Chapter 53 (1/2)

Breathe.

Although it was late summer, thanks to the dim yellow street light, the air exhaled from one’s nostrils was clearly visible.

“Did you feel anything?” Li Ang asked softly.

The black umbrella shook gently behind him, and a sound was heard.

The Yin Qi. The faint, yet clear Yin Qi filled this narrow and messy alley just like a misty veil and obscured the view.

The black umbrella swayed comfortably and sucked the gloominess and coldness in the air. Li Ang adjusted his breathing and allowed the Ripple Breathing Technique to slowly circulate through his body.

The warm current made the chilliness dissipate. Li Ang shook his body, walked through the alley along the path of the Yin Qi, turned left and right, and arrived at a two-story house.

The whole house was grayish-brown and was covered with verdant creeps on the outer wall. Through the space between the branches and leaves, the mottled concrete wall tiles could be seen.

The house was probably 12 years older than Li Ang. The cracked corners and the foot of the wall made people wonder whether the building would collapse at any moment.

The room on the second floor of the building was lit. He could hear a young reading voice from upstairs while standing at the bottom of the building. Li Ang froze for a moment. After he made sure that there was nobody, he climbed up the wall of the building quickly like a black cat. He silently crouched on top of the second floor and listened to the movement coming from the floor below.

“There is a stone cliff at the foot of the mountain, and there is a crack on that cliff. The complex-toothed flying squirrel uses this crack as its nest.”

Several young children’s voices were reading the text aloud. They were reading the textbook The Complex-Toothed Flying Squirrel of the second grade of the People’s Education Edition. The general idea was that winter was coming, but the complex-toothed flying squirrel got by without doing anything and refused to build a nest. In the end, it froze to death late at night in the winter.

The voices of five boys and three girls were speaking, and they were all very young. They were seated in rows of four, two people in each row. At the front of the room, an adult man wearing cloth shoes and weighing around 70 kilos occasionally stood up to walk.

Based solely on sound, without looking, Li Ang could roughly imagine the scene inside the house. Was this a cram school in the shantytown?

The children finished reading the text. The man sitting on the podium in front of the room coughed violently and asked the children to use their math book.

Li Ang patiently lay on the rooftop, waiting for something to change. Ten minutes later, there was a knock on the door. A middle-aged woman, who sounded like she was doing heavy physical work, thanked the teacher in a tired voice and took her child away.

As 10:00 approached, the children in the cram school were taken away by their parents. When the door was closed, the man in the classroom coughed violently and slowly brewed a pot of tea for himself.

The jasmine tea he brewed was clear, sweet, and delicious and had detoxifying properties. The pale white flowers floating and spinning in the tea could make people calm just by watching them.

The middle-aged man named Zou Zhengze held the lid of the enamel cup, rubbed the brim lightly, took a sip of tea, and said indifferently, “Aren’t you coming down to have a look?”

After a moment of silence, Li Ang gently jumped into the place through the window, his red-faced Lord Guan mask glaring at Zou Zhengze.

“Which organization are you from?” Zou Zhengze blew on the surface of his tea and asked casually, “Special Affairs Bureau? Abnormality Institute? Or Whale Vocalization Organization?”

Li Ang did not answer and only looked at Zou Zhengze with interest.