Chapter 139: Number 434

Liang Zicheng lay on the ground, cowering and begging for mercy. As soon as I moved the stick away, he suddenly scrambled up and tried to slip away. I reached out, grabbed him by the collar, and hauled him back.

“No, big brother, I was really wrong! I’ll definitely pay you back when I get back, okay? Just let me go home!”

I didn’t actually care much about the money he made from reselling my two paintings. Liang Zicheng’s family had always been poor, so to get scholarships, he had worked harder than anyone else in school activities since he enrolled. The hundred thousand yuan offered by that person was a massive amount of money for him. If I were in his shoes, I would have found it hard to resist the temptation too.

The reason I was holding onto him now was mainly because I didn’t want him to leave alone. The complexity of this situation clearly exceeded his understanding. The person behind the scenes had told him to knock me out, but now that he had failed the mission, I was afraid something might happen to him as an outsider.

At least according to my sixth sense, I felt something would definitely happen to him if he went off on his own.

“You can’t leave. Something will happen,” I said, holding him back.

Liang Zicheng looked at me, close to tears. “Oh, come on, what could happen? I feel like the probability of something happening to me is much higher if I stay here with you.”

I ignored him and flipped open my phone, using the light from the screen to illuminate the entrance to the Xinchang Bank Vault nearby. A pale yellow door plate hung on the wall of the entrance, showing the number “18,” but the plate was somewhat faded. I wanted to see it more clearly, so I reached out and wiped it, causing one corner of the plate to curl up.

To my surprise, I discovered there was another layer beneath this plate. I gently peeled off the faded top layer and saw that there was indeed another door plate inside. However, it was very old, and much of the writing on it was no longer clear.

The only thing I could identify were the three characters “434.”

434? 4341951009?

These three digits immediately made me think of that inexplicable string of numbers.

I didn’t think it was a coincidence. I stuck the top layer of the door plate back on, then ran my fingers around the walls of the entrance. I couldn’t explain the details of the situation clearly, so I planned to threaten him first to make him follow me obediently. “You probably don’t want me telling anyone about you selling my paintings, right?”

“I…” Liang Zicheng was suddenly choked up.

I walked to the edge of the entrance and put my bag back on, gesturing to him. “Since that person wanted you to drag me inside, he must have a reason for it. I’m going in to take a look, and you’re coming with me.”

“Huh?” Liang Zicheng stood there, at a loss. “But brother, the doors are all locked. How are we going to get in?”

I picked out a piece of wire from the debris, swung my bag behind my back, and ducked into the entrance again. I called out to Liang Zicheng, telling him to hold the phone to provide light.

I didn’t know if he was scared of me or if I had beaten him too hard earlier, but the light from the phone he was holding kept trembling. I tried twice but couldn’t get the wire into the lock cylinder. I looked up at him and rolled my eyes in frustration. “Seriously, do you have damn Parkinson’s or something?”

I looked at him, grabbed his arm to steady it at a certain height, and began to intimidate him with my gaze. “Hold it steady! If you shake again, I’ll cut your hand off, believe me?”

Liang Zicheng was stunned by my bluff. As it turned out, intimidation was quite effective sometimes. He held his hands steady, and the light didn’t flicker once. I successfully inserted the wire into the lock cylinder, gave it a few twists by feel, and the old lock hanging on the door opened with a click.

Liang Zicheng watched wide-eyed as I pushed the door open. “Gan Ji, I feel like you’re different from before. Have you been hanging out with some bad crowd lately?”

I didn’t reply. I didn’t know how to answer him. Too much had happened in the last six months, and I had met too many new people. My way of handling things had undergone a world-shaking change.

I took the phone and stepped through the door without any psychological burden. Beneath my feet were broken bricks and stones. The interior of the Xinchang Bank Vault wasn’t very large. It was a two-story courtyard house with a five-meter-square courtyard in the middle.

There were buildings on the left and right. A dead old tree leaned precariously against the wall. Moonlight filtered down in patches from the square of sky above. Compared to the tombs I had entered before, this place was bright enough.

The phone’s light still wasn’t bright enough. We could only rely on the moonlight to see from a distance that many of the windows on the upper floors of the courtyard had become black holes. Because it hadn’t been repaired for years, many of the bricks on the upper floors had collapsed. Standing here required a lot of courage, as the entire building looked so fragile it might completely collapse at any moment.

I circled the courtyard and found a path where the debris wasn’t too thick, then began walking deep into the corridor. Liang Zicheng, who had initially lagged behind, ran up and walked almost glued to my side.

I grew increasingly annoyed by his crowding and snapped, “Can you stop squeezing me? This corridor is over three meters wide. Can’t you walk properly?”

Liang Zicheng’s legs were weak, and his voice trembled. “Maybe we should go back. This… this is too dark, too creepy. If… if you want to come, I… I don’t have classes tomorrow morning. I’ll… I’ll come with you then.”

“No,” I interrupted him, refusing to continue the conversation.

The corridor wasn’t long, and there were only a few rooms on the first floor. Many of the door plates in the inner corridor had faded, and most of the contents had been cleared out. I shone the light through the windows; the air was thick with dust, and even the cabinets had been overturned.

After a circuit with no results, we returned to the courtyard.

Liang Zicheng sighed. “I told you, this place is just a ruin. Everything was moved out long ago. What exactly are you looking for?”

I looked up at the second floor, estimating where I could climb up with my bare hands. The original door number here was “434,” and the “18” plate had been pasted over it later, likely a long time ago. I believed that the number on the door plate definitely had some connection to that string of digits.

Many early Chinese coded numbers had specific meanings. Since 1951 likely refers to a project started in 1951, could 434 refer to the location where the project began?

I found a section of the wall with plenty of pits and hollows, connected to the brick railing of the second-floor corridor. I estimated the height, gripped my phone between my teeth, and crouched to pull a small dagger from my bag. Liang Zicheng, crouching beside me, was practically stuttering.

“W-w-w-what are you doing? Why are you carrying that around?”

I pulled out the dagger and tucked it into my waistband, then put my phone in my pocket. “Wait down here,” I told him. “I’m going up to take a look.”

Liang Zicheng stood up with me, his mouth agape. “Wait, calm down! It’s that high! There’s no ladder or anything, how are you going to get up?”

I rolled up my sleeves, took a few steps back for a running start, then jumped and grabbed a protruding stone on the wall. Using the friction between my soles and the stone, I climbed up two steps and lunged to grab the second-floor railing.

This was much easier to climb than a wet, slippery rock face. Combined with the advantage of my height, I was soon pressed against the edge of the second-floor corridor. I grabbed the railing, swung a leg over, and landed smoothly inside.

“Be careful!” Liang Zicheng shouted up at me.

I signaled back with my phone’s light, brushed the dust off my hands, and began exploring deeper into the second floor, flashlight in hand.

The door signs on the second floor were much less faded than those on the first. They were written in Traditional Chinese characters and covered in a layer of dust, but the writing was still barely legible under the light.

The first three rooms were offices and a washroom. I continued forward until I reached the fourth door. When the light hit the sign, it read: Vault Filing Room.