After recalling this segment, the cigarette in my hand had burned down to the filter, so I had to light another one. The fat guy asked, “What are you really pondering about?”

“The power of information asymmetry,” I replied. “In this world, knowledge is possession. For instance, the essence of owning a wealth is that we know where that wealth is. A bank card number is just a coordinate; what we possess is merely a coordinate. Without this coordinate, we essentially lose that wealth.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” the fat guy said. “Economics?”

“My brother once said that at the very bottom of the Zhang Family Ancient Tower, there is a greatest secret, and this secret might be the reason why the Zhang family is so powerful.”

“I personally think that a secret can’t be that impressive. This world is full of various things. What secret could make me submit? Go ahead, tell me, Fat Master here won’t yield to any secret,” the fat guy said.

I looked at him and said, “What if I know how to bring clouds to life? Would you be my lackey?”

The fat guy was taken aback for a moment, glanced at me, and fell silent.

I continued, “Everyone has their own secrets, and these secrets often can control that person. However, there are some secrets that can indeed drive everyone in the world.”

The fat guy sighed, “Not everyone is as sentimental as Fat Master here.”

I said, “It’s not about sentiment; it’s about…” I didn’t finish my sentence. In fact, I had an answer in my heart. I vaguely felt that this answer might be something buried beneath the Zhang Family Ancient Tower, and this answer was indeed something everyone in the world is pursuing and wary of. Moreover, this thing is quite strange; there are two kinds of people in this world: some want to know this answer, while others do not. So once I possess this answer, I could almost control everyone.

“Fate,” the fat guy suddenly looked up at me and said, “You mean fate, right?”

That word is too pretentious; I don’t really like it, but indeed my thoughts are somewhat aligned with his meaning.

“To possess this world, one must understand this world. Only when this world holds no secrets for you can you possess the world,” I said. “In ancient China, there were many theories that could predict causality, such as Qimen Dunjia, Ziwei Dou Shu, and Zhuge Liang’s divination. However, all these theories can only yield very vague results. It is said that the loss of these theories over generations has led to many incomplete theories. Just like the book ‘I Ching,’ what has been passed down to today is certainly not the original one; perhaps nearly ninety percent of its content has been misunderstood, altered, or recompiled by people. The Zhang family has been digging up ancient tombs for generations; perhaps they can find the original texts of these studies in the tombs. If so, they might be able to understand the causality of all things to the greatest extent possible, making the world fixed and unchanging for them.”

“Is that the huge secret buried in the Zhang Family Ancient Tower? That must contain a tremendous amount of information, essentially infinite.”

I glanced at the fat guy: “There’s nothing infinite in this world. The amount of information may not be too large, because it might be a piece of closed information.”

The fat man looked at me with confusion, suddenly turning pale and saying, “Are you saying that this secret has an end—there’s a future endpoint?”
“Yes, it seems that way,” I sighed.
The fat man clicked his tongue and said lightly, “Is this what the young man meant by saying there’s no time left?”
I was startled by my own thoughts, goosebumps rising on my skin. I touched my face and said, “Are we going too far? Could such a thing actually happen?”
“There’s no time left.” The fat man didn’t answer but suddenly glanced at me and said that.
“Don’t joke around.” I replied.
But the fat man suddenly lifted his head and said, “Really, there’s no time left.”
I suddenly found my thoughts a bit ridiculous. Shaking my head, I said, “Don’t mess with me. This inference must be unfounded; our imagination is just too wild.”
The fat man’s eyes suddenly grew vacant, and he began to mumble to himself, looking up: “There’s no time left, really no time left.”
I looked up and was shocked to see that the sky above us had changed, transforming into the huge, hornet’s nest-like meteor we had seen before at the base of the Queen Mother of the West City. I saw countless faces of the young man suddenly poking their heads out from those holes, all speaking to me in unison: “There’s no time left.”
I jumped up, my whole body shaking, and instantly everything in front of me disappeared, turning into darkness.
I took a breath and saw a glimmer of flashlight light, hearing the fat man’s voice. I wanted to move, but found myself lying on my bag; I could feel it but couldn’t move. The fat man and Zhang Haixing were bandaging my wounds and chatting.
“There’s no time left,” the fat man said to Zhang Haixing, “That’s exactly what your clan leader said back then.”
Damn it, that was just a dream. I sighed in a daze. Did I just overhear the fat man and Zhang Haixing talking and then dream this?
But I was suddenly surprised; I remembered my grandfather’s words. Why did that come to mind?
Grandfather had indeed said something like that to me; I had completely forgotten, and it had come back to me in a dream. Could it be that Grandfather already knew about the Zhang family’s situation back then?
Before I could figure it out, I fell asleep again.