Chapter 4 Chapter two

Pastor's story: "The Man Who Wept For God" "Sometimes there is a thin line between orthodox zeal and apostasy," said Father Rainer Hoyt. In this way, the pastor's story began.Later, the Consul wrote down a complete story, except for Hoyt's pauses, heavy breathing, off-topic beginnings, and the usual embellishments of human speech.He dictated the story into the comlog. Rainer Hoyt was born, raised, and a young priest on the Catholic planet of Payson.His priesthood was recently ordained, and he was also given his first out-of-world mission: to escort revered Jesuit priest Paul Durley, who was about to be exiled to the colonial world of Hyperion superior.

Father Paul Duré, in another time, would have certainly been a cardinal, and perhaps a pope.He was tall, thin, and practiced hard, with white hair receding from his high forehead, and a sophisticated look in his eyes that concealed his pain.Paul Duré was a follower of Saint Theia, as well as an archaeologist, theologian, anthropologist, and outstanding Jesuit theologian.Although the Catholic Church is in decline, people have mostly forgotten about it, because it is too eccentric, out of the mainstream life of the overlord.Still, the Jesuit creed did not lose all its followers.Father Du Lei did not lose his belief that the holy Catholic Apostolic Church is still the last and best hope of mankind for eternal life.

When Rainer Hoyt was a child, Father Duley visited the pre-school seminary, of course, very rarely, and those who were about to become seminary students would sometimes visit the New Vatican. Even rarer, but on these rare occasions, Hoyt caught a glimpse of Father Durey, who, in his mind, was a man like a god.Hoyt then enrolled in seminary, and while he was studying there for a few years, Dooley was on an important mission on the nearby planet of Armaghast: conducting an archaeological dig there.This mission is funded by the Church.When the Jesuit returned to Payson, where Hoyt had just been ordained a few weeks earlier, there was a moment of fog.Nobody outside of the top ranks of the new Vatican knows exactly what happened, but there are rumors that he will be excommunicated, and even heard that he will be handed over to the Inquisition, however, the Inquisition has been dormant since the end of the earth for four centuries.

Hyperion, what most people know about this planet, is limited to the eccentric church of the Shrike, because the church originated there.However, Father Durley asked to serve there, so Reverend Hoyt was recruited to accompany him to Hyperion.This is a thankless job, which combines the most uncomfortable parts of being an apprentice, guard, and spy, and does not even have the opportunity to appreciate a new world; Hoyt's order is that once Father Durley is delivered Hyperion's spaceport, he must immediately board the same gyratory ship and return to the WorldNet.What His Excellency gave Rainer Hoyt was twenty months of frozen slumber, a few weeks of near-system voyages before the end of the journey, and eight years of time debt that left him behind his former classmates, unable to claim Vatican appointments and missions.

Out of obedience and teaching with precepts, Rainer Hoyt accepted the appointment without saying a word. Their transport ship, an ancient gyratory ship, the Nadja Ole Hegemony, was a pockmarked metal vessel that flew without any artificial gravity and provided passengers with no artificial gravity. No viewing points of any kind, not even onboard entertainment, just thrilling simulations hooked into datalinks to keep passengers in their hammocks and sleeper beds.After waking up from a slumber, the passengers, mostly workers from the outside world, tourists who wanted to save money, and some mysterious figures who believed in the church and self-proclaimed Shrike suicides, joined the gang for extra pay and slept in those In the same size hammock and sleeping bed, eating regenerative food on the nondescript meal platform, slowly coping with space sickness and boring time, the spacecraft glides from the abort roundabout to Hyperion in zero gravity, and it takes twelve days time.

During the time they were forced to be together, Father Hoyt did not know much about Father Durey.Hoyt was completely unaware of what had happened on Armaghast, sending the high priest into exile.The young man pressed the implanted comlog and searched for as much Hyperion data as possible. There were three days before landing, and Pastor Hoyt felt that he was already an expert in this world. “There are records that Catholics have been to Hyperion, but there’s no mention of a diocese there,” the two chatted one night hanging from their zero-gravity hammock while their fellow travelers lay there, having fun Playing with the simulation of sexual stimulation, "I guess, you are going to preach there?"

"No," replied Father Durley, "the good people on Hyperion will not impose their religious beliefs on me, so I have no reason to offend them and persuade them to convert to my religion. In fact, I intend to go to the South Continental, Aquila, and then take the city of Port Romance to find a way into the interior. But not under the guise of preaching. I plan to set up an ethnological research station in the Great Rift." "Research?" Reverend Hoyt repeated in surprise.He closed his eyes and pressed on the implant.Then he opened his eyes and looked at Father Du Lei again. He said, "Father, the area on the Wingwing Plateau is not suitable for living. There are flame forests growing there, and people are not allowed to approach it all year round."

Father Duré nodded with a smile.He wore no implants, and his ancient comlog was kept in his luggage during the trip. "It's not completely inaccessible," he said softly, "and it's not entirely inhabitable. That's where the Bikura lives." "Bikura," Hoyt murmured, closing his eyes, "but they're just legends," he said finally. "Well," said Father Durley, "look up the index, Mamet Speedling." Reverend Hoyt closed his eyes again.The Universal Index told him that Mamet Spedling, a second-rate explorer and member of the Society of Shackleton on Planet II Revival, had published a short report almost a century and a half ago, in which From there, Port Romance had just been newly built, and from there he hacked his way inland, wading through wetlands that have now been reclaimed as fibrous plastic plantations, and then, in a rare period of silence, through flame forests, climbing On the high winged plateau, I saw the Great Rift and a small tribe of humans.They fit well with the description of the legendary Bikura.

Spedling's brief account posits that these humans are survivors of a missing seedship colonist three centuries earlier, and are described as suffering from the degenerative effects of civilization due to their extreme isolation.Spedling's blunt words are as follows: "...Even though we have been here for less than two days, it is obvious that Bikura is very stupid, lifeless, and too dull to take time to describe." Later, Flame Lin began to show signs of being active, Spedling couldn't waste any more time for a deeper observation, but hurried back to the coast.It took him three months to escape the forest, losing four native porters, all his equipment and records, and his right arm, left in the "quiet" forest.

"My God," said Reverend Hoyt, lying in the hammock of the Nacha Ole, "why study Bikura?" "Why not?" Father Durley responded kindly. "We don't know much about them." "We know very little about most of the things on Hyperion," said the young pastor, who was a little emotional, "Why not choose the Time Tomb at the northern foot of the Bridle Mountain Range on the mainland of Malaysia and the legendary Shrike?" ?” he said. "They have a great reputation!" "It's absolutely true," said Father Durley. "Reiner, let me ask you, how many scholarly documents are there on the Time Tombs and the Shrike creatures? Hundreds? Thousands?" The old priest stuffed tobacco leaves into his pipe , and set it on fire; Hoyt observed that this took a lot of work in zero gravity. "Besides," said Paul Dooley, "even if the so-called Shrike existed, it wasn't human. I'm only interested in humans."

"Yeah," said Hoyt, rummaging for a strong argument, "but the mystery of the Bikura is so trivial. You'd find at most a few dozen natives, living in the smoky area . . . …insignificant, not even noticed by the colonists' own mapping satellites. On Hyperion, there are other greater mysteries to study... such as the labyrinth, why choose Bikura?" Huo It became excited, "Father, do you know that Hyperion is one of the nine labyrinth worlds?" "Of course I know," Du Lei said.The smoke formed a rough semicircle and gradually expanded until the airflow smashed it into pieces, "But in the entire world net, there are already too many researchers and admirers studying the labyrinth, and, Reina, tunnels exist in those nine worlds Come on, do you know how long? Half a million standard years? Nearly 750,000 years, I think. These secrets will last forever. But how long will the Bikura civilization last? Will they Absorbed by modern colonial culture, or, more likely, eliminated by environment." Hoyt shrugged. "Perhaps they're extinct. It's been a long time since Spedling met them. And there's no other confirmed report of them. If they're all extinct, all you've ever paid to get there The time debt, all the labor and all the pain will be for naught." "Indeed." Father Du Lei just said this, smoking his pipe calmly. It was in the last hour with Father Duré during the descent in the lander that Reverend Hoyt had a glimpse of his companion's thoughts. Above them, the edge of Hyperion glowed white, green, and azure for hours, when suddenly, the ancient lander cut through the low-altitude clouds, flames instantly filled the windows, and then they began Quietly shuttling through the dark clouds sixty kilometers above, flying over the ocean dotted with stars, the morning and evening lines of the rising sun of Hyperion rushed towards them, like a tsunami formed by the spectrum. "It's magnificent," said Father Durley softly, more to himself than to his companion. "It's spectacular. I feel something like that sometimes...very slightly...the sacrifice of the Son of God condescending to be transformed into the Son of Man, that's it." Hoyt opened his mouth to speak, but Father Dooley continued to stare out the window thoughtfully.Ten minutes later, they landed on the Keats Interstellar Station, and Father Duley was quickly involved in the tide of passengers and luggage. Twenty minutes later, the extremely disappointed Rainer Hoyt took the spaceship up to the sky, and again Rendezvous with the "Naga Ole". "Five weeks later, I returned to Payson," said Reverend Hoyt. "I lost eight years, but my spiritual loss was greater than that. As soon as I returned, the bishop informed me that Paul Du During the four years that Ray was on Hyperion, there was no news. The New Vatican inquired through super-light communication, but neither Keats’ colonial agency nor the consulate could find the missing priest.” Hoyt paused, taking a sip of water from his water glass, when the Consul added to the pastor's words: "I still remember the search. Of course, I never met Duray himself, but in order to find him, we all Tried my best. My assistant, Theo, spent a lot of energy over the years trying to solve the case of the missing priest. But apart from a few contradictory sighting reports in Port Romance that he was seen there, there is nowhere else. His tracks. Also, these people have seen him going back weeks, years ago, when he first arrived. There are hundreds of plantations out there with neither radios nor lines of communication. Mostly because they were in Harvesting fibrous plastics at the same time as harvesting underground drugs. Guess we never found the right person to find the plantation that Dooley was on. At least Father Dooley's case was pending until I left." Reverend Hoyt nodded. "I came to Keats again a month after you abdicated at the consulate. The Bishop was surprised to hear that I volunteered to return there. But His Holiness granted my request. I stayed on Hyperion According to the local calculation, the time is seven months. When I returned to the World Net, I had already discovered the fate of Father Du Lei." Hoyt lightly patted the two stained leather books on the table . "If I'm going to tell the whole story," he said hoarsely, "I have to read chapters." The giant tree ship "Yggdrasil" turned around, the trunk blocked the sunlight, and the dining table and the canopy formed by the curved leaves fell into darkness, replaced by thousands of stars dotted in the sky , as if looking at the starry sky on the surface of a planet.Slowly, thousands of lights shone above the head, around the side, and under the table.Hyperion became a clear sphere, and it hurtled towards them like a deadly missile. "Read it," said Martin Silenus. From the diary of Father Paul Duré: First day: In this way, my road to exile began. I'm a bit stumped as to how I should date my new diary.According to Payson's monastic calendar, today is the seventeenth day of Thomas, 2732, the Father's day.According to the Hegemon's standard calendar, it was October 12th in the year 589 of the Hegemony.According to Hyperion's calculation, I heard from the skinny and short clerk in the old hotel where I stayed, today is the month of Lithus in 426 A.D. (the last of their seven months, with forty days in a month) 2 The Thirteenth, or 128 years of the reign of Sad King Billy, in those years the king really reigned for less than a hundred years. hell.Call it the first day of exile. Exhausting day. (It's strange that after sleeping for months, I'm still so tired. However, it is said that this is a normal reaction after waking up from fugue. Even if I don't remember that I have traveled, I can still feel the past in every cell of my body Tiredness from months of travel. I don’t remember feeling so tired after a trip when I was younger.) I deeply apologize for not getting to know young Hoyt in depth.He looked like a decent man, well-spoken, and bright-eyed.It is by no means the fault of a young man like him that the church has gotten to this endangered field.It's just that his innocence couldn't prevent the church from being annihilated as if it were destined to be inevitable. Alas, all I gave was for nothing. As the spaceship landed, I saw a spectacular view of my new world, and I could make out two of the three continents, Malaysia and Aquila.The third one, Big Bear, I didn't see. The spaceship landed at Keats, and it took me several hours to get past the checks of the customs officers.After that, I took a ground transport vehicle and came to the town.I was bewildered by what I saw: the mountains to the north shrouded in a shifting blue mist, the foothills lined with yellow and green trees, the pale sky dotted with green and blue clouds, the sun small but larger than the sky. Payson's is much brighter.From a distance, the scene is radiant and vivid, but as one approaches, the colors gradually melt and fade away, just like a painter's palette.The huge statue of Sad King Billy, I used to hear the callus, but when I actually saw it, strange to say, I was extremely disappointed.Viewed from the highway, it looks rough, a hastily hewn sketch from a black mountain, not at all like the emperor in my mind.It overlooks the collapsing city of half a million people, musing that perhaps the neurotic poet king would appreciate the gesture. The town itself seems to be divided into the ecstasy of slums and salons, which the locals call Jacktown and Keats respectively, and the so-called Old Town, though only four centuries old, is all polished stone, deliberately Make it barren.I'm going to visit it soon. I had planned on staying at Keats for a month, but I couldn't wait to hurry up.Oh, Monsieur Edward, if only you could see me now.After being punished, he still does not want to repent.I am lonelier than ever, but strangely enough, I am content with my exile.If because of my fanaticism, I did the atrocities in the past, let me be punished, and I was exiled to the desolate seventh heaven, then Hyperion is a good exile place.I could forget about my own quest, go find the Bikura far away (are they real? I don't think they're real tonight), and be content with the rest of my life in the capital of this dead god-forsaken world.My exile will not be in vain. Ah, Edward, through childhood with you, through school days (although I am not as brilliant or orthodox as you), and now I am an old man.Now you have four years more wit than me, and I am still the naughty, stubborn little boy you remember.I hope you are still alive, I hope you are still healthy, pray for me. so tired.want to sleep.Tomorrow, visit Keats and have a good meal.Then arrange your itinerary and head south to Tianying. Fifth day: Keats had a church.Or, to be more precise, there was one.It has been abandoned for at least two standard centuries.Nestled in ruins, the transept opens its doors to the green and blue sky.One tower to the west was unfinished, and the others were just skeletons, made of crumbling stone and rusty reinforcing poles. I stumbled across it as I wandered and lost my way along the banks of the Hawley, a sparsely populated part of the town where the old town had been transformed into a jumble of large warehouses in disrepair, with the ruined tower of the church blocked There is not even a glimpse behind these houses.It wasn't until I turned a corner and came to a narrow cul-de-sac that I could see the outer shell of the church.Its pastoral hall half collapsed into the river, and some statues and relics after the Great Exile stood on the front, sad and thought-provoking. I swam past frame after frame of shadows, swung through collapsed buildings, and finally entered the nave of the church.The Bishop of Payson never mentioned a Catholic history on Hyperion, let alone a church.It's hard to imagine that four centuries ago, there would be enough believers on the colonial ship that crashed here to guarantee the bishop's appearance, let alone the church.However, there are. I wander in the darkness of the sacristy.Dust floated in the air like incense, and two beams of sunlight were outlined, pouring down from the narrow window high above.I went out into a wide area bathed in sunlight, and came to an altar stripped of all its decorations, riddled with falling stones.A gigantic crucifix hanging on the east wall behind the chancel had also collapsed and was now among stone piles and crockery shavings.I casually walked behind the altar, raised my hands, and began the communion prayers.My behavior is not imitation, nor is it a play, there is no symbolic meaning, and there is no hidden meaning; it is just an automatic reaction of a priest who has celebrated Mass every day for forty-six years. Now I can no longer participate in this peaceful celebration. The ceremony is over. To my surprise, I found a believer praying.The old woman was kneeling on a bench in the fourth row.Her black dress and black scarf blended into the shadows perfectly, and only her pale oval face, wrinkled and old, was seen floating in the darkness in nothingness.Out of shock, I stopped praying.She was looking at me, but there was something wrong with her eyes, and even at that distance I immediately believed that she was blind.I was stunned and speechless.Squinting to look at the altar bathed in the cloudy sunlight, how did this bizarre image form?Where am I?What am I doing? When I spoke again and spoke to her, my voice echoed in the hall, but I realized she had left.I can hear the scuff of feet on the stony ground.The voice was harsh and piercing, and then, a short section of light illuminated her figure on the right side of the altar.I put my hands in front of my eyes, shaded from the sun, and began to climb over what should have been the altar rail, which was now a field of rubble.I called her again, told her to rest assured, told her not to be afraid, although the person who was sweating on the back was actually me.I strode on, but by the time I came to a hidden corner of the nave, she was gone.Back in the dark lobby, I would have been happy to attribute this woman to a figment of my mind, a nightmare waking up after so many months of forced freezing slumber, but I didn't, Because I found the real evidence of her existence, I found, in the cold darkness, burning a lonely red prayer candle, its faint flame flickering in the invisible cold wind. I'm tired of this city.I'm tired of pagan conceit, tired of falsified history.Hyperion is a world of poets without poetry.Keats is a boomtown that's gorgeous, pseudo-classical, and dumb.There are three Zen churches and four Muslim mosques in town, but the real places of worship are the countless saloons, brothels, the vast fibrous plastic market that handles southern shipping, and the Shrike Temple.Here the lost hide their despair in this shallow mystery.The entire planet exudes a mysterious atmosphere, but no one has uncovered the mysterious veil. To hell with it. Tomorrow I will set off for the south.In this funny world there are skimmers and other flying machines.But boats seem to be the only way for ordinary people to travel between these accursed island continents, and I've been told it's going to take forever, or some kind of gigantic passenger airship, which only works once a week. Once departed from Keats. I'm leaving early tomorrow morning by airboat. Tenth day: animal. The first-timers definitely have a special love for animals.Horse, bear, eagle.For three days, we trekked along an irregular coastline on the east coast of Malaysia called Mane.On the last day we took a short trail across the Central Sea to a large island called Cat Cay.Today we unload passengers and cargo in Felix, the "main city" of the island.From the observation decks and mooring towers, I could see more than five thousand people living in those haphazard huts. Next, the airship slowly flew more than 800 meters, flew over a series of small islands named Nine Tails, and then boldly crossed the vast ocean and equator of more than 700 meters.After that, the next landmass we saw was the northwest coast of Aquila, the so-called beak. animal. Calling this means of transportation "passenger airboat" is the use of creative semantics.It was a gigantic lift, with a cargo hold so large it could carry the town of Felix out to sea, with thousands of bales of fiberplastic, and more than enough.As for us passengers, it is not a very important "cargo". We can go wherever we can and do what we want.I set up a cot at the stern unloading exit and created a fairyland for myself, laying aside my luggage and three big boxes of expedition gear.Next to me is a large family of eight farmhands who are returning to Keats after their biannual shopping excursions, although I don't mind the snort and smell of the pigs in their cages too much. Not paying attention to the chirping of their hamsters, I've tolerated the incessant crowing of their poor dizzy cock some nights quite well. animal! Eleventh day: Tonight, I had dinner with citizen Helimez Denzel in the saloon above the Promenade Deck.He is a retired professor at a small planter training school near Andy Mills.He told me that Hyperion's initial landing party had no animal worship; the official names of the three continents were not Big Horse, Big Bear, and Skyhawk, but Clayton, Aaronson, and Lopez.He went on to say that it was to commemorate the three mid-level officials of the former Survey Bureau.Animal worship is fine! after dinner.I walked outside alone and watched the sunset.The walkways here are protected by cargo delivery modules, so the wind carries a slightly salty taste.The orange and green skin colors of the airship meander above me.We are among the islands; the azure sea is filled with the undertones of the green sky reflections.Sprinkled with the last rays of Hyperion's green bean-sized sun, flecks of cirrus clouds ignited like flaming coral.Three hundred meters below, the shadow of a huge octopus-like sea creature chased the airship.A second ago, a thing that didn't know whether it was a bug or a bird, the size and color of a hummingbird, but with spider web-like wings one meter wide, stopped five meters away, and then folded its wings and dived into the sea . Edward, I feel so alone tonight!It would be a great consolation to me to know that you are still alive, still working in your garden, and writing every night in your study.I think my travels will challenge my old beliefs, which are the thoughts of San Theia: God, the evolved Jesus, the personality, the universe, the advent and the descending inextricably united, but there will be no such The resurrection has come. It was slowly getting dark.I am slowly getting old.I have a feeling about my guilt of falsifying evidence during my Armaghast research... that's not remorse.But, Edward, my lord, if the prehistoric antiquities show that a Christian-originated civilization arose there, in a place six hundred light-years away from the Old Earth, that would be almost three thousand years before man left his homeland... Deciphering such a dubious data could mean the revival of Christianity in our present life. Is my sin unforgivable? Yes, unforgivable.But I don't think it's a sin to falsify data, it's a bigger sin to think it can save Christianity.Edward, the church is dying.Not just the branches of our beloved sacred tree, but all its offshoots, all their remnants and festers, are dying.The whole Christian church is dying, that's as true as my depleted body.You and I know this death well in Armaghast, where the blood-red sun shines on nothing but dust and death.At the Academy, we knew it when we first took our oath, and I remember it being a cold, pale summer.We have known it since we were children, the ball of silence at Villefonne-sur-Saône.Now, we also know. After the afterglow has dissipated, I have to pass through the faint light from the salon window on the upper floor to write under its illumination.The stars are scattered in strange constellations.At night the Central Sea glows with a green, unhealthy phosphorescence.There is a black object on the southeast horizon.Maybe a storm, maybe the next in this series of islands, the third of Nine Tails. (Which myth is about a cat with nine tails? I don't know.) For the sake of the bird I saw earlier, if it was a bird, I wish it was an island ahead and not a storm. Twenty-eighth day: Eight days in Port Romance, I saw three dead men. The first was a corpse by the beach, bloated, pale, and almost inhuman.That was the first night I stayed in the town. He was washed up by the sea into the muddy swamp on the other side of the mooring tower, and he was no longer human.The children kept throwing stones at him. The second man lived in a small town slum near my hotel, and I watched as he was pulled from the burnt-out remains of a methane store.The body was charred and unrecognizable, scorched and huddled, his limbs sprawled tightly in the pose of a professional boxer, the pose of a man dying by fire.I've been fasting all day, and I'm ashamed to admit that when the strong smell of frying fat from charred corpses fills the air, my mouth waters. A third person was killed less than three meters away from me.I've just emerged from the hotel onto the maze of muddy planks that serve as walkways in this rotten town.At this time, a gunshot rang out, and a man a few steps ahead of me suddenly tilted his body, as if he had tripped his foot, stood up towards me, with a funny expression on his face, and then fell to the mud on the side of the road ditch. He was shot three times with some kind of projectile weapon.Two shots went into the chest, and the third hit the left eye.Miraculously, he was still breathing when I came to him.Without even thinking about it, I opened the overcoat that covered my handbag, fumbled for the phial of holy water that I had been carrying with me for a long time, and began to anoint the sacrament.The onlookers did not raise any objection to my approach.The body of the fallen person twitched, his throat coughed a few times, as if he was about to speak, and then he died.The crowd dispersed before the body was removed. The man was middle-aged, sandy-haired, and slightly stout.He has no identification on him, not even a Huanyu card or a comlog.There are six silver coins in the pocket. For some reason, I stayed with the dead body for the rest of the day.The doctor, a short, gossiping fellow, allowed me to stand aside while the necessary autopsies were performed.I guess he just hungrily wants to talk to people. "That's what the whole thing is worth," he said, slicing open the wretch's belly like opening a pink satchel, pulling back the folds of skin and muscle, securing them like tent flaps. "What?" I asked. "His life," said the doctor, lifting the skin from the corpse's face like a grease mask. "Your life. Mine." The red and white streaks of muscle turned into bruises around the hole above the cheekbones. "There must be more than that," I said. The doctor stopped his relentless work and looked up with a hint of bewilderment in his smile. "Really?" he said, "show me, please." He took the dead man's heart, as if trying to weigh it in one hand. "On the Web, this thing is worth a few bucks on the open market. Some people are too poor to stockpile cloned organs cultured in vats, but too rich to die without a heart. However, in our It's just a pile of garbage." "There must be something else," I told him, though I wasn't quite sure.I thought back to the funeral of the great Pope Urban XV not long before I left Payson.As a tradition passed down before the exile, the pope's body was not embalmed.It was parked in the foyer, not in the main synagogue, where it was waiting to be put into an ordinary wooden coffin.At that time, when I helped Edward and Monsignor Frey put the vestments on the stiff corpse, I noticed that the skin of the corpse was brown and the mouth was loose. The doctor shrugged and finished the routine autopsy.Formal surveys are very brief.No suspects were found and there was no motive.A description of the dead man was sent to Keats, but the dead man himself was buried the next day in the slum between the mud planks and the yellow grove. Romantic Harbor is a mess of yellow weir-wood buildings piled up in an enchanted array of scaffolding and planks, stretching to the mudflats of the Zhanjiang Estuary in the distance.The mouth of the river is about two kilometers wide, and the river is surging all the way to Tuocai Bay, but only a few channels can pass through, and dredging machines are working day and night.Every night, as I lie in my cheap room with the window wide open, the pounding of the dredger sounds like the vicious heart of the city thumping, while the distant rustling of the waves seems like its sad breathing.Tonight, listening to the breathing of the city, I couldn't help but think of the skinned face of the dead man. The crew stopped for a while on the edge of the town, and then they would transport the passengers and goods to the large plantations inland, but I didn't have much money left and couldn't stay on the ship.To be precise, I had enough money to get myself on board, but I couldn't pay for the transportation of my three boxes of medicine and scientific tools.I still want to go there and work for those Bikura, but now, it looks more and more ridiculous and absurd.The mere need to achieve a goal (what a strange need), to complete the exile I had voluntarily undertaken (with masochistic determination), drove me determinedly up the river. Two days later, a ship will depart from Zhanjiang.I've reserved a seat and I'm going to move my suitcases on board tomorrow.You won't have any trouble leaving Port Romance behind.