Chapter 23 Qi Yu

I had my own theories about those things. At the time, I thought that some Wang family members had tested whether I was sensitive to snake venom when I was in a coma. And for a while, I even doubted whether everything I had experienced at the Qinling Mountains was real.

Jin Wantang was a little excited, as if he was about to tell some great secret. He calmed himself down before saying, “One day—I remember it was a rainy day—Master Hua came to me. He imitated someone’s posture in front of me and asked me to investigate who in the old Mystic Nine’s circle was like this.”

I watched Jin Wantang quietly. His condition was bad right now, so I knew it would probably increase his fatigue if I interrupted him and asked some questions. As a result, I planned to wait for him to finish.

“Many people in that circle had moved to Taiwan and the United States, but most of them had already passed away by this point. When they left China at that time, they all took antiques with them. After their descendants gradually declined, these antiques flowed into the market. Since there were a large number of overseas sellers, I bought most of them and ended up meeting with a lot of the old bigwigs’ children, who were all grown up now. I was looking for them to see if any of them remembered seeing someone with this posture back when they interacted with the Mystic Nine.”

Because Xiao Hua offered a high price, Jin Wantang actually found the key person very quickly. The woman was probably in her seventies, and when she saw Xiao Hua’s posture, she immediately recalled who the person was.

The person with that posture was named Qi Yu, and he was a descendant of the Qi family.

There was very little information about this person. Jin Wantang kept asking Xiao Hua why he wanted to find information on this person, but Xiao Hua wouldn’t tell him. He just made a gesture at Jin Wantang and said, “I’ll give you enough of a budget to check. No matter what you find out, as long as you see this gesture, you’ll tell him the information.”

That gesture was the very same gesture he showed me just now.

Later, Jin Wantang gradually realized that many people in the industry were checking Qi Yu’s affairs for Xiao Hua, but none of them knew each other. The only thing they had in common was this gesture.

The only remaining clues about Qi Yu were related to Xisha and my Uncle Three. But after Xisha, there were very few clues about Qi Yu, and even photos couldn’t be found. But even if there were photos, they were all side profiles. Then, Jin Wantang heard a bit of gossip that Qi Yu was very resistant to having his photo taken most of the time.

As it turned out, Jin Wantang wasn’t so idle while we experienced so many adventures. He also had his own life. He worked tirelessly for Xiao Hua’s bonus and slowly began to discover a strange setup.

It’ll take a long time to list out the specific evidentiary details here, so I’ll just give a simple conclusion.

Jin Wantang later discovered that no one knew what Qi Yu was like, and after a certain point in time, all the clues about Qi Yu’s existence seemed to have problems.

In other words, after a certain year, all traces of Qi Yu’s life seemed to be artificially forged.

In other words, there was a high probability that Qi Yu had died, but some people didn’t want the world to think that, so they kept creating evidence to show that he was alive.

There were several possibilities for this. One possibility was that someone hoped that the situation would become sufficiently complicated. Another possibility was that Qi Yu was very powerful and could act as a strong deterrent, so the signs that he was still alive could increase a certain party’s false strength.

Jin Wantang looked at me and said, “During the whole investigation process, I found a clue that didn’t seem to be tied to anything. I found that someone had bought an empty tomb at a high price, but it wasn’t a cover to bury mines. Instead, it was to restore the inside of an ancient underwater tomb. This happened when you were a child. The person who made the fake tomb chamber was your Uncle Three, and you followed him to the tomb to play.”

I frowned as Jin Wantang continued, “You may have forgotten, but you played a game while you were in that tomb. At that time, you played as an archaeological team member whose name was Qi Yu.”

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