512: Chapter 512 The Old Man Caught in the Camera

Fifteen days.

Lin Que had been in Muchuan Town for exactly fifteen days.

Starting from the eighth day, when Old Zhao opened the iron gate, every day since then, Lin Que's life had become extremely regular.

During the day, he wandered around the town.

Sometimes he would sit under the old locust tree, watching people who had been grocery shopping pass by.

Sometimes he would go to the pond to listen to that opera passage.

Sometimes he would walk along the perimeter of the factory area, noting which blades of grass had grown taller and which windows had an extra light on.

In the afternoon, he would go to the guard room to find Old Zhao.

Old Zhao was not a man of many words.

Most of the time, he would sit on an old wooden chair, spreading out the old photo album he had dug out from the very bottom of the iron cabinet on the table.

Wherever his finger pointed, he would talk about that.

"This is Old Liang. In the factory's first basketball tournament, he went up and shot three times, but missed every single one."

"This photo is from the Chinese New Year in '98, when the cafeteria slaughtered a pig. Look, I still had hair back then."

"This is Zhou Haisheng, from Line 3; he was the most skillful. Any screw in the workshop that he tightened was guaranteed not to loosen for five years."

The photos were yellowed, their corners curled. Some were already so blurry that the faces were indistinguishable.

The time Old Zhao's finger lingered on each photo varied.

Some for two seconds, some for a dozen seconds.

Lin Que leaned against the wall of the guard room, listening quietly.

With his notebook resting on his knees, he wrote down a line for every sentence Old Zhao spoke.

Old Zhao had caught a glimpse of his notes a few times later on.

He didn't say anything.

It was just that the tea brought over the next day had become two cups.

Returning to the guesthouse at night, Lin Que would spread out the fragments he had heard during the day on the table.

He had already used up more than half of the notebook.

He sat at the desk, opened his computer, and embedded those fragments bit by bit into the skeleton of Qin Opera.

The story began with a passage of opera singing.

When Auntie Song was young, her voice was so bright it could shout away the clouds over the Qinling Mountains.

Back then, the factory was bustling. During the night shift change, she would belt out a tune from the window on the second floor of Unit 3, and everyone on the street would stop to listen.

As she sang, the factory moved.

As she sang, the people left.

As she sang, her voice grew lower.

That opera passage ran through the entire book.

It appeared every few chapters.

Each time it appeared, it was one breath shorter than the last.

And Old Liang's story was kneaded into the white steam of the steamed buns in the cafeteria, kneaded into the sound of footsteps splashing in water during night shift patrols, and kneaded into that afternoon when Auntie Song suddenly stopped singing.

Lin Que did not write that accident as the opening gong and drum.

He wrote about how the days in Muchuan Town emptied out after the explosion.

He wrote about that half-smoked cigarette in Old Zhao's hand, from a full stick to one pinched until only tooth marks remained.

He wrote about how, after the net on the basketball hoop at the factory gate rotted, no one ever went to replace it.

Fifteen days.

The first draft had accumulated over thirty thousand words.

Lin Que flipped through it once himself.

This time, the frequency of his pauses while turning the pages had changed.

Before, when writing, he would stop to think about structure, rhythm, or whether a certain plot twist was clean enough.

Now, he stopped because a certain line of text made even him feel choked up.

That feeling of being choked up was not due to a lack of technique.

It was the dampness of Muchuan Town, truly seeping into the gaps between the words.

...

The morning of the sixteenth day.

The sky was still slow to brighten.

Mountain fog wrapped around the town street, with visibility less than twenty meters.

Lin Que wore a grey jacket, his notebook stuffed into his pocket as usual.

As he pushed open the side door of the guesthouse and his soles stepped onto the damp concrete road, a familiar damp scent of mixed rust and moldy wood rushed into his nose.

He had already gotten used to this smell.

In the first few days, he would subconsciously frown.

Now, breathing it in was as normal as drinking plain water.

Walking two hundred meters east along the town street and turning into a narrow alley, he arrived at Old Liu's breakfast shop.

The shop wasn't big, just two storefronts opened up into one.

Inside, there were four square tables set up; the tabletops were wiped until they were bleached white, and the table legs were wrapped several times with wire.

The stove was against the wall, with a large aluminum pot placed on it, white steam escaping from the gap in the lid.

Old Liu was in his early sixties, his apron covered in noodle soup stains.

Seeing Lin Que enter, he didn't even lift his head.

"You're here?"

"Yeah, the usual."

"Got it."

Old Liu picked up a pair of long chopsticks, fished a clump of wide noodles out of the pot, shook off the water twice, and plopped them into a coarse bowl.

He ladled a scoop of thick soup over them and topped it with chopped, dark pickled vegetables.

He pushed the bowl in front of Lin Que.

Lin Que took it and found a seat at the table against the wall.

When he first arrived on the first day, he sat by the door.

On the third day, he moved to the window.

After the fifth day, he fixed himself to this position against the wall.

It wasn't a deliberate choice.

It was because he discovered that sitting here, he could hear Old Liu and his wife bickering in the back kitchen, and he could also see people passing by the entrance.

It was a good spot, suitable for listening.

He picked up the bowl of noodles and ate.

The soup base was thick, the noodles were firm, and the pickled vegetables were over-fermented.

For fifteen days, the taste had never changed.

Lin Que didn't feel it needed to change either.

Halfway through the meal, the entrance darkened for a moment.

A hunched figure shuffled in slowly.

He held a cane in his left hand and carried a plastic bag in his right.

When walking, his left foot landed first, and the rhythm of his right foot following was half a beat slower than a normal person's.

Old Zhou.

Lin Que looked up.

"Uncle Zhou, morning."

Old Zhou tilted his head and glanced at him.

There was a hint of a smile hidden in the wrinkles on his face, but his mouth was unforgiving.

"What's 'morning'? I've already walked half the street."

Lin Que smiled.

"Out early today?"

"Going to buy chili noodles. The old woman is craving them; she insisted the bag from yesterday wasn't spicy enough."

Old Zhou stood at the door for a moment, switched the plastic bag to his other hand, and then continued shuffling forward.

After walking three steps, he turned back.

"Kid, did you write me down in that notebook of yours today?"

Lin Que raised his chopsticks.

"I haven't finished eating yet."

"Then write a little less. You write every day; you'll run out of paper."

Old Zhou didn't wait for a response after saying this and continued walking forward, leaning on his cane.

His cane tapped on the wet ground, making a 'thud' sound, the rhythm steady.

Lin Que watched his back disappear into the fog and lowered his head to continue eating his noodles.

This kind of conversation had happened almost every day for the past half month.

When he first arrived, the people in town looked at him like he was a monster.

An outsider from the city, sitting there all day watching people walk by, not taking photos or conducting interviews—it looked abnormal no matter how you sliced it.

In the first week, some people even talked behind his back, saying he had something wrong with his brain.

Starting in the second week, the tide turned.

The cause was small.

One afternoon, there was a torrential rainstorm, and the threshold of Grandpa Wang's house on the first floor of Unit 3 was flooded.

When Lin Que passed by, he saw Grandpa Wang alone, scooping water out with a basin, unable to stand up from his crouch.

Lin Que didn't say a word; he took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and helped scoop.

He scooped for half an hour, his pant legs soaked through.

Grandpa Wang later brought him a bowl of ginger soup; he drank it, thanked him, and left.

It was just such a small matter.

But after it spread throughout the town, the way people looked at him changed.

It wasn't because he had helped with something major.

It was because he didn't take photos, didn't post it online, and didn't mention it to anyone.

The people in town had seen too many faces of people doing good deeds while holding up their phones.

They couldn't wait to livestream the whole process of helping someone, subtitles and all.

Lin Que was different.

He left as soon as he was done and went back to sit under his old locust tree the next day as usual.

From then on, the people in town started greeting him.

The old lady who had been grocery shopping would say when passing by him:

"Kid, sitting here again today?"

The proprietress of the grocery store would hand him water to drink.

Even Old Zhou, who didn't like to pay attention to outsiders, would throw a couple of snide remarks at him when passing by.

This counted as being accepted.

Lin Que understood the weight of this.

The people of Muchuan Town didn't easily open up to outsiders.

They had been ignored for too long and exploited too many times.

Every time someone appeared with good intentions, they were often followed by cameras and traffic.

Trust here was more precious than anything.

He finished the last drop of noodle soup in the bowl.

Lin Que put the bowl back into the collection bucket next to the stove.

"Uncle Liu, I'll settle the noodle bill later."

"Alright, alright, I've got it noted down."

Lin Que pushed open the shop's door curtain and walked onto the town street.

The fog had dissipated a little. The outline of the distant mountains became clear, with a few white water streaks hanging on the grey-green slopes.

He planned to go inside the factory area this morning to take a look.

Old Zhao said yesterday that there was still a stack of old documents in the iron cabinet, which were the duty record books from the factory back in the day, writing down who was on shift, who took leave, and who swapped shifts every day.

Although those records were boring, to Lin Que, they were all living material.

From the record of someone being absent for three consecutive days, he could trace the traces of that family having once been in a panic.

He had walked less than twenty steps.

A harsh sound of a motor suddenly came from the direction of the town street entrance.

The sound was very loud.

In this old town street that had been quiet for decades, the roar of the engine was like a stone thrown into a stagnant pool.

Lin Que stopped his steps and looked back.

A dark grey off-road vehicle charged in from the narrow road at the town entrance.

The car body was splattered with mud, the tires were wrapped in yellow mud, and the windshield was also half-covered.

The speed was not slow. It made a sound of tires skidding on the wet and slippery concrete road, and finally stopped crookedly on the side of the road.

The car door opened.

Two young men jumped down.

The first one wore a black windbreaker, was not tall, and had his hair shaved very short.

He had a mirrorless camera slung across his shoulder, an action camera hanging around his neck, and a microphone with a light clipped to his chest.

The second one was slightly taller, in an orange windbreaker, carrying a bulging backpack.

He was holding a carbon fiber selfie stick with a mobile phone clipped to the top, the screen facing forward and lit, likely already recording.

The two of them looked around as soon as they got out of the car.

The one in black spoke first.

"This place has substance, the sense of decay is complete; just pressing the lens down gives you a story."

He excitedly raised his camera and did a 'scan' of the town street.

The shutter clicked seven or eight times in a row.

The lens swept over the closed grocery store, the old wires wrapped around the street light pole, and the 'Fu' character that had fallen off halfway on the rolling shutter door.

The one in orange wasn't idle either.

He held the selfie stick high and filmed the exterior walls of those family residential buildings, muttering to himself.

"Let's go, let's go further in; the more raw and authentic, the better. For the title, we'll write 'The Forgotten Industrial Town'; the audience eats that stuff up."

"Wait, that..."

The one in black suddenly paused.

His lens locked onto a direction.

In the middle of the town street, Old Zhou was slowly walking back from the other end, leaning on his cane.

Inside the plastic bag were the chili noodles he had just bought, and his walking rhythm was uneven.

The eyes of the one in black lit up.

He walked up to meet him quickly.

"Liang-ge, look at this."

The one in orange followed.

The two walked one after the other to Old Zhou, pointing their camera lenses at the old man.

The one in black squatted down, lowered the angle of his lens, and aimed it at Old Zhou's lame right leg.

The shutter clicked repeatedly.

"Damn, this is incredible. This lighting, this texture."

The one in orange was even more direct.

He extended the selfie stick forward, the phone camera almost shoved right in front of Old Zhou's lower leg.

"Look at these shoes, this pant leg. Uncle, hey, don't move, don't move, let me get a close-up."

Old Zhou was dazzled by the flash in front of him and instinctively turned his face away.

When he saw the two people in front of him clearly, his face sank.

"What are you doing?"

He knocked his cane on the ground. The sound was heavy.

"Did I ever tell you that you could film?"

The one in black didn't put away his camera, his mouth curling.

"Uncle, we're filming the scenery."

"Scenery?" Old Zhou's eyebrows knit together.

"You point the lens at my leg, and you call that filming scenery?"

"It's natural and cultural landscape."

The one in orange laughed, his tone becoming grotesque.

"Uncle, relax a bit, you look pretty good on camera. After we post it, maybe we can even help make this little town famous."

"Famous? Famous my ass."

Old Zhou was furious.

He stabbed his cane into the ground hard again.

"Is this how you city folks behave? Filming others and treating them like monkeys?"

The smile on the one in black's face faded.

"Uncle, you might not understand, our account has over six million followers; this is giving our place exposure. Besides, this is a public place; we're filming material, we didn't go into your house."

As he spoke, he raised his camera again.

The one in orange was even worse.

Old Zhou blocked the middle of the road and refused to move, so he impatiently reached out and pushed the old man on the shoulder.

"Move aside, you're blocking the light."

The force of that push wasn't great.

But Old Zhou's right leg didn't work well.

His center of gravity shifted, and his body staggered back two steps.

His cane slipped, and he almost fell to the ground.

"Hey!"

Several townspeople passing by saw it and hurried over.

"What are you doing! Pushing people!"

"Bullying an old man, are you!"

The angry shouts of the townspeople converged from several directions.

But those two young men didn't take it seriously at all.

The one in orange raised the selfie stick high, unable to suppress the corner of his mouth, his voice even becoming a bit excited.

"Did you see that? The true ecology of a deserted town, the extreme rejection of outsiders by the indigenous people. This is the real cultural record."

When he said this to the phone lens, his voice was deliberately pressed to sound emotional and sensational.

Old Zhou hadn't even stood steady.

Just at this moment, a hand steadily gripped his arm.

The force wasn't heavy, but extremely steady.

Old Zhou turned his head and saw Lin Que standing beside him.

The cuffs of the young man's grey jacket were stained with a bit of hot noodle soup steam, and there was no expression on his face.

He first steadied Old Zhou.

Then he looked down at the old man's right leg.

"Uncle Zhou, are you okay?"

Old Zhou shook his head.

The young man's lips were pursed, the line of his jaw tight.

After confirming the old man was fine, he let go.

Then, he lifted his head.

He took a step forward.

His shoulder line blocked the lens perfectly, and the grey jacket filled the entire viewfinder.

The one in black was about to continue filming.

Nothing could be seen in the viewfinder anymore.

He straightened up and sized up the young man:

"And who are you? Move aside!"

Lin Que looked down at the lens, his voice cold without a hint of warmth.

"Delete what you just filmed."