Corpse Recovery Diver
Chapter 408 - 74 (End of this volume)

Chapter 408: Chapter 74 (End of this volume)

The morning breeze, stealing a moment of cool from the summer days.

Li Zhiyuan stood beside the water tank on the second floor brushing his teeth when he happened to see Tan Wenbin, dressed in a tank top and sports shorts, running down the dam with high knee lifts, starting his morning jog for the day.

This habit, Tan Wenbin had maintained for half a year now.

Humans are truly creatures of infinite potential.

A year ago, Tan Wenbin was still a spirited young man who stole money from his mother to buy video game consoles, hid adult comics in textbooks, stashed explicit magazines under the covers, and liked to pretend to be an adult by tucking a cigarette behind his ear.

Now, he studies hard during the day and practices diligently at night, treating his forty-minute morning run as a form of clearing his mind and enjoying self-discipline.

Sometimes, due to his illness, Li Zhiyuan would feel a bit of confusion and unreality when looking at himself in the mirror. If Tan Wenbin could see himself from a year ago through the mirror, he’d probably stubbornly claim that the person in there must be an illegitimate child his dad left behind due to misbehavior in his youth,

And then he’d add:

"Just look at this crooked melon split date appearance, clearly of impure bloodline."

After washing his face, he returned to his room.

Alii was standing at the drawing table, painting.

The girl was painting a landscape, and within it, not only was there a grand scene but also the dam.

This wall was covered with paintings, just the Yangtze River bridges from Nantong to Shanghai alone took up four or five versions.

One version, in particular, had bustling traffic on the river bridge and ghostly spirits prevalent in the Bai family town below, a perfect combination of reality and the void.

On the other end of the painting table was the boy’s desk, covered with professional books, and underneath were several cardboard boxes filled with research materials and design drawings.

That’s just what he had on hand; many he’d already studied were sent by Li Zhiyuan to enrich Alii’s collection box in the east room.

Xue Liangliang, for the past six months, was essentially Mr. Luo’s secretary, and Mr. Luo was in a phase of running projects, often needing to attend validation meetings and report meetings all over the place.

Whenever he was near Nantong, Xue Liangliang would take a day or half-day off in the name of bringing learning materials to his junior brother from Mr. Luo.

Tan Wenbin’s pager was only used to receive messages from two people, one was his father Tan Yunlong, and the other was Xue Liangliang.

Brother Liangliang would always page Tan Wenbin, then leave the materials by the Yangtze River, and Run Sheng had to ride a tricycle all the way there, hauling back the materials and design drawings, and also bringing a fresh set of clothes for him.

In this way, the more frequently Xue Liangliang came to Nantong, the more materials Li Zhiyuan accumulated.

In addition, Mr. Luo would send Li Zhiyuan periodicals, magazines, and some relatively high-standard but non-confidential documents irregularly through the mail.

At the same time, he would set problems for the boy, letting him come up with his own designs. For convenience, he would send several topics at once, then mail them back together, and review and respond to them all at once.

Both parties were truly like competing, one desperately "absorbing," the other eagerly "forcing growth."

Li Zhiyuan had reason to suspect that the "college courses" he was previewing here were a bit beyond the syllabus.

Even the smartest genius, if they want to achieve something in any field, cannot escape the steps of deep cultivation. Li Zhiyuan, for the past six months, indeed dedicated too much time and energy to "learning."

But that was unavoidable, as long as the Grandmaster under the peach grove didn’t die, there would be nothing for him to do in the village.

Now, any ordinary normal drowning case, Run Sheng, Tan Wenbin, and Yin Meng were all competing to retrieve; even Grandmaster had become a hands-off shopkeeper.

As for those Corpses that could get ashore and walk on their own, it had been a long time since any were seen. If not for personal experience, one might doubt whether it was just a delusion when one’s own mind was disordered.

When tired from drawing architectural plans, Li Zhiyuan would stand up, walk towards the girl’s drawing table, and the girl would leave her drawing table to come to the desk.

Li Zhiyuan would pick up a brush and relax by painting, while Alii would start browsing through those design drawings.

The girl could understand them; otherwise, she wouldn’t be able to paint them.

Moreover, she seemed to possess a natural special sensitivity, capable of transforming the cold data of the drawings into the dynamic flowing water of the paintings.

Li Zhiyuan had also created a painting based on Alii, but up until now, he hadn’t been able to capture Alii’s face, so he only painted her silhouette.

In the painting, the girl stood atop a mountain, with a turbulent river before her and ancient people below her.

Such composition was very suitable to appear in the murals of Water Burials.

This was the boy’s self-entertainment amidst dull studies. Then, when waking up the next day, there was another boy’s silhouette added beside the girl in the painting.

The two even held hands.

The style of the painting suddenly turned into a kindergarten wall painting.

After all, the two were still kids, essentially no different from the children playing with mud in the village. It’s just that their mud seemed a tad more sophisticated.

Li Zhiyuan had already finished deciphering "Qi’s Spring and Autumn." The further he went, the more challenging the deciphering became, and the more time it consumed. He then realized that this book should have a cipher.

Otherwise, with his own deductive and computational abilities, he had to expend so much effort. It couldn’t be possible for the Qi family to learn or simply understand the words after half a lifetime of dedicated study; that just couldn’t be.

And the cipher was likely to be some basic thing passed down through generations of the Qi family, similar to the "Liu’s Qi Observation Technique" for the Liu Family.