It was an old Guangming Daily with a picture laying on top of it. I looked at the picture and realized that it was a Dai Jin (1) painting of a bird sitting on a pine branch. The Guangming Daily was torn on all four sides like it had come from one of those old houses that had newspapers stuck on all of its walls.
We were in deep waters. I wasn’t familiar with Dai Jin’s works, but the rice paper was very old. Someone may have found some old rice paper and asked an artist to paint on it using old ink. I remembered that some people forged fake certificates of authenticity in the past, and in order to find the paper at that time, they bought countless old books from that era and copied them. Nowadays, forgeries made using fine-painting technology looked almost identical to printed products. But Chinese paintings were very difficult to copy.
I didn’t speak as I examined the newspaper carefully. All of the details told me a story.
When it came to the old houses here, courtyard houses in particular were subletted by many people. Newspapers were usually posted on all of the walls. Someone found an old painting in an old house and wrapped it in the Guangming Daily. This painting was later discovered when the house-owner was moving and sold to the shop. When the boss saw it, he realized that it was a Dai Jin painting.
I might have hesitated if the Guangming Daily hadn’t been here, but this old newspaper was too deliberate. It naturally made me wary.
I didn’t ask for the painting, but told the old fat man to keep the forty thousand yuan in the shop as credit. When he had any good products, he would send me photos and I would come and give him the rest of the money.
The old fat man was very happy and even walked me out of the shop with his iPad in hand. When I went out and explained everything to Bai Haotian, she scratched her head, “I thought you had to look at the things themselves to see whether they were real or fake.”
“With today’s technology, you often can’t tell that something’s wrong with a single glance. For example, some people can create carvings on old mirrors that are almost undetectable.”
When I got back to the hotel, I began to fiddle with the remaining beeswax beads. I made two and a half strings: one was a hundred thousand yuan and the other was seventy thousand yuan. The remaining half string was given to Bai Haotian.
Bai Haotian thought for a while and then said, “Didn’t we buy the goods for Haoshanju? Why did you take them for yourself?”
I told her not to worry and that this was just practice; we hadn’t even entered the village yet.
In the evening, the old fat man sent me a lot of photos of various things. There were bronze swords, bronze knife money (2), and some Western Zhou agates. I was stunned when I saw a pair of jade earrings that were bright green.
I saw the corpse residue on them and realized that they probably came out of a tomb. I found it very interesting, because green jadeite from the Qing Dynasty was very precious. There had been various claims over the past decade that such a bright green jadeite would sell for more than two hundred thousand yuan even now.
All of these photos were sent from the dealers in the village to the antique dealers in the whole county. The old fat man didn’t actually have these items in his store, but would buy them if we wanted them. Of course, I also conveniently sent all of these photos to various groups using Bai Haotian’s number while praying in my heart, let it work again. Please let it work again. That way, I can enter the village.
There was nothing that night, so I hid the beeswax and forced myself to go to sleep while trying not to think about Poker-Face’s situation.
In the end, I still ended up thinking about it for a few seconds. If they didn’t die, then I needed to calculate how much time they had left. If they did die, then I figured they were probably as soggy as fried dough sticks now. I didn’t know how I would face those two if they really did look like fried dough sticks.
After sleeping for a few hours, I heard someone knocking on the door. I turned over, but all I could hear was the very faint knocking sound. I wasn’t expecting anyone, so I had no idea know who it was.
<Chapter 127><Table of Contents><Chapter 129>
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TN Notes:
(1) Dai Jin (1388-1462) was a Chinese artist best known for being the founder of the Zhe School of Ming dynasty painting. More info here.
(2) Knife money is the name of large, cast, bronze, knife-shaped commodity money produced by various governments and kingdoms in what is now China. Knife money circulated in China between 600 and 200 B.C. during the Zhou dynasty. More info here.
MereBear's Translation 