When Fatty finally found us, we were sitting on someone’s flower beds. I had taken off Jin Wantang’s shoes, tied the shoelaces together, and hung them around my neck. The old man’s soles were so thin that he couldn’t run away barefoot. He scratched his feet sadly and said to me, “Little Master Three, how about it? We’ve been friends for so many years that you could even say our friendship runs deep. It might not be equal to jade, but it’s as good as gold or a pleasant-sounding poem…”
“Fuck off! Do you think I’m blind? This isn’t the first time a white-eyed wolf has tried to act like a husky. Now, explain.” I made Jin Wantang look at the transfer statement I took from the museum. “Why are you posing as my Uncle Three to sell my land?”
Jin Wantang’s eyes shifted and he was just about to speak, when Fatty spoke up from the side, “Old Jin, you’re a real son-of-a-bitch. We already know that you’re a bastard, but I always appreciate that you can clearly distinguish between the big and the small things. Let me tell you, when it comes to this matter, cheating us out of money is a small thing. But if you don’t clear things up, that delays Mr. Naïve’s business, which is a big thing. Now, have you thought things through? After so many years of friendship, I’d hate to have to beat the shit out of you.”
Jin Wantang nodded and gave a faint smile, “Fat Master, you’ve got a point. Let me think for a moment.” He took some cigarettes out of his pocket and passed them to me and Fatty.
When I looked at his expression, I could see that Fatty’s words were racing through his mind. By the time he lit the cigarettes for us, I figured he’d made up his mind. He looked up at the sky and said, “This was more than ten years ago.”
“Finish it in three sentences,” I said, immediately annoyed. It was like I was in my twenties again, listening to him talk about his own old stories. I had too many of my own stories now, so although my heart lacked a lot of things, this wasn’t one of them.
“Your uncle asked me to buy this piece land for him. He was particularly keen on weather at the time and said that there was something he wanted to check in this weather station,” Jin Wantang said. When I asked him what it was, he shook his head. “Your uncle disappeared after the formalities were completed. He didn’t even give me the money. Although it wasn’t expensive at the time, I still wasn’t happy about giving up that much money. I wanted to sell it, but I wasn’t the owner after the formalities were done. Since I couldn’t sell it, I hardened my heart and pretended to be your uncle.”
I turned my head and frowned at him. What is this nonsense?
“This isn’t the important part,” He quickly said. “This isn’t the key point. Hear me out first. If you want to sell land, you have to clear out any abandoned buildings on it. I brought some people here to clear the area and found that there was indeed something strange in that building. But I don’t know if it’s what your uncle was looking for at the time.”
“What is it?”
Jin Wantang was relieved to see that I was interested, “It’s too troublesome to say. But that thing is in those ruins. Why don’t you go and see for yourself?”
Setting aside the issue of whether his story is true or not, there’s no doubt that Uncle Three has asked people to do things without paying them before. And that didn’t only apply to outsiders, either. I helped pay for us to go to the Seven Star Lu Palace.
But there was no point in worrying about it since Jin Wantang was really an old bastard who wanted to sell my land.
I returned his shoes to him and Fatty helped pull him up. As we walked back, he told us the details of the matter.
The old building was actually the weather station’s old archives. There were no computers in the 1980s and ‘90s, so many of the meteorological charts were on paper. Since most files were electronic now and this was a regional weather station that sent a summary of the data recordings to Nanjing’s weather station every year, the charts left here were actually just waste paper. A large number of these files remained in the old building’s filing cabinets, which had been covered in dust and moisture for decades. According to Jin Wantang, they were basically covered in mushrooms.
His first step to cleaning things up was to move all the filing cabinets out. Since he was feeling a little guilty, he planned on getting it done as quickly as possible. But he didn’t think that something unexpected would happen. On the first day of cleanup, the workers reported something strange.
The building had a total of six floors. When they moved a row of cabinets that were placed against the wall on the first floor, they found a strange door hidden behind them.
Even though they said it was strange, it was actually just an ordinary wooden door that was painted a sky-blue color. The paint was peeling off badly, and the door frame had warped because of the moisture. They said it was strange because there wasn’t a door like this on the other five floors and it had been completely blocked by the filing cabinets.
It was as if someone wanted to hide it.
The workers pried open the door and found that it turned out to be a humble living space. There was a rotten and moldy desk, a single bed, and a thermos covered in cobwebs. The putty on the ceiling was damp and had fallen to the ground.
When we came to the door, I had a clearer understanding of why it was so strange. I had studied architecture before and knew at a glance that the door wasn’t actually a special design. It was really the door to the reception room.
On the wall near the door, I could see traces of where bricks had been laid before. I immediately understood that someone had changed the position of this building’s entrance and the one we had just come through had been made later. This was the building’s original entrance, and the hidden room had really just been an ordinary reception area before.
Jin Wantang was very skilled in feng shui, so he shouldn’t have missed something like this. If he said there was something strange here, then there had to be something other than the door hidden here.
The inside of the building was very cold and I felt a little creeped out as I walked into the reception room. I hadn’t been in this kind of environment for a long time. I used my phone’s flashlight to look around and finally understood what Jin Wantang had been talking about.
A dried corpse was sitting in a chair in the middle of the room. Its whole body had collapsed into the chair and it was wearing a jacket that appeared to be stuck to its body.
When I looked at the jacket, my head buzzed and my throat became numb. I recognized the style of this jacket.
It was my Uncle Three’s jacket.
My mind hadn’t fully processed things yet, but my body had already started instinctively trembling. It was so sudden that I didn’t dare take a step forward.
When Fatty’s light shot over, I felt all the hair on my body stand on end. Even though the corpse’s face had rotted away, I had a strong feeling that this corpse was my Uncle Three.
I glanced back at Jin Wantang and found him looking at me silently. His expression wasn’t as smooth as before, and he seemed to be waiting for me to come to a conclusion.
Truthfully, I wasn’t ready to face my Uncle Three’s body so quickly. After forcing myself to face all those difficulties over the years, this was the first time I had actually fled.
But at that moment, my phone alerted me that I had a text message.
MereBear's Translation 