Listeners

"The Listener" My name is Fang Lei, a poor boy from Tieling. In 1998, I spent two yuan to buy a broken brick that no one wanted. From then on, my life was over. That brick introduced me to Chen Banxian. He taught me to lie on the ground and listen to the soil, saying that there were sounds under the ground, some of which were water, some of which were wind, and some of which were living things. I asked what it was, and he put out his cigarette, stood up and left. Later I understood - some answers are best left unasked. Traveling all over the country with him, I saw seventeen skeletons in the Liao Dynasty sacrificial pit under the Liaoning coal mine, each hand holding the same jade plaque. The year number on the jade plaque has never appeared in any history books; I saw the sound of water flowing upward in the desert of Inner Mongolia; I saw the 800-year-old rusty copper door in Changbai Mountain, with only a letter and an address behind the door. I also met Su Wanqing. She saved my life when we first met, and later I discovered that the birthmark on her wrist was exactly the same as the dungeon totem. On the third night when I was lost in the jungle, she asked me if I was afraid of death. I said I was, and she said, "Then follow me." Twenty years into the industry, eleven provinces, two brothers have not come back, and have been in trouble three times. What is buried underground is never just the dead. Bring a small bench and I'll tell you.