Chapter 140: Special Savings

I suddenly grew excited, the cold blood in my veins seemingly boiling in that instant. I lowered my phone and shone the light up and down the door again, taking a silent, deep breath.

My heart was a mix of trepidation and excitement. Had I really found the right place? The room number was 434. Could this be the official site where that secret project from 1951 began? If so, did this prove that the 1951 project and the current Nine Rings Project were actually one and the same?

Thinking that the truth was about to surface, I reached out and gripped the handle of the archive room. With a gentle turn, the door opened. I found it strange that it was unlocked, especially since the office doors outside had been secured. It defied logic for a place as important as an archive room to be left open.

I prepared to enter, using my phone as a light. The moment I stepped inside, the light fell upon a torn piece of paper on the floor.

I quickly bent down to pick it up. It was covered in a layer of old dust, which I shook off before examining the writing. It was a piece of lined paper from a typewriter, with several large words printed in bold at the top: Xinchang Bank Official Record Paper.

I was a bit confused. I flipped the paper over but found it was completely blank. Aside from those few large words, it held no meaning. I shifted my gaze back to the archive room itself.

The archive room wasn’t very large. Within this space of less than sixty square meters, the builders had erected a wall in the middle, dividing the original room into two. A small square table stood near the door with a chair in front of it, one of its legs broken.

I swept my phone light around the outer area. The iron shelves once used for storage had collapsed. I knelt to gather the rotting papers scattered on the floor. They were all ordinary record sheets bearing the “Xinchang Bank” header, along with a few lists of depositors whose names were almost illegible.

It seemed these papers weren’t of much use, so I tossed them aside. I stood up and walked to the old square table, beginning to rummage through it in hopes of finding something else.

The desk drawers were unlocked and opened with a light pull. I pulled out all four drawers to check them. They were quite clean. Unwilling to give up, and refusing to believe that person had gone to such lengths to lead me here just to look at empty air, I sat on the floor. I spent a long time dismantling the drawers to check for hidden compartments.

As I pulled out the bottom drawer, I heard a dull thud from within the frame. It sounded like something heavy had dropped from a hidden space to the bottom of the unit. I pulled the entire drawer out and found a thick ledger lying at the base of the cabinet.

I took it out and sat cross-legged on the floor, using my phone light to read. The ledger was roughly A3 size, containing a neatly handwritten table. I was shocked by the sight of it, as pure hand-drawn tables are rare nowadays, and this one was exceptionally tidy with a beautiful layout.

Holding it like a precious treasure, I opened the ledger. The first page had been torn out. On the corner of the second page was a red stamp. I narrowed my eyes to make it out, and could vaguely see the words “Xinchang Bank” carved into the seal.

Unlike the previous lists of depositors, the names in this book were recorded with much more detail. Even the exact moment of the deposit was recorded down to the second. I looked closely at the first line.

“Cui Baiquan. Deposit Time: June 6, 1980, 00:12:32. Deposit Term: 24 years. Deposit Slip: Signed. Account Number: 20. Deposit Amount: 0. Remarks: Special Savings, Encrypted.”

My head began to ache. The year 1980 was far too recent. Anyone would know that the Xinchang Bank vault in Kaifeng had long since become an abandoned site by then, and the building was no longer in use.

What did this mean? Was this VIP list actually fake? It couldn’t possibly be a ledger from the Xinchang Bank of the Republican era. But if it was fake, why? Why go to the trouble of fabricating such a list of fake bank customers?

I skimmed through a page. It was mostly filled with entries spanning from 1970 to 1990. Not only that, these customers shared another commonality: every single deposit amount was zero, and the remarks always read “Special Savings, Encrypted.”

It was strange, truly strange.

I couldn’t wrap my head around it, so I shook my head and flipped to the next page. But the second page was much the same, only with different names. I flipped through over a dozen pages, the tiny script straining my eyes until they blurred, but I still couldn’t find anything out of the ordinary.

By the thirteenth page, I forced myself to keep reading despite my fatigue. But with just a single glance, all my drowsiness instantly vanished.

Because on that list, I found a name that completely shocked me.

Gan Rukui.

The hand holding my phone began to tremble uncontrollably. I was so stunned that I couldn’t master my own emotions. I kept reading down the page, and in an instant, I discovered something even more terrifying.

There were thirty customer names on that single page, and fourteen of them were my grandfather, Gan Rukui! The name “Gan Rukui” took up nearly half the page.

I immediately felt dizzy, and the dust floating in the air made me feel miserable. I coughed a few times to catch my breath, then looked at the exact timestamp after the first line with my grandfather’s name.

“1960, 1971, 1983, 1984…” I muttered the numbers under my breath, my hands continuing to flip until I reached the very last page.

The final page made my vision go dark. That entire page was filled with my grandfather’s name, and seeing the dates broke me into a cold sweat. The list actually went from 1988 all the way up to 2003!

My eyes quickly shifted to the entry for 2003.

October 12, 2003, 2:36:12 AM.

I immediately threw the booklet aside and sprang up from the floor. Sweat broke out across my temples, and I pressed my back flat against the wall. Clutching my knife behind me, I stared into the darkness, trembling. My heart felt like it was in my throat, and I could hear nothing but its frantic pounding.

I slowly flipped open my phone and glanced at the time.

October 12, 2003, 2:36:30 AM.

If the records in this booklet were real, then just now, at the exact hour, minute, and second I turned to the last page and saw that entry, my grandfather, who had been dead for years, had stored the final item in this long-abandoned vault, completing the entire ledger.

“Gan Ji! Where are you?”

Liang Zicheng’s voice suddenly came from the doorway, instantly pulling my chaotic thoughts back to reality.

I wiped the sweat away with my sleeve, picked up the booklet, and went to open the door. I threw it open abruptly just as Liang Zicheng reached the outside, scaring him so badly he nearly jumped out of his skin.

“You, you, you… could you not scare me like that?” He patted his chest to catch his breath and looked into the archive room behind me. “What’s wrong? Did you find what you were looking for in there? Your ancestors didn’t store money here, did they? Are you here to collect a debt?”

I relaxed slightly and stepped aside to let him in. Once inside, Liang Zicheng looked around, taking in the collapsed cabinets and the papers scattered across the floor.

My mind was still occupied with the booklet, so I didn’t want to deal with him for the moment. I let him wander around on his own while I spread the booklet flat on the table to examine it closely.

There was no way my grandfather had come back from the dead, so the real depositor behind these entries was likely using his name as a cover. But why use my grandfather’s name? Did he have some connection to all of this after all?

My mind was in complete chaos when a sharp pain suddenly hit the back of my head. Caught completely off guard by the strike, my head slammed into the wall. A wave of dizziness washed over me as blood trickled down my forehead, and I vaguely felt a hand snatch the booklet off the table.

“Sorry, Gan Ji. You should try to offend fewer people in the future. You probably didn’t expect that more than one person hired me for a job,” Liang Zicheng said.

I collapsed on the floor, my head throbbing painfully. Through the blur, I caught the flicker of a lighter as Liang Zicheng set the paper alight. Realizing instantly that he was burning the booklet, I fought through the dizziness and reached out to grab him, but a second later, he bolted out of the archive room, clutching the burning ledger.

I pulled myself up from the floor bit by bit, clutching a table leg. My head was still spinning as I staggered toward the exit. Just as I stepped out, I ran into Lu Ayao. He rushed over to support me, but I pushed him away and told him to go after the guy.

He hesitated for only a second before reacting, vaulting right over the second-floor corridor railing. I wasn’t as fast as he was. I tried to stop the bleeding while climbing down the stonework. Once at the bottom, ignoring the blood dripping down my head, I burst out of the building and began sprinting down the road into the night.

I hadn’t been running long when the phone in my hand rang. It was Lu Ayao. I answered immediately, and he gave me a location.

“I found that classmate of yours, but something came up. Come to this location I’m sending you. Hurry.”