In the car back to Hangzhou, Uncle Two told me the story in detail.
It turned out that when he saw the snail ghost-shadow on my window, he knew that it must have been done by someone.
“It’s too simple. With the crawling speed of snails, even if they were possessed by a fierce ghost, what do you think they can do? A pile of snails can’t crush you and can’t stretch you flat. Even if you were only one meter away from it, it would take more than ten minutes to reach you if it wanted to harm you. Plus, I study feng shui and know too many frauds so I didn’t believe it. At that time, I was sure someone was doing it.” Uncle Two checked his stocks on his phone and added, “But I wasn’t sure who it was. This wasn’t an ordinary scare tactic and I figured he had a special reason for doing so.”
He paused before continuing, “My money was all on the coffin. After the live snails in the coffin were released, the snails’ ghost-shadow appeared in the stream. I felt that this troublemaker’s purpose may be related to the coffin, but there wasn’t anything in it. I couldn’t imagine what he was trying to do.” Uncle Two turned to look at me, “Little Xie, Uncle Two is giving you some good advice, which I’ve learned after so many years’ experience—there’s a motive to everything. There is always a motive behind things, which must be figured out first.”
“This is what you learned from the stock market,” I teased him.
“You can say that. With the ups and downs, there’s always a reason why the stockbroker does something,” Uncle Two said while looking at the stocks. “So I went to Zhao Shandu first, to find out the origin of the coffin. But after asking, I found that it was all just groundless speculations that weren’t of any value. I realized that maybe his purpose wasn’t the coffin, and this might just be a pretext for what he really wanted. Sure enough, after we came back, Biao Gong died in such a suspicious way. I immediately understood that this was the other party’s purpose.”
“Why? Was it necessary?”
“Everyone in the Wu family works in the tombs, and like your Uncle Three, they have a small belief in things like ghosts and gods. If they had just pushed Biao Gong into the stream to drown, we would have known that he was killed because we could figure out how much alcohol he drank. But if it occurred in such a strange way, then it becomes very mysterious. If the people on this side don’t make it public, they can literally deceive everyone and also point the finger at us. At this time, I began to think about his second motive. Why did he want to harm Biao Gong?
“Biao Gong was childless, had no family property, and didn’t have any particularly deep-seated enemies. The only thing that would arouse envy in others is his position. This is what bothered me the most because even his position wasn’t particularly attractive. In order to figure this out, I wasted a lot of time without getting any results.
“In the end, I had to give up thinking from this angle and turn to another question: Who was not only in conflict with Biao Gong, but also wanted to deal with us? Third Brother and I thought of the same person— Cao Er Daozi. Later, I secretly took the copy of the genealogical record and discovered that Cao Er Daozi is the same generation as your father. That is to say, if your father isn’t the patriarch, then Cao Er Daozi would take over before you came of age. When I saw this, I suddenly realized that if Cao Er Daozi really was the culprit, then he still had one more person to kill, and that was your father.
“But your father is different from Biao Gong. Third Brother is staying in the room below your father’s and I get up early so he didn’t have time to do it. In order to determine whether it was him or not, I created an opportunity for him—pretending to steal the genealogical record and leaking the information to his spy who was beside Third Brother. Thinking this was a good opportunity, he would surely find someone to ambush us over there while he came to kill your father himself.”
I thought of the conversation at that time and said, “If no one went to steal the genealogical record, wouldn’t your plot be discovered?”
“That’s why I quickly called Pan Zi and Da Kui and brought some buddies with fresh faces,” Uncle Three said. “It was Pan Zi who stole the family tree. How could that gang of small, useless children catch Pan Zi and not be beaten by him? They did everything they were asked to do. Da Kui was lying in ambush in your father’s room, waiting for Cao Er Daozi.”
I felt a little stunned as I listened, “So Cao Er Daozi came out to kill my father and Biao Gong? For the patriarch’s position?”
Uncle Three nodded and smiled, “Exactly.” But Uncle Two put down his phone and said, “No.”
“Oh, no?” Uncle Three wondered, “Then what was he doing it for?”
“What I’ve said so far is just the tip of the iceberg. In other words, what we’ve seen is only the surface of the real matter,” Uncle Two said.
<Extra 1.28> <Table of Contents><Extra 1.30>
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Updated 12/4/2021
MereBear's Translation 