Chapter 18 Former Conjecture Toppled

“Please enlighten me, Master Three!”

“It’s simple. The Zhang family is a large family and must live outside Banai. They’re likely from other provinces. If someone in their family dies, then the funeral custom is to bring them to Banai. As a result, outsiders appear. There are then two possibilities here: one is that the number of outsiders is very small and the bodies are secretly wrapped; the other is that the coffins or bodies are very heavy and the number of outsiders is relatively large. The group would at least be large enough for a funeral procession.” I lit a cigarette. “The former is very unlikely since it takes a lot of equipment to go back and forth in this remote mountain area and it’s unrealistic for two or three people to carry a corpse up here. All the characteristics of the second possibility are too similar to the appearance of the archaeological team.”

Pan Zi finally seemed to understand and slapped his thigh.

“Shit, you mean to say it’s not an archaeological team at all?! Fuck me. The archaeological team from that year was the Zhang family coming to the ancient building to pay their respects.”

I nodded, “Calling it an ‘archaeological team’ created a preconceived notion in our minds, so we always thought that they were here to dig something up. But maybe they didn’t come here to dig anything up at all.”

Xiao Hua nodded, “They were holding a funeral.”

“But Huo Ling was among them,” I said. “Was she a family member?”

“No, no, no, no. We need to think of it from the beginning and combine all the information,” Xiao Hua said. “We know that the archaeological team had very high credentials and was even received by a national leader.”

“Someone told me that the incident that year had a strong political atmosphere with a very deep background,” I said. “It went all the way to the top.”

“We all thought at the beginning that they were looking for the Zhang family’s ancient building and took something out of it,” Xiao Hua continued. “The only clue was those iron pieces.”

“Now we all know that they may not have wanted to take stuff out, but to put something in,” I said. “They were taking part in the funeral, but Huo Ling—who isn’t surnamed Zhang—was also among the funeral procession. There were also many other people there with different surnames from the big families.”

Xiao Hua and I both went silent at the same time. My mind suddenly became a little stiff, but it wasn’t from confusion. It was from extreme clarity.

After a long time, Pan Zi said, “Fucking hell, I’m not interested in all this. I just want to know, if your conjecture is true, who did they send in?”

I hid my surprise as I shook my head and asked Xiao Hua, “Zhang is one of the most common surnames, so is it Zhang Da Fo Ye?”

“You can’t use this as an inference. At that time, it was too easy to change one’s name. Everyone in the Mystic Nine had at least a dozen aliases. Their last names were hardly their original names,” Xiao Hua said. “In addition, there’s also a very big possibility that this is a ‘dove occupies the magpie’s nest’ sort of situation. The owner who was sent in probably wasn’t a descendant of the Zhang family. Maybe the Zhang family’s ancient building has some strange function we don’t know about so they sent the body in. It could also answer Master Three’s question from a different perspective.”

“You mean, why was Huo Ling in the funeral procession?”

“It may be more difficult to send a corpse in there than to take something out of an ancient tomb. Assuming that the force behind the Mystic Nine was the same one behind the archaeological team back then, it was probably this force that made Huo Ling’s archaeological team send the bodies into the Zhang family’s ancient building. One is an act of pure destruction, while the other is like building a dojo in a snail shell. The latter demands more from the team, so it wouldn’t be unusual for Huo Ling to appear there.”

I wiped the sweat from my head and thought to myself, now this is a situation I didn’t expect at all.

“Of course, we’re only speculating about the truth now. We have to go inside to determine if we’re right,” Xiao Hua said. “No matter what the truth is, it obviously has something to do with the previous generation. I suddenly have a better understanding of why so many of my predecessors suddenly wanted to wash their hands and give up such a big business. They would rather let their children run small businesses than let them get involved in this industry again. The water is really too deep.”

I knew he was talking about me and the others in the Mystic Nine. “But aren’t there still many families that have passed on the business?” I asked him.

“All the families that have done so have very high-level backgrounds and probably couldn’t help themselves,” Xiao Hua said. “Compared to those of us who are trapped in this circle and can’t extricate ourselves, Master Wu was really an extraordinary person to be able to arrange such a plan to wash you guys clean. Although my grandfather, Xie Jiuye, was always recognized as a genius in the Mystic Nine when it came to intelligence, he didn’t have Old Dog Wu’s courage.”

Could it really be true? When I heard Xiao Hua say this, I suddenly had a flash of inspiration.

There were a lot of things I didn’t tell Xiao Hua, among which were all the things that had happened between Xie Lianhuan and my Uncle Three. Xiao Hua said that my grandfather had washed his hands of the business on purpose. I always thought that it had been a very easy process, but when he said this, I suddenly realized that maybe my thinking was too simple.

First of all, judging from my whole family’s situation, my father was the completely clean one out of all three brothers. My Uncle Two had one foot in and one foot out, while Uncle Three had inherited everything from my grandfather. But Uncle Three was self-taught and my grandfather didn’t teach him too much.

Had this structure really been formed naturally? It occurred to me that neither Uncle Three nor Uncle Two had any children. It was only my father—the completely clean one—who gave birth to me. If things were really as Xiao Hua said, then this was a “silent agreement”—Uncle Three entered the business as a person who would bear everything, Uncle Two weighed in as a secret alternative, and my dad quit completely. In this way, the mysterious force probably wouldn’t have as great an influence on Uncle Three’s generation. In the next generation, neither Uncle Three nor Uncle Two would have children, and the relationship between the Wu family and this mysterious force would be completely broken.

When I thought of it like this, such a scheme really seemed plausible. I took a hard drag of my cigarette and thought, Uncle Three, you’ve suffered a lot even though you’ve been replaced.

When Yun Cai came with Agui to greet us for dinner, Xiao Hua said to me, “No more talking. Everything will be ready in a few hours. If it fails, we’ll have to directly ask our elders what’s going on when we get to the underworld.”

<Chapter 17> <Table of Contents><Chapter 19>

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Updated 1/11/2021