Chapter 84: Han Jian’s Request

Han Jian settled He Yu into the inner room to rest, and the two of us sat in silence on the living room couch. He brewed me a cup of tea with a few leaves, and then we just sat staring at each other.

I really didn’t feel like talking, nor did I know what to say. The minor clash with Lu Ayao had already sunk my mood to rock bottom. I couldn’t understand how Han Jian and Lu Ayao had run into each other, and judging by the look of things, the two of them were definitely plotting something.

Tracing it back, the two of them had first met in Fourth Brother’s shop. At the time, Han Jian was still full of suspicion toward Lu Ayao. I couldn’t quite understand how they could decide to team up so quickly.

As for the Lu Clan, I had a vague, unexplainable sense of trust in them, whether because of the friendship between my grandfather and Lu Xiaosu back then or my own personal reasons. That was why I had refused to pledge the jade to Qiao Sangui no matter what. But looking at it from their side, it seemed the Lus didn’t treat me like a friend.

In this journey of competing factions, I could tell that Lu Ayao had always had a goal. He had never let anything stop him from pursuing it, nor had he ever revealed his goal to anyone out of personal feelings.

Fourth Brother was searching for something, and so was Lu Ayao, but I had a vague feeling that they weren’t looking for the same thing. The reason was that Fourth Brother had taken the initiative throughout the entire ordeal, while Lu Ayao remained reactive.

We sat in silence until the sun was almost setting. Finally, Han Jian let out a sigh, stood up, and pulled two maps out from between the couch cushions. He swept everything off the table and spread the maps out for me to see.

I glanced over them. Han Jian had brought out two maps in total. The first was a standard color-annotated map of the Nu River Grand Canyon tributary basin in Yunnan Province. The second was slightly different, printed a bit unclearly, but clearly scanned and copied from a hand-drawn map depicting a specific tributary section of the Nu River.

“What’s this?” I crossed my arms and leaned back on the couch, taking the Luan Bi from my neck and slapping it onto the two maps. “Aren’t you guys all about secrecy? Rest assured, you don’t need to say a word or reveal anything. As soon as He Yu recovers from his injuries, we’re out of here.”

“Hey, come on. He Yu’s injured right now. You can’t drag him around asking questions, can you? That’d be too much of a hassle,” Han Jian said as he topped off my tea.

Han Jian’s behavior felt completely off. The fact that he hadn’t immediately called my mom to tattle on me was already suspicious enough, and now he was actively showing me maps, proving he intended to involve me in their upcoming operation.

So I probed a little. “Does your brother know you’re here? Wait, aren’t you supposed to be job-hunting in Henan right now? Don’t tell me he doesn’t know you came to Yunnan. Did you sneak out too?”

The moment I said that, the expression on Han Jian’s face stiffened. It lasted for only a split second, but I caught it clearly. This kid had snuck out in secret too. If his older brother in the antique business found out, wouldn’t he break his legs?

Han Jian coughed a couple of times and awkwardly changed the subject. “Well, I’ve been helping my brother manage one of his branch stores lately. I picked up a Republic-era rubbing manuscript tracing a waterway’s branches. I noticed something odd about it, so I wanted to come check it out in person.”

He swapped in the second picture. The original rubbing must have been small, very small in fact. Han Jian had probably gotten someone to make a copy and enlarge it to this size, but some of the details were still pretty blurry.

Examining rubbings wasn’t my area of expertise; this was something he should have asked He Yu about instead. The dense, branching waterways across the copied rubbing made my scalp tingle just looking at them.

So I said, “I can’t help you with this. Wait until He Yu wakes up and ask him to take a look.”

The moment the words left my mouth, I felt something was off. Who knew how long Han Jian had been camped out here? Judging by Lu Ayao’s condition, he had likely been staying here for quite some time as well. If it were just about a rubbing, Han Jian could have simply asked Lu Ayao.

Before long, Han Jian shook his head at me. “It’s not an issue with the rubbing. I discovered something else. When this rubbing first came into my hands, there were a lot of splatter marks on it. At first, I thought I’d made a bad deal and bought something in terrible condition.”

He pointed out some of the black dots scattered across the four-to size copy and continued, “But later, by chance, I made friends with someone from a line of fortune-tellers. He told me the arrangement of these black dots was very interesting, and that connecting them would form a picture.”

As Han Jian spoke, he pulled a sheet of blank A4 paper from his backpack on the table. He leaned over the living room table right then and there to draw based on the arrangement of the dots. He clearly had no background in drawing, as the lines were all crooked and uneven. Finally, he pushed the paper over to me.

“Doesn’t it look like a tower?” Han Jian asked me.

I picked up the paper, adjusted the copy on the table, and compared them briefly. I took fine arts in high school, so I was quite sensitive to shapes and colors. Without even needing Han Jian’s crooked drawing, I could tell at a glance that connecting the black dots on the copy in a certain way would form a collapsed tower.

The entire tower lay fallen right alongside the river, with many of the black dots scattered in the water. After looking at it for a moment, I asked, “Could it just be a coincidence? Because if you connected them a different way, it wouldn’t form a tower.”

“I thought the same as you at first,” Han Jian said. “So I decided to trace it back to its original source and ask the previous owner if he knew anything about this rubbing. But when I arrived at his house, nobody was there. Not only that, his family told me he’d been missing without a trace for a long time.”

I was no longer surprised by turns of events like this. I simply turned over the map and said, “So you think the previous owner’s disappearance has something to do with this item, and that’s why you came to Yunnan behind your brother’s back?”

“There’s probably some connection, though I can’t say for sure. But I reckon there’s definitely something fishy going on near the Nu River,” Han Jian said.

“This is an old house belonging to a friend of mine. Since nobody lives here, he let me stay in it. On my second day here, I bumped into that guy inside at the antique market. He was injured, had lost his ID, and didn’t know what he had come here for. He paid me room rent and asked to stay for a week.”

Han Jian pointed toward the closed door of the bedroom opposite us, then spread his hands to me.

“So don’t get the wrong idea. We’re not together in this. As for those rumors that suddenly started spreading out there, I don’t know much about them either, but it seems the whole industry already assumes he’s dead. The Lu Clan brings bad luck, so I don’t really want to talk to him much. I only spoke a couple of words to him today to save you guys.”

I was still fuming. Looking at him with eyes full of distrust, I waved my hand dismissively. “You don’t need to explain. He and I aren’t close. Give that piece of jade back to him later. I have no interest in whatever tower you’re talking about. As soon as He Yu wakes up, we’re leaving. Don’t worry, we won’t stay a minute longer.”

Han Jian quickly stepped forward to stop me. “No, you can’t leave!”

I started weighing things in my mind again. Truthfully, right from the moment Han Jian voluntarily showed me the diagram, I suspected his motives were impure. He must have uncovered something through the rubbings already. The fact that Lu Ayao arrived here at the exact same time as him suggested their destinations might be the same.

That was why they had teamed up on short notice. Han Jian mentioning that Lu Ayao was injured only proved the point. His physical condition wasn’t what it used to be, and going underground while injured meant he needed a partner so he wouldn’t end up dying down there without a sound.

But they had already been stuck here for a long time, which likely meant they had run into some tricky problem along the way that directly prevented them from reaching their destination.

Han Jian’s intention was obvious. Showing me the copy of the rubbings was his way of trying to rope me in. But Lu Ayao’s attitude earlier was just as clear. Either the two of them had never reached an agreement from the start, or one was playing good cop while the other played bad cop, teaming up to fool me.

“Gan Ji, I need your help,” Han Jian said, dropping all pretense and laying it out directly.

It seemed he was far more anxious than I was. Before I could even try to probe him for details, he couldn’t hold it in and blurted it out himself.