I was stunned and looked at the name carefully to make sure there wasn’t anything wrong with it. Indeed, it was Qi Yu.

In the Xisha incident that Uncle Three had been involved in, there were countless imaginative clues about this person, but never any real information. All I knew was that the copybooks I had used to practice calligraphy were actually written by him (1). I spent more than ten years practicing calligraphy with his copybooks, which eventually led me to see the document he wrote. At that time, I thought I was the one who had written it.

I also had some special doubts about this man because he had appeared in many clues I found, but there wasn’t a particularly clear context to figure out what had happened to him. In the most critical Xisha incident of that year, he was always a huge blind spot.

I also discovered that many of the habits and connections I had since I was a child were all related to this Qi Yu. For a while, I suspected that he might have been my mother's first love and she had trained me based on the man she had so admired.

Among the Mystic Nine children who went to Xisha at that time, Qi Yu was undoubtedly a member of the Qi family. There weren't many members of the Qi family. They were good at avoiding misfortune because they could do calculations using the eight Qimen trigrams.

This shuikao belonged to Qi Yu, which was also in line with my previous reasoning. An expert had set up an array in this South Sea King’s tomb, which was probably the work of Qi Yu.

Generally, people who were familiar with Qimen’s eight trigrams were good at finding tombs and setting up arrays. In other words, they either used feng shui to find the location of tombs and earn some money, or they identified things. If there was anything evil around, then they also had ways to deal with it.Setting up an array in this tomb was probably due to special circumstances at the time, which only someone from the Qi family could handle.

But the presence of this shuikao meant that Uncle Three had interactions with Qi Yu very early on. In fact, it showed that they had worked together before the Xisha incident. But Qi Yu was a clerk of a state-owned organization at that time and had been a civil servant for a long time before that. Uncle Three had been hanging out with Aunt Chen Wen-Jin for a while, and since Chen Wen-Jin was the leader of their archaeological team at the time, that meant Qi Yu should be regarded as her subordinate.

With things like this, they must have entered the South Sea King’s tomb after Uncle Three met Chen Wen-Jin but before they went to Xisha. It was when Uncle Three met this beauty that he had a big dream to join the archaeological team and turn over a new leaf so that he could return as the prodigal son.

I smacked my forehead. In other words, Uncle Three came to the South Sea King’s tomb not to rob a grave, but to conduct an archaeological project? This might explain why only the main coffin disappeared and all the other funerary objects were safe and sound.

But if it was an archaeological excavation, why didn't it continue?

Was Uncle Three secretly working with Qi Yu to make some money on the side, but didn't let Aunt Chen Wen-Jin know?

I remembered the picture of Uncle Three and Yang Daguang. They didn’t look like grave robbers, but more like industrial workers doing scientific research.

I quickly stopped myself. If I continued thinking like that, I would have to redo all the training I went through over the past ten years. But there was no denying that Qi Yu and I had a very strong connection. If the whole thing really was related to him, then there was a logical reason for Uncle Three to give me these clues to check.I listened carefully to my surroundings but still didn’t hear anything. I pushed Fatty, but he still didn't wake up.

I opened his nostrils and asked myself, I picked up the candle and prepared to look up Fatty's nose, but once I picked it up, the range of light widened and I suddenly saw a person standing about four meters away in the middle of the tomb passage.

I was taken aback, but as I stared at it, I realized that it was a black leather figurine. It was standing there in the dark like some kind of creepy nightmare.

All my hair immediately stood on end as I looked from the broken hands to the delicate face. It was the leather figurine woman from the waterway.

For some reason, it had suddenly appeared in the tomb passage.

Did it follow me from the waterway?

I looked at it carefully and saw that it was holding something in its arms.

****

TN Notes:

(1) This is referring back to Vol 8 Chapter 73.