The opening of the Grand Master


    When I was five years old, I once witnessed an event that led to Yin. Watching my little friend Zheng Gaang, who was having a good class, suddenly lost his mind, jumped off the wooden bench in the classroom and rushed to the corridor, then flipped over the railing, jumped down to the first floor, entered the sewer, and finally disappeared into the end of the sewer — a sewer. Back then, Daibo, Li Xiaoluo, and Li Xiaofu, the two brothers, were standing in the corridor, punished by the language teacher.


    The usually bad-tempered language teacher, upon seeing his student do such a thing, was also dumbfounded. After a moment of silence, all the students followed their teacher into the corridor. Dozens of primary school students followed their teacher, looking down the stairs.


    On the ground, a passing teacher was facing our language teacher and pointing at the sewer beside the teaching building. His face was also filled with surprise, and the language teacher and I quickly ran downstairs. Everyone bent down to look at the end of the sewer, a sewer hole that flowed into who knows where. The language teacher shouted at the hole nonstop, "Zheng Gaang, Zheng Gaang, you little b * stard, crawl out for your father!"


    The students and teachers of the other classes, alarmed by our language teacher, also ran to the end of the ditch to watch. Everyone lied down and looked at the depths of the sewer — it was pitch black inside, and from the beginning till the end, Zheng Gaang had not made a single sound. However, the teachers who heard the news and started to discuss among themselves, saying that they could roughly see a weak figure squatting inside, was obviously Zheng Gaang.


    Just as everyone was in a panic over this matter, everyone felt the ground shake. The glass windows of the classroom shattered.


    "An earthquake!" The teachers let everyone gather on the field. At the same time, the fire brigade''s alarm sounded from the opposite side of the school. Only the physical education teacher, who had already taken off her cotton pants, stood in the sewer, shivering in the winter, bare-chested and bare-chested. At the same time, Zheng Gaang''s miserable wails came out from the sewer.


    I laid down at the end of the sewer before the teacher drove the students to the sports field. Enduring the stench coming from the sewer, I looked down the sewer between the legs of the sports teacher and saw Zheng Gaang curled up his body, hugging his knees as he squatted a few meters away from the sewer. His eyes looked towards the outside of the sewer and met my gaze.


    Then I saw countless pairs of gray eyes behind him.


    These eyes, for the next few years, have been in my nightmares.


    When the sports teacher pulled the muddy Zheng Gaang to the sports field to gather, Zheng Gaang started spouting nonsense. However, no one could understand what he was saying, and no one could understand either, but I could clearly hear some of the words, "You''re already dead, you''re dead, you''re dead." That''s all I understand, and nobody else understands. The teachers thought that Zheng Gaang had lost his mind because he had a crazy mother.


    Only I, after many years, understood that Zheng Gaang had not contracted a hysteria, but had gone dark. The instant Zheng Gaang crawled into the sewer was also the time when a tragic explosion occurred in our city.


    No one but me would link that huge explosion with Zheng Gaang''s sudden hysteria. The first floor of the warehouse was filled with a ton of yellow explosives. Not only did all of the village committee cadres who were in the middle of a meeting instantly lost their lives, the huge power of the explosion even blew up and killed everyone within a hundred meter radius. In a short period of time, too many people died, so many hell commissioner were busy trying to pull away all the normal people in the area, including the six year olds.


    However, this time he was not so lucky. His hysteria caused him a stroke, and from then on, only half of his body was able to move, to the point that on Hong Kong Kowloon Road, everyone could see for a long time a pale young man, who could only move half of his body, slowly walking on the street. And then from youth to middle age, they all slowly moved like this.


    This is the story of my little friend Zheng Gaang, and if I were to meet him personally, it would be the time for me to be able to connect these matters.


    The reason why I''m looking for Zheng Gaang is because I can already confirm that Zheng Gaang is an unlucky guy who can walk on the dark side. And I went to him to verify another matter that had troubled me for decades.


    Back to my primary school, which I attended at the age of five, the Dongshan Elementary School, which was then on a hill near the outskirts of the city. The hill opposite our school was the fire brigade, although the two hills were originally the same mountain, but because of the construction of the railway, the mountain was split in two, and the railway ran through the middle, so the north side of the railway was our primary school, and the south side was the fire brigade. As a primary school student, one of our biggest hobbies is to lean on the railing of the corridor and watch the majestic fire trucks of the fire brigade come and go. Now the fire brigade had moved, moved to one place — the site of the Bay Funeral Home.


    At least now I know one thing, but in any evil land, there are usually two types of public facilities, one is the army, and the other is the school!


    My alma mater, Dongshan Elementary School, was on the top of a small hill that was a cemetery before it was built, then the railroad was built, and to the north was the school, and to the south was the fire brigade.


    Our classrooms were still of old wood and brick, the steps on the first floor were all stone, the floors on the second were all wood, and as time went by and the boards rotted, I could often see from the floor beneath my feet to the top of the classroom students'' heads on the first floor.


    At that time, I was in the first grade of primary school, and the one who usually had a good relationship with me was Zheng Gaang. Better still, there was a child named Deppo, who suffered from severe skin disease, with dense horny scales growing from his body, and two classmates who played with us often. But Deppo never spoke to the two students.


    The two classmates were brothers. The elder brother''s name was Li Xiaoluo, and the younger brother''s name was Li Xiaofu. In the 1980s, whether it was adults or children, their clothes were all plain, almost all of them black and grey. Li Xiaoluo and Li Xiaofu, the two brothers, always wore black cotton clothing. Both of them seemed to me a little retarded, with a bad head and a bad string. Of course, I''m not very smart, so every afternoon we would be left in the hall by a math teacher, memorizing the nine-fold formula. It was only when the sky was about to turn dark that the math teacher let us go along with the other students who weren''t very smart. After school, I have to accompany Zheng Gaang to the brothel road in Hong Kong. He comes to my home, and then I will walk a long way before returning to my home at Baotuo River.


    However, Li Xiaoluo and Li Xiaofo didn''t have such worries. They lived in the boiler room of the school. Their father was a boiler maker, and the family of three lived in a small room next to the boiler room. I have never seen or asked the mother of the two Foros.


    Other than Zheng Gaang and I, the two brothers didn''t have any other friends. In fact, in the class, there were me, Zheng Gaang who was crazy like a sow, Dai Bo who had a skin disease, and there were the two brothers, who never talked to anyone, as they were friends. The other students disdained playing with me.


    During the new year, my parents would buy me new clothes and ask me what color I wanted to wear. I remembered that there was an interesting pattern on one of the Fords'' clothes, so I told my parents. But I didn''t make it clear that my parents never knew what kind of patterns I wanted. It was not until my parents led me past a small shop that I saw the fabric of the Fuluo brothers. They pulled my parents into the shop and said that was the suit they were wearing.


    At that time, my parents'' reaction was to ruthlessly pull my ear up and then leave. After a long time, I realized that it was a store specializing in white business. The black satin fabric in the storefront had dark red "Shou" characters that were like flowers on it. At that time, I thought it looked really good.


    Many things happened later on, such as my meningitis, Zheng Gaang''s loss of control, dropping out of school, or Daibo''s shedding of his skin. The first grade passed just like that. In the second grade, Li Xiaofeng and Li Xiaoluo didn''t follow me to level up, but stayed in the first grade. I understood that they were still in the first grade, so I understood that they were still in the second grade.


    That''s what I remember about the two Fulus brothers.


    Until one day, when the surging waves of my memories reminded me vividly of my childhood memories, I decided to look for Zheng Gaang and confirm my bewilderment for him. Li Xiaoluo and Li Xiaofu, the two brothers, were really strange. Because I remember, back then these two brothers, especially liked to play on the first floor of the stone steps, just sitting on that rock in a daze, sitting there for an entire afternoon, not even going to class.


    I know that these two brothers and Zheng Gaang might have been the source of a series of unexplainable things that I encountered after I became an adult. I have to look for this confusion, it''s very important to me. The source of my confusion was three books, three very strange books.