Daomu Biji: Restart

During the process of listening to the tapes, I had recorded a lot of the sounds into the computer to prevent the tapes from demagnetizing. I rummaged through the tapes, found the box I had numbered, and then found the corresponding number files in the computer. As I played the thunder I just recorded and the sound files in the computer, I compared them bit by bit.

Soon, the two thunder recordings started to synchronize, until the thunder I just recorded and the thunder in the computer overlapped perfectly.

The frequency and state were almost exactly the same.

I took two steps back and let the two recordings play repeatedly. I could tell that Fatty was puzzled, so I pointed to the computer and told him that this thunder was recorded more than ten years ago. I then pointed to the thunder playing on the tape recorder, which had been recorded during the thunderstorm just now.

The two recordings were exactly the same.

The fact that two thunderstorms separated by more than ten years were exactly the same was absolutely impossible. Even if we assumed this was a coincidence, the probability was infinitely close to zero.

It was really creepy once I thought about it, and it stirred up my curiosity that had been calm for a long time. I realized that this was different from all the situations I had encountered before, but I couldn’t figure out what was going on—how the fuck was this possible?

Were the thunder gods copying each other?

The two thunder recordings kept playing repeatedly, and my mind gradually entered an endless loop. A voice kept telling me that there had to be a reasonable explanation for this since all the unreasonable things I had encountered before had eventually been explained reasonably. But another voice kept telling me that the things I had encountered before were completely different from what I was seeing now

I even thought of the rain and thunder I had heard in that dark video tape so long ago, which was said to have come from behind the bronze door. The thought made my whole body break out in goosebumps and all my associative thoughts were in chaos.

Fatty wanted to discuss some ideas, but he opened his mouth for a long time and couldn't say a word. "This doesn't make any sense. Does all thunder sound the same?" He eventually muttered.

No one actually knows, I said to myself. Since ancient times, no one had ever tried to record thunder like this. If Yang Daguang was a meteorologist who was used by Uncle Three to find an ancient tomb, he was probably the first one to ever try and record thunder. Like this, he had a good chance of finding something if there was a lot of thunder. This would explain his behavior of chasing after thunderstorms and recording thunder for so many years.

He was trying to figure out what the thunder was.

But why did Uncle Three push me to find this?

As Fatty and I sat down, I turned off the tape recorder and computer and said to him, "Come on, use your enumeration method to figure out all the possibilities."

"Enumerate my ass. What do we need enumeration for?" Fatty retorted. "Maybe the thunder this guy recorded more than ten years ago wasn’t thunder from that time. Maybe the place where he recorded the thunder was tied to the future."

I shook my head. "Even so, it's too coincidental. I don’t know where he recorded the thunder back then, but it doesn't make sense that I would hear the exact same thunder a few months after I got the tapes more than a decade later."

Fatty nodded. "Well, there’s only one more ridiculous possibility." He looked at me and continued, "If it’s not a coincidence, then there’s only one possibility—thunder at this frequency often appears. Yang Daguang heard it once more than ten years ago and now you’ve heard it once more than ten years after that. There must have been countless other claps of thunder at this frequency in between these two points in time. But any sound that repeats at a fixed frequency—regardless of whether it’s a cry of ecstasy in bed or a clap thunder—has one explanation."

I looked at Fatty, and he looked back at me seriously before saying, "It means there’s hidden information in it."

After that, there was another flash of lightning outside the shop, thunder boomed, and it started to rain again. I looked at the pedestrians who were trying to take shelter from the rain again and asked him, "Who sent the message?"

"Only God knows," Fatty said.

I didn’t sleep very well that night. For some reason, I kept dreaming about the bronze door, the video I saw before, that image of myself crawling on the ground, and countless lightning strikes streaking across the sky. I woke up at five in the morning. The rain was still falling intermittently and my scalp felt numb as I looked out the window at the dark clouds in the sky.

I flipped through all of Yang Daguang's things again and searched online for similar information, but still found nothing. I stared at his old ID card, looking at his face and the address on it. I finally realized that I needed to go to his hometown. It was the only place where there might be clues.

Before Fatty and I set off the next day, Wang Meng gave me a lonely look and asked, "Boss, why are you leaving as soon as you come back?" When I gave him another two hundred yuan, Fatty didn't even object. I saw that he didn't sleep well either, and had two huge black circles under his eyes. He told me that he couldn't figure it out. He didn’t care that he had seen a lot of strange things over the past few decades, but he really couldn't understand how thunder could have a hidden message.

To make a long story short, we went to Yang Daguang's hometown village, showed his ID card and photos to people everywhere, and asked them some questions. To our surprise, Yang Daguang was very famous in his hometown, and almost all the old people knew him. They said that he was the only college student in the village at that time and later went to work in a government agency. But he never came back.

I asked if Yang Daguang had any relatives that were still alive. An old man told me that Yang Daguang didn’t have any brothers and his father was his only relative, but he had been shot many years ago. They heard that it was because he was grave robbing. Not only was Yang Daguang very poor, but he was all alone at a very early age, so he didn't return to the village after he was admitted to university.

Fatty and I glanced at each other, and I thought to myself, there’s a chance. I asked the old man where Yang Daguang's old house was. The old man shook his head and said that it was long gone, but the old grave was still there. The grave was a bit strange because no grass could grow there.