NR | Chapter 3

This woman had such an overwhelming presence it was frankly terrifying. Once she took her seat, the thug Tan on the other side didn’t dare keep cursing, but he was too foul-mouthed to stay quiet for long, and soon started speaking in a mean, mocking tone again: “Hey, Yujingzi, you’d better be careful. Sure, Zhongyuan Yinggantang is a nice place, but who knows whether Chen Si even feels like having a candlelit talk with you.”[[N]]

There was something underneath those words. I understood what he meant, but thinking back, it really had been a little strange just now.

Chen Si and I could be considered childhood friends, and I knew his personality very well. He had a strong sense of territory. Once, during hide-and-seek, I slipped into his room and accidentally smashed his blocks. Before I could even apologize, he was already crying like a tearful little wreck, and I ended up apologizing again and again, then getting a belt beating from my grandpa.

That woman had been able to come and go freely from Fourth Brother’s room, and Fourth Brother hadn’t even blown up. It looked like he had already tacitly allowed it. That alone said a lot.

Hearing Tan say that, Chen Si finally stopped pretending not to care. He gave a cold laugh. “Tan Qiu, you’re a guest here in Zhongyuan. As the host, I should give you some face no matter what. But you should be clear on this, I’m giving face to Grandpa Tan, not to you. These past years, the dirty business you’ve been up to outside, if it all came out, it would be enough to keep Tan Ji from having any peace in his old age. Before you speak, you’d better weigh yourself first.”

Thug Tan snorted coldly and said nothing.

The nickname Yujingzi was enough to make people’s hair stand on end, and it also stirred up some not-so-pleasant memories for me.

When I was very young, my grandpa used to mention a phrase over and over for a while, “Liu Yujing by the lakeside.” Besides that, the feng shui masters of this family also didn’t seem to like staying in one place for too long.

In 1930, one of the Liu ancestors passed through Zhongyuan and felt that, with the Yellow River flowing endlessly here, it gave them a huge advantage in a business that depended on water. On top of that, the Liu ancestors no longer wanted to keep doing business by walking the streets and alleys, so they planned to settle in the central region.

As fate would have it, things didn’t go their way. In the Henan famine of 1942, before the family had even settled down, the Lius had to pack up again, forced to flee south in search of food. In the end, they finally established themselves and made their fortune in the coastal areas of Lingnan.

“Yujingzi” was a very famous nickname in the trade. Back then, the first-generation “Yujingzi,” Liu Sanshui, relied on years of deep study and, so the rumor went, could even find direction accurately in the middle of a storm stirred up by seawater without using a compass.

If this woman was also called Yujingzi, I didn’t know whether she would be the second generation or the third.

I thought about all this while rubbing my legs, which had already started to go numb. I had originally wanted to keep listening to them talk about that key or whatever it was, but my legs were so numb now that I could hardly stand. I decided not to eavesdrop anymore and slowly made my way upstairs instead.

I wasn’t worried that Fourth Brother would do anything illegal. My grandpa was a rule-abiding man, and the disciples he taught had spent so many years doing things by the book as well. I wasn’t some moral vacuum either. A lot of work in this line involved the homeowner’s private affairs, so if I didn’t listen, so be it.

After I closed the door, the room was cleaned up very neatly. I opened my suitcase and started putting away my clothes, then pulled out the charging cables I used often and prepared to put them in the bedside table drawer.

I grabbed the drawer handle and yanked hard.

It didn’t come out.

The drawer was locked.

I squatted down again and shook the handle. After ruling out the possibility that something inside was jamming the drawer, I shifted from a squat to kneeling and lay down on the floor. There was a clearly visible keyhole.

Many older cabinets like this came with locks. The style of this wooden cabinet looked very much like the old house my grandpa used to live in. After Grandpa passed away, nobody lived there anymore. Most of the antique odds and ends inside had been moved by Fourth Brother to use in the shop. A lot of those items were actually pretty good. Putting them to use would extend their lifespan too.

This redwood cabinet had probably been moved out from the old house as well.

But why was this cabinet still locked now? Had my grandpa locked it? If it was Grandpa who had locked it, then the key must have been lost somewhere during the move.

I fiddled with the keyhole by hand. It was an ordinary early-style flat key lock, which was basically child’s play for someone like me, who often played with all kinds of mechanism locks.

I sat cross-legged on the floor, dug a very thin wire out of my bag, a wire obviously much thinner than an ordinary one, bent it into a curve in my hand, and inserted it into the keyhole. Resting my head against the cabinet, I let the various sounds coming from the lock echo in my mind in an instant.

Right, I forgot to say, at my one-month birthday banquet, when it came time to “choose one,” I ignored the stacks of cash and grabbed a mortise-and-tenon block, refusing to let go no matter what. After that, my grandpa started showing me all kinds of mechanism blueprints, ancient ones and modern ones, wooden mortise-and-tenon structures and modern steel structures alike.[[N]]

The moment I heard a crisp click, I pulled out the wire and the cabinet door came completely loose.

Locks had been old news since I was three. At first, I played with them just for the rush of cracking them open, but later I made things harder on myself by limiting how long I could take. For a regular padlock, I’d never need more than fifteen seconds at most.

I tucked the wire into my pocket and pulled open the drawer to take a look.

Inside was a box of considerable size, but its shape was truly unusual. The box seemed to have been made from a single piece of jade. It still had old mud on it, and the patterns carved into it were very fine, unlike anything ordinary.

I wasn’t interested in the jade itself. What interested me more were the nine silver rings hanging in front of the box. These nine silver rings wound and gathered together at the ends, very much like a regular chain-ring puzzle, but if you looked a little more closely, you could tell they were different.

In a normal nine-linked ring puzzle, you remove the front ring in order to free the rings behind it, each ring interlocking with the next, the head matching the tail. But with these nine silver rings on the box, the front parts that should have been removable were instead impossible to take off. The heads were completely sunk into the keyhole of the jade box, and the rear ends were likewise sunk into another keyhole on the jade box.

But if that was the case, wouldn’t it become a dead lock?

The jade box felt icy in my hands. I reached out and pulled it out of the drawer, then held it carefully to examine it. Dragons and phoenixes had been carved onto the silver rings. It was hard to imagine how the craftsman who forged this jade box had managed to carve such delicate patterns.

It looked like an old piece. I didn’t know how my grandpa had acquired it back then. In the system of education I had received, there was no lock that couldn’t be opened, and no mechanism that couldn’t be broken.

My interest was piqued. I held the jade box in my hand and stood up from the floor. In the flash of the light, I suddenly noticed something unusual at the bottom of the jade box. So I pushed the calligraphy and paintings piled on the table aside, set the box on the tabletop, pulled out the old-fashioned green-shaded desk lamp, and fished out my glasses from my bag to start studying it.

I opened my backpack, took out a small flashlight and a flat iron box, steadied the jade box with one hand, and started sweeping the flashlight inch by inch over it with the other. The jade was quite translucent. It had been carved by hollowing out a whole piece of jade from the inside. Through the flashlight beam, I could clearly see that there was something inside the box.

But what exactly it was, I would have to open it to see clearly.

I put down the flashlight and slightly lifted the box to look at its bottom. One glance was enough for me to know I hadn’t just imagined things earlier.

The craftsman who made the box had carved an additional groove into its base. A pale yellow liquid was being held at the bottom of the jade box, and there was even golden sediment in the liquid.

Hm. And what kind of design is this?