Chapter 145: Overlapping Areas

I caught his subtext: “You think Fourth Brother is connected to the boss who had Liang Zicheng send me that message?”

Before Lu Ayao could answer, I looked at him and denied it: “Impossible. Fourth Brother isn’t that kind of person. He would never drag innocent people into his affairs, let alone commit murder to silence someone.”

“Then how do you explain such a coincidence?” Lu Ayao suddenly smiled and stood up straight. I instinctively took half a step back.

He looked at me calmly: “Whose hands in the Outer Eight Trades are truly clean? It’s just that business has been easier these last few years, so those people have gradually started going straight. I’m not saying your Fourth Brother did the killing, but at the very least, regarding Liang Zicheng leading you to the Xinchang Bank vault, you should go ask him yourself. He’s definitely involved.”

When he put it that way, it was hard for me to argue. The timing was just too perfect. Besides, before Fourth Brother picked us up in Kaifeng, he had intercepted He Yu halfway. If I tried to say Fourth Brother had nothing to do with this, I wouldn’t even believe it myself.

But what struck me as strange was the hint of complaint in Lu Ayao’s tone. Previously, he hadn’t uttered a single grievance even when we were in mosquito-infested mountains.

“What’s wrong? Did you calculate something again?” I asked reflexively.

Lu Ayao shook his head. This time he didn’t pay me any mind, instead walking straight toward Fourth Brother and Liu Wan. Before long, they were deep in conversation. As expected, his presence immediately drew their attention.

This made me feel incredibly jealous. If it had been me walking over there, Fourth Brother would have definitely waved me away impatiently, probably scolding me with something like, “What’s a kid like you doing eavesdropping on adults talking?”

I stared at Lu Ayao, fuming. I cursed him in my head. Great, you just finished eating my cheap sausage and now you’ve defected? You won’t talk to me, but you’re chatting away happily with Fourth Brother.

“Brothers! I found… Oh, my god! What are you doing with that look of resentment? Why are you skulking over here? You scared the life out of me!” He Yu climbed out of the car and saw me sitting on the open trunk, nearly jumping three feet in the air from the fright.

I rolled my eyes at him, pulled a bottle of mineral water from the trunk, and tossed it to him. “What is it?” I asked irritably. “Spit it out. What guilty deed did you do to have your soul scared out of you in broad daylight?”

Hearing this, He Yu immediately glanced around and lowered his voice. “Seriously, I actually found something. While I was organizing my notes just now, I discovered a huge secret related to the place we’re heading. Get in, and keep your voice down!”

I thought to myself, what could you possibly have found? Why all the secrecy?

Thinking this to myself, I closed the trunk and climbed into the car behind He Yu. Once the door shut, I noticed the back seat was covered in yellowed papers. Some were new, some old, all written in a script I couldn’t read, but I could tell the handwriting and writing style were basically identical.

He Yu gathered up a few of the papers and shoved several others into my arms. “Hurry up and look at these. I copied them in secret from the elders’ notes earlier. Don’t tell anyone, or my reputation will be ruined.”

His words made me chuckle. I unfolded the papers and began to read, but after one look, I threw them back at him. “I’m not part of your He Clan. Why the hell are you giving me this? The whole thing looks like hieroglyphics. If you want to insult my intelligence, just say so.”

He Yu was startled when I tossed them at him, but he quickly reacted. “No! No, I know you can’t read the script. I’m not asking you to read the text. Look at the drawings! The drawings! Look at these two places. Don’t they look really similar?”

I took the papers back. This time, I saw clearly that what He Yu had handed me wasn’t just an old paper full of scribbles, but a hand-drawn aerial view of the terrain. The coded text I couldn’t read was annotated all around these locations.

The other paper was a more professional positioning map. I couldn’t understand the data described on the side, but I recognized the shapes. Even without putting the new and old papers together for comparison, I could tell they referred to the same place.

“What’s the point? Why are you giving me two identical maps?” I asked, looking up at He Yu.

He Yu raised an eyebrow and countered, “Are you sure they’re the same place?”

At his question, I instinctively looked over the maps twice more. By the end, I was getting a bit annoyed and slapped the papers back into his arms. “The outlines are identical; only the scale is different. If this isn’t the same location, I’ll eat the paper. Now tell me, where is this?”

He Yu gave a sly grin and held up the second, newer positioning map. “This one is the terrain map your Fourth Brother showed all of us. It’s our destination for this trip.”

Then he put that map down and held up the yellowed, hand-drawn paper. “And this is a fragment of a terrain map from the last century that I secretly copied from my elders. I just did a quick comparison and found they are highly similar.”

My mind couldn’t keep up. I quickly gestured for him to stop. “Wait, wait. I don’t follow. This one is our destination, and that one is a terrain map recorded by your family’s elders. They’re highly similar… are you saying your He Clan went to this place back in the last century?”

“No, no, no. My family never went there.” He Yu waved his hands repeatedly, then asked, “Do you know that Liu Sanshui eventually went missing at sea?”

My heart skipped a beat.

“When Liu Sanshui disappeared, it caused a massive stir in the industry. Almost every shop connected to the Liu Family was affected. So, at the time, many people spontaneously organized fleets to search for him at sea. One of my ancestors was on one of those search-and-rescue ships. This map is what he drew from memory after he returned,” He Yu explained.

I thought about it for a moment, then took the location map Fourth Brother had given us from He Yu. I could see that the map only outlined a general area, but in reality, sending ships to search it would take more than three days and three nights without ever covering it all.

“No matter how many fleets went out to search, they all returned empty-handed. According to my ancestor’s records, the biggest problem was that they couldn’t find even a trace of the tomb during those searches. The area was simply too vast, and without pinpointing the location, they couldn’t go into the water,” He Yu said.

I did the math in my head. If that was the case, the area where Liu Sanshui disappeared years ago mysteriously coincided with our current destination. I remembered he had suddenly proposed going to sea back then to find the legendary “Immortal Palace,” but that trip had been different from his usual ones.

On that occasion, he didn’t act as the Chopstick Head (tomb raider slang for the person who organizes a raid; Chopstick Heads usually hold a very high status in the industry, a position someone like me isn’t cut out for). Instead, he had set out entirely on his own.

Liu Sanshui was a seasoned tomb raider with a sharp eye who hit the mark every time. Looking at it this way, a tomb really did exist beneath these waters, and it had to be of considerable scale for Liu Sanshui to call it an “Immortal Palace.”

At the same time, another thought occurred to me. I offered He Yu a smile. “If the rumors are true and Liu Sanshui really did meet his end inside the tomb, then logically, we should be able to find his body.”