I followed the flashlight all the way to the farmer"s house, knocked at the door, and went in when I found that it wasn"t locked. All the way up, all the gates were open and the whole building seemed empty. I went to that room, and saw that it was bare with no furnishings and one of the windows was wide open. The flashlight had been placed on the window"s edge.
Through the window, I could directly see the balcony and kitchen of Uncle Three"s building. I also saw a telescope placed on the window.
I glanced at it and found that the telescope was facing Uncle Three"s kitchen.
There was a piece of paper under the flashlight and I immediately unfolded it, finding that it was actually a letter. The first sentence was very strange.
“Take a look around. The place where you are is full of ghosts.”
I took the letter and looked around, at first not understanding what it meant. After looking around, however, I understood as a strong chill was blowing against my face, and the cool wind blowing in from the window seemed to immediately reduce the temperature in this s.p.a.ce.
I saw from this window that the whole area, together with all the farmers" houses, had no lights and was completely dark.
Only Uncle Three"s house had lights.
I looked at my watch and saw it was now after nine. This wouldn"t be the case under normal circ.u.mstances and I immediately looked down and continued reading.
The letter said: From nineteen years ago, your grandfather either bought or rented all the houses here. Every house was cleaned regularly by a special person, but it wasn"t used for any purpose. Nineteen years later, the neighborhood where your Uncle Three lives is almost empty. There"s no light at night, just like a ghost.
This is all because there"s a huge secret buried underground in this area, and it"s not ancient. It"s a trump card, a legacy of a huge game.
Holding my breath, I found a corner in this dark room and squatted down. I held the flashlight and read the letter slowly.
Much of the information in this letter had to be connected with a lot of the previous information I had already obtained. Since some of it had already been mentioned before, it would be too troublesome to restate it again here so I"ll just state some of the most important parts. As soon as these parts came to light, the whole thing could finally be connected.
In this letter, one thing was stated very clearly: a group of people sent dozens of boxes of strange things to my grandfather, who put them in a coffin and buried them under the area where I was now. These dozens of boxes were very important.
As soon as I thought about it, I knew that they were brought out from the Zhang family"s ancient building by that the replacement archaeological team. I remember Pan Ma had said that when the team left, they took a lot of boxes with them.
Were they trying to find a place to hide them? Was it true that those f.u.c.king corpses were hidden somewhere in this area before my eyes?
This was truly a trump card. These corpses were too important, and their appearance would destroy all the dependencies of “it”.
The content of the letter wasn"t long, and I appended the full text. A big portion of the narrative was messy, but as long as you had a certain understanding of this matter, you would fully understand it after reading this letter, and find a huge amount of information was contained within.
Wu Xie:
Take a look around. The place where you are is full of ghosts.
From nineteen years ago, your grandfather either bought or rented all the houses here. Every house was cleaned regularly by a special person, but it wasn"t used for any purpose. Nineteen years later, the neighborhood where your Uncle Three lives is almost empty. There"s no light at night, just like a ghost.
This is all because there"s a huge secret buried underground in this area, and it"s not ancient. It"s a trump card, a legacy of a huge game.
A long time ago, an archaeological team made up of collected grave robbers was preparing to send a coffin loaded with a corpse into an ancient tomb. In this tomb, the corpse would undergo a strange change that was very important to the organization where the body was located.
However, some of these grave robbers foresaw what terrible consequences would happen after the corpse was sent to the tomb, so some of them betrayed the others in order to prevent it. They killed their accomplices and took on their appearances, and then hid the coffin.
This corpse is now among the ghosts you see in front of you and you mustn"t try to find it. In this area, anyone who touches the core secret will either become one of us or be mercilessly wiped out.
This is true even if you are the grandson of the original partic.i.p.ant in this plan.
I think you should also be aware that in your experience, some people will continue to lie to you even if they know it"s pointless to continue. Someone should have told you that some lies are to protect a person, which is the core reason.
Because this core secret is so important that we can"t bear any risks.
I am writing this letter to you, however, because our time is up. After tomorrow, everything will vanish.
You may want to ask why, so I"ll tell you: we"ve finally made it to the death of the last leader of that organization, and so the organization will finally disappear completely. Come tomorrow, that organization will become a speck of dust in history that will never be revealed. No one will know whether it ever existed or how powerful it was.
You don"t have to think about the importance of this time, I can tell you very frankly: as long as this comes to pa.s.s, the corpse won"t have any effect on anything. This body had been a huge secret for a long time, and they"ve been afraid that we would expose it and all the absurd plans behind it. With this corpse as collateral, they wouldn"t dare kill us with their utmost strength under any circ.u.mstances.
We aren"t going to make it public now, though. Our threat has disappeared, so although the evidence can still destroy a lot of things, we don"t want to be burned.
Tomorrow is the time. Tomorrow at 9:45, we will destroy the coffin and all things related to it and get out of here.
All our fates will have ended completely.
You don"t have to make any sacrifice or guesses about the end of this fate, the truth is here. You"ll want to thank your previous generation for protecting you and for enabling you to do everything you"ve done since. Those who hide, cheat, and plot can finally let the whole thing end in your generation. This is because, originally, you were likely to succeed us and continue to fight against fate. But it"s not necessary now.
I think you really want to know, who am I? I used the most decisive method to conceal my ident.i.ty long ago, only your grandfather and your Uncle Three knew of my existence. Nearly 20 years have pa.s.sed, and now I can finally leave. I hope I can forget all this in my later life.
I made an exception and let you live because of our unusual relationship, however, this was the only time I hesitated and it won"t happen again.
Your grandfather and my father were the first two people to give up everything, but they took different paths—your grandfather always wanted to wait, hoping to wash everything away through time. My father knew that as long as the possibility of that thing existed, all our fates wouldn"t end.
Therefore, my father started his own plan. We switched the archaeological team and hid the coffin. When we fled, however, we encountered the biggest encirclement and suppression in Hangzhou and had no choice but to turn to your grandfather.
He gave us the most help, and in the years that followed, Wu Sanxing also helped us a lot. Although your Wu family didn"t partic.i.p.ate in the beginning, without you, the plan couldn"t have been carried out in the most terrible years that followed. This was another reason why I had been merciful this time.
Wu Xie, I had heard Wu Sanxing talk about you many times, so when I saw you, I was surprised that you were in so deep. Fortunately, you didn"t discover my existence until now, and simply believed all kinds of lies that your Uncle Three told you.
When Uncle Three first took you to the tomb, he was already preparing for someone to take his place when he couldn"t handle it anymore—he chose you.
You may not know what secrets are contained in all the skills you practiced since you were young, including your handwriting and all the stories you were told by your Uncle Three. All the copybooks you used to practice calligraphy were written by a man named Qi Yu. Since you were young, Uncle Three told you many, many stories, in which the name of this person was implied countless times. This was all to make everyone misunderstand that you were Qi Yu in all of the plans. You don"t know, but since the expedition to Qixing Lu Palace, your appearance has puzzled countless people who secretly investigated this matter. They have no idea who you are or your true ident.i.ty. When they investigated your notes, they found that you were probably the Qi Yu who disappeared that year. You are a huge smoke bomb, helping us consume a large portion of the enemy"s energy and resources.
Later you began to investigate, but fortunately you only found some clues and didn"t think deeply. But you must have a headache, and will constantly be doubting your true ident.i.ty now.
I know that you are still confused by a lot of things, but I won"t divulge what shouldn"t be known.
You shouldn"t hurt yourself anymore, because everything is meaningless, and no one will reveal this secret for your safety. Compared with this secret, you are too insignificant. In fact, this letter is also meaningless, and nothing can be changed.
When it"s over, I"ll find an appropriate time to tell you everything. Don"t try to find that coffin. Take off your ridiculous mask, go back to your own home, forget all this, and wait for the moment when I send you the truth…
I looked at my watch. It was about twelve hours before 9:45 the next day and it seemed that this person should be somewhere in this ghost town now.
After reading, I leaned against the wall to think. The letter was very brief, but was the only thing that really made things clear, and after reading it, I understood that everything it said was true. I even felt that the person who wrote the letter seemed to have a special relationship with me.
The writing was very stable, and it was obvious his mentality didn"t change when he wrote it. He must be an extremely calm person, calm to the point that even if it all ended tomorrow, he wouldn"t have any ups and downs.
From here, I could see Uncle Three"s building. If what the letter said was true, and if I were him at this time, I would be restless and extremely uneasy. But he monitored me from this place and even wrote this letter calmly.
What should I do now?
If it was a pa.s.sage of a novel, I should work hard until 9:45 tomorrow. I still had a lot of time to kill, so I could search and dig up all the cellars one by one.
But I really couldn"t move as the exhaustion of these past couple of years seemed to have surged up.
He said he would give me an answer, so I would wait, and even if I didn"t do anything now, at least there was still a glimmer of hope. Even if there wasn"t any hint from now on, I could still wait until I no longer had any interest in it.
I leaned against the corner of the wall, holding the letter and waiting, nodding off twice in the middle. At five o"clock, it was starting to get light and I was so tired that I finally fell asleep until the sound of sirens woke me up.
I got up and looked at my watch. It was past ten o"clock. I hurried out of the empty room, climbed to the top floor, looked around, and saw that there were more than a dozen fires in this area, thick black smoke rising up to the sky.
Fire engines tried to enter, but all the streets were blocked by the illegal structures. I sat down on the roof, lit a cigarette, and watched it all quietly.
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