S.C.I Mystery Series Volume 3 Chapter 76

Lucky Murderer 06 - Boss Lian

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The interrogation of the three tigers of the Xu family resulted in more and more mysteries. The crowd went back to the archaeological team to inquire and find the team's records... but strangely enough, the drawing on the page of the record about how many stone statues were actually in the pit had disappeared and it was obvious that it had been torn out by someone.

"The jagged edges on the paper indicate the person's panic when they tore out this page." Zhan Zhao looked at the books that had been used for recording, and all of them had relevant pages torn out.

"It must have been done by one of their own." Bai Yutang asked the leader of the archaeological team, "Who was responsible for these records?"

The leader wiped his sweat and shook his head, "I was responsible for all of them, I would have placed them in a box… However, such things are really useless apart from their archaeological value, and have never been coveted... How could this happen?!"

"You can't think of anyone suspicious?" Zhan Zhao knew the team leader, the old man's surname was Wu, and he was a well-known old professor in the archaeological world.

Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang put the items into the evidence bag and went back to get fingerprints, hoping to extract a range, but according to the clues provided by Team Leader Wu, almost the entire archaeological team had looked through these records.

Zhan Zhao walked through the tomb again and really didn't find anything suspicious, so he asked Team Leader Wu, "Is there anything of particular value here?"

Team Leader Wu raised his hand and pointed to the circular caves above him, asking, "Do you see those two caves?"

Zhan Zhao nodded, "I see them."

"Those are all robber holes. This tomb is almost a thousand years old. Those tomb robbers, ah, are very powerful, what should have been taken has been taken long ago, what would be left until today? We only found some broken porcelain and jars, there is nothing left of the gold, silver, and jade."

Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang nodded, and Zhan Zhao was still searching for clues inside the tomb.

At this time, the team leader suddenly said, "That's right…"

Bai Yutang and Zhan Zhao both looked at him, "What's wrong?"

"Well, we have dug up something very special, though I don't know if it will help the case, it was supposed to be kept secret…"

"You can bring it to us, the police won't leak it to the outside world." Bai Yutang knew it was probably something involving a historical discovery, and for those engaged in history, this aspect has always been very strict.

"Okay." The team leader ran out and returned shortly afterwards, carrying a small box.

Bai Yutang and Zhan Zhao looked at each other, staring at the box in confusion.

“Take a look." The team leader opened the box, and they saw that there was a paper packet inside, which they opened carefully.

The contents inside made Zhan Zhan and Bai Yutang dumbfounded.

“This is… a bullet?" Zhan Zhan and Bai Yutang looked at each other blankly and looked at the team leader, "You dug this out of the ancient tomb?"

"That's right!" The team leader lowered his voice and said, "And it was dug out from the coffin."

Zhan Zhao's eyes widened, while Bai Yutang picked up the bullet and looked at it, "An old, German-made bullet, used during the Second Sino Japanese War. Could it be that the tomb robbers fired a gun here and the bullet fell into the coffin?"

"We guessed so too, but look at the bullet!" The team leader told Bai Yutang and Zhan Zhao to look closely.

The two of them looked carefully under the light and saw a lotus flower engraved on the bullet.

"A lotus flower?" Zhan Zhao found it interesting and took the bullet to look at it carefully, "It's quite pretty."

"You may not have heard of this!" The team leader laughed, "At the time of the war, there was a very famous tomb raider called Boss Lian, he used this lotus flower as a mark, look at the base of the bullet."

Bai Yutang turned the bullet upside down and looked at the bottom, and saw that the word 'Lian' was also engraved.

"Oh..." Zhan Zhao smiled, "this is worth a lot of money!"

"Dr. Zhan, it's worth a lot of money, but I can't talk about this bullet." The team leader put the bullet away and told Bai Yutang and Zhan Zhao, "But that Boss Lian, ah, is a character and a legend of sorts. It is said that this Boss Lian was born as a boat runner, loved lotus flowers, and was born in the late Qing Dynasty. When he was a teenager, he went out to sea in a storm and came back crippled, and since then, he stopped fishing and raised lotus flowers for the dignitaries."

"Raising lotus flowers?" Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang found it interesting that there was still such an elegant profession.

"In ancient times, it was similar to the gardeners nowadays. Think about it, a rich man's family would have to have several people to pick bird's nests, not to mention serving a courtyard of flowers and plants. Can't a flower be matched with a gardener?"

Everyone in SCI found it interesting and gathered around to hear what the team leader had to say.

"The person that this Boss Lian was serving was the weaver of this area, that's a rich job!"

Bai Chi nodded, “En, not to mention Mother Jia in ‘A Dream of Red Mansions', are they based on the sister of Li Xu, a Suzhou weaver during the Kangxi period?!"

"Heh, the quality of the police is really high nowadays!" The team leader laughed, "Boss Lian was quite secure as a gardener, but he never thought that the Xinhai Revolution would overthrow the Qing Dynasty. The official fled with his family and before leaving, he hid a box at the bottom of the lotus pond for Boss Lian to find. Boss Lian quietly slipped back to the lotus pond and took the box out, and saw that it was a box made of ebony."

"When he took the box home, he thought he had made a fortune, perhaps it was some kind of treasure, but when he opened it, it was all diagrams!"

“Diagrams?" The crowd wondered what diagrams were so precious. Tang Yin's paintings? Wang Xizhi's writing?

"Heh heh." The team leader, who had been a lecturer at the university, told the crowd mysteriously, "In that diagram, there were the locations of the tombs of the most important officials and noblemen throughout the dynasties!"

Zhan Zhao and the others all opened their mouths wide – Oh my!

"It is said that the weaver, who was good at history, liked to read books and so on. In other words, he was an archaeological enthusiast of the time!" The team leader was talking enthusiastically and the crowd was listening with interest. Zhao Hu asked, "This old man must have used his knowledge and the convenience of his status at the time to collect all this!"

"Not bad!" The team leader nodded, "I won't hide it from you all, this is a great treasure!"

"That's true." The crowd all felt it was justified.

"Boss Lian was uneducated, so how would he know this? At first he was disappointed and threw this under his bed but didn't throw it away. It wasn't until a few years later when he occasionally heard someone say that there were riches in some ancient tomb and he looked at some of the tomb raiding maps of the time that he suddenly remembered!" The team leader shook his head, "At that time, he was a cripple and no one even wanted him to pull a rickshaw, so he took the risk, got a torch and an axe, found the nearest ancient tomb and did his first robbery!"

As the crowd listened, they all felt that this man was bold.

"Ancient tombs are not as exaggerated as human novels, which are full of a lot of ancient corpses and monsters." The leader laughed, "As long as you are careful with the mechanisms, the corpse poison, and the turbid air, and you are bold, you will be fine! The courageous and the cowardly starve to death, Boss Lian is really rich! Afterwards, when he got rich, he lived in a small house, drove a small foreign-style car, started a cabaret business, started a tobacco business, and became very rich!” (Angel: The courageous and the cowardly starve to death, 撑死胆大的，饿死胆小的, is a proverb that means that those who dare to take risks can reap many benefits; those who are timid and cautious, who dare not deviate from the track, often get no benefits.)

Everyone nodded their heads.

"But he didn't get to enjoy his fortune for more than a few years when the devils came in during the July 7th Incident!" The team leader shook his head, "Boss Lian was a man of blood, he sold all his family's wealth and brought a group of brothers to buy guns and cannons to fight the devils. But the money ran out quickly! And then he remembered his pile of diagrams!"

"Oh..." The crowd understood. Bai Yutang thought for a moment, "He didn't go back to robbing tombs after his first success, huh?"

"No!" The team leader said, "Back then, people were not as greedy as capitalists are these days, and they were all concerned about the fact that unjust money is unjust trouble. You can't be greedy for ill-gotten gains, it will end up being a disaster for your children and grandchildren."

"What happened after that? Did he go back to his old job to fight against Japan?" Zhan Zhao asked.

"No, he set up the Lotus Gang, specialising in grave robbing, and all the treasures he stole were used to buy equipment for the Anti-Japanese Allied Forces."

"Ho," Zhao Hu thought the man was quite impressive, “an anti-Japanese hero!"

"However, this ancestral treasure had been dug up." The team leader whispered, "There are many kinds of tombs, the closer they are, the better they are to dig! Just like old tombs from the Ming and Qing dynasties that are easy to dig, the bigger tombs that are a thousand years old are risky!"

"What happened to him?" Zhan Zhao asked.

"It's said that he dug up all the graves on the diagrams within five hundred years, but unfortunately the devils hadn't been driven out yet. Moreover, at first it was time to buy guns, then it was time to buy artillery, and then it was time to buy planes, so there wasn't enough money! Boss Lian then hit on the idea of the thousand-year-old tomb.”

The crowd frowned. Although they said they had dug up the ancestral graves, they were not seeking wealth for themselves, and this Boss Lian was quite respectable.

"After that, there was no more news from Boss Lian." The team leader shook his head, "There are many folk legends, some say that he was killed by the puppet army, others say that he was caught in a trap inside a thousand-year-old tomb, and the more outrageous one is that he was eaten by the old ancient corpses."

The crowd laughed.

"That's right!" The team leader nodded, "Although this gang is one of bandits, most of them are righteous. They don't kill the people, and when they sometimes encounter devils in a fight, they are afraid that they will retaliate against the common people, so as the saying goes, one person does things and one person is responsible, so they engrave their names on the bullets."

"Could he have died here?" Zhan Zhao asked.

"Actually, this is what I would like you guys not to reveal." The team leader pointed to the back, "This is a secondary chamber, and there is a main chamber at the back, a large chamber!"

"What does that mean?" None of the crowd could quite relate to the shape. 

"Oh... let's put it this way, this tomb, it's similar to a zigzag shape, the top one with a particularly large entrance is the main chamber, the two smaller ones at the bottom are the auxiliary chambers, and we're now inside that small one! So we don't know who the owner of the tomb is yet."

The crowd looked at each other, and Zhan Zhao asked the team leader, "So... this tomb is considered a thousand-year-old tomb, right?"

"Of course it counts, it's from the Northern Song Dynasty, a proper thousand year old tomb."

Zhan Zhao pulled Bai Yutang aside and asked in a low voice, "Yutang, guess, what if Boss Lian died in this tomb?"

"Then the body is most likely in the main chamber, and he may also have the diagram on him..." Bai Yutang and Zhan Zhao looked at each other – The diagram had a lot of unopened tombs from years ago! That's a billion dollar fortune, isn't it? This is indeed worth a lot more than a $10 million lottery ticket!

‿︵‿︵ʚ˚̣̣̣͙ɞ・❉・ ʚ˚̣̣̣͙ɞ‿︵‿︵

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Translator Notes

Please feel free to comment any mistakes I made so I can improve and do better as I go through the book.

Translated: April 4, 2022 by Angel