Chapter 48
Morning had become afternoon, and the experimental waste dump was bright with sunlight. However, Fang Qing was not the least bit happy. The odour of the different kinds of trash and strange reek of chemical waste had almost made him see stars. He also had to be very careful not to make contact with the nameless acids and poisons employed by the chemistry students.
The garbage collection vehicle had arrived at dawn, but Fang Qing had stopped the worker from taking the garbage. He thought, good thing this wise man* had reacted so quickly, otherwise ‘that thing’ would have been taken away by the garbage collectors, and even many lifetimes of searching would have proven fruitless.
*T/N FQ calls himself 老子 (Lao Zi) i.e. the Chinese philosopher who founded Taoism. Could also be used to refer to himself in an arrogant or joking manner.
However, he was going blind looking for it!
He had already searched through half the garbage bags in the room. He gritted his teeth and resumed his examination of the other half.
He opened yet another black bag and very carefully removed the contents one by one and laid them out. Bottles, tweezers, test strips . . . one hourglass, two hourglasses, three hourglasses . . .
The blood rushed to his head as he was seized by a sudden thought, and his movements accelerated.
An hourglass, the hourglass in Ke Qian’s laboratory . . . as well as the objects in disarray on the shelves, obviously, something had been moved frequently — in the words of Bo Jinyan, Ke Ai, as impersonated by Ke Qian, was a neat and tidy person; her things would not have been so disorganised. Why didn’t he think of this before? Also, the adhesive, found coincidentally in the empty spaces on the shelves . . . what object had been placed there originally, and then taken away?
An hourglass.