The moonlight of the Loy Krathong Festival was shining on the river. Tang Ren squatted on the stone steps, making a banana leaf boat. Suddenly, he grabbed my leg and said, "Look at that lotus lantern!" In the direction he pointed, the lotus lantern made of gold foil was going upstream, and the wick was emitting strange green flames. Qin Feng waded into the water and picked up the lantern. There was a piece of tattooed human skin stuck to the banana leaf base, and the pattern was the star Rahu swallowing the moon.
"This, this is the amulet of a sorcerer!" We heard the sound of something heavy falling into the water from the other side of the river. When we arrived in a long-tail boat, we only picked up a soaked silk Tang suit with a torn "Zheng He Navigation Map" painted in fish blood on the front.
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Following the shop mark on the lining of the clothes, he found the "Guangyuanlong" store with peeling wall. Tang Ren kicked open the rusty riveted door, and bats flew all over the house. Qin Feng wiped the dust off the counter and found a half-pawn ticket sandwiched between the accounts from the Guangxu period, and the collateral column read "23 Siamese crocodile skins".
"Here!" I knocked on the Qinglong bricks on the back wall and pried out a tin box from the empty space. The Chaozhou scallion biscuits in the box had gone moldy, but the sugar stains on the wrapping paper outlined a dotted pattern of a crocodile farm. Tang Ren licked the wrapper and suddenly gagged: "It smells like a corpse!"
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In the iron cage beside the breeding pond, the body of a Chinese businessman who had been missing for three days sat cross-legged, with his hands clasped together and forming a demon-subduing seal. Qin Feng discovered that the dead man's ear canal was plugged with crocodile tear crystals: "This, this is the ancient Siamese soul-locking technique!" Tang Ren used a bamboo pole to stir the water in the pond, and a crocodile bone plate engraved with scriptures floated up.
We searched the night watchman's shed and found betel nuts, with the chewed residue mixed with gold foil fragments. We followed the direction of the crocodiles' restlessness at night and found 23 wooden barrels with amulets in the abandoned crocodile skin processing factory. We pried open the seventh barrel and found a whole set of tattoo tools soaked in the smelly tanning agent. The needle residue was detected as cobra venom and Kumantong ashes.
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The pawn ticket stub pointed to the golden signboard of "Yongchang Pawn", but the shopkeeper claimed that he had never received crocodile skin. Tang Ren pretended to pawn a fake jade bracelet and took the opportunity to sneak into the warehouse. Qin Feng used a magnifying glass to observe the iron fence and found traces of new welding: "It was reinforced just this week!"
I touched the mechanism at the bottom of the incense burner, and the entire antique shelf moved horizontally to reveal the cellar. Twenty-three sandalwood boxes contained pawn tickets of different ages, the earliest dating back to the time of Rama V. In the iron box at the bottom, the yellowed remains of "Six Ren Divine Lessons" sandwiched a photo - the first owner of Yongchang Pawnshop stood side by side with Tang Ren's great-grandfather, and the third stroke of the word "pawn" on the plaque behind him hid a tiny Q character.
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During the Mid-July Festival, the incense stick in the abbot's hand suddenly broke into three pieces. We squeezed through the crowd and rushed into the main hall, and found that the palm of the pure gold Guanyin statue in the town temple was oozing black blood. Tang Ren climbed onto the altar to check, and the Buddha's palm mechanism ejected a jade chess piece, with the coordinates of Chaozhou Pier etched on the back of the pawn.
"Look at the incense ash!" Qin Feng pointed at the incense burner that had not yet been cleaned. Three pieces of incense ash formed a hexagram, pointing to the abandoned warehouse at Thonburi Old Port. A rusty iron box was found in the gap between the warehouse beams, with a half-sealed blood-written message inside: "Goods are shipped all over the world, and the business will last for thousands of years." The fingerprint at the signature completely overlapped with Tang Ren's fingerprint.
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A stormy night broke through the century-old arcade. Tang Ren held up the Chaoshan lantern handed down from his ancestors to illuminate the hall. The mother-of-pearl inlays on the fairy table concealed a hexagram lock. Qin Feng turned the copper button according to the order of the hexagrams of the Book of Changes, and the secret door burst open. The family tree on the wall was glowing with a faint light, and the pupils of the portraits of the ancestors of the "Cheng" generation were all dotted with gold lacquer.
"So that's it!" Tang Ren suddenly spoke in Teochew dialect, and the lantern reflected the bronze tiger charm in the dark cabinet - completely different from the fake in the evidence room of the Bangkok Police Station. When we place the real tiger talisman in the Buddhist niche, the legacy of the 23 generations of talisman keepers appears verbatim: "Produce goods to benefit the people, secretly protect the country's lineage."
As the morning light penetrated the stained glass windows, a long whistle sounded from the pier. Tang Ren chewed a moldy scallion cookie and muttered, "So my dad is an undercover agent?" Qin Feng wiped the chess and smiled, and I looked at the Chao Phraya River - the upstream lotus lantern was floating along the river, and the green flame of the wick had turned into warm candlelight.
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