On the 14th day of the seventh lunar month, the paper-cutting shops in Chinatown were three times busier than usual for the Yulan Bon Festival. When Tang Ren was carrying a paper horse through the archway, the horse's head was suddenly hit by a falling lantern. He ripped open the torn lantern paper with a swear, and his pupils suddenly shrank - half a scaly human skin was wrapped around the bamboo frame.
"This, this is the work of a tattooist!" I took the fragment and looked at it carefully. There were Thai numbers hidden in the faded tattoo pattern. Qin Fengjing squatted at the fall point and wiped the moss on the eaves with his fingertips: "It rained three or three days ago, but there are fresh scratches on the tiles."
Following the water marks, they came to a Buddhist shop at the end of the alley, where the owner was adding the finishing touches to the Buddha statue with a cinnabar pen. Tang Ren pretended to select candles, and suddenly pointed to the corner of the wall: "There is gold foil in the paper ash!" Qin Feng used tweezers to move the ash away and found the remains of the burnt contract, which read "Warehouse No. 17, Chao Phraya River".
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A rusty cargo ship lay in the bay, with a few datura plants sticking out from the seams of the deck. Tang Ren took the oar and poked open the cabin door. The musty smell was mixed with a strange sandalwood. Thirteen pottery urns with talismans were neatly arranged, and the wax seals on the urns were the emblems of different temples.
"Look at the bottom of the jar!" Qin Feng wiped the mud with his sleeve, revealing the dragon pattern from the Jiaozhi period. I took out a magnifying glass and looked closely. There was a very small era name of the Jincheng Dynasty engraved on the position of the dragon claws. Tang Ren suddenly screamed strangely, and a Buddha head rolled out of the jar he kicked over, with a piece of blood-stained jade inlaid on the lid.
The river suddenly became foggy, and the old boatman's sampan approached like a ghost: "This boat carried a batch of Buddhist scriptures from Chiang Mai thirty years ago..."
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In the wild temple at the foot of Suthep Mountain, Tang Ren took photos of the incomplete statue of Luang Phor. Qin Feng used mineral water to wash the base of the Buddha statue, and the water flowed on the stone slab to form a hexagram with an arrow. I followed the direction and opened the cushion, and the secret compartment under it was filled with faded black and white photos - each one was a group photo of Q organization members from different generations in front of the temple.
"This, this monk who sweeps the water!" Qin Feng pointed to a photo from 1978. In the corner of the picture, the old monk has six fingers on his right hand. When we found the temple vegetable garden, the six-fingered monk was digging watermelons. The tattoo on his wrist was exactly the same as the lantern man's skin.
Tang Ren pretended to help with the hoeing, but the hoe suddenly got stuck. When he dug up the soil, he found a metal box covered with talisman paper, which contained half a copy of the Lanna Pharmacopoeia, with Morse code mixed in the margin comments.
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Tracing the formula recorded in the pharmacopoeia, deep in the rainforest, the spider webs hanging between the vines were stained with gold powder. Qin Feng used a dagger to cut open the branches blocking the road, and the milky white sap that oozed from the bark turned blue when it came into contact with the air - it was the raw material of the hallucinogen detected on the Obon lantern.
As the wild elephants screamed and startled the birds, we found the abandoned poppy processing plant. Tang Ren kicked open the rotten wooden door. Under the rusted distiller was the yellowed contract, and the buyer's signature was stamped with a wax seal with the letter Q. Qin Feng suddenly pulled me back, and the moonlight illuminated the steel wire rope at the door frame - the end was connected to thirteen bamboo tubes with poison arrows.
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When we returned to Chinatown, the body of the six-fingered monk was hanging under the archway. The autopsy revealed an ivory miniature carved with a canal map from the Khmer period in his stomach. We dug along the ancient river channel and the shovel hit a hard object - a three-meter-long teak coffin was buried there, lined with gold thread brocade used exclusively by the Siamese royal family.
"This, this is a soul-transferring coffin!" The archaeologist who came over trembled, "In ancient times, the monks used it..." Tang Ren suddenly opened the brocade, and a copper box popped out from the secret compartment on the bottom plate, with a carved chessboard inside. When I put the jade Buddha head obtained in Chiang Mai on the chess eye, the longitude and latitude appeared on the chessboard - pointing to a Hakka walled house in Penang.
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In the Nanyang-style arcade, a 90-year-old Teochew grandma was cutting lanterns. She glanced at the chessboard in our hands, and her cloudy eyes suddenly cleared up: "Finally, I'm here." Her trembling fingertips crossed the shrine, and a bronze mechanism box appeared behind the ancestral tablet.
Tang Ren rotated the compass on the box according to his birth date, and the portraits of 13 generations of box keepers unfolded one by one. The last one was actually a young Tang Ren's father, and the Q-shaped lantern in the background was hanging high above the Bangkok Pier. The sea breeze blew through the hall, and the Chaozhou songbook behind the portraits turned pages. In the yellowed lyrics of "Guo Fan Song", all the Qs were changed to "Cheng" by cinnabar.
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