Prepared for quite a while...

_

We didn’t have that much luggage. Most of it was on the three men. Mom and I only carried a few personal things...

I put on my backpack, helmet, and scarf. Wrapped up like that, I felt like some kind of Michelin tire man...

Mom was the one driving the motorcycle. By this point, though, I wasn’t even that surprised anymore...

Everything she’d said and done on the way had already completely shattered her old image of being gentle and virtuous...

Watching her sit on the bike and start it with practiced ease, I quietly wondered just how many skills she still had that I’d never seen before...

“Get on. Hold on to me...”

Mom called out...

Since I had to hold on to her, both our things were strapped to me, including two not-so-large oxygen tanks...

Only then did I realize the things they’d been carrying into the yard earlier were all spare canisters. The tanks we were using were much smaller. Strictly speaking, they should’ve been called compressed air cylinders, one of the essential pieces of diving gear...

We were currently south of Qinghai Lake. Our destination was Haixin Island in the middle of the lake. We had to ride across the ice for about thirty kilometers...

I’d naively thought riding a motorcycle on ice would be difficult, that we’d have to keep the speed down. But when Mom pushed it to 150 km/h, I realized I was completely wrong...

Even the frozen lake couldn’t stop a veteran speed demon like my mom from going full throttle...

I clung tightly to Mom and didn’t dare raise my head again. I didn’t dare move either...

Even with all those layers on, the freezing wind still seeped through the gaps and into my body. It was honestly hard to bear...

Luckily, it didn’t take long. After enduring it for a little while, we reached the area near Haixin Island. Mom slowed on the ice, then braked hard and drifted sideways to a stop. Only after the bike had fully steadied did I let go of her in a slight daze, gently pull down my scarf, and take a deep breath...

I really couldn’t imagine what kind of life Mom had lived before this. She handled that motorcycle way too skillfully, like one of those flashy female bosozoku tearing through midnight streets in the Heisei era...

When I was little, Mom would sometimes ride an e-bike to take me to school. Even back then, I could clearly tell she rode much faster than Dad...

At the time, I thought it was pretty thrilling...

Who would’ve guessed? Mom had been hiding a move like this all along. I should really be glad that little e-bike only topped out at fifty or sixty. Otherwise, wouldn’t she have flown me straight into the sky back then?

Only then did Second Brother and the others arrive one after another. Obviously, they couldn’t keep up with Mom’s speed...

_

We parked the motorcycles on Haixin Island. After tidying up a bit, the two men had already started warming up...

At that moment, Mom took out that old worn map again. Tucked inside it was a fairly large slip of paper with a string of messy numbers written on it. She studied it carefully against the map...

Driven by curiosity, I leaned in to take a look...

The string of numbers was: “11 59 100 16 36 47 GD S155 8”...

“??”

I read through it once and had absolutely no thoughts at all. As for what those numbers were actually for, I had no clue...

Mom glanced at me, then at Second Brother and the others who had also gathered around, and began explaining in a low voice...

“This is information passed down through generations of your Wei family. It records a specific location.”

“10016 and 3647 refer to longitude and latitude. Qinghai Lake’s coordinates are N36°47′58.08″, E100°16′34.92″...”

“You can ignore what 11 and 58 mean. GD stands for the English word gold. It refers specifically to the golden Buddha statue in the island’s Lotus Nunnery. S155 means using that golden Buddha as the reference point, then going South—that is, 155 meters south. And 8 refers to the approximate depth...”

“Your dad went to that place before. There are detailed notes here. Using the front of the Buddha statue as the reference, walk from the southern shore toward the lake for 155 meters. Then drill down. At around 8 meters deep, that’s where the entrance is.”

Mom wasn’t just explaining it to me. Wei Qiuying, Wu Datong, and Second Brother were all gathered around, listening seriously too...

After hearing it just once, both Wei Qiuying and Wu Datong nodded in understanding, then turned and got to work. Second Brother followed right behind them...

_

“So this was all thought up by my dad himself, right...”

“This code is way too arbitrary...”

Even after hearing the explanation, I was still completely dumbfounded. Once it got into longitude and latitude, it was already beyond me. I’m a science girl, okay...

“This is how Wei Chuanyi marks secret locations. You’ll get used to it.”

As she spoke, Mom put away the old map...

“He always mixes some irrelevant numbers into the code, and he also changes the units all the time. So for outsiders, cracking these codes is basically impossible...”

As Mom said that, she rubbed my head and showed a confident smile...

Mom really did love Dad. I understood that very clearly. Dad and Mom were each other’s pride...

The smile in front of me was the best proof of that...

_

For the next while, everyone did their own thing. Mom was also looking around and checking the surroundings. I was the only one standing by the lakeside with nothing to do, feeling nervous...

Thinking about how I was about to take an icy bath in a bit, I had no choice but to bounce around and get my body warmed up first...

At the same time, I kept turning over Mom’s words in my mind...

The place Dad had gone before... where could it be...?

Using elimination, the first thing to rule out was the nunnery on the island. A building that obvious wouldn’t need to be marked with a code, right...?

Dad was a tomb raider. Could that place be the burial chamber of some ancient tomb?

The moment that thought came to me, fear started creeping in. Mom wasn’t planning to take me tomb raiding with her, was she?

_

At that moment, Mom called out to me from not far away. Hearing her, I walked toward the Lotus Nunnery in the center of the island.

There was a nunnery on Haixin Island in Qinghai Lake. Seven nuns lived there. They only went out once a year, when the lake froze over. The rest of the time, they lived completely cut off from the world.

The island wasn’t open to tourists. Maybe only cultivating oneself in a place like this could really count as true cultivation.

When I got to Mom’s side, I saw that Second Brother and the others were busy measuring distance. I couldn’t really tell what method they were using. It looked kind of like pacing it out?

Wu Datong and Second Brother were calling things out over here, while Wei Qiuying had already gone very far away. She’d even left the island and reached the ice...

A moment later, Wei Qiuying fired a flare in the distance. She’d probably found the spot, so we immediately got up and headed over...

When we reached the shore, Wei Qiuying pointed at the ice not far away...

“Got it...”

Then Wu Datong, Wei Qiuying, and Second Brother swiftly pulled folding ice augers out of their bags and walked over. Mom and I followed close behind. At this point, I finally understood what they were planning.

They were going to drill a hole through the ice and jump down.