Chapter 293 - 129: The Missing 3,001st Puzzle Piece (2)
After starting to restore the puzzle, his mood took a sharp turn for the worse, and he drank several large glasses of juice or sugarcane juice every day, using the dopamine from the sugar to calm his gradually irritable emotions.
Drinking orange juice and sugarcane juice wasn't enough, so he even opened two cans of canned peaches he had been reluctant to eat to make up for the mental trauma he had suffered.
...
The restoration progress moved forward at a slow and steady pace, and Chen Zhou always thought this would continue until the entire puzzle was completed.
Unexpectedly, on March 2nd, when he had completed about a quarter of it, he encountered an unforeseen problem—
He couldn't find a single puzzle piece to match one particular gap.
...
At first, Chen Zhou thought it was because he wasn't careful enough, so he took out more puzzle pieces from the wooden box and tried several more times.
The puzzle piece corresponding to this gap had two bulges and two indentations and was asymmetrical, which wasn't common among the puzzle pieces. He tried more than two thousand times in total, but couldn't find a suitable piece.
Then he took out puzzle pieces from several other wooden boxes and continued to try, but the result was the same—no perfectly matching puzzle piece.
After confirming this fact, Chen Zhou immediately shifted his suspicion to the cats and dogs at home.
He thought maybe they had stolen a puzzle piece, making it impossible to match the gap.
Because of this, he seriously counted the number of puzzle pieces, and he counted them six full times, with puzzling results.
Because the total number of puzzle pieces was exactly 3000, which meant none were missing, and the small animals at home were innocent.
"So what's going on with this gap that can't find a matching puzzle piece?"
Chen Zhou was puzzled and came up with an idea—the total number of pieces in the puzzle wasn't 3000; it was 3001. Perhaps a piece was left on the beach.
By this time, more than a week had passed since he received the puzzle.
Although Chen Zhou's memory was quite good, when he thought back to that day about whether he had missed picking up any pieces, he couldn't be sure he had collected all of them.
Thinking it over carefully, he felt that according to the Space-Time Administration Bureau's usual quirky humor, sending him a 3001-piece puzzle made perfect sense.
Perhaps the last piece was placed vertically at the top of the beach, so looking from below, you'd only see a narrow strip of blue, and if you weren't paying attention, you could easily miss it.
After thinking it through, Chen Zhou felt his guess was completely correct, so he put on a raincoat, donned a straw hat, and ventured into the rain to the beach.
However, upon arriving at the beach, the most frustrating thing happened—
No matter how hard he searched, he couldn't find the missing piece of the puzzle above the wood-stone wall.
To find this "3001st piece" that might not even exist, he even dismantled the built wood-stone wall and turned over the entire beach.
In the end, the result he obtained was—
Absolutely nothing.
...
It rained heavily that day, and Chen Zhou set off at noon and worked through the rain on the beach until the sun set.
After dismantling the wood-stone wall and digging up the beach, the rain was at its strongest, as if someone was pouring water from the sky.
His mental state was gradually breaking down in exhaustion and despair.
Taking a few steps weakly in the rain, Chen Zhou collapsed next to the mess of the wood-stone wall, looking up at the filled space above him, his eyes vacant.
The brim of his thin straw hat had long been bent by the heavy rain.
An untimely sea breeze blew by, and the straw hat suddenly flew away, rolling a few times on the sand with the help of the wind, getting covered in sand, and being pressed to the ground by the pouring rain in a sorry state.
Meanwhile, Chen Zhou's face and clothes were already soaked by the rain, as cold water crazily flowed down his neck, saturating his clothes.
He just sat there in a daze, unable to figure out where the last puzzle piece had gone.
"Was it picked up by a seabird?
Or blown away by the wind?
I can't find it on the beach; where on earth did it go?"
Countless questions surged through Chen Zhou's mind, clamoring and arguing, almost turning his brain into a complete mess.
...
Chen Zhou didn't know how long he sat in the rain on the beach that day; he only knew that he didn't start putting the wood-stone wall back together in a trance until the rain stopped and then staggered back to the kiln cave.
Even though his body, honed by years of labor, was very strong and he never usually got sick.
But this time he had been in the rain almost all day, and even an iron man couldn't withstand it.
Chen Zhou fell ill.
...
From March 3rd to March 5th, Chen Zhou lay in bed for two whole days.
He was afraid of the cold and wind, his head was dizzy, his muscles ached, he sneezed, and he had a runny nose—all the typical symptoms of a cold hit him at once.
Compared to his last illness, this cold was much more severe.
Even worse, there was still no medicine at home.
Chen Zhou could only use an old method, brewing tobacco leaves to drink, and chewing a few cloves of garlic raw, but it had little effect.
Fortunately, the food supply at home was sufficient, and the firewood was plentiful enough to use.
To dispel the cold that seemed to cling to his bones, he boiled water all day, then sat wrapped in a seal-skin blanket in front of the fire wall, constantly drinking hot water.
The tightly closed doors and windows kept out the wind and rain, and the fire, which burned for more than ten hours straight once it started, raised the indoor temperature, seemingly having a limiting effect on the illness.
...
On March 7th, the day before the thirty-fifth descent, Chen Zhou's health finally took a turn for the better, showing obvious signs of improvement.
In just five days, he visibly lost a significant amount of weight.
When his illness was at its worst, his appetite diminished greatly; even cooking a pack of fragrant braised beef noodles made him nauseous.