I'm doing engineering in the instance.

Chapter 63 New Cocoon

The moment you exit the realm, there's a physical sensation of falling, not a real fall, but a feeling of gravity taking over again, like finally stepping onto solid ground after being in water for a long time.

The light changed first. The light in Yuan City was uniformly diffused, without a source, and cast no shadows on people; the light in reality was directional. The afternoon sun at three o'clock slanted in through the gaps in the construction site fence, hitting the ground with a clear boundary. This side of the boundary was bright, and the other side was dark. Xie Chengzhou stood on that boundary, his right foot in the light and his left foot in the dark, feeling the temperature difference between the two sides.

It is true.

He paused at the boundary, letting his body process the matter. Then came the smells—the smells of a construction site were mixed: the bottom layer was the smell of diesel fuel, the smell of generators and bulldozers, lingering and having seeped into the wooden planks of the fence; above that was cement dust, left over from today's pouring work, not yet fully dispersed; on the very surface was the smell of the canteen, at three in the afternoon, the canteen had already started preparing dinner, the smell of scallions and ginger wafting from that direction, mixed with cement dust, a combination unique to construction sites.

About ten seconds. That's enough. He walked towards the project office.

The project office consisted of three prefabricated houses, arranged along the east side of the fence. The middle one was the conference room, the left one was the archives room, and the right one was the shared office of Xie Chengzhou and Lao Meng. The door was half open; he pushed it open and went in. Lao Meng was there.

Old Meng sat at the table by the window, a glass of chilled tea in front of him, a ring of condensation around the inside indicating it had been sitting for a while. He was looking at a drawing, spread out on the table, two corners held down by staples, the other two corners sticking up. He didn't look up, but simply said:

"I'm back."

Xie Chengzhou hung his safety helmet on the hook behind the door and sat down at his desk.

"Um."

"The client called," Lao Meng flipped through a page of drawings, "saying that the railing height in the east stairwell is insufficient and needs to be rectified."

"How many."

"They said nine hundred, but the standard is one thousand."

Xie Chengzhou put down his bag without saying a word. He first flipped through the folder of drawings on the table, found the page about the stairwell, and looked down at it for two seconds.

"How much is marked on the blueprints?"

"Nine hundred."

"That's the design institute's problem." He closed the drawing sheet. "Let them issue a change order. This isn't our fault."

Old Meng grunted in agreement, made a mark on the drawing, and scribbled a soft sound as his ballpoint pen swept across the paper. He then put the pen down, picked up his glass, and took a sip of his cool tea.

The office was quiet for a moment. Outside, a bulldozer was working, and the sound of its engine came in from outside the fence—deep, even, the kind of background noise that's always present on construction sites, so present that you forget it's there.

Xie Chengzhou leaned back in his chair, letting his spine rest against the backrest. After leaving the instance, his body felt a dull ache, not from pain, but from the discomfort of gravity regaining control, like the lingering pressure in his ears after surfacing from diving. He knew it would disappear within half an hour. He sat up straight again, turned on his computer, glanced at his emails—nothing urgent. He casually flipped through a supervisor's notice on his desktop; it was from last week and had already been processed.

"Where did you go today?" Old Meng asked. "I couldn't find you this afternoon."

"I went out for a while."

"where."

"It's something personal."

Old Meng didn't ask any more questions and looked down at the blueprints again.

The two of them went about their own business, and about twenty minutes later...

The bulldozers outside stopped, the engine noise disappeared, and the construction site became quiet for a while, with only someone shouting in the distance, but it was impossible to hear what they were saying.

Old Meng folded the blueprints, pressed them back into the folder, stood up, stretched, and his joints cracked softly. He picked up his glass, walked to the window, glanced outside, and then lowered his head to drink his tea.

Xie Chengzhou didn't notice that Lao Meng was looking at him.

Then Lao Meng said:

"Let me see your hand."

Xie Chengzhou looked up.

Old Meng stood by the window, still holding the glass in his hand, his eyes fixed on Xie Chengzhou's hand—not his face, but his right hand. His expression was no different from usual, neither particularly serious nor particularly casual, just the kind of look one might give while examining a detail on a construction site—without judgment, simply observing.

Xie Chengzhou placed his right hand on the table.

Old Meng walked over, glanced down at it, didn't touch it, just looked. He looked for about five seconds, then said:

"It's not a cocoon on a construction site."

Xie Chengzhou remained silent.

"What did you build in there?"

It's not a question. Or rather, the sentence structure is a question, but the tone isn't; it's a statement, a confirmation, as if he already knows the answer and is just asking Xie Chengzhou if he's willing to tell him.

Xie Chengzhou did not move.

"What's inside?" he said.

Old Meng raised his head, glanced at Xie Chengzhou, and then looked back at his hands.

"Here," he pointed with his finger, without touching it, referring to the area above the web of the hand, near the base of the thumb close to the palm, "the calluses here are different from those on construction sites. Calluses on construction sites are caused by friction, they're horizontal, they're caused by wearing gloves and being pressed down. Yours are caused by force, they're vertical, they're caused by holding something and pressing it down."

He paused for a moment.

"A stirring rod, or a chisel, or something similar."

Xie Chengzhou glanced at his right hand.

There was indeed a new callus on the tiger's mouth, a bit darker in color than the old one, and the edges weren't fully hardened yet; it had been worn out over the last two months. He had noticed it before, but hadn't thought much of it, attributing it to the labor in the dungeon, and hadn't pursued it further.

He knew how he got the callus. It was from chiseling expansion joints in the dungeon, holding a chisel and working continuously for nearly three hours. He was wearing gloves, but the gloves were too thin; each time the chisel struck, the vibration was transmitted directly from the wooden handle into his palm. It wasn't a one-time impact, but a continuous, accumulated frequency, one strike after another, until eventually he felt nothing, but he just kept holding it and kept chiseling. Only after he finished and took off the gloves did he realize that the area between his thumb and forefinger was red from the chisel.

That was the fourth instance. He spent nearly eight hours working on it. When he came out, he felt a slight resistance when he clenched his right fist; it was the tightness of the skin on the inside of his palm. The newly formed calluses hadn't fully keratinized yet, and his skin was still adapting. He wrote a line in his memo: "Hands: Slight abrasion on the inside of the thumb, expected to heal in three to five days." Then he never looked at that line again.

He never expected that the cocoon would be seen. He certainly never imagined that someone could deduce what he had done inside from its shape.

Old Meng is right. The shape of this cocoon is different from the ones on the construction site.

He pulled his right hand off the table and put it in his pocket.

His movements were natural, almost casual, but he knew what he was doing.

He did not answer "inside what".

"You have good eyesight," Xie Chengzhou said.

"You've been doing this for thirty years," Old Meng said. "You can tell."

He put the glass back on the table, sat back down in his seat, picked up another document, and began to read.

This is the end.

There were no follow-up questions, no explanations, no "Where did you go?", no "What does that mean?" Old Meng finished speaking and moved on, as if he had just said it casually, as if it were the same level of information as the previous statement, "The client said the railing height is not high enough."

Xie Chengzhou had seen many ways of "ending" things on construction sites. Some people would look at you after saying something, waiting for your reaction, for you to reply, for you to give a response; others would add details, explain, and worry that you hadn't understood what they meant. Old Meng was neither of those—once he finished speaking, that was it. He didn't wait, didn't add anything, didn't explain. The sentence was just there; whether you responded or not was up to you.

Xie Chengzhou recalled the day he first emerged from the dungeon, having been out of contact for nearly five hours. By the time he returned to the construction site, it was almost six in the afternoon. Old Meng was at the project office, with two lunchboxes on the table—one for himself and one for Xie Chengzhou. The braised pork was already cold. His first words were "Have you eaten?" not "Where did you go?" or "I've been looking for you for ages."

Xie Chengzhou initially thought that Lao Meng hadn't noticed he was out of contact. Later, he realized: Lao Meng had noticed, he just hadn't asked. He had seen Lao Meng remain silent when the client was putting pressure on him, waiting for them to finish speaking before dismantling their logic in three sentences; he had seen Lao Meng stand there when workers were causing trouble, neither persuading nor stopping them, waiting for them to finish speaking before asking, "Are you done?" and then starting to address the problem.

He didn't press for answers, not because he didn't care, but because he knew when to ask and when not to.

This made it impossible for Xie Chengzhou to respond in a normal way. He couldn't press for answers because Lao Meng had already moved on; he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard because the words had indeed been said; he could only suppress it and wait for it to reveal itself.

Xie Chengzhou typed two words on the keyboard and then stopped.

He placed his hands on the keyboard and stopped typing.

I went through that conversation in my mind, not as an analysis, but as a feeling—Old Meng said, "It's not a cocoon on a construction site," then asked, "What did you build inside?" He explained the differences between cocoons, then sat back down to continue reading the documents. The whole process was very calm, the tone was the same as when he asked about the height of the railing, but something remained in that calmness, like a nail driven in, not deep, just there.

Xie Chengzhou took his hands off the keyboard.

Old Meng was still looking at the documents. His glass was on the table, and he had already drunk half of the herbal tea. The condensation on the glass had dissipated.

Xie Chengzhou closed the progress report on his desktop, opened the memo app, and turned to a new page.

He wrote:

"Old Meng: The source of the information is abnormal. Second record."

He paused, then wrote another line below this one:

"The word 'inside'."

There is no explanation, no inference, and no "to be verified" for this line.

He closed the memo.

Old Meng flipped through a page of documents across from him without looking up.

The sun was beginning to set, and its light slanted in through the window, illuminating Lao Meng's desk and casting a bright line along the edge of the folder. Lao Meng's hand rested on the desk, the back of his hand covered in calluses—thick, even calluses from thirty years working on construction sites—completely different in texture from the fresh callus on Xie Chengzhou's right hand.

Xie Chengzhou glanced at it and then looked away.

He put the memo back in his pocket, tidied up the documents on the table, stacked them neatly, and placed them under the folder. He stood up, pushed the chair back, and the chair legs made a soft thud on the floor.

Old Meng did not look up.

"I'm leaving now," Xie Chengzhou said.

"Um."

He took his helmet off the hook behind the door, put it on, and pushed the door open to go out.

The moment the door closed, he heard the sound of Old Meng turning a page of a document inside.

He didn't know who Lao Meng was.

He simply didn't know who Lao Meng was.