(1)
The two old men fishing by the seaside were still staring at the calm ocean. One of them, holding a bamboo rod with one hand, turned his head sideways to glance at the girl sitting beside him—and the two young women sleeping on her lap.
“Haha, I got one!” The old man sitting by the rocks on the other side wobbled to his feet and started reeling in the line unhurriedly. “Whoa, pretty heavy—must be a big one!”
“Lucky you.”
“And you—what can you catch with that bamboo stick?”
“The ones caught with bamboo taste the most original. You old fool wouldn’t understand.” He smacked his lips and shook his head, then looked at Wang Xinru, the only one still awake beside him. “Right, little sis?”
“I don’t really know much about fishing…” Wang Xinru smiled a little sheepishly and looked down at An Jing and Zhu Ying, who were sleeping peacefully.
“Youth is great—when they’re tired, they just fall asleep like that.” “When I was young, I slept even faster than them.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Like I wasn’t young too? Back then, hell, the moment my head hit the pillow, next thing I knew—bam—it was the next day!”
“What made you come all the way from the north down south?”
“Wasn’t it the layoff wave back then? Had to make a living. Couldn’t find work in the big cities, so I came here for manual labor. What else was I supposed to do? A man can’t just starve to death.”
“All these years, and you never went back?” An Jing’s grandfather finally dragged his fish onto the shore. It was a large fish with silvery-white scales, easily longer than half his arm. It struggled vigorously, but then he tossed it into the fish basket submerged in seawater. After a short flurry, it settled down again.
“Back when you were young, what was the northeast like?”
“What could it be like? Same old stuff. The Japanese invaders had taken over everywhere, even set up Manchukuo. That puppet Puyi up top—whatever the Japanese said, he did. Worthless piece of crap—”
“Was there food?”
“Some, barely. Plenty starved to death, but more survived than in those places that were both poor and at war. I don’t remember much from back then—that was when I was a kid. Then a few years later, the Americans dropped two big mushrooms on the islands of those invaders. After that, life settled down for a while.”
“Life was good back then, huh?”
“For a few decades, yeah, it was pretty good. I worked at the factory, and that life—man, it was booming!” The old man with the bamboo rod caught a crab, tossed it back into the sea in annoyance. “What about you back then? The south wasn’t exactly better off than us up north.”
“When?”
It was about then that he caught sight of something.
“Before they bombed those invaders awake.”
“Back then, we were all hiding on the island. There wasn’t much of anything. The invaders didn’t come up. Actually, I heard from the adults that they were planning to come, but because we kept having typhoons, they couldn’t be bothered—have you ever seen a tsunami?”
“A tsunami? I’ve never seen that thing. Actually, before I came down south, I never imagined typhoons could be so big.”
An Jing’s grandfather mumbled something in dialect, then tried his best to repeat it in Mandarin thick with his hometown accent. But he used so many dialect words that the other old man couldn’t understand a thing.
“Girl, what did this old fool say?”
Wang Xinru said something to her grandfather, then leaned in and listened attentively as he spoke in a dialect so earthy that even the local speech sounded refined. She translated patiently: “Grandfather said that when the tsunami came, it was like a very solid wall. The water didn’t look like water anymore—it looked like a blue mountain of stone…”
(2)
Zhu Ying was born in the twentieth century and grew up in the twenty-first.
She was a child of the new era and had watched movies in theaters.
But no matter how realistic the special effects, they couldn’t compare to the scene before her eyes.
Towering waves.
They could truly block out the sky. Like mountains, the tide surged forward with overwhelming force, as if about to swallow this island far from the mainland.
Actually, it was still far away.
Yes, still far from reaching the island’s shore.
At least four or five kilometers.
But it already brought an immense sense of pressure.
A ship flying the Japanese military flag looked like a helpless leaf in the water, completely overturned by the undulations of the waves. It was as if it had been chewed up by a giant beast—nothing remained.
An Jing slowly flew higher and higher. Her figure grew smaller, but in the eyes of those below, she seemed larger and larger.
The adults looked up, following the children’s gaze. This time, they could see something.
At least they could see the golden light spreading in all directions.
The golden glow grew brighter, but Zhu Ying could still clearly see An Jing’s face—her closed eyes and deeply furrowed brows.
Within just a few breaths, the tsunami was close. The closer it got, the more enormous it seemed, as if the entire world would be swallowed by the ocean, and the last stop was this island.
An Jing’s eyes snapped open. Her golden pupils had a power that calmed the heart. Then, slowly and forcefully, she extended her hands and gave a gentle push.
An invisible force collided with the blue wall that connected heaven and earth.
Foam splattered everywhere.
Then the tide was pushed back, faster and faster, farther and farther, until it disappeared completely.
The sea calmed once more, as if everything that just happened was an illusion.
But the people drenched in seawater knew it was no illusion.
The adults fell to their knees, more devout than ever:
“Anhai Deity above!”
“The tsunami… the tsunami has been pushed back…”
In the face of such immense power, even the most casual believers began to waver. Maybe there really was a god in this world—or perhaps the god had truly descended to be among them.
After a long silence, someone finally looked at the children: “Anhai Deity, is he still here?”
“She’s gone,” a child answered. “She and… great-grandmother both turned into golden specks of light and disappeared.”
“Saved…”
The High Priest pressed his hand to his chest: “Thank the divine for their blessing, allowing us to be rescued in our distress.”
The others also chanted—with voices full of utmost devotion.
(3)
An Jing, whose head was resting on Wang Xinru’s lap, turned over and mumbled something indistinct.
Wang Xinru leaned forward slightly to block the sunlight shining directly on her face.
“Bullshit. There’s no such thing as gods or spirits. If there really were, they would have jumped out to save us mortals a long time ago.”
An Jing’s grandfather wasn’t great at speaking Mandarin, but he understood it fine. He immediately blew up, sputtering a whole torrent of earthy dialect.
“What did this old fool say?” The old man with the bamboo rod looked at Wang Xinru again.
“He… um…” Wang Xinru lowered her eyes awkwardly. “He’s cursing you…”
“Hey! If you’ve got the guts, curse me in Mandarin!”
“Grandfather says it’s true. He saw it with his own eyes.”
“Yeah, yeah, right. It’s the New Qing State Era already. Who still believes that crap? I sure don’t. My family used to worship the Family Guardian Spirit. What good did it do me? I still ended up jobless and single my whole life. Later I smashed that thing, and nothing happened. Ghosts and gods—they don’t exist in this world.”
An Jing’s grandfather kept arguing, and Wang Xinru continued translating beside him, though she left out the swear words.
“Grandfather says you can’t completely deny what you haven’t seen. The world is big—there are things you’ve never experienced.”
“You still need to be scientific, okay? There’s no scientific basis for this. I think either a typhoon really came back then, and you old fool were half-asleep and mistook your dream for reality.”
“Grandfather says it wasn’t just him. Many people saw it with their own eyes.”
“Bullshit! Only a ghost would believe that! Don’t glare at me—I’m not insulting your faith. I’m just telling the truth. Gods and stuff don’t exist. They’re just a psychological crutch. Ah, you, who never had a proper education, just don’t have that kind of logical thinking. Can’t compare to me. I went through the factory school back then. Let me tell you, you need to read more Karl Marx…”
Wang Xinru watched the other old man, who was actually a bit younger than An Jing’s grandfather but was putting on the airs of a teacher lecturing him. She couldn’t help but purse her lips.
She certainly didn’t believe in superstitious things either. But she thought there might still be many things in the world that couldn’t be explained by science.
And she was quite interested in her grandfather’s vividly told personal experience—there were many more details than when An Jing had recounted it.
Remembering it so clearly after all these years—either it made such a deep impression that he kept thinking back to it, or he’d spent a long time perfecting this fabricated story. Either way, it was interesting. Anyway, watching two old men fish was idle time, so listening to them talk about the past wasn’t bad.
So she asked in dialect: “Grandfather, what happened afterward?”
“Well, Anhai Deity and that Near-God Attendant disappeared, but that wasn’t the last time we saw them. Just a few days later—yeah, right, probably less than a week—we met again.”
“Then—Grandfather, do you still remember what they looked like?”
“How could I remember that clearly? I just recall they were very approachable, tall. The Lord Deity looked like a gentle big sister, and the Near-God… well, roughly great-grandmother was a lively big sister. Haha, as for the faces, I can’t remember them anymore.”
“For Grandfather back then, were they big sisters?”
“Gods definitely don’t age. Now this old man must look older than them…” Grandfather retrieved his fishhook again, but this time he didn’t catch anything. Unconcerned, he baited the hook and cast it back into the sea, continuing the unfinished story. “Before we saw the god again, some invaders came to our island, wanting to build a naval base…”
…