NR | Chapter 13

I’m not someone who gets curious about everything. Being able to follow this team all the way here while knowing nothing was already my limit. What Tian Yuqing said was very absolute: if I learned everything from him, then I would definitely have to follow the team to the very end. On that point, his attitude was very firm.

But leaving Fourth Brother behind and running off on my own, I absolutely couldn’t do that.

My mom was a woman with a strong sense of ambition. As soon as her breastfeeding period was over, she left me to be raised at my maternal grandfather’s place and went off to build her career alone. That said, I always felt like she stayed away from Henan for so many years because she simply didn’t like me.

So for a long time when I was little, Fourth Brother was the one who kept me company. You could say my emotional bond with Fourth Brother was even deeper than the one I had with my mom.

After enough internal struggle, I said, “I’ve made up my mind, but you have to tell me everything. Otherwise, I won’t keep my promise.”

At the time, I was a little too confident and not very clear-headed about myself. I thought my reasoning was foolproof, but I didn’t realize there was a huge bug in my thinking, which was that I had no channel at all to verify what Tian Yuqing said. So even if he was making things up, with my level back then, I wouldn’t have been able to tell.

Tian Yuqing looked at me and smiled. He stubbed out the cigarette in his hand and said, “You can relax. I’ve been business partners with your Fourth Brother for ten years. You’re not in this line of work, so there are some core things I can’t tell you in full, but I’m not going to hurt you.”

“I’ll tell you the parts you’re allowed to know, but first I need to confirm a few things.” He took a piece of wire from his pocket and handed it to me. “Use this wire to open the wooden box in your arms.”

Tian Yuqing spoke with complete certainty. The lock on the wooden box I was holding was quite old, probably from the last century. Its mechanism was more complicated than a modern lock, but for me, a piece of wire was enough.

It was as if Tian Yuqing was already certain I had a deep understanding of traditional mechanism techniques. But if he was already sure, then there was no need to make me demonstrate it again. I didn’t take the wire, and my whole body stayed on alert.

With a casual motion, Tian Yuqing reached back and pulled an archive envelope out from the back seat, tossing it in front of me. “I know you can work mechanisms. No need to hide it. All of your identity records from childhood to now are in here. Right now, I just want to confirm it again. I want to see your real ability.”

The level of shock I felt inside had already far exceeded what showed on my face. I started flipping through the stack of materials as if nothing were wrong, and with just one glance, I realized how childish my previous actions had been. Someone like Tian Yuqing was the one who truly knew how to control the whole situation.

I had no reason to refuse anymore, so I reached out and took the wire. I quickly bent it into a standard curve. The curve for opening this kind of lock had to be precise within a certain range. Then I slowly inserted the end into the tiny keyhole and lowered my eyes, listening for the mechanism’s movement.

A minute later, I pulled the wire out. “It’s open. Do you want to check it?”

Tian Yuqing took the wooden box from my hands. The big lock had completely loosened, and there wasn’t any sign of external damage. He examined it from top to bottom, then gave me an approving look. “Well-deserved reputation. Master Gan taught you very well.”

I gripped the wire. “Can you tell me now? What exactly is the thing you took over?”

Tian Yuqing nodded. He took out the jade casket from the wooden box and let me study the patterns on it up close. I leaned over, and the moment I looked, I immediately noticed something was wrong. The patterns on this jade casket were completely different from the ones I had seen before. They didn’t depict an army, but a winding, irregular mass of lines.

“This jade casket was unearthed in the last century. Later, because of the war, it was lost overseas and ended up in a Japanese private museum called Qiujin. But around 1950, it vanished from the museum without a trace. This is the second time it has appeared in nearly fifty years.”

What did he mean, vanished without a trace? The box definitely couldn’t grow legs and run off. My guess was that someone had stolen it.

“The first time it appeared was in Shandong, where it was dug out of the ground by a farmer doing work in the fields. But not long after, that farmer hanged himself under a bridge. The spot was a very tricky one, and a local Wen Bilu recorded the whole thing in detail. After that, none of our people in the same line of work ever saw this jade casket again.”

According to Tian Yuqing’s description, he and Fourth Brother had initially discussed it and concluded that it was a makeup casket. Judging from the hibiscus carved on the base of the jade box and the overall shape of the box, it looked much more like something used by women. That conclusion still surprised me quite a bit.

Tian Yuqing and Fourth Brother investigated the same thing using two completely different methods. Tian Yuqing traced it all the way back to that Qiujin private museum. To do that, he even pulled some strings to call the museum and have someone dig up records from a long time ago.

Fourth Brother, on the other hand, started with the jade casket itself. He shone a light on the whole thing, then turned the light off, repeating it several times. After that, he discovered that the patterns the jade casket showed in the dark were completely different from what appeared in daylight. It seemed the inside of the box had been coated with a material that worked on the same principle as night pearls.

Those messy, disordered black dots and lines looked just like tree rings, leaving Chen Si with nowhere to start. My Fourth Brother was someone who was very good at adapting, and once he had a preliminary idea, he wouldn’t keep it to himself. So he traced those vertical lines little by little and showed them to Yu Jingzi.

“The lines aren’t supposed to be looked at vertically, and they’re not tree rings either,” Yu Jingzi recognized it right away. “It’s a complete map of rivers, stretching from Chifeng in Inner Mongolia in the north down to the Hengduan Mountains in the south. I don’t know which dynasty it’s from, because some of these rivers have completely disappeared now.”

According to Tian Yuqing, their initial guess was that those black dots of various sizes were likely different imperial tombs. After hearing this, Tan Qiu immediately notified a professional archaeological team, and they carried out an initial on-site investigation of one of the black dots on the Datong River in Gansu.

As for my Fourth Brother, he led a team to the area near the Hengduan Mountains. The locations marked by the black dots were not very clear, and the higher-level archaeological team hoped to find someone versed in feng shui to locate the site on the ground. This excavation was on a very large scale, and they called it the “Nine-Ring Project.”

Tian Yuqing finished his story, and it took me quite a while to react and come back to my senses. Strangely, I didn’t feel fear at all. What I felt more of was excitement. I had somehow stumbled into a nationally important archaeological project.

I wondered if, in the end, they could stamp something for me. The credits would definitely be a lot.

“Then what can I help with?” My voice was a little shaky, and I was utterly uneasy inside. I had taught myself mechanisms entirely on my own. Compared with their professional, professor-level people, I might just be a three-legged cat at best.

Tian Yuqing started the vehicle and drove back. He said casually, “You just need to follow the team. I never expected you to help us with much, but from what you just showed me, Master Gan must have put a lot of thought into training you. As long as you behave, I’ll consider taking you down with us.”