Chapter 371: Qionglong Stone Shadow: The Old Archive

The iron chain was broken, covered in a layer of old rust, and the links were full of cobwebs; it clearly hadn't happened recently.

"Hey!" Du Juanshan was also surprised. "What's going on here?"

"Nothing, it just means you were wrong—someone's been inside." I said, shining my flashlight through the bars of the iron door down the stairs. There was clutter on the steps, not to mention dust, and a stale old smell wafted up.

"You're not thinking of going down, are you? It's filthy in there!" he said.

I was also hesitating whether it was necessary to go down. It seemed completely unrelated to why I'd come here. There could be a million reasons the chain was broken—maybe it had never even been locked in the first place. But even if the reason were incredibly bizarre, what did it have to do with me? Thinking it over, I gave up.

Just as I was about to leave, by reflex I swung the flashlight beam and it landed on the seal strip next to the door.

Maybe it was a side effect of doing rubbings—I always took a look whenever I saw brush calligraphy. Or maybe it was the odd position of the seal strip, too low and a bit conspicuous. In any case, I glanced at it unconsciously.

When I looked, I froze. The old seal strip was firmly affixed to the door, unbroken.

"Strange. Look," I said to Du Juanshan. "It seems this seal strip was put on later."

He leaned in to look and also found it odd. "Maybe the institute discovered the iron chain had been cut, so they put the seal strip on."

"That's even stranger. Why didn't they just put on a new chain and lock it? What good is a seal strip?" I said, shining the light on the characters on the strip. "Someone who cut through the chain would be afraid of a seal strip?"

"There's nothing valuable in there. Maybe they thought what's inside isn't even worth the cost of a new chain."

"Makes sense." I found it a little amusing. Owning something doesn't mean you own its value. These old archives aren't just worthless to people today—they'd cost a lot to process. That's why they're still lying here.

The characters on the seal strip read: "Sealed July 6, 1990, XX University Institute of Archaeology." I do rubbings, so I have a good instinct for handwriting. Those brush characters were well written—the calligraphy was definitely imitating a fairly common calligrapher, and it looked very familiar.

Going by the date, the seal strip must have been applied in 1990. By then Wenjin had already disappeared, so this shouldn't have anything to do with them.

I sighed to myself. Well, that's it. Hope completely dashed. Time to go back and start over. So I told Du Juanshan to lead the way out. He didn't want to stay there long either—it wasn't exactly a pleasant place. He looked relieved when I said we were leaving.

We went back the same way without any trouble. The civilized world was a lot more relaxed than ancient tombs—I wasn't nervous at all. Even if someone saw us, so what? A hundred guards couldn't be as fierce as a zombie!

Back at the hotel, I felt uneasy. This had really narrowed my options. If even the archives yielded no clues, what else could I look into? It struck me as odd—why wouldn't there be any archives? Could Du Juanshan be right? It wasn't very likely. If the Xisha incident really happened, the records had to be there. Those files couldn't fit in a single bag; if they'd been destroyed, half a shelf of archives would have been emptied. But all the files were packed in tightly—it didn't look like any had been removed.

I realized I might have been wrong from the start. The archaeology team had students, but that didn't necessarily mean they were connected to the university. Those students might have been interns who already had jobs. If so, the institute Wenjin belonged to might not be this one.

That thought made me feel a lot better. I turned the computer back on and began looking up information on other merged institutes, copying everything down, planning to ask around again tomorrow. Anyway, I had plenty of time. Better to check them one by one than leave any regrets.

After I finished copying, I lay on the bed and filtered through the information in my mind, deciding on the next steps. Some of these units were strict, some loose—I'd have to start with the easiest.

Staring at the notes I'd copied, I suddenly felt uneasy, as if something about the notebook was bothering me. But when I tried to pin it down, I couldn't.

Could this be an obsessive-compulsive episode?

I laughed, then suddenly stiffened. The seal strip flashed through my mind. Institute, institute, institute... XX University Institute of Archaeology...