Chapter 28 Shigou Diao

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Merebear note: Nobody seemed to care too much so I decided to go with “shigou diao” instead of the direct translation. After reading this chapter, I think it fits better anyways.

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As Jin Wantang spoke, his voice became quieter and quieter and some of the words that followed were intermittent. Then, he fell into a coma.

Although his story was very confusing, the context was still very clear.

From those intermittent words, I knew that he had delayed Xia Wen until Xiao Hua finally arrived. After Xiao Hua had a long talk with Xia Wen, he told Jin Wantang that this person wasn’t Qi Yu, but he did have some skills.

When Xiao Hua said this, Jin Wantang fully believed what Xia Wen had told him earlier. After that, Xia Wen showed him a picture of the gold board that he had on his cell phone.

It was definitely an old gold board that was very big, and the words on it were covered in patina. Jin Wantang had taken a look at it and knew right away that it was very likely genuine, which was something that rarely happened.

I pulled Old Jin’s cell phone from his pocket and spent fifteen minutes trying to figure out what his password was—old-school people were very practical, so it was probably the same as his Wi-Fi password. Once that was done, I opened his photo album and started looking through the photos.

The album was full of all kinds of unsightly photos of him and young girls. I frowned and continued scrolling as Fatty looked on in amazement. He felt that Old Jin looked like a weasel, so why did so many young girls seem to like him?

I quickly scrolled to the photo of the gold board. At this time, Old Jin had fallen into a coma, but his vitals were relatively stable. I figured that he had talked too much after losing all that blood.

In my opinion, the gold board in the photo appeared to be a genuine article, but I could tell at a glance that it wasn’t an engraving done by Wang Zanghai. This was because Wang Zanghai’s works were very gorgeous, which gave off the feeling that he was so talented, he had to leave his own style everywhere.

But this gold board was extremely pragmatic, so based on my understanding of everything and the place where the gold board was discovered, I could probably guess this thing’s origin. It belonged to the Zhang family. They probably used the old gold board to engrave some copied text onto it a long time ago, almost like some kind of experiment. The era this text belonged to should be later than the Ming Dynasty, so it was probably engraved at the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty. Truthfully, it was hard to tell just by looking at a photo, so I was using logic to make my speculations.

If it was before, I would definitely have reservations about my own guesses, but now I usually regarded these initial theories as facts, because I was very familiar with the various forces involved.

They might have been testing how the text engraved on gold corroded over time in order to determine the extent of the impact of Wang Zanghai’s plan on future generations.

There was probably more than one such gold board out there, because the water and soil in the north, west, and south of China were all different. This in turn meant that there were probably similar experimental tombs everywhere.

Since the tomb was fake, what Xia Wen had said should also be false. But why did Xiao Hua come to such a conclusion and then tell it to Jin Wantang?

I fell deep into thought.

There was a detail on the gold board that had me very worried—it didn’t mention the world’s second most valuable tomb. This text used very vague expressions, but insiders could guess what it was referring to with only a single glance.

I tried to put myself in the shoes of the Zhang family member who made this gold board back then. Did he engrave the information casually, or did the information represent some of his thoughts? It seemed like he was hoping this gold board would influence insiders, so he had a specific purpose for carving these words.

In this way, a very simple inference could be made. If you knew that Wang Zanghai had laid mines for you in ancient tombs all over the country and it was very difficult for you to find them, what else could you do?

If it were me, I’d bury fake mines in even more ancient tombs and then lure grave robbers to a tomb that destroyed households. In this way, a legend would appear in the business that whoever found some special clues in ancient tombs and actually believed in them would disappear from this world.

By doing this, everyone would be afraid of any special clues they found in ancient tombs and Wang Zanghai’s plan would ultimately fail.

This gold board probably also played such a role, but they obviously had to ensure that this tomb which destroyed households could be entered, but those who did could never find a way out.

So, it really wasn’t surprising that this was the Zhang family’s restricted area. But was this restricted area used as a trap by the Zhang family?

Couldn’t Xiao Hua have inferred this? His thoughts ran so deep that I could never seem to touch them, so was there something in his past that prompted him to come here?

I looked at the darkness around me, feeling more and more confused.

Xia Wen must have later deceived Jin Wantang into searching for his past life, which was when they dug up Guotang Feng’s corpse. Jin Wantang realized that he was starting to touch upon the world’s second most valuable tomb, so he organized all the good players in the business to go to this trap.

Truthfully, Jin Wantang was an extremely difficult person to deceive, but when it came to this matter, it was just like he had been ensnared by the devil. In the end, he completely fell for Xia Wen’s scheme.

This actually didn’t surprise me at all, because when I heard the words “shigou diao”, I was pretty sure that Xia Wen was a liar and he was very patiently brainwashing Jin Wantang.

This was because there was a very detailed record of shigou diao in my grandfather’s notes. It was an evil cult among grave robbers. Their so-called “seven souls lacking one soul” was essentially an excuse for them to eat human flesh.

They said they ate human flesh to make up for the soul they were lacking, but in fact, it was to prevent them from disturbing the dead when they went into tombs.

The so-called “heavy corpse qi” referred to such a person.

In fact, I believed that my grandfather once joined this cult; otherwise, his record of Shigou Diao wouldn’t be so accurate and detailed. Plus, my whole family wouldn’t have heard him mention that he frequently ate corpse flesh since childhood.

Eating the flesh of ancient corpses could cause joint diseases and affect the way you walked.

So, this Xia Wen’s purpose was to take advantage of the Zhang family’s trap and either kill all the experts in the business or kill the three of us.

Those in Shigou Diao were very good at brainwashing people, especially when it came to those in our line of work. They were able to wrap these people around their finger.

Of course, this cult had long since disappeared and lacked organization.

In Grandpa’s notes, that was an extremely dark period in his life and it was difficult to have the courage to write it down.

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