After getting on the aircraft, the burgundy ponytail did something that Luo Binhan never expected. She took off her high boots and wool socks and started rubbing her feet.
Luo Binhan was deeply shocked by her behavior and quickly pushed her to the farthest corner.
"What do you mean?" the burgundy ponytail said dissatisfied, "I'm wearing new shoes today! They pinch my feet too much!"
"That's none of my business." Luo Binhan ruthlessly pulled her feet off the seat, "Let's talk, let's make trouble, don't joke about athlete's foot!"
The suppressed burgundy ponytail became more aggressive and tried to poke his nostrils with her toes. Luo Binhan finally managed to stabilize her with the savage's whereabouts, but he couldn't get her to put the shoes back on her feet properly. Not only did she refuse to wear shoes, she even took off her coat in a threatening manner.
"You try taking off your clothes again?" Luo Binhan threatened, "Do you know what happened to the women who took off their clothes in front of me?"
The burgundy ponytail sneered: "You are a weakling, what can you do to them?"
"I don't need to do anything to them." Luo Binhan said, "They were either beaten by bandits, shot, or went to far away places for medical treatment."
The burgundy ponytail snorted from his nose and took off his coat and tied it around his waist. After a while, she stepped on Luo Binhan's thigh with her toes.
"Tell me about the one who went to cure the disease," she demanded.
Luo Binhan glanced at her sideways: "Why?"
"The tone of your voice is different when you mention this. You must like this to treat illnesses the most." The wine-red ponytail said, "I can smell it."
"Are you a paparazzi? You hear everything?"
Luo Binhan drove the aircraft to the hillside near the Dwarf Basin. It was still early morning, the stars and moon were dead and silent, and the mountains and forests were still sleeping in darkness. He deliberately chose a place to stop where he couldn't see the savage tribe, then leaned on his seat and took a nap.
"Why did you come here to sleep?" asked the burgundy ponytail, "Is there anything special here? Other than me?"
"You are really confident." Luo Binhan said.
The burgundy ponytail started kicking him again with her bare feet, forcing him to open the aircraft and let him out. This time Luo Binhan did not contradict her, but simply complied.
The night in the mountains was cold and humid, and the wine-red ponytail immediately screamed when I stepped on it with my bare feet. She was obviously wearing a set of thick autumn clothes, but she refused to put her coat on properly instead of asking Luo Binhan to come down and do warm-up exercises with her.
Luo Binhan came out of the aircraft and suddenly wanted to smoke a cigarette, and his desire for cigarettes reminded him of Zhu Ye.
He asked the burgundy ponytail: "You still remember when we met the sculptor going crazy in the carving room, right? Why did you suddenly think of burning the leaves at that time? And you have been carrying this thing with you all the time?"
The burgundy ponytail shrugged: "My mother told me before. She said these are holy leaves that can ward off evil spirits, and she secretly planted a lot of them in her studio. I also learned how to plant them from the work records she left."
"Then you are quite powerful." Luo Binhan said. Although this sentence is still a bit weird, it can be considered sincere in general, so the burgundy ponytail proudly puffed up her chest.
Her look made Luo Binhan not want to talk any more. He listened to the sound of wind in the forest, and found strangely that even in the mountains, the wind here was very different from that in the Great Rift Valley on the other side. It is always soft and mysterious, whining like a savage whispering in his sleep. This wind has been blowing in the mountains for countless centuries. It is as willful as the planet itself and does not care what the creatures living on it think.
Now Luo Binhan knows that some civilizations can easily dismantle and reassemble the planet, or even drag it entirely to another world. That was enough to prove the power of interstellar civilization, but now he felt that the mountains and land under his feet were such a giant. The species that parasitize it claim to control its destiny, or want to save and beautify it, but that actually makes no sense: why does the planet care what the parasites on its surface do? If the parasite makes it sick, its immune system will naturally start to work to eliminate the harmful things. That may temporarily damage its complexion, but it won't be worth mentioning in its long life. It was just a flu.
He was curious about whether there was a disease, a deadly parasite, that not only damaged its skin and appearance, but could even pose a real "life threat" to it. What kind of strange disease is that? cancer? Acquired immune system deficiency?
"Your expression is so ugly." The burgundy ponytail said standing next to him, "It's like my dad broke into the suspect's room and found him rolling around naked on the bed with another man."
"You can't get over this shit, can you?" Luo Binhan said, casually slapping the back of his head with a burgundy ponytail. He used to teach his sister this way, but the results were usually not very satisfactory. She would only make the devil scold and insult him, and even complain to the police on the roadside about sexual harassment.
The burgundy ponytail now had no father to complain to, but he didn't start making bad words to hurt anyone. She pounced directly on Luo Binhan, pinching the flesh on Luo Binhan's chest and stomach, and tried to reach out to the completely out of bounds area.
Luo Binhan was forced to fight with her. He felt like an old man practicing Tai Chi Cloud Hands in the park, endlessly patting away the layers of burgundy ponytail. Finally, the burgundy ponytail finally got tired and lay down on the grass, panting.
"What on earth are you doing here?" she asked.
Luo Binhan sat down and said, "Nothing, I just want to see what the sunrise looks like in the mountains."
The burgundy ponytail seemed okay. She grabbed a piece of grass and put it in her mouth, then stepped on Luo Binhan's back with her foot: "How long will it be until dawn here?"
"An hour or two."
"I'm so bored, let's find some entertainment."
"I'll get you another perverted sculptor to kill, okay?"
"Really?" The burgundy ponytail asked expectantly, and Luo Binhan really wanted to kick her.
Finally he resisted his sexual temptation and just sat there and said to her: "Do you remember what your mother looks like?"
"Of course." The burgundy ponytail said immediately, "I still have a photo of her at home. We look a lot alike."
"Do you have it on your phone? Show it to me?"
The burgundy ponytail took out his mobile phone and rummaged through it for a long time. Luo Binhan was also watching her stroke one by one. There were almost tens of thousands of pictures in the album. He thought he would see some inappropriate content, but it turned out that most of them were just ordinary mountain scenery photos, and some were obviously study notes.
"I really didn't know I took so many photos." Burgundy Ponytail complained, "And the internet here is so bad. I can't even log into the cloud album."
"You know how hard it is now? Just go back if you feel bad."
"I won't."
Eventually they managed to find a picture of her mother. That was the photo she accidentally captured on the wall while taking a picture of a bat that flew into the house. Through extreme zooming, Luo Binhan saw a brown-haired woman dressed like an expedition team member. What was interesting was that she also had a high ponytail tied behind her head.
"Your eyes are very similar," he said. "The outer corners of your eyes are a little slanted outward."
"How did you tell?" The burgundy ponytail asked, staring at the blurry picture.
Luo Binhan took the matter lightly and asked her to talk about her mother. But the burgundy ponytail couldn't remember much. She was too young at the time, and she only knew that her mother was lost. Her father took her to the mountains to look for someone, and that's where they found the wild man and her mother.
"They also wanted to take me and my father away, but my mother didn't agree. I followed her, and she put me back in the grass. She must have felt that my father was not suitable here, and she didn't want him to stay alone, so They didn’t let me come either. But now that I’m older, it’s different.”
"It's different." Luo Binhan said.
The first ray of dawn appeared in the sky, outlining the boundary between the void and the clouds and rivers. Luo Binhan finally stood up from the grass and pulled her towards the top of the mountain.
The burgundy ponytail kept asking them where they were going. Until they reached the top, she still couldn't figure out the situation and complained that he made her walk barefoot.
"Look down." Luo Binhan said.
The burgundy ponytail lowered his head, and his voice immediately changed from complaining to screaming. Just below the top of the mountain where they stood was the basin where the savages lived, which was exposed to an unobstructed view at dawn. It was still early at this time, and only a few people were moving in the morning breeze.
Luo Binhan allowed his burgundy ponytail to go crazy while he used his sight to find a new camp on the edge of the village. Those dormitories were made of linen and branches, and some vines were used to help fix them. He guessed that the latter was Lan Que's handiwork.
At this time, there were almost no people in the camp. The guests who came from afar traveled all night and fell asleep from exhaustion upon arrival. Amidst the peacefulness of deep sleep, there was only an old woman wandering outside.
Instead of walking, she sat on a strange-looking wooden cart. The floor of the car was made of wood, and it happened to have metal axles and rubber wheels like a scooter. The old woman put herself on such a funny cart, used two wooden sticks to paddle the ground, and wandered around at dawn when no one was around.
Luo Binhan asked the burgundy ponytail to look there, and then he never heard her voice again.
He left time for the burgundy ponytail, and suddenly felt a little homesick for his hometown, so he took out the gravity device and touched it. After taking out all the miscellaneous items, he finally found the silver lighter placed in the innermost part.
"Are you happy now?" Luo Binhan said, playing with the lighter.
The wine-red ponytail turned her head and looked at him with tears in her eyes. She wanted to say something, but Luo Binhan stopped her.
"Just now you told me your mother's story." He said to the burgundy ponytail, "Now I will tell you one too."
The burgundy ponytail blinked, looking a little confused. Luo Binhan turned a blind eye and continued: "There used to be a little tadpole who wanted to find his mother every day. But he was very smart. He knew that his mother looked different from him, and he also knew that he was too young to go ashore. So it waited patiently until it grew big enough, and then ran ashore to find its mother. But no matter how it looked, it couldn't find a frog that looked the same as itself. Do you know why?"
The burgundy ponytail shook his head.
"Because it's not a tadpole," Luo Binhan said. "It's a parasite born from a frog egg. A bug happens to look like a tadpole when it's young, but when it grows up, it doesn't look like a frog."
The light of morning falls on the silent mountain top. The morning glow was like flowing fire slurry, but when the dawn wind blew from that side, Luo Binhan still felt that his fingers were cramping from the cold.
"Qirui." He put down the lighter and said, "You died a hundred years ago."
