Chapter 494: Clue in Despair

In the following days, I spent my time in a daze, only able to return to this world when some unexpected event occurred. Most of the rest of the time, I was either lying down or sitting. In my mind, I replayed past events over and over. I no longer thought about the details of everything; I just ran them like a movie in my head.

But I felt no emotion.

Despair is the greatest emotion; it can devour everything. At one point I even realized that I no longer had much attachment to life. Either let me know everything behind all this, or let me die on the road to understanding it all.

This is the retribution I deserve. Because of my obsession, I have already caused the deaths of many people. If I don't die, then this world is truly too unfair.

When I thought about these things, my mood was particularly calm, without any of my previous anxiety. I felt that even if I finally learned all the keys behind everything, I wouldn't feel relieved.

From now on, I would never again have that intense desire; no unknown could move me. But then, just a few days later, I realized I was wrong. It seemed that the development of this matter would never be within my expectations.

A few days later, I received a very unexpected piece of news: Jude Kao's company had begun asset restructuring.

Obviously, due to the deterioration of the health of the primary shareholder, Jude Kao, his control over many aspects of his company began to weaken, and other shareholders became active. The struggle among the hidden shareholders grew increasingly fierce. Many people became victims of this struggle, including some senior members of Jude Kao's core team.

These senior members had good personal relationships with me and Fatty during the time at Cloud Summit Palace. Although we were not in close contact, sometimes I would still consult them on many questions, and they would privately give me advice.

After the company fell into chaos, many of these senior members began to resign, and among them, several started sending me files that were originally confidential to the company.

These files were top secret when Jude Kao was in power, but once Jude Kao fell, these things became worthless—nobody believed the information in the files. The files were separated and destroyed.

Those people said that since the company no longer valued them, rather than destroy them, it was better to let me, someone who needed them, have a look to see if there was any useful information.

The sheer volume of files was astonishing. Obviously, although these people were kind-hearted, they weren't kind enough to sort them for me. The several file packs added up to at least several hundred gigabytes, all image files scanned with a scanner.

I brewed some black tea and, starting with the first file pack, finished reading all these files within two days.

The content of the files was quite rich. Although not every file was valuable, the valuable parts were quite valuable, and the parts that were not valuable also had suspicious aspects.

I organized all these files into three categories: one category for valuable files, one for files with doubts, and one for worthless files.

What made me suddenly realize the truth was one of the summary documents about the Xisha archaeology. The main purpose of this document was to request funds from the board of directors. Such a document had to explain to the board why carrying out the Xisha project was necessary and what its potential value was.

The core part of this document was divided into two sections. One section explained why: Jude Kao believed that the probability of ancient tombs beneath Xisha was quite high, with a large amount of folklore and historical records. These materials alone amounted to several hundred megabytes, many being photos of ancient texts. However, the decisive evidence was not this. The decisive evidence was an "internal document."

This internal document was very peculiar; it was a red-head document, a death report of an archaeological team member bought at a very high price.

After careful scrutiny, I realized that this deceased person was the first to enter the Xisha ancient tomb, and it was he who brought out the first batch of data. Then, an informant within the company brought this news to Jude Kao—at the time, the situation should have been that on the dark sea, Jude Kao's boat impersonated the organization's boat and intercepted the data.

Afterward, Jude Kao handed this data to Xie Lianhuan, which led to Third Uncle's Xisha incident. So then, a thing I had always found strange—how Jude Kao obtained the internal data from Xisha—now had an explanation.

It seemed that the organization's habit was: first send their own people into the ancient tomb to explore, to see if they could obtain first-hand data. If not, they would submit all the data to the archaeological team and let them conduct a second exploration.

Another especially important piece of information was that when Third Uncle deceived Jude Kao into providing money and effort back then, he used a token, and that token was the "iron block."

This thing was the iron block from the boxes brought out of Banai during the Banai incident. Third Uncle used this iron block to prove that he had all the data from Banai at that time, and thus exchanged it for the resources for his trip to Xisha. I still don't know how Third Uncle obtained that kind of iron block, but obviously he did. There must be steps behind this that I don't know about. And the file that puzzled me the most, I need to focus on. This file had only one title: "Investigation of Topographical Features near Wu Sansheng's Residence."

There was no specific content in the file. On the cover of this file, there was English text saying "Not Approved."

The proposer of this file was actually A Ning. It took me a long time to recognize A Ning's English.

A Ning proposed to investigate the topographical features near where my Third Uncle lived. Why? Could there be ancient tombs near my Third Uncle's house? The A Ning I remembered was a very reliable and dedicated woman. She wouldn't make a meaningless proposal; her proposal must have had a purpose.

I checked the date; it should have been before our first underground expedition. Obviously, Jude Kao's company had already started monitoring my Third Uncle long ago.

However, in a professional corporate system abroad, funding and the board of directors always dominate. This proposal was apparently not implemented.

I leaned back in my chair, smoking and thinking, but had no clue at all. I went up to the roof of Third Uncle's shop and looked around.

Third Uncle's shop was in an area densely packed with peasant houses, surrounded by all kinds of peasant houses, many quite old. In a place like this, what topography could there be? You couldn't even see the ground.

If I could see the file, I might be able to guess what it meant. Unfortunately, now I could only guess without direction. I came up with a rough reason for myself: maybe A Ning thought there might be ancient tombs around Third Uncle's shop. Many tomb raiders choose a place, appearing to want to run a small business, but actually use it as cover to dig long tunnels underground to rob tombs. Moreover, a madman like Third Uncle, if the treasure underground was valuable enough, his plan to dig tunnels might last for years.

Besides this, the files contained a large amount of information that could supplement many of my previous pieces of information. After I read them, many vague ideas became certain, but those were not very meaningful.

There was still a lot of information in them, but the English was too difficult; I couldn't understand much. I packaged all of them and sent them to my friends who were good at English, asking them to translate for me before I could carefully examine them. All the operations were done on my laptop, but there were too many documents; it was hard to operate smoothly on a single screen.

Only then did I remember that Third Uncle had a computer here. I turned on the computer, copied the files over with a USB drive, and performed comparison operations.

During this operation, I discovered a very strange phenomenon: on two different computers, many documents showed different details. I opened the document about A Ning that I had just looked at. On Third Uncle's computer, there was actually one more page than before. Previously there was only a cover page, but on Third Uncle's computer, there was an additional title page.

I found it strange and opened it. I saw that this title page was an explanatory page, saying that the system version was too old to display all pages. Could it be that there were hidden things in these files? I suddenly had a jolt, thinking that many encrypted files could only display all their pages on specific machines. On other machines, only the pages that the other party wanted you to see would be displayed; the real core information would not show.

I thought to myself, it seems I need to find an expert to handle this; I am definitely powerless. I turned off the power, went over it in my mind several times, and realized that I really didn't know many people in Hangzhou who understood computers. I did have friends in the Jinan area, former college classmates, but it seemed too much to call him over specially. I would find a few reliable people in Hangzhou when I had time.