Zhuang Rui's feelings toward the old house were complicated. In his hazy memories, his father's image was tied to that house. His memories before age five were happy — nestled in his father's arms, eating dates shaken from the old house's date tree, listening to his father tell Andersen's fairy tales. Undoubtedly, Zhuang Rui was happiest back then.
But after his father passed away, everything changed. The vast old house became lifeless. When he was ten, his mother was assigned an apartment, and they moved away to their current home. Over the years, Zhuang Rui rarely visited the old house, mainly because he didn't want to face the memory of his father, who had passed away many years ago. Losing a father in childhood is an unbearable pain for many people.
The old house was located at the foot of Yunlong Mountain, a famous scenic area in Pengcheng. A few hundred meters in front of it was the Pengcheng Museum, where the Jade Burial Suit Sewn with Silver Thread on display attracted numerous domestic and foreign tourists every day.
Not far behind the old house on Hubu Mountain ridge stands the famous scenic site of Xima Terrace (Horse-Viewing Terrace), where after overthrowing the Qin dynasty, the heroic Xiang Yu declared himself Hegemon-King of Western Chu, made Pengcheng his capital, built the Cong Terrace, and used Xima Terrace for viewing horse shows, martial drills, and military parades. Historically, it was listed alongside Suzhou gardens and Nanjing's Six Dynasties stone carvings as one of Jiangsu's three treasures, but it was destroyed in war and did not survive as well as those other two sites.
Over the centuries, various dynasties constructed many buildings on the Xima Terrace grounds, including the Terrace Summit, Sanyi Temple, Temple of Famous Officials, Juqu Academy, Songcui Mountain Villa, and Stele Pavilion. As time passed and circumstances changed, the original buildings have completely disappeared. After restoration, Xima Terrace has re-emerged in majestic splendor. When young, Zhuang Rui and his friends would often sneak in to play and romp around.
……
Early the next morning, Zhuang Rui headed to the old house with his brother-in-law. The rented car could only stop at the alley entrance, so they got out and walked toward the old house through the thick snow.
Zhuang Rui's old house consisted of three single-story rooms and a spacious yard. In the middle of the yard stood a tall jujube tree, beneath which were a stone table and several stone stools. I remember every summer when I was a child, the family would sit on the stone stools in the yard to eat and enjoy the cool evening air. Now the stone stools had long been unused and were covered with moss.
Originally, Zhuang Rui's mother would come to clean here every month, but now that it's about to be demolished, she packed up her belongings and didn't come back. The spacious yard is overgrown with weeds, and on the outer wall is written a large character for 'demolition.' Since construction will start here after the New Year, the neighboring residents have long since moved away. Amidst the festive atmosphere of the New Year everywhere, this place feels somewhat desolate and lonely.
The middle room was where Zhuang Rui's grandfather used to live. After his grandfather passed away, the room became vacant and was used to store miscellaneous items. When Zhuang Rui was young, he always felt it was eerie in there and never dared to go in. As he grew older, he visited the old house less often and lost interest in going inside.
Zhuang Rui had never met this grandfather; he only knew from his mother that his grandfather was a geologist who had worked in the Yunnan-Myanmar border region after the liberation. For this reason, during those chaotic ten years, he was falsely accused of collaborating with the enemy and persecuted, which also implicated Zhuang Rui's grandmother, causing both elders to pass away prematurely.
"Xiao Rui, it's dusty inside, don't come in. I'll move the stuff out; you just give me a hand outside..."
When brother-in-law opened the door of the middle room, a cloud of dust came rushing in, making Zhuang Rui step back repeatedly, coughing incessantly.
The sunlight reflecting off the snow on the ground shone into the room, where two rectangular wooden chests about a meter in length could barely be seen in the corner. The purpose of the two men's visit was to move these two chests back home; the rest of the small items had already been taken back by Zhuang Rui's mother.
"It's okay. I've rarely been into grandpa's room. Since this house will be gone soon, let's go in and take a look. These chests are big enough, and hey, they're really heavy. Let's carry them out together..."
Zhuang Rui walked back into the room and lifted one corner of a chest to test its weight, feeling it sink down in his hands.
Few people use heavy wooden chests for storage nowadays. These two chests should be old items left from the past. The baked enamel on the outer surface had partially peeled off. The surface of the chests was carved with floral and grass patterns, and two iron locks hung on the finely crafted lock clasps.
Zhuang Rui had originally planned to take a stroll at Xima Terrace today, but seeing these two large chests completely killed his desire to hang around.
The box must be packed with who knows what; it was really quite heavy. The two of them carried it onto the cart and hauled it home, both soaking with sweat. But as soon as they got back, they heard some good news—the house next door was basically a done deal. Mom's colleague agreed to handle the transfer after the New Year, and the price was set at 38,000, a few thousand less than the initial quote. That made Zhuang Rui and Zhao Guodong pretty happy.
After helping move the boxes, Zhao Guodong took his leave. After all, the New Year was right around the corner, and his own folks had plenty going on. Once her colleague left, Mom went to visit an old work buddy, leaving Zhuang Rui alone in the house.
Staring at the two big boxes in his room, Zhuang Rui felt a strong urge to open them up. After all, the old memories were about to fade away with the demolition of that house, and these things left behind by the elders became especially precious in the eyes of the younger generation.
Zhuang Rui found a few keys in his mom's desk drawer and tried them—they worked on both boxes. Delighted, he quickly flipped open one of them and found it full of books. The covers were yellowed, showing that these books were quite old.
Carefully picking up a book from the box, Zhuang Rui checked the publication date and found it was Li Siguang's original work, the 1953 edition of *Geology of China*. Flipping through, he saw lots of pictures of fossils and maps. After a quick skim, he carefully put the book back, certain that a copy from that edition could only be found in some big libraries these days.
Digging deeper, he found a bunch of geology textbooks, which didn't interest him much, so he opened the other box. Inside were bundles of letters and stacks of notebooks. In one corner of the box, there were four or five dark, fist-sized stones.
"No wonder the box was so heavy, why did Mom put a few stones in there?" Zhuang Rui was stunned, thinking with annoyance.
He casually picked up a letter and opened it. After glancing at it, Zhuang Rui was instantly stunned, because the entire letter was written with a brush, and the signature at the end of the letter was actually the three characters "Li Siguang." Zhuang Rui quickly began to read it carefully. The content of the letter was not long; it should be a reply from this admirable scientist to his grandfather. In the letter, he introduced in detail the geological features of Yunnan, Guizhou, Myanmar, and other places. The wording was very professional, and there were many phrases Zhuang Rui couldn't understand, but he was already sure that this was undoubtedly a handwritten letter from Li Siguang.
He never expected that his grandfather actually knew this great scientist whom he had admired since childhood. This greatly increased Zhuang Rui's interest, so he started organizing his grandfather's letters. Those pitch-black stones were in the way, so he took them out and threw them directly under the bed. If it weren't for the trouble, he would have tossed them into the trash pile downstairs.
He roughly flipped through these letters; most were professional correspondence between his grandfather and classmates or teachers. After reading only a small portion, with a thick layer still left in the box, Zhuang Rui grew impatient, because some of the terms in them were really hard for him to understand.
Putting down the letter he was reading, Zhuang Rui had a sudden idea: if he used spiritual energy, it seemed he could read the letters without even opening the envelopes. With that thought, Zhuang Rui focused his gaze toward the bottom of the box. A flash of green light passed, and the spiritual energy in his eyes seeped out.
"Eh！".
Zhuang Rui suddenly shouted out in surprise, because when his eyes peered through a stack of letters and saw the bottom of the box, two scrolls came into view. What shocked him was that after the spiritual energy penetrated the scrolls, it seemed that some aura inside the scrolls merged into the spiritual energy in his eyes, and then the spiritual energy returned to his eyes on its own. Zhuang Rui could clearly feel that the spiritual energy, which had originally been thin and reduced to just a single layer, had become much denser.
Zhuang Rui felt that his eyes at this moment were like they had just been treated with eye drops—a cool sensation with a hint of sourness. He gently closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, the entire room seemed to have become much brighter.