It's four o'clock in the morning, minus fifteen degrees.
I put my hand into the icy water of Xiyugou, turned over a piece of my fingernail, and found a skinned stone.
Express delivery, 15,000.
She replied with three words: Got it.
Half a year later, she appeared at Erdaoqiao Bazaar in Hotan, wearing an Adelaide silk coat. She looked at my legs covered in mud and said -
"You've lost weight."
My name is You Shi, I am 28 years old. I have no house, no car, no savings, and the most I have in my bank card is less than 20,000 yuan.
But I have traveled through seventeen provinces, dug agates from glaciers, traded my life for white jade on a 4,000-meter mountain, and almost died of thirst in the Gobi Desert.
I don't trust machines, I don't use electric drills, and I don't partner with any businessmen.
I used only one pair of hands to pull the stone out of the soil and sent it to a woman named Shen Qingci in Zhenping, Henan.
She wears plain cheongsam and top-quality bracelets, and never speaks more than five words.
The transfer is fast, the reviews are cold, and they never ask me where I am or if I have eaten.
Until I was on the verge of death from high school in Yiniugou, the last message on my phone was from her:
"Are you here?"
Later, I found out——
Every piece of "original and undamaged" jade she receives from me is not for business purposes.
She was looking for evidence.
Looking for a piece of incriminating evidence that can drag her family out of the quagmire of fake jade and can only be left by natural leather.
And I, a homeless man covered in mud, had unknowingly become the sharpest knife in her hand.
*What he dug out of the mud was not jade, but the lives of three generations of her family. *
