Chapter 31: Zhao Zhengshan’s Experiences
The guesthouses at Yanjing University are all intended for students’ parents. Now that Yanjing is on vacation, there aren’t many people staying there.
After Su Xiaofan completed the check-in procedures, he played on his phone in the room for a while, then returned to the university and had dinner with his younger sister at the cafeteria of her institute.
Also eating with them were Zhao Qingyao and her father, as well as two other male students and their parents. Su Xiaofan introduced himself to all of them and exchanged contact information.
Su Xiaofan deliberately ordered several expensive dishes. After the food was served, the ingredients all tasted very good. Su Xiaofan felt that even if he didn’t agree to go up now, his little foodie of a sister wouldn’t agree either.
After dinner, Su Xiaoxiao and Zhao Qingyao went back to the dormitory together, while Zhao Zhengshan and Su Xiaofan leisurely strolled toward the guesthouse. After all, the campus of Yanjing University was itself a scenic attraction.
“When we went to university, we certainly didn’t have conditions like these.”
Walking through the quiet campus, Zhao Zhengshan sighed with emotion.
“Uncle Zhao, why didn’t you go work for the family business?”
Su Xiaofan had chatted with Zhao Zhengshan a few times and knew that he worked at Luochuan Hospital. As it happened, that was the hospital where Su Xiaofan had stayed after his car accident.
“I’m not cut out for that. Even if I went, I wouldn’t be able to help much.”
Zhao Zhengshan laughed and said, “I’ve been interested in medicine since I was little, especially traditional Chinese medicine. At the hospital, I’m mainly responsible for bone-setting and acupuncture……”
When Zhao Zhengshan was young, his family was still relatively poor. His eldest brother dropped out of school early and followed their father into business. By the time Zhao Zhengshan entered high school, however, the family had begun to have money, so Zhao Zhengshan went on to university.
Originally, according to the old man’s wishes, he wanted Zhao Zhengshan to study something like business administration, or enter politics after graduating from university, so that he could help the family business in the future. Zhao Zhengshan, however, was a person with a very detached temperament.
Before choosing his major, Zhao Zhengshan had a serious talk with his father.
Zhao Zhengshan saw things very clearly. The family business was the empire his father and elder brother had built with their own hands. If he went straight into it after graduating from university and took the fruits of their labor, it would certainly be unfair to his elder brother. If things were mishandled, the brothers could end up turning against each other, and the entire family business might even fall apart because of it.
Moreover, Zhao Zhengshan had no ambition in that direction. He had no interest in doing business at all. Instead, when he was a child in the countryside, he had followed a traveling physician and learned massage and bone-setting for several years, developing a deep affection for traditional Chinese medicine.
Zhao Hengjian had always been domineering and rarely listened to other people’s opinions, but that time he was persuaded by his son and let Zhao Zhengshan choose his own life.
Zhao Zhengshan really was suited to medicine. He first studied Western clinical medicine for five years, worked as a clinical doctor for several years, and then enrolled under one of the country’s leading masters of traditional Chinese medicine, truly achieving an integration of Chinese and Western medicine. He was now an expert receiving a special government allowance.
However, Zhao Zhengshan was still willing to stay in Luochuan. He merely held the nominal position of vice president at the hospital and had always worked on the front lines.
Of course, although Zhao Zhengshan did not compete or fight for anything, he was not short of money. Every year, he could receive a large sum of money from the family business to spend on his hobbies.
Zhao Zhengshan’s only hobby was collecting antiques. As it happened, Jingxin Hall’s Jing Shizhen was someone he had met first, and only later did he introduce him to his father.
“No wonder Uncle Zhao looked familiar to me before. So you’re a regular at the antique market.”
Once they started talking about antiques, Su Xiaofan and Zhao Zhengshan had even more to discuss, and the more they talked, the more they hit it off.
“Uncle Zhao, that bracelet on your hand is Hetian jade, right?”
Su Xiaofan saw that Zhao Zhengshan was wearing a string of irregular beads on his wrist. Since it was nighttime and he couldn’t see clearly, it vaguely looked like jade.
Su Xiaofan had seen many bracelets, but this was the first time he had seen one made of irregular pieces, which naturally aroused his curiosity.
“Yes, and it’s Hetian jade seed material. My father obtained it for me from a master back then.”
Zhao Zhengshan nodded and raised his wrist for Su Xiaofan to take a look, but he did not take the bracelet off, nor did he have any intention of letting Su Xiaofan touch it.
【Repair Value: 7 points!】
【“Low-grade Kunshan Jade incomplete magical artifact, repairable, requires deducting 7 Repair Value points, repair it?”】
“Hmm, Kunshan jade? That’s an ancient name for Hetian jade……”
Seeing the information appear in his mind, Su Xiaofan was stunned for a moment. The Kunshan jade magical artifact Zhao Zhengshan possessed was actually of slightly better quality than his little sister’s black jade Buddha, because repairing it required 7 points, one more Repair Value point than repairing the black jade Buddha.
Of course, Su Xiaofan chose not to repair it.
According to Uncle Jing’s method of converting the value of Yin Sha Stones, one point of Repair Value was worth roughly four to five hundred thousand RMB. Whether it was money or Repair Value, Su Xiaofan himself didn’t have enough, so how could he possibly use it to repair something for someone else.
“Doesn’t the Zhao family have a pendant-type magical artifact? Why didn’t they give it to Zhao Qingyao?”
“By the way, Uncle Zhao, what do you think of the major studied by this special admissions class?”
Su Xiaofan asked. The other man had far more life experience than he did, and surely knew more than he did about these so-called supernatural phenomena.
“Supernatural phenomena?”
Zhao Zhengshan paused, lowered his voice a little, and said, “Your Uncle Zhao believes in this stuff, because I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”
“Uncle Zhao, what did you see?” Su Xiaofan was stunned when he heard this.
“Ahem, how should I put it? It was something that happened not long after I started working.”
Zhao Zhengshan thought for a moment and said, “It was more than twenty years ago, I suppose. At the time, after graduating in Western medicine, I was working in the emergency department of a hospital. One night while I was on duty, 120 brought in several patients who had been in a car accident……”
The events of more than twenty years ago seemed vivid in Zhao Zhengshan’s telling, clearly leaving a very deep impression on him.
At that time, Zhao Zhengshan already had his medical license and was the emergency department doctor on duty that night.
He remembered very clearly that one of the middle-aged patients had his heart pierced by a sharp fragment of broken glass. By the time he was brought to the hospital, he had already stopped breathing. For some unknown reason, however, the man’s eyes remained open.
After confirming the patient’s death, Zhao Zhengshan personally called the morgue and assisted the morgue staff in placing the body onto a vehicle, which the staff then used to transport it to the morgue.
Zhao Zhengshan was busy throughout that night. It was nearly dawn before he finished his work. Because he was so exhausted, Zhao Zhengshan dozed off while resting in the duty room.
Even now, Zhao Zhengshan couldn’t say whether he had actually fallen asleep at the time.
Zhao Zhengshan only remembered that while he was resting, he noticed the door of the duty room open and a middle-aged man walk in. The man told Zhao Zhengshan to lend him some paper and a pen and help him write something down.
Encountering something like this in a hospital was perfectly normal. Zhao Zhengshan handed the paper and pen to the man, but the man said that his hand was injured and he couldn’t write, so he asked Zhao Zhengshan to write it down for him.
It was just a small favor, so Zhao Zhengshan naturally didn’t refuse. But after writing down a password dictated by the man, when he was about to hand the paper to him, he suddenly discovered that the man had disappeared.
At that moment, Zhao Zhengshan suddenly woke up completely. Recalling the man’s appearance, he immediately broke out in a cold sweat, because the person who had come to borrow paper and a pen from him was precisely the middle-aged man who had died in the car accident that night.
People who study medicine have all dissected cadavers, and Zhao Zhengshan was considered quite brave. He immediately ran to the morgue to look at the man. When he did, he discovered that the man’s eyes, which had originally been open, were now closed.
Everyone who has studied medicine knows that medical school has all kinds of terrifying and absurd stories, but Zhao Zhengshan never expected to encounter one himself. Thinking about the man’s actions, Zhao Zhengshan did one thing.
The next day, Zhao Zhengshan found the man’s family and handed them the piece of paper with the password written on it, after cutting it down to remove the hospital markings, telling them that it had been left behind by the man.
The man’s son had also been in the car accident. His injuries were not serious, but he needed to stay in the hospital for a while. During that time, Zhao Zhengshan deliberately made some inquiries, and the numbers written on the paper were indeed the password to their family’s bankbook.
At that point, Zhao Zhengshan understood that he really had seen the middle-aged man that day, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he had seen his lingering attachment.
Perhaps the middle-aged man did not know that after his death, as long as the hospital issued a death certificate, his legal heir could withdraw the bank deposits, so he deliberately sought out Zhao Zhengshan and had him write down the bank password.
In Zhao Zhengshan’s view, the man’s soul at the time should have been a kind of disembodied mental energy, which stimulated his brain through mental means, causing him to hallucinate and see the man.
After this incident, Zhao Zhengshan, who had never had much faith to begin with, developed an intense interest in whether consciousness existed after death and how such consciousness came into being.
So Zhao Zhengshan began systematically studying traditional Chinese medicine again, because traditional Chinese medicine had the theories of yin-yang and the five elements, the theory of the five movements and six qi, as well as the theory of qi, blood, essence, body fluids, and spirit. Studying these seemed more conducive to helping him understand the existence of mental consciousness.
What greatly frustrated Zhao Zhengshan, however, was that over the next twenty-plus years, he never encountered another similar event.
If he hadn’t remembered that incident so clearly, Zhao Zhengshan might even have suspected that the direction of his research was wrong and that mental consciousness simply did not exist in this world.
“Could there really be ghosts in this world?”
After hearing Zhao Zhengshan’s experience, Su Xiaofan shook his head and said, “Uncle Zhao, I’m not as lucky as you. You actually managed to encounter a ghost. When I was in school, I often had to walk through graveyards, and after three years I never saw any ghosts.”
“Based on my research over the years, I’m afraid certain conditions have to be met before they can be seen.”
Zhao Zhengshan was also extremely bold. When Su Xiaofan said that seeing a ghost was a matter of good luck, Zhao Zhengshan actually agreed wholeheartedly.
“A few days ago, I went back to my village and did see someone being trapped by a ghost wall.”
Su Xiaofan told him about the incident he had witnessed some time ago.
“No wonder you asked Professor Lei about ghost walls. I’ve never seen one in person, but I’ve seen patients who experienced being trapped by a ghost wall.”
It had to be said that the thinking of Su Xiaofan and Zhao Zhengshan was somewhat unusual. Once they started talking, they hit it off as if they had known each other for years, and found each other extremely congenial.
Even after returning to the guesthouse, the two were still talking animatedly. They went to Su Xiaofan’s room and continued chatting for several more hours, and it wasn’t until after one in the morning that Zhao Zhengshan finally returned to his own room to rest.
(End of Chapter)
Comments
Post a Comment