introduction say you're Brooklyn's King of Punctuality? What could possibly have held you up?"

"King of Punctuality... the most famous thing about our line of work is instability. Some colleagues might be enjoying Neapolitan pizza at Lucali, full of Italian charm, one day, then have nowhere to stay and not even a bowl of instant noodles the next. There is only one legend in this business, one legend who never fails, one man strong enough to live steadily. Guess who it is?"

Did he even need to guess? Old Tang had used such an obvious bragging setup. Lu Mingfei laughed and obligingly sent a surprised emoji and a worshipping emoji.

"So you mean you can reliably eat Neapolitan pizza at that fancy restaurant?"

"I can reliably eat instant noodles."

Old Tang told the truth. Though he earned a lot, most of it was not spent on himself.

"Sometimes I can add potato hot dog sticks to my instant noodles. And Lucali isn't exactly a fancy restaurant. I only used it as an example because their garlic rolls and Margherita pizza have amazing portions, and the location has a great view of the Brooklyn Bridge at night..."

"Old Tang, aren't you getting a little off topic?" Lu Mingfei realized that Old Tang probably lacked friends. Once he got talking, he could not stop.

If he had not been curious about why Old Tang was late, he would have been quite happy to hear more about life abroad.

Though they knew virtually nothing about each other in real life and were not even in the same country, he instinctively felt that Old Tang bore him no ill will. They felt as though they had known each other for a long time, and it was easy for them to discuss things they would not readily reveal to outsiders.

Looking at it that way, although they had only just met, Old Tang and he could already be considered friends.

How nice. Just like that, he had gained a friend, without any bumps or complications.

"Sorry, sorry. What I mean is, I was confident I could be punctual because I had never failed before, but today I failed... my lifelong reputation!"

Old Tang kept him in suspense.

"Mingming, have you heard of Norse Mythology?"

The change in topic was rather abrupt.

Lu Mingfei's heart stirred. "A little. I never seriously read the Translated Prose Edda at the school literature club, but I know about Odin, Loki, Jormungandr, and so on."

He had attended Teacher Chu's crash course on dragon knowledge in bits and pieces at Genji Heavy Industries, giving him a basic understanding of hybrids and dragons. He knew about the Black King, the White King, the Four Great Sovereigns, and the half-decayed World Tree, Yggdrasil. Dragon history was also full of traces of Norse Mythology.

Not to mention that he had run into Odin on the overpass today.

"That's enough. The tomb I entered today belonged to a high-ranking Nazi officer. The original location was Cologne in western Germany. There was a major problem with the design of the burial complex at the officer's ancestral home. The tunnels went very deep and were close to an underground tributary of the Rhine... but when we came out, we were somewhere near Augsburg, Bavaria. The latitude had shifted by 2.57°."

Old Tang added kindly, "If you don't believe what I'm about to say, just treat it as a bedtime story. There's no need to take it to heart. Even when I told my colleagues, they only half believed it."

He sent three crying emojis in a row.

A tomb... Old Tang's profession really was unstable.

"Is it okay to tell an outsider like me the specifics?" Lu Mingfei was not particularly worried about his own safety. He knew a little martial arts, but he was afraid Old Tang might be punished by the rules of his trade.

Not causing trouble for others was a habit he had developed, as well as his instinctive way of dealing with the outside world.

Old Tang sent a smiling emoji and explained without embellishment. "Generally speaking, we can't casually reveal the content of a client's assignment, but the client for this job died suddenly from illness after we emerged from underground."

"Sudden cardiac death. Once the client is dead, it doesn't matter who you tell if the relevant information isn't encrypted on the website. It counts as abandoned information that can be made public."

Since Old Tang had said so, naturally there was no reason for the already curious Lu Mingfei not to listen. He could tell that Old Tang seemed to be in a bad mood. He could not remember which short story had said that people in a bad mood chose to talk and confide in friends as a form of self-regulation.

"The bounty the client posted internally was a little strange—or rather, eerie. She wanted us to find a coffin lost more than a hundred years ago, one cast entirely from gold. The entire coffin was carved with crimson patterns like winding vines, and the payment was generous."

"The patterns on the front of the coffin resembled Mesopotamian cuneiform. Every line looked like an enraged snake, with no discernible pattern. The client had left a message saying it was an excavated artifact of the Parihat Civilization. To professionals like us, it was an extremely crude antiquities forgery because... nothing about it matched, and it was far too recent."

"Time leaves the marks of vast change on every object. It corrodes many things that appear immortal."

"Therefore, we believed that the 'gold' used to make the 'coffin' was most likely not genuine either. Yet the client spent 2.5 million dollars searching a tomb for a crude fake. Before entering the tomb, everyone talked about how she was stupid and rich... When I saw the photo, I acted on impulse and, as if possessed, volunteered to take the job."