I spent the next few days in a daze, and only when some unexpected events happened could I return to this world. The rest of the time, I mostly lay or sat there, thinking over and over again about what happened before. I didn"t think about all the details anymore, just played it like a movie in my head.
But I didn"t have any emotions.
Despair was the greatest emotion, it could devour everything, and for a moment, I even realized that I didn"t have much attachment to this life. Either let me learn everything behind this mystery, or let me die on the way to understanding it.
This was what I deserved, because my obsession had already killed many people. If I didn"t die, the world was really unfair.
When I thought about these things, my mood was very calm, without any of my previous anxiety. I felt that even if I finally knew all the key points behind all this, I wouldn"t feel relieved.
In the future, I knew I"d never have the same strong desire as I did before, and any unknown wouldn"t be able to impress me. Just a few days later, however, I found out that I was wrong. It seemed that this matter"s development would never be within my expectations.
I got the very unexpected news that Qiu Dekao"s company began to restructure its a.s.sets.
Obviously, due to the first shareholder"s deteriorating health, Qiu Dekao"s control over many aspects of his company began to weaken, other shareholders began to become active, and the struggle between dark shares became fierce. Many people fell victim to this struggle, including some senior members of Qiu Dekao core team.
These high-level officials had a very good personal relationship with me and Fatty when we were in the Heavenly Palace. Although the contact wasn"t close, sometimes I would ask them many questions and they would give me some advice in private.
After the chaos in the company, many of these senior officials began to leave, and several of them began to send me some files that were originally confidential to the company.
These files were top secret when Qiu Dekao came to power, but when he fell, these things became chicken ribs, and no one believed the information they held. These files were to be separated and destroyed.
Those people said that since the company hadn"t attached importance to it, it was better to give to me— the person that needed it— to see if there was any useful information rather than destroy it.
The number of files was staggering. Obviously, although these people were kind-hearted, they weren"t kind enough to cla.s.sify it for me. A few files added up to at least a few hundred gigabytes, all of which were pictures of files that had been scanned and uploaded.
I brewed black tea and read all the files in two days, starting from the first package.
The contents were quite rich, and although not every volume was valuable, those that were had very important information. In contrast, the worthless parts had something odd.
I sorted out all these doc.u.ments and divided them into three categories: valuable, doubtful, and worthless.
What struck me most was one of the summary doc.u.ments for the Xisha archaeology trip. The main purpose of this doc.u.ment was to request funds from the board of directors and it had to explain why the Xisha project was necessary and what the potential value was.
The core part of this doc.u.ment was divided into two parts. The first one was the explanation: Qiu Dekao thought that the probability of ancient tombs in Xisha was quite high and he included a large number of folk legends and historical records taken from photos of ancient books that were hundreds of megabytes in size. This wasn"t the decisive evidence, however. An “internal doc.u.ment” was the key factor.
This internal doc.u.ment was very strange. It was an official government doc.u.ment bought at a very high price that reported the death of an archaeological team member.
After careful deliberation, I realized that the dead man was the first person to enter the Xisha underwater tomb, and that he brought out the first batch of information. Then, there were spies in the company who brought the news to Qiu Dekao—at that time, it was supposed to be under the radar, but Qiu Dekao"s ship pretended to be the organization"s ship and intercepted the information.
After that, Qiu Dekao handed over the information to Jie Lianhuan, which led to the Xisha incident with Uncle Three.
So, one of the things that I always found strange— how did Qiu Dekao obtain internal information about Xisha— was finally answered.
It seemed that the organization"s habit was to use their own people to enter the tomb to explore and see if any first-hand information could be obtained. If not, all the information would be submitted to the archaeological team for the second exploration.
Another particularly important piece of information was that when Uncle Three tricked Qiu Dekao and asked him to contribute money, he used a token, which was an “iron block”.
This was an iron piece brought out in one of several boxes during the Banai incident. With this piece of iron, Uncle Three proved that he had all the information about Banai at that time, and used it to exchange for resources for his trip to Xisha.
I didn"t yet know how Uncle Three got that kind of iron, but he obviously did, and there had to be some steps behind it that I didn"t know about.
However, I needed to focus on the one file that puzzled me the most. There was only one topic in this file: the investigation of geological features near Wu Sanxing"s residence.
There was no specific content of the file and on the cover were the words “Not Approved” in English.
The proposer of this file turned out to be A Ning, whose English I had recognized for a long time.
A Ning proposed to investigate the geological features near where my Uncle Three lived, but why? Were there ancient tombs near his home?
As far as I could remember, A Ning was a very reliable and dedicated woman who wouldn"t make meaningless proposals. Her proposal definitely had a purpose.
I looked at the date, which should have been before we first went to the tomb. Obviously, Qiu Dekao"s company had been monitoring me for a long time.
In professional foreign companies, however, capital and boards always had the largest sway, and this proposal had obviously not been implemented.
I leaned against the chair, smoking and thinking, but I had no idea. I went up to the roof of Uncle Three"s shop and looked around.
His shop was located in a place where farmers were very densely populated and all around were all kinds of these farmers" houses, many of which were quite old. In a place like this, there were no land forms to speak of, and you couldn"t even see the ground.
If I was able to read the file, I might"ve been able to guess what the significance was. Unfortunately, I could only guess without direction now.
I figured a general reason would be something like A Ning thinking there might be ancient tombs around Uncle Three"s shop. Many grave robbers chose a place to seemingly do some small business, but in fact used it as a cover to dig long underground pa.s.sages for grave robberies. Moreover, a madman like Uncle Three"s plan to dig tunnels may last for several years if the treasure underground was worth enough.
In addition, there was a large amount of information in the file, which could supplement much of what I already knew. After I read it, many floating ideas were confirmed, but they didn"t make much sense.
There was a lot of information, but English was too difficult for me to understand. I decided to send them to my friends who were good at English and ask them to translate them for me and check them over carefully. All the operations were carried out on my laptop, but there were so many doc.u.ments that it was difficult for me to operate smoothly on one screen.
Then it occurred to me that Uncle Three did have a computer here. I turned it on and copied the files with a flash drive for comparison.
During this operation, I found a very strange phenomenon. On two different computers, many doc.u.ments showed different details. I opened A Ning"s doc.u.ment that I had just read and on Uncle Three"s computer, there was one more page than before. Previously, there was only one cover page on my laptop, while on Uncle Three"s, there was one more t.i.tle page.
I found it a little strange. When I opened it, I found that this t.i.tle page was a description page, saying that the system version was too old to display all the pages.
Was there something odd in these files? I was immediately struck by the thought that many encrypted files must be opened on a specific machine in order to display all of their pages. On other machines, only the pages that the other party wanted to show you could be displayed, and the real core information wouldn"t be shown.
It seemed that I had to find an expert to deal with, and I was simply powerless right now. I turned off the power and thought it over several times, only to find that I really didn"t know much about computers in Hangzhou. I did have friends and former college cla.s.smates in Jinan, but it seemed too exaggerated to call them here. It was better find some reliable ones from Hangzhou.
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