Book 1: Chapter 5: Yang Daguang

Book 1: Chapter 5: Yang Daguang

We took everything from the reception room and brought it back to the shop, including the body.

Fatty tied the body to the chair, hired a moving van, and drove all the way back to Hangzhou overnight. I piled all the things that were in my back room into the front room and stuffed them around Wang Meng's station. After that was done, I put all the broken and rotten furniture that Fatty had brought back into the back room.

Wang Meng was shocked. "Boss, didnt you retire? What kind of tomb is this from? How come it looks even more worthless than the goods weve bought?"

I put the corpse in front of my couch and then covered it with cloth before handing Wang Meng two hundred yuan and telling him to go away. Once he was finally gone, I started listening to the tapes one by one.

There were far more tapes than I had originally thought and they both had A and B sides. Practically all of them had recordings of various operas and children's songs, which made it obvious that Yang Daguang had transcribed over peoples old tapes.This chapter is updated by nov(e)(l)biin.com

His life must have really been difficult.

Based on this, I figured that he and my Uncle Threes relationship must have been distant, because Uncle Three was rich very early and would have definitely helped him.

It took me two months to listen to all the tapes. During this time, I would listen to them any time I got in the car, when I went to the toilet, and even when I was in the shower. Not only were the recordings different from any other sounds, but listening to thunder was very boring. I was still attentive and tried to remember all the details, but I always fell asleep before I knew it. I ended up having to listen to the tape again when I woke up. As a result, it was a very inefficient process.

I didnt get any new text messages on my phone. As I listened to the tapes, I came to the conclusion that this Yang Daguang must've been a madman.

All the tapes were full of all kinds of thunder, frequencies, and sounds, and many of them were accompanied by the sound of heavy rainfall. The thunder in most of the tapes sounded like it was at the intensity of a thunderstorm.

Since it was possible to figure out what era the cassettes had been sold in, and I knew Yang Daguang had gotten them some time after that, I made a preliminary calculation. It didnt rain every day, so even if I calculated from the earliest sales date, the only way he could record so much thunder was if he chased after storm clouds.

He would go wherever the storm clouds went, which meant he was a storm chaser.

But storm clouds didnt exist all the time. For him to record so much thunder, he needed to keep chasing thunderstorms for a minimum of sixteen years.

Hes a fucking lunatic. Why did he do this? What's the point of all this thunder?

But Uncle Three didn't come back, of course.

On this particular day, I stealthily went to Lou Wai Lou (1) to throw our garbage outtheir garbage was handled specially, so we secretly threw ours in with theirs when it suddenly became dark and started to rain. The downpour came so suddenly that I ran back to the shop, but before I entered the door, lightning flashed across the sky and the deafening sound of thunder rang out.

"Bring all the tofu in!" I shouted to Wang Meng.

But right after I yelled, I suddenly had a strange feeling in my heart. I looked up at the dark clouds in the sky. The lightning flashed and the thunder boomed again, sounding very clear.

I broke out in a cold sweat in the heavy rain, suddenly realizing that I had recognized the thunder just now.

For fifteen minutes, I stood in the rain, watched the sky, and listened until Fatty dragged me inside. He asked me what I was doing and if I was acting out a scene from "Romance in the Rain" (2). I rushed into my room, pulled out the tape recorder, and took out a cassette tape. I then ran back out into the rain in my raincoat, faced the sky, and started recording the thunder.

The thunderstorm passed quickly, and I went back into the shop soaking wet. Fatty handed me a hammer, "Welcome to the Avengers."

I pushed him away and started rummaging through Yang Daguang's tapes. I had a stunning premonition that was enough to make my blood run cold.

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TN Notes:

(1) Lou Wai Lou is a famous traditional restaurant in Hangzhou.

(2) It's a famous Chinese TV period drama from 2001. More info here.

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Merry Christmas!!!! Only 1 today dears. Between dogs barking, my mom putting on Gregorian chants, my bro and his fiance watching "Home Alone", and getting prepped for our "Die Hard" movie marathon, it's a little hard to concentrate lol. Hope you all have a wonderful day full of love and happiness!!!