Li Shuangmu, 47 years old, is a laboratory technician at a county fertilizer factory with a monthly salary of 3,200 yuan.
My wife is tallying goods in the supermarket because of herniated lumbar disc and dare not ask for leave; my daughter is in her second year of college and relies on student loans for tuition; and my old mother has to send her medicine money on time every month. His savings balance never exceeded four figures.
No one knew that this taciturn middle-aged man had a geological hammer hidden under his bed - it was left to him by his master who was working in the mining area before he died thirty years ago.
Every weekend, he rides his motorcycle into the mountains for "fishing." No one believed it, and no one cared.
Until one day...
In the days that followed, he traveled to every ridge of the Qingling Mountains alone. The heavy snowfall in winter almost killed him, and the meltwater in spring washed away all his dry food. He learned to read river terraces, read maps of Quaternary glaciers, and washed hundreds of kilograms of sand samples with chemicals secretly brought back from the laboratory.
Finally, on a clear morning after snow, he saw a piece of natural gold smaller than a sesame under the microscope.
That is the code that the earth has been sleeping for 2.6 Million years, leaving to those who understand it.
This is a story about the dignity of knowledge.
A story about a middle-aged man who had no choice but to use his useless geological knowledge for thirty years to dig a crack in his destiny in the deep mountains.
There is no golden finger, no system, only one person who chooses to believe in what he learned in his youth when he is most desperate.
It is written for every middle-aged person who can't sleep late at night, and for ordinary people who are gritting their teeth in life.
