Xia Jin ran out of the electrical room and, beaming, said to Ning Tiance said, "Tianshi, now that the ghost problem has been solved, there"s no need to dismantle the elevator, right?"

He looked irritatingly like a dog trotting at someone"s heels.

Xiao Ning, still with an expression like his whole world had collapsed, nodded.

"Well, please tell me your account number. I"ll ask the accountant to transfer the money."

"No need." Ning Tiance shook his head and looked at me. "I wasn"t the one who got rid of the ghost. Mr. Shen did it. He was somehow able to wield the peach wood sword handed down from generation to generation by the Maoshan Sect. It"s truly astonishing, if only — "

"Don"t!" I immediately interrupted him as soon as I saw where he was going. "I"m a university graduate with a degree in Ideological and Political Education. The only things I believe in are Marxism and communism. I will never join the Maoshan Sect."

He smiled wryly. "Since there"s no chance of success, I won"t ask. We"ll part now."

"Wait." When I saw that he was going, I got up, dusted off the seat of my pants, and ran up in front of him.

Though this Ning Tiance was full of feudal superst.i.tions, hadn"t gone to senior middle school, had attacked Mu Huaitong and groped me in the dark, he was still a good person. He"d stepped in to help me when those children had gathered around to hit me, and then he hadn"t even known that it was me. I could have been any staff member. In this ever colder desert of society, Ning Tiance was a rarity.

So I had to thank him!

"That person in the bear costume getting hit by children was me. Thank you for helping me stop them," I said sincerely to Ning Tiance. "Although we have different beliefs, I still think we can be friends."

Xia Jin, who knew me pretty well, glared at me with a look that could have burned through my face. I ignored it, boldly looking at Xiao Ning.

Ning Tiance nodded slightly to me. "I have to leave now. In the future there will be a chance to meet again."

"Where are you going tonight? We can go together, it might be on my way."

Ning Tiance shook his head. "I"m going out to the countryside."

Well, that wasn"t on my way. I could only watch Xiao Ning leave the mall and disappear in the distance.
.
Xia Jin was still staring at me.

When Ning Tiance was gone, I said to him, "You can drive me."

Xia Jin said meaningfully, "Ning-tianshi is handsome, isn"t he?"

I thought about the way he had looked wearing ordinary clothes yesterday and had to agree: "Yes, very handsome."

"Ha," Xia Jin sneered, "don"t come to me to drink your sorrows away when your love affair goes wrong."

"Ha," I sneered back, "what a filthy mind. I was just grateful!"

"You know perfectly well what you were thinking," Xia Jin said as we walked to the parking lot on the first subfloor.

In fact, if it hadn"t been for yesterday"s incident on the school bus, I would have told him what I was really thinking. When I was in university, I"dd a crush on a very handsome senior who played basketball. At the time, I wasn"t very physically fit. In order to get close to him, I spent every day on the basketball court. Later, I led my basketball team to defeat the senior"s team. He took some people to help him corner me at the school"s back gate to beat me up, and instead they got beaten up by me. From then on there was an irreconcilable feud between myself and that senior I"d had a crush on. The only time my heart had been moved, that had been the outcome.

After that, Xia Jin drank with me every night for around a month to relieve my wounded feelings. I had been poor even since university, so at that time it was Xia Jin buying 2 yuan a bag Baijiu, which tasted very bad, was very difficult to drink and gave you a headache the next day. I had never forgotten this demonstration of brotherly feeling.

I didn"t speak all the way back to 404. It was already past one in the morning. The following night I had to go to cla.s.s. Before going to bed, I picked up my cell phone. Princ.i.p.al Zhang had sent the lecture topic and address.

Midnight on Monday, the a.s.sembly room on the fourth floor of the former site of the H City Fourth Hospital. Cla.s.s will run for two hours. The topic of the lecture is Ideological and Moral Cultivation. The school bus will take you there and back.

It wasn"t Benevolence Middle School this time.

Lying in bed, I looked up the former address of the Fourth Hospital. The information I found was simply petrifying.

The Fourth Hospital was forced to relocate due to rumors of hauntings. The old site hadn"t been sold yet. All the developers who came to investigate died suddenly. All the information was of this sort. Princ.i.p.al Zhang really knew how to pick locations.

I was puzzled. Since Princ.i.p.al Zhang wanted to help these special people, why didn"t she find a fixed location for the cla.s.s?

I voiced my doubts over WeChat and soon received a message from Princ.i.p.al Zhang: A student helped me find it. It"s free.

The word "free" instantly dispelled all my doubts. So that was it. Recently I"d found I really liked that word.

Princ.i.p.al Zhang was a kind-hearted person. I didn"t even know whether she collected tuition fees from her students. If she didn"t, then the school was run purely as a charity. In that case, Princ.i.p.al Zhang"s economic outlook wasn"t good. She had to save money where she could. So what if there was no fixed location? If the students didn"t mind, then it was fine.

But I had another problem. Why were cla.s.ses always at night? Daytime was better. Even if it had to be at night, couldn"t it start at eight?

I thought unhappily of Xia Jin"s hairline.

Princ.i.p.al Zhang"s response: There are fewer people out at night, the students feel more secure.

I thought of Li Yuanyuan. She always appeared at night. Probably there were too many people for her to feel comfortable going out during the day, considering what she had gone through.

I could understand this. Ah, baldness was worth it for the sake of the students.

I lay tossing and turning in bed, unable to get to sleep, thinking of Comrade Xiao Ning"s stern, tight-lipped face. Though he was clearly very young, he still acted like an old man. His speech was also pretty old-fashioned. Thinking about it, it really was adorable.

I picked up my phone and sent Xiao Ning a message: Are you sleeping?

He answered almost the next instant: No.

Why aren"t you asleep this late at night?

I"m at H City"s cemetery, thinking how to walk the road ahead, how to find the right path for my cultivation.

What bizarre freak of Ning Tiance"s was this? Going to a cemetery in the middle of the night to contemplate life? I asked: Are there ghosts in the cemetery?

There were before the founding of the People"s Republic. Now, cremation is popular. There are no bones for the soul to attach to. Most of them don"t stay. There are no ghosts here, and no people. It is the clearest place in the earthly realm.

When I thought about Xiao Ning"s appearance of having had all his ideas overturned before, this way of talking worried me a little. Having your worldview pulled down by others was a very painful experience. It was very easy to go astray as a result.

Didn"t we arrange to meet on Monday? I didn"t expect I"d see you the night before. Let"s meet again during the day. Xiao Ning"s emotional state didn"t seem to be very good. I wanted to see him and have a chat.

I"m sorry. I may have to break my appointment. Before I went to the cemetery, I went to the railway station to buy tickets to return to my sect early tomorrow morning. What just happened shook me to my core. I need to go back for a while.

Oh. Where is your sect? How long does the train take?

It"s over thirty hours sitting on a hard seat, three or four days for a round-trip, plus the time I"ll need to spend meditating. Altogether it should be between seven and fifteen days. How about we meet then?

More than thirty hours on a hard seat! Just thinking about it made my back and b.u.t.t hurt. It seemed that Xiao Ning"s exorcism didn"t bring in much money. Thinking that I had just s.n.a.t.c.hed business away from him, I felt guilty.

Is there a discount on hard seat tickets? This time of year, plane tickets are sometimes cheaper than train tickets.

No, I"m not short of money. I ride on a hard seat to cultivate my mind and heart in the earthly realm.

Reading the words "not short of money," I felt a faint stab of jealousy. I was very short of money. Every time I rode on a hard seat it was to save a few hundred yuan for living expenses.

Then… I won"t disturb you anymore. I"ll see you when you come back. You must remember to come see me.

After the message was sent, I suddenly wondered whether it was too direct. What if Xiao Ning wasn"t gay? Though he had touched me in the elevator…

I added a sentence: Come see me, and I"ll help you read up on pop science.

All right, Ning Tiance replied simply. I didn"t know whether he suspected my intentions.

After chatting, I slowly fell asleep. I slept without dreaming. When I woke up in the morning, seeing the sunlight put me in a good mood.

I"d never dreamed much since I was a child, and I could sleep easily. Aside from not being able to sleep in cla.s.s, I could sleep anywhere.

Princ.i.p.al Zhang had told me what the topic for today"s cla.s.s would be, a subject I was good at. All day I shut myself into my room making up a lesson plan. Since an abandoned hospital might not have a projector, after putting together a PowerPoint, I wrote my lesson plan down in the notebook Liu Sishun had given me as insurance.

At night I went to wait for the bus at 11:30 as usual. The bus driver, as always, was punctual.

Getting on the bus today, I felt a little hot. I couldn"t help saying, "Sir, it"s a little warm in here today. Haven"t you turned on the air-conditioning?"

"You can have any seat today," said the driver, not answering my question.

I looked around. Sure enough, the chairs had all become green, and the sign for Teacher Shen Jianguo"s seat was gone.

Although I"d felt a little embarra.s.sed about the special seat for pregnant women, it had also shown the driver"s good intentions. Having it gone felt a little unfamiliar.

"Why have all the chairs been painted green?" I asked.

The driver continued to avoid answering my questions directly. "You"re the only one tonight. You can sit anywhere you like."

He said that as if I hadn"t been the only one every time… But thinking about it, suddenly I thought of what happened between me and Xia Jin the other night. Thinking that the driver must have seen it, I felt uncomfortable talking to him and quietly took a seat.

After arriving at the old site of the Fourth Hospital, the driver said to me, "I"ll come for you at two, and I"ll wait until five. Before five you have to… forget it, you"ll definitely come back."

Then he dropped me off and drove the bus away.

The Fourth Hospital"s original buildings were still in good condition. In the dark I couldn"t clearly distinguish the office building, the outpatient building and the inpatient building.

My cla.s.s would be in the a.s.sembly hall in the outpatient building. That was supposed to be where doctors met to discuss treatment plans. The meeting room was very large, and there were projection facilities. It was well suited for a cla.s.sroom lecture.

As I approached the front gates of the hospital, I saw a girl in a red dress standing at the door waving to me.

I came closer and saw that it was Mu Huaitong. She must have been wearing too much face powder. Her face in the night was as shining white as snow, and her lips were unnaturally red.

"Teacher Shen," Mu Huaitong said to me with a smile, standing at the gate and not coming out, "I was afraid you wouldn"t be able to find the cla.s.sroom, so I volunteered to come out to meet you."