Overly Intense [Criminal Investigation] 179

Chapter 179: Flying to Altay

Altay

Plans change quickly. The next day, just as she had woken up, the local guide driver had sent a message to Qin Luo, saying that Burqin County had issued a blizzard warning, and that there might be a road closure.

The guide had given them two choices. The first was to drive into Kanas while the weather was good, but this option was risky, and it was highly likely that they would be trapped near the scenic area with no way back. The second choice was to simply give up on going to Kanas and Hemu and to go directly to a ski resort.

Qin Luo had not discussed it with the two elders and had simply given the choice to Shen Yiyi.

Shen Yiyi was also very decisive and had directly had the driver set off immediately. She had thought that since the two elders had traveled for seven or eight hours to visit the northern border, they should at least see the country’s border. Besides, Jiang Yan had been looking forward to the trip to Hemu for a long time, and she couldn’t let her be disappointed.

And so, Wang Xi, who had just returned to Shanghai to resume work after the spring break, had received a call from Director Qin at nine in the morning, asking her to coordinate the accommodation in Hemu, and that the subsequent itinerary would be changed according to the situation.

“Change, change, change. It’s not as simple as changing a PPT!”
“Achoo—”

Qin Luo was wrapped in a down jacket and had sneezed in the car. It was indeed cold in Xinjiang. The temperature difference between getting in and out of the car was forty or fifty degrees. Qin Luo was not resistant to the cold to begin with, and she had not expected to have a sign of a cold as soon as the wind blew.

Shen Yiyi was worried and had taken out some cold medicine from her pocket to have her take it as a precaution. The scenic area was remote, and it would be difficult to find a hospital at that time.

Qin Luo had taken the medicine and was a little sleepy. She leaned back in her chair and looked out the window.

The car had already left the city, and the city behind them was swallowed up by the white, as if it had been splashed with paint. The heavy reinforced concrete could not escape from this single color.

On both sides of the highway was an endless snowfield, with no signs of life. The soft felt blankets were spread out straight, until the lines disappeared into the thin mist.

The winter sun was not enough to be described as dazzling, but the blue light reflected from the snow surface could cause a burning pain to the vision. Qin Luo squinted, not knowing what she was thinking.

The car had entered a tunnel, and then had turned onto a national highway. Three or four hours had passed, and Qin Luo could not count how many mountains they had crossed, how many rivers they had crossed. To be honest, she could not tell which were the river surfaces and which were the grasslands. The vast expanse of white had been a novelty at first, and she had taken a couple more glances. After a few hours, even the Jiang Yan who had been exclaiming all the way was a little tired of it.

They had set off in the morning, and it wasn’t until two in the afternoon that the car had begun to wind up the mountain road. Perhaps it was because of the warning, but there were almost no cars going up the mountain.

“Our northern Xinjiang is just that beautiful.”

The driver was a young Kazakh man. He had studied in the inland in college, and his Mandarin was very standard. He had not said much on the way, but every time he had said that their grassland was primitive and fertile. Unlike the northeast, the three eastern provinces always had memories of mine carts and logging, while Xinjiang had the most primitive and rugged feeling. This might be related to the inconvenient transportation and the sealing of the mountains in the winter. The cost of developing the mines and trees here was extremely high, which had instead preserved her original appearance.

“We’re finally here.”

Just as they were about to enter Hemu, Qin Luo’s signal was already so weak that there were only a few bars left. The car was almost driving on a white cloth. If it weren’t for the utility poles on the side, no one would have been able to tell if they were on a highway or on the side of the road.

Wang Xi had contacted the manager of the ski resort hotel in advance. The owner of this hotel was from Wenzhou. Hearing that Qin Luo was coming to ski, he had immediately had his employees wait at the entrance of the ski resort.

“The room keys for the two elders, and your room key.” The hotel manager had personally taken the family to check in, had introduced the environment, and had even given them suggestions for skiing. Finally, before he had left, he had handed Qin Luo a bottle of red wine. “It’s a gift from the boss. He said that if you post on Weibo, you can help to promote the hotel’s environment.”

But Qin Luo was only concerned about the weather. “Is there going to be a blizzard these few days?”
“You can rest assured about that.” The person in charge of the hotel took out a business card and handed it over. “No matter what the weather is like, you can contact me if you need anything.”

The snow around the wooden cabin was almost up to his chest. And it was not Shen Yiyi’s chest, but Shen Qinwen’s chest. Shen’s father had curiously lain down in the snow, but the hard snow had almost broken his back.

“You can have a good rest. Contact me if you have anything.”

It was the first time the two elders had stayed in a luxury snow view room. Jiang Yan was in high spirits. After dinner, she had dragged Shen’s father to the village to take pictures. Shen’s father had also happened to have this intention and had specially brought his DSLR camera, which he had been practicing with for many years, and had taken a sightseeing car down the mountain with Ms. Jiang.

Qin Luo was tired from the car ride and did not want to move. She changed into her pajamas and lay on the bed.

“I’m going out for a walk to see if there’s a pharmacy where I can buy some cold medicine.” Shen Yiyi had just finished cleaning the inside of the house. When she was packing her luggage, she had found that she had not brought much cold medicine. She was a little worried about Qin Luo’s condition. This was the first day of their trip. If she really caught a cold, everyone would not have a good time.

Qin Luo nodded. “Wear more.”

The bed was directly opposite a large floor-to-ceiling window—the courtyard, the wooden fence, the distant hillside, and the commercially planned horse farm were all covered in a thick layer of white, without a single gap.

The room was warm, and the great dream had lost its color.

Qin Luo couldn’t sleep. She took out her e-reader from her handbag, but she wasn’t going to read. Instead, she opened the protective case and took out a letter.

In chronological order, it was the second letter.

“I’ve read what you said in your letter. Beijing is very boring.”

Qin Luo couldn’t help but laugh after she had read the first sentence. She knew that this was Shen Yiyi’s reply to her twenty-year-old self. She had forgotten what she had written in her heart. She might have complained a couple of times about the dryness of Beijing in her letter.

But she didn’t understand why Shen Yiyi had written it as “boring.” Perhaps this was the difference between a liberal arts student and a science student, or perhaps she had deliberately written it this way. Qin Luo turned over and lay down in the soft mattress, covered herself with the thick blanket, and began to read seriously.

“I’m also very boring.

Military training, classes, dealing with different insect corpses, cleaning the classroom, until the bird flu broke out, my life had a slight change.

It became classes, dealing with different insect corpses, and disinfecting the various classrooms with a legitimate reason.

The pathology teacher said that the mortality rate of this infectious disease was not high, and that it was just another way for humans to die. I was not afraid. I had called my dad for several days in a row to remind him to pay attention to disinfection. Every time I had hung up the phone, I would always think of you, thinking about whether to remind you to also be careful at school. But I was afraid that this kind of behavior was superfluous. After all, we had not spoken for more than a year. The most important point was that I did not have your phone number.

Although I didn’t have your phone number, I would often log in to QQ. Your profile picture was always gray. I would log in with my phone over and over like this, but my smartphone was not smart at all. Every time I logged in, the website would take more than ten minutes to load, but this time was enough for me to walk from the classroom to the cafeteria.

The cafeteria here is also very boring. Every time I eat a meal that makes me frown, I will subconsciously think of you, and then secretly go online to glance at QQ, thinking that if you are online, we might be able to say a word or two of polite words. This kind of thought is like a piece of firewood thrown into a bonfire, burning day by day, and expanding day by day. I thought that perhaps it was a phased relaxation after I had gotten into my target university. I knew that I should not have this kind of thought.

Until one day, I accidentally found that you had suddenly come online. Besides changing your signature, you had also locked your QQ space to me. I didn’t understand why the platform had suddenly launched this damn function. It seemed to be reminding me that I should not have the desire to peek. This had made me very unhappy, and from then on, I had never logged in to QQ again, wanting you to completely exit my world.

I no longer mentioned your name, and you rarely appeared even in my dreams. But it was in some inexplicable moments that your figure would suddenly appear in my mind.

It’s not an exaggeration to describe it as a sudden appearance, right?

To be more specific, the timing of your appearance was very sudden. It was the impact brought by the moment of the invisible becoming visible, without any warning, very fierce. It would make me distracted in class, and would make me drill into a covered state. There were no shadows there, only fireworks that were about to explode. It would wake a person up and would have a short, stinging pain.

Therefore, I hated criminal justice very much.

The professor would always show some photos of crime scenes. Most of them were female victims. They were either killed by their lovers or husbands, or were tortured and killed by ruffians. These photos were shocking and would make me worry again about whether you were doing well in Beijing.

Are you doing well?

Are you eating well, sleeping well? Will you go back to Fengjiang when winter is coming? If you go back to Fengjiang, will you go for a walk by the river, will you go for a walk in the park, will you buy that radish cake? If I happen to be there too, what should I say when we run into each other to make us forget the past and become friends again? Will you still unlock your QQ space for me? And most importantly, will you also like the person who said they liked you very much on your QQ message board?

Of course, all these detached imaginations had eventually turned into a sudden firework, and had disappeared after my exam results were not good. Thinking about it this way, I am indeed an individualist, and I have attributed all my short-term setbacks to falling in love with you. I hate this kind of utilitarian self, and I hate that I don’t dare to admit it.

I also don’t know whose personality I’ve inherited. When I like something, I will indulge in it, with no distractions, and no obstacles can stop me. This is my strength, and also my weakness. I’m like I’m trapped in an iron box, until I’m forced by it to develop claustrophobia. I want to escape, but I don’t know where to go when I escape.

And so I had spent two years of college in a muddle. In the year that your father had gotten sick, I had successfully obtained the qualification for a training and study program with the first place in my major. I had gone to a university in Beijing to study for three months during the summer vacation. Unfortunately, the pressure was too great at that time, and I had endless homework every day. I didn’t even notice that a bookstore near the school was selling your new book, let alone had I anticipated that we would gradually drift apart from then on.

On the train back home that year, I had bought your new book and had flipped through it a few times. By the time I had realized that I was just a self-important clown, I did not feel relaxed. The only thing to be thankful for was that perhaps the person who had said they liked you on the message board was also in the same predicament as me. We had hit a huge rock, and you had clearly already turned a corner, or had already stopped. I felt no pain, or rather, I had lost my sense of pain like a frog being boiled in lukewarm water.

I knew you were disappearing.

It wasn’t that you were leaving, but that I was, in a continuous and slow way, completely leaving your world.”

“I’m back.”

Before she had finished reading the letter, the door was suddenly opened, and a gust of cold wind drilled in. Qin Luo wrapped the blanket tightly. Shen Yiyi was empty-handed and walked to the bedside, a little annoyed. “There’s no pharmacy. I didn’t buy anything.”