The plum rain was falling heavily on Pingjiang Road. Tang Ren squatted under the eaves of "Moyanzhai" and ate crab shell yellow biscuits. The body of the ancient book restorer Lao Xu fell from the second floor. The remaining pages of "Wu Men Hua Fang Lu" in his hand were scattered like dead leaves, mixed with brain matter and stuck to the bluestone slab.
"There's something wrong with this page." Qin Feng used tweezers to pick up half a piece of yellowed paper. The broken part revealed fine gold thread patterns, which was definitely not the craftsmanship of Qing Dynasty paper. Su Chen squatted beside the pool of blood and suddenly pointed at the corpse's hand: "There are burn marks on the palm of the hand, as if it was..."
"It was burned by hot wax!" Tang Ren suddenly interrupted, "When I was a kid, I worked as a handyman in a picture framing shop, and my teacher said that beeswax should be used to repair worm holes." He picked up a piece of broken porcelain, the glaze color of which was exactly the same as the celadon powder in the nail crevices of the deceased.
A figure wearing a bamboo hat flashed by in the rain, and Tang Ren chased him to the alley entrance and found only a bamboo tube. On the bottom of the tube was a half-painted painting of a lady, and the round fan in the beauty's hand contained a seven-character quatrain: "The shadow of Tiger Hill Pagoda is broken, and the fragrance of the lotus in Humble Administration is withered."
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In the camphorwood fragrance of "Jigu Pavilion", Qin Feng stared at the neatly arranged bronze movable type molds. The owner, Mr. Lu, handed over the tea with a trembling hand: "Lao Xu came to borrow a batch of Kangxi bronze movable type last month, saying that he was restoring "Suzhou Flower Painting"."
Tang Ren suddenly knocked over the teacup, and the brown tea spread a strange purple-blue color on the rice paper. "There's something in the tea!" Su Chen snatched the teapot, and there were a few undissolved indigo particles at the bottom of the pot. "This is wormwood salt used to prevent ancient books from being infested with moths. Excessive intake can cause cancer."
Suddenly, there was a sound of something heavy falling to the ground in the backyard. When everyone rushed in, they saw the printing press drum was covered in blood and flesh, and a male corpse was rolled into a weird twist shape - it was Mr. Lu's apprentice Ah Chang. Between his stiff fingers, he tightly grasped a movable type of the word "繁" stained with ink.
"The weight of this block of type is wrong." Qin Feng weighed the copper movable type and pried open the bottom with a carving knife - half a land deed was stuffed in the empty space, stamped with the official seal of Suzhou Cultural Relics Bureau in 1953.
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The night cruise ship swayed across Shantang River. Tang Ren pointed to the abandoned shipyard on the shore and said, "Look! Is that a pleasure boat under the broken sail?" When the three of them sneaked in in the dark, the rotten deck suddenly collapsed. Qin Feng felt for a hard object in the mud - a fragment of gilded ship's side, engraved with the Manchu characters "Gift from Emperor Qianlong".
Su Chen wiped the boat's pillar with a handkerchief, revealing dense carvings where the vermilion paint had peeled off: "These are page number marks from an ancient book. Someone carved the book numbers on the boat." Tang Ren held up a lighter and shone it toward the top of the cabin. The faded "Ladies Playing Cuju" suddenly glowed - a miniature route map was hidden under the beauty's skirt.
"It's the secret passage of Huqiu Sword Pond!" The old boatman's voice echoed behind him, the harpoon in his hand gleaming coldly, "You shouldn't touch the Lu family's things..."
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Deep in the stele corridor of "Ting Feng Yuan", Tang Ren's sneeze shook off the wall. Qin Feng found a wall behind the peeling lime layer, and hundreds of blue and white porcelain bottles were neatly stacked inside. Su Chen pulled out the cork, and the pungent smell of pine smoke and ink mixed with the scent of bitter almonds.
"There is a number on the bottom of the bottle!" Qin Feng turned the porcelain bottle, "January of the Bingshen year... This is the ink tablet from 1956!" Tang Ren suddenly convulsed and fell to the ground, the ink block in his hand emitting green smoke in the wet air - it was actually white phosphorus ink that would burn when it came into contact with water.
There were noisy footsteps outside the garden, and Mr. Lu appeared with a torch in hand: "Old Xu discovered the secret of the Lu family, and you are following in his footsteps!" The firelight illuminated the inscriptions on the stele. The inscriptions praising the ancestors of the Lu family had tiny copper movable type embedded in the gaps between the characters, spelling out the evidence of "privately selling national treasures."
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In the police evidence room, Su Chen arranged the copper movable type into a poem. When "Shadow of Tiger Hill Pagoda" was fully presented, the raised patterns on the back of the movable type suddenly spelled out a map of Suzhou. Tang Ren blew on the characters, and the ink that appeared pointed to the Sutra Library of Hanshan Temple.
"This is not an ordinary map," Qin Feng looked through a magnifying glass, "The contour lines are marked with the page numbers of the Diamond Sutra!" In the darkness of the sudden power outage, the sound of paper tearing came from the evidence cabinet. When the emergency light came on, the key "broken" movable type disappeared, and half an ink-stained shoe print was left on the windowsill - a thousand-layer sole shoe with a blue print on the forefoot.
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The night bell of Hanshan Temple startled the crows, and Tang Ren climbed into the Sutra Pavilion on the statue of Veda. Qin Feng's flashlight swept across the high Sutra cabinet and suddenly stopped at a certain place - the color of the cover of Tang Ren's "Lotus Sutra" was half a degree darker than the adjacent sutra volume.
"The envelope is a replica from the Republic of China!" Su Chen pulled out the sutra, and a yellowed share certificate fell out from the interlayer. The Lu family's ancestor actually mortgaged the land around Hanshan Temple to a Japanese trading company in 1923, and the collateral was the Wu Wang Sword under the Tiger Hill Pagoda.
Tang Ren suddenly knocked over the candlestick, and the flames followed the prayer flags up to the beams. A dark figure rushed out from the thick smoke, holding a gilded wooden box. When Qin Feng rushed to grab it, the wooden box cracked - inside was a bronze movable type plate that had been sawed in half, engraved with the Japanese Showa era.
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In the ancestral hall of the Lu family's old house, Qin Feng smashed the movable type onto the blue brick floor. From the cracks came thick black pine smoke, mixed with scraps of newsprint from a few years ago - before the Japanese army withdrew from Suzhou in 1945, they had secretly transferred a batch of ancient book bronze molds.
"The ancestors of the Lu family were traitors!" Su Chen unfolded the moldy account book, "They transformed the bronze molds of ancient books into cipher versions to help the Japanese army..." The beams suddenly broke, and Mr. Lu fell into the ink pool holding the ancestral tablet: "The three people of the Lu family kept this secret, what do you rely on..."
Tang Ren took out an iron box from the ancestral crypt. On the faded marriage certificate was written: "1953 Xu-Lu marriage". When Old Xu was young, he was actually the son-in-law of the Lu family! Qin Feng suddenly realized: "Old Xu discovered the secret of the Lu family and wanted to expose it, but was silenced."
In the morning light, the rescued bronze mold glowed green in the sunlight. Tang Ren suddenly pointed at the mold surface and said, "This is not a word, it's a map!" Under the microscope, the micro-carved route is hidden in the grooves of the strokes - pointing directly to the coordinates of the sunken ship in the depths of Taihu Lake.