Chapter 81 Conclusion

The story should be over by now. I knew all the puzzles I could know and put down the ones that I couldn’t. But there are still some things worth mentioning and sorting out, which are beneficial to the integrity of the whole story.

By now, I could basically confirm that the Zhang family was indeed from the northeast and they lived in an area beyond the Shanhai Pass where ethnic minorities usually inhabited. Of course, they weren’t a minority at that time. It was also basically known that since the Mongolians entered the Central Plains during the Yuan Dynasty in China, the Zhang family’s activities were at their lowest, and almost all of them were hidden. It wasn’t until the Ming Dynasty that they resumed their activities.

The Zhang family had extremely strict family rules, and Zhang Qiling wasn’t a name that just anybody could be called. Only the heir of the clan’s chosen patriarch could take that name.

That was why the Zhang Qiling project was created at that time. They wanted to use this method to find the current patriarch of the Zhang family.

And I guess in regards to the Zhang family’s strange blood, not all of them had it. It was probably a recessive gene that could even be said to be a disease. Among the Zhang family, only a few people had it, and among those who did, the one with the strongest blood effect was likely to become the patriarch. The patriarch’s wife also had to be a woman with the same strange blood in her family so as to ensure that the ability could continue. This was the so-called intermarriage we had seen, but it also led to the long-term inheritance of another genetic disease, namely amnesia.

No one had entered the ancient building since the middle of the Republic era, which indicated that the Zhang family began to decline rapidly at that time. The reason for this was because they had reached the end of China’s feudal society, and the ensuing revolutions were completely focused on ideology. The Zhang family had more wealth and power, and under the impact of this new trend of thought, they began to fall apart from within.

It was at that time that Zhang Da Fo Ye’s small family, as one of the forces, left the Zhang family’s control, supposedly led by Zhang Da Fo Ye’s father. When they left, they didn’t take any information about the family with them. They still moved around in the northeast, but they abandoned all the ancestral teachings of the Zhang family and began to trade extensively, gradually becoming businessmen. After the Japanese invaded, Zhang Da Fo Ye’s family almost died in the local war, so he fled to Changsha with his people. It was also said that he went there because Changsha was said to be the stronghold of tomb-robbing inside the Shanhai Pass.

After he arrived in Changsha, Zhang Da Fo Ye rapidly expanded his power, actively resisting the Japanese on one hand and developing relations with the local heroes on the other. At that time, it was the most turbulent and legendary period in China. Heroes from all walks of life came forth one after another and the Mystic Nine slowly came into being. Three of them became members because of Zhang Da Fo Ye’s resistance to the Japanese and slowly moved closer to the military circles. Zhang Da Fo Ye entered politics after China’s victory in the war, and his background ensured him the position of head of a special department. At the same time, he must have discovered the Zhang family’s secret of longevity.

Although he wasn’t familiar with the Zhang family’s main clan, Fo Ye knew that all of his ancestors’ secrets were in the Zhang family’s ancient building, which was the family’s mass grave.

He needed to find the Zhang family’s ancient building.

First, he started the Zhang Qiling project to look for the Zhang family patriarch that had completely disappeared during the chaos of war.

A large number of people with the same name and surname as Zhang Qiling had been found, but they weren’t the one he was looking for. At that time, the Mystic Nine was under Zhang Da Fo Ye’s supervision, and although they were protected, they were also monitored. They finally found Zhang Qiling in the 1960s, and under his leadership, the Mystic Nine carried out the largest joint grave robbery in history. But they suffered heavy losses in the end.

The event resulted in two consequences.

The first was that Zhang Qiling’s authority had been severely questioned and the whole organization had been divided into two groups. One group had been rescued by Zhang Qiling, and the wisest among the Mystic Nine like Granny Huo supported and worshiped him as a god. As a result, Zhang Da Fo Ye’s control over them had become very strained. The other group blamed Zhang Qiling for the entire event’s failure. Zhang Da Fo Ye’s family had also split into two factions. The Zhang Qiling faction was facing a purge, while the second faction was becoming more and more powerful because of its close ties with the top. In the end, the two sides ended up fiercely fighting each other.

My grandfather felt a strong urge to retire, as he didn’t want to see any more people die for meaningless things. He saw these former heroes dying in vain in order to follow Zhang Da Fo Ye, so he stood by Zhang Qiling as well. (1) At that time, Zhang Qiling was seriously injured because of that event and completely lost his memory when he woke up.

My grandfather made arrangements for his three sons. He knew that the next generation wouldn’t escape, but my wise grandfather saw the opportunity for things to develop. He hoped that by my generation, he could completely extract the Wu family from this strange circle, so he planned my father’s, Uncle Two’s, and Uncle Three’s lives.

Grandpa’s plan was very clever in that everything was completely based on the different personalities of the three brothers. He chose the most calculating Uncle Two as his successor and hoped that my father and the most uncontrollable Uncle Three could completely break away from the control of the organization.

What he didn’t plan for was Uncle Three’s rebellion being beyond his control. Not only had Uncle Three become the most skilled and reckless tomb robber among the three brothers, but he had also become one of the most promising talents.

As a result, Uncle Two took a backup role.

The representative of the Wu family in the Mystic Nine’s second generation became Wu Sanxing, who didn’t know at the time that this wasn’t a glorious thing. Of course, the top also didn’t know that Uncle Three wasn’t an easy character to deal with.

All the other families had their own plans. The Huo family had been supporting Zhang Qiling because of their marriage relations with the top officials. Like all women, Huo Xiangu did everything she could during that period to protect Zhang Qiling’s life.

Xie Jiuye, leading the Xie family, was the one who could really see through everything. He knew that evasions like my grandfather’s and moves like Huo Xiangu’s couldn’t solve the problem at all. In the end, the Mystic Nine would definitely be completely destroyed. He had seen too many similar examples in history.

Having understood this, Xie Jiuye began to play a very, very vicious game. He found his son and moved his first chess piece.

The Mystic Nine’s counterattack started with Xie Jiuye’s plot.

The follow-up archaeological work on the Zhang family’s ancient building was the first gathering of the Mystic Nine’s second generation. But they didn’t know what a dangerous adventure this would end up being. Except for a few core people, nobody knew that the event at that time was not an archaeological event but a funeral. Archaeological research on the Zhang family’s ancient building was completed in 1970, thanks to a large amount of data obtained from the largest tomb robbery in history (most of the data consisted of the results obtained by gold-toothed Jin Wantang).

This was a force that had never appeared before. The team was led by the then-powerful Zhang Da Fo Ye’s family and had completed all the archaeological exploration activities. But after entering the ancient building, the team was completely wiped out.

For this reason, the fresh-faced second generation was launched, but that team was destroyed by Pan Ma. Only a few people who were exploring underground survived, but when they returned aboveground, Xie Jiuye’s team had taken over everything.

The team didn’t complete the original task at all. They burned the coffin that was meant to be buried, sealed the body with molten iron, destroyed all information, took the body, and began to flee. They then found that a strange organization had begun to hunt them all over the world.

When they escaped to Hangzhou, they were hunted to the greatest extent and had no choice but to turn to my grandfather. At that time, my Uncle Three was exploring a secret imperial tomb of the Southern Song dynasty in Hangzhou under the guise of building a shop. My grandfather used a trick to throw this strange organization off the scent and hid the corpse in that Southern Song Dynasty’s imperial tomb.

At that time, Xie Jiuye’s people split up, infiltrated the organization, and began to purposefully destroy a large number of relevant information, killing or replacing key personnel. It was at that time that Granny Huo discovered that something was wrong with her daughter.

At the same time, Xie Jiuye’s other purpose was to rescue Zhang Qiling. But the Golmud sanatorium was beyond anyone’s reach at that time, and all the core information and people were inside.

The research continued, and the fake team received an order to go to Xisha. When the archaeological team was gathering its equipment in Xisha, the real Huo Ling and Chen Wen-Jin used secret orders that had been faked to transfer the fake Huo Ling and Wen-Jin to Changbai Mountain and mixed themselves into the fake archaeological team. In order to bring help, Chen Wen-Jin found Uncle Three, and Xie Jiuye’s insider finally managed to transfer Zhang Qiling out of the sanatorium at that time.

In the meantime, in order to obtain greater support, Xie Lianhuan had made contact with Qiu Dekao, whose internal relations helped Xie Lianhuan obtain first-hand information about the Xisha underwater tomb.

This was the first time that Uncle Three had intervened in this matter. At that time, Xie Jiuye had passed away and Xie Lianhuan found that there was a problem in the team. But for a while, he couldn’t figure out that it was because the person who had been replaced had been switched back to the original because the whole setup was very strange. The difference between Xie Lianhuan and Xie Jiuye was that he wasn’t as unfeeling as Xie Jiuye and couldn’t sacrifice everything for the ultimate purpose. He was very puzzled by Wu Sanxing’s appearance, so he joined the team.

At that time, Xie Lianhuan’s plan was to follow Xie Jiuye’s thinking and find someone to replace Wu Sanxing, so he took a boat in advance and followed the archaeological team’s boat at a distance. There was a man on the boat who was ready to replace Wu Sanxing. Xie Jiuye must have had this man prepared a long time ago.

But Wu Sanxing was completely out of control, and the events Uncle Three described to me before finally happened. The story of Xie Lianhuan and Uncle Three at the bottom of the sea was invented by Uncle Three because it was the first time that they were alone in a situation where no one could watch them.

They had a fierce conflict in the tomb, but at that time, Uncle Three was at his peak. His skill, alertness, courage, and ferocity made up for his recklessness. The man in the dark was killed as soon as he attacked Uncle Three.

Either by Uncle Three’s pressure or by some chance, Xie Lianhuan came up with a whole new plan. Thus, in the burial chamber of the undersea tomb, the two men conspired together. By his presence alone, Xie Jiuye had already messed up the organization’s operation, while the addition of Uncle Three had changed the plan that Xie Jiuye had passed down.

Uncle Three’s determination and boldness made up for Xie Lianhuan’s flaws, and coupled with his own caution, they started a fast and bold plan to completely destroy the core layer of the organization, namely the descendants of Zhang Da Fo Ye.

At the heart of this was the need to find a certain sanatorium. So, Xie Lianhuan put on a mask that looked like my Uncle Three and played a double act while Uncle Three knocked out all the people in the undersea tomb with forbidden incense. He then transported everybody to the shore by boat and returned them to the organization.

Forbidden incense was a very special drug that could cause confusion for a long time. Xie Lianhuan pretended to be the first to wake up, made up a story, and then transported them to the sanatorium. After that, Xie Lianhuan and Uncle Three joined forces inside and outside while simultaneously using tricks to cut off the connection between the sanatorium and the organization.

At the same time, another team was tricked into going to Changbai Mountain, and as expected, something happened in the Heavenly Palace. The corpses we saw in that endless cycle were the bodies of these people. According to the number of bodies, combined with Shunzi’s account, those who went in that year weren’t completely annihilated. Those people who impersonated Wen-Jin and Huo Ling must’ve had some skills, but I didn’t know if they were the two that had managed to escape.

The situation had changed here, however, and all the teams were divided into three groups: Chen Wen-Jin who had escaped, Uncle Three and Xie Lianhuan, and then Poker-Face.

The real Uncle Three had been looking for people from Xie Lianhuan and Chen Wen-Jin’s groups, but in the process of escaping from the sanatorium, Chen Wen-Jin found that she could no longer trust anyone. Both Xie Lianhuan and Wu Sanxing were obviously untrustworthy because they would sacrifice anybody to achieve their goals, while the organization was even more untrustworthy. In order to evade capture and find the truth, she started the Golmud expedition and set up the video mechanism to warn the third generation.

When I think of this, I feel a strong sense of warmth. Throughout the whole situation, everyone was ruthless and bloody, while only the team led by these two women focused on protection and exploration, even in the face of such a huge dilemma.

Meanwhile, Uncle Three and Xie Lianhuan had been squatting in Hangzhou, looking for traces of other people. I believed that Uncle Three’s persistence was really due to his feelings for Chen Wen-Jin, but there was no denying that it was also possible that Xie Lianhuan had always wanted to get rid of them in order to prevent future troubles. When Chen Wen-Jin met me, she reminded me that Uncle Three was fake, which is also why I believe this.

At this time, the secret pursuit of Xie Lianhuan had reached an unprecedented level of tension. He had finally arrived in Hangzhou and had been hiding under Uncle Three’s shop, watching the coffin and waiting for the date to come. Since then, the Uncle Three I knew was really two people. But it was really difficult to tell them apart because I didn’t think there were such perfect human skin masks in the world and the two men were indeed very similar in many aspects.

During this period, I felt that Uncle Three appeared and disappeared unpredictably like a ghost, probably because there were two of him. These two Uncle Threes were very familiar with everything, but they had different personalities. If they did something at the same time, each had his own methods and clues, and only when all the clues were mixed together would they become complicated and weird.

I couldn’t tell when I was facing Wu Sanxing and when I was facing Xie Lianhuan, but I also clearly remembered that there was more than one instance where I felt that Uncle Three’s character had changed. But it didn’t matter anymore; they were just like twins, fighting for the same purpose.

Having said that, Chen Wen-Jin and Huo Ling, along with their men, had come to an end in their investigation of Golmud. Moreover, their bodies had undergone a lot of changes as a result of taking the medicine by mistake. The changes in Huo Ling were especially rapid, and some people were beginning to lose their consciousness and memory. They used the abandoned sanatorium as a resting place to monitor Huo Ling.

But Poker-Face had his own purpose, so he returned to the Zhang family’s ancient building. Unfortunately, he was born with the Zhang family’s amnesia and was later taken as bait and put into an ancient tomb to fish for dead bodies. He was rescued by Chen Pi Ah Si and returned to the public eye, but the organization at this time wasn’t the same as it was before. It had become seemingly non-existent with hardly any control.

At that time, Uncle Three and Xie Lianhuan thought it was very strange so they brought out a trophy they had taken from the Zhang family’s ancient building—a black gold ancient sword— and used it to test Poker-Face. At the same time, Qiu Dekao began to fully intervene in the matter, unwilling to be a cheated investor again. As a result, Jin Wantang, who had obtained all kinds of information from Qiu Dekao, came to my shop to find me.

When Uncle Three saw the silk manuscripts of the Warring States Period at that time, he realized that Qiu Dekao was now a menace and must be controlled. He organized the first expedition to the Seven Star Lu Palace, but he didn’t expect that the incident would never end.

<Chapter 80> <Table of Contents><Chapter 82>

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TN Notes:

(1) Tiffany cleared up the confusion for us (if you read the comments below you’ll understand what I’m talking about).

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And that’s it! The main story is officially finished. Kind of unsatisfying, isn’t it? lol. I spent like 2 hours trying to get the next bit organized and found that they fucked up the order of these extras and postscripts as well (shocker). So the REAL postscript to Vol 8 is like 26 pages in word (sorry but that’s not gonna get done tonight) and I will post that hopefully tomorrow (no promises). It turns out those 30 chapters of extras and the 2nd postscript (that isn’t really a postscript) are the 2009 Chinese New Year Special (apparently there are like 5 other New Year Specials the author has posted throughout the years with a bunch of chapters for each one and I’m not even going to think about those right now). According to his reading order, this 2009 Special kind of comes a bit later but I don’t think it’ll impact or spoil a plot or anything since it’s just an extra. I figure I’ll work on getting those chapters out sometimes this week and then start on the Tibetan Flower story.

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Updated 11/19/2021