We took everything from the reception room and brought it back to the shop, including the body.

Fatty tied the body to the chair, hired a moving van, and drove all the way back to Hangzhou overnight. I piled all the things that were in my back room into the front room and stuffed them around Wang Meng's station. After that was done, I put all the broken and rotten furniture that Fatty had brought back into the back room.

Wang Meng was shocked. "Boss, didn’t you retire? What kind of tomb is this from? How come it looks even more worthless than the goods we’ve bought?"

I put the corpse in front of my couch and then covered it with cloth before handing Wang Meng two hundred yuan and telling him to go away. Once he was finally gone, I started listening to the tapes one by one.

There were far more tapes than I had originally thought and they both had A and B sides. Practically all of them had recordings of various operas and children's songs, which made it obvious that Yang Daguang had transcribed over people’s old tapes.

His life must have really been difficult.

Based on this, I figured that he and my Uncle Three’s relationship must have been distant, because Uncle Three was rich very early and would have definitely helped him.

It took me two months to listen to all the tapes. During this time, I would listen to them any time I got in the car, when I went to the toilet, and even when I was in the shower. Not only were the recordings different from any other sounds, but listening to thunder was very boring. I was still attentive and tried to remember all the details, but I always fell asleep before I knew it. I ended up having to listen to the tape again when I woke up. As a result, it was a very inefficient process.

I didn’t get any new text messages on my phone. As I listened to the tapes, I came to the conclusion that this Yang Daguang must've been a madman.

All the tapes were full of all kinds of thunder, frequencies, and sounds, and many of them were accompanied by the sound of heavy rainfall. The thunder in most of the tapes sounded like it was at the intensity of a thunderstorm.

Since it was possible to figure out what era the cassettes had been sold in, and I knew Yang Daguang had gotten them some time after that, I made a preliminary calculation. It didn’t rain every day, so even if I calculated from the earliest sales date, the only way he could record so much thunder was if he chased after storm clouds.

He would go wherever the storm clouds went, which meant he was a storm chaser.

But storm clouds didn’t exist all the time. For him to record so much thunder, he needed to keep chasing thunderstorms for a minimum of sixteen years.

Fatty had lost interest after the first month had passed, saying that this guy was the only one in the world who had a thunderstorm fetish. Believe it or not, he probably climaxed when he got struck by lightning. Whenever he heard thunder in the sky, he would take his little brother out and use it as a lightning rod.

I didn’t think that was the case. I looked at the other materials we had taken and found some new clues. In the photo of him, Uncle Three, and Wen-Jin, I saw that he was carrying a big machine. When I asked an expert about it, they said that it was a tape recorder (the first generation of tape recorders at that time were very large). This photo had been taken in the mountains, which meant that there was a time when Yang Daguang was recording thunderstorms with Uncle Three.

Uncle Three had no interest in getting up early, and the only things that could make him do so at that age were Chen Wen-Jin and grave robbing.

I touched my chin. I hadn't shaved my beard for a long time, so I went to take care of it. As I was shaving, I began to feel conflicted.

I looked at the Uncle Three in the photo. I didn’t want to think of him as someone with deliberately bad intentions. He appeared to be a good friend or even a brother to this Yang Daguang, but my Uncle Three… in fact, he was the kind of guy who would deliberately pretend to make friends with others for his own purposes.

So, was he using Yang Daguang's meteorological knowledge about thunder to search for ancient tombs for himself? When it came to my cruel and stubborn Uncle Three, it was absolutely possible. And with them chasing thunderstorms, it felt a lot like the ancient grave robbers’ way of listening to thunder to find tombs in Luoyang.

Or maybe Yang Daguang was also in the business and Uncle Three hired him to go find a tomb?

But finding a tomb was finding a tomb. Why were they recording thunder? Were this man's ears so powerful that he could judge the location of an ancient tomb in the region just by listening to the tapes? No, based on common sense, it was absolutely impossible. No matter how I listened, I could only hear the very vague sound of thunder.

But this was definitely a clue. I had been listening to these tapes again and again, but my body soon began to reject it. I became very anxious and uncomfortable every time I heard the sound, and I even felt a little nauseous whenever I saw the tapes.

I persisted in my investigation for a long time, but there were hardly any clues at all. Eventually, I slowly started to slack off.

I began to classify the tapes, examined the corpse again and again, and used my connections to find someone to cremate and bury the corpse while Fatty made all kinds of trouble.

Summer was just around the corner, so our attention gradually began to shift towards the June crab season. As Hangzhou started warming up, Fatty wanted to go back to the mountains in Fujian. I told him we should do some work to make some money before going back, otherwise things would be bad during the New Year.

We had spent so much money before—building roads and investing in nightclubs in the villages and towns—so we stayed in the shop and set up a business right outside.Fatty put five-spice tofu and Dutch roasted sausages in front of the shop, which basically became our main business. We sold tofu during the day, and drank wine and ate crabs at night. We’d occasionally talk about this matter, but we became more and more desensitized to it. It seemed as if Uncle Three just wanted me to bury the body, which meant that I was done.

I had also been wondering how to tell my grandmother about Uncle Three. I was afraid she wouldn’t be able to stand the stimulation, so I figured it was better to postpone it. My dad started crying when he found out, accusing Uncle Three of being unfilial and unkind. But he was finally happy to know and asked me to text the number back, telling Uncle Three to come home. I told him we should wait in case he came back on his own.

But Uncle Three didn't come back, of course.

On this particular day, I stealthily went to Lou Wai Lou (1) to throw our garbage out—their garbage was handled specially, so we secretly threw ours in with theirs— when it suddenly became dark and started to rain. The downpour came so suddenly that I ran back to the shop, but before I entered the door, lightning flashed across the sky and the deafening sound of thunder rang out.

"Bring all the tofu in!" I shouted to Wang Meng.

But right after I yelled, I suddenly had a strange feeling in my heart. I looked up at the dark clouds in the sky. The lightning flashed and the thunder boomed again, sounding very clear.

I broke out in a cold sweat in the heavy rain, suddenly realizing that I had recognized the thunder just now.

For fifteen minutes, I stood in the rain, watched the sky, and listened until Fatty dragged me inside. He asked me what I was doing and if I was acting out a scene from "Romance in the Rain" (2). I rushed into my room, pulled out the tape recorder, and took out a cassette tape. I then ran back out into the rain in my raincoat, faced the sky, and started recording the thunder.

The thunderstorm passed quickly, and I went back into the shop soaking wet. Fatty handed me a hammer, "Welcome to the Avengers."

I pushed him away and started rummaging through Yang Daguang's tapes. I had a stunning premonition that was enough to make my blood run cold.

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TN Notes:

(1) Lou Wai Lou is a famous traditional restaurant in Hangzhou.

(2) It's a famous Chinese TV period drama from 2001. More info here.

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