Chapter 204: Looking for Labels

My brain short-circuited for a brief moment. Lu Ayao blocked the door and sat beside it. The impact of that corpse was simply too much for me. I reached for the first black crate I had opened, slammed the lid shut, and sat on top of it, slapping my face hard with both hands.

He Yu followed my lead and closed the crate containing Tian Xiao’s body. He started to prop himself up to sit on it, but halfway through the motion, he must have remembered exactly who he was sitting on. His knees nearly buckled, and he almost fell into a kneel. He scrambled back to the floor, pressed his palms together toward the black crate, and muttered a few prayers before he finally felt settled enough to sit on the ground.

“I’m saying, why did we even have to open these crates? It’s all your fault, Xiao Yao. Why did you have to go opening things for no reason?” He Yu grumbled at me.

I shot back, my words coming out in a hurried stutter: “You’re the one who found the crates first! Now that something’s gone wrong, you’re pinning it on me? I’m telling you, this is definitely on your ass. Everything was fine on this ship. At most, these crates should have held tools or clothes. Who knew your backside would sit a corpse into existence?”

“How is this on my ass? If you hadn’t picked that copper lock, would we have seen the body? Let me tell you, this is still a Gan Clan ship. If you let the Tian family people find out about this, you’re in for a world of hurt.”

“Hey, I don’t like the sound of that. You’re actually blaming me now?”

Lu Ayao cleared his throat. He Yu and I glared at each other, then shut our mouths and stopped arguing.

After a long silence, Lu Ayao finally spoke: “Which Tian Xiao do you think is in the crate?”

The temperature in the cargo hold seemed to drop thirty degrees at his words. None of us spoke. We all had our own theories and began to turn them over in our minds. I knew exactly what he meant.

Tian Xiaoqi had said before that Tian Xiao had been swapped. The person who had gone to Gansu with me at the beginning was an impostor. She even suspected that Tian Yuqing had orchestrated the whole thing, and that it had been set in motion more than six months before I ever opened the Nine-Ring Jade Casket.

“I think,” He Yu spoke up first, analyzing the situation, “that the one inside might be the fake.”

“Let’s just assume for a second. Assume Tian Xiaoqi is right and Tian Yuqing is a piece of work. Now Tian Yuqing has disappeared in Inner Mongolia. Doesn’t that prove someone saw through his scheme? Ha! They killed the Tian family impostor, froze him in this black crate, and used your family’s ship to smuggle him out. Then they just wait for the right time to dump the crate into the sea. What do they call that? Destroying the evidence.”

I rolled my eyes and asked him, “According to your logic, this person must be inextricably linked to the Gan Clan. Using a Gan ship to transport the body and Gan people to dump it… are you trying to say my Fourth Brother did this?”

He Yu rubbed his chin. “Looks like it!”

“Looks like your head!” I snapped at him. “Chen Si isn’t that kind of person. He’s ruthless, sure, but he would never stick his hand into another family’s internal power struggle. I’d stake my character on that.”

“What about your mom then?”

He Yu’s question choked the words right out of my throat. I pursed my lips, defeated. “That… I wouldn’t know.”

Lu Ayao said, “There is at least one thing we can be sure of.”

“What?” I asked.

“Gan Rong must be aware of these black crates,” Lu Ayao said. “It’s impossible for her not to have inspected so many crates when they were brought on board. If she knew and didn’t tell us, nor did she inform Tian Xiaoqi when the ship docked, then she’s definitely involved in the death of the Tian Xiao in that crate.”

I was still reluctant to link my family to such things. To kill someone, dismember them, and freeze them… what kind of person would do something so cruel? Whether it was Gan Rong or Chen Si, I simply couldn’t accept it.

“But… but there are so many crates. What if… what if they just weren’t inspected thoroughly when they came aboard? That’s… that’s possible, right?” My defense felt weak. As I spoke, my own guilt began to rise, and I couldn’t even meet Lu Ayao’s incredibly calm eyes.

He Yu immediately stated his position: “Whoa, whoa, I’m with Old Lu on this one. Xiao Yao, if there really is a connection, you can’t play favorites.”

I thought to myself, favorites my ass. My mind was becoming a mess. With these crates sitting on the ship, once we hit land, anyone who saw that corpse would inevitably assume the Gan Clan was responsible. I suddenly realized this was a very clever frame-up.

But the person being framed was Gan Rong. She wouldn’t give anyone that kind of opportunity. So why were these crates sitting here?

Just then, a phone suddenly rang in someone’s pocket, breaking my train of thought. I glared at He Yu. He looked innocent and pulled out his empty pockets to show me. “Don’t bite me, it’s not mine!”

I turned to look at Lu Ayao, but he had already turned the phone off and put it back in his pocket.

Well, that was a first.

Clearly, He Yu was thinking the same thing I was. He teased, “Answer it! Don’t let this mess delay you. Someone might have an emergency.”

“It’s fine. It’s not urgent. Let’s focus on how to handle these black crates first.” Lu Ayao remained as steady as a mountain.

The phone stopped ringing, and I tried to pick up my train of thought again. After sitting for a long time, I felt a chill under my backside. I reached down and wiped it, only to find my hand covered in water. The snow on the crate had long since melted from my body heat. I had been thinking so hard I hadn’t noticed, but now a large patch of my trousers was soaked through.

I jumped off the crate and started brushing the remaining snow off my pants. Suddenly, a thought struck me. “Wait, that’s not right. It’s not even the season for snow yet. Where did all this snow come from?”

He Yu sat up with a start and looked at me. “Are you saying… the Northeast?”

I continued to unravel the thread. “This is a research vessel converted from a freighter. The one Tian Xiaoqi and the others are on is different. Theirs are all fishing boats from the northeastern ports that bypassed the Zhoushan Archipelago. This ship isn’t from the South China Sea. It only met up with those fishing boats later to pick us up?”

He Yu was likely contemplating our route, and Lu Ayao, sitting to the side, didn’t answer me immediately. However, I already had an idea. I crouched down and began inspecting the black crates from top to bottom. The corpses weren’t going to come back to life to tell us where they came from, but the crates and the tools inside them would.

These mass-produced items had to have a place of origin. I was betting on a slim margin of error, hoping that whoever had moved the cargo had neglected to peel off a manufacturing label.

There were no marks on the black crates themselves, so I started rummaging through the ice axes, flipping them over one by one to check every angle. Seeing how much I was struggling, He Yu and Lu Ayao came over to help. We finished one crate and moved straight to the next. We pushed through ten full crates in one go, but damn it all, we couldn’t find even a scrap of a torn label.

The shafts of the tools were as smooth as if they’d been greased. He Yu collapsed onto the floor, panting. “Look, maybe we should just call it. This is way too much work. Maybe that ‘oversight’ you’re looking for just doesn’t exist. How about we just close the lids and go sneak some food from the kitchen?”

I wiped away my sweat, feeling like I was hitting my limit too. I sat down next to He Yu, leaning against him. “Buying this many tools at once means they must have come from a wholesale supplier. Even if they wanted to hide their tracks by stripping the labels, these workers were way too thorough. Not a single bit of corner-cutting.”

“Gan Ji, come here a second.” Lu Ayao called out to me. Out of the three of us, he was the only one still trying.

I was too exhausted to get up and just waved a hand. “Unless it’s something like a label, don’t call me. I’m done for.”

“It’s a label.”

He Yu and I froze. Suddenly, our backs didn’t ache and our legs didn’t hurt. We scrambled over to Lu Ayao’s side. He was holding up one of the black crate lids, tilting it slightly. In the light, I saw four large, recessed characters: “Northwest Outdoor.”

I glanced back at the other lids scattered on the floor and realized every single crate had those same four characters. I felt a sudden, strong urge to slap myself.

He Yu’s resentment had been drained by exhaustion, leaving him only with a hollow stare. “Well, Strategist Gan… we spent all that time digging until we were half-dead, and it turns out the label wasn’t on the tools, but on the lids?”

I sighed. “Just pretend I’m blind.”

All names of real locations and manufacturers in this text are purely fictional.