Eighteen years ago, beneath the raven moon in a quiet night.
In the corner of a wasteland in Qinshan Tongyang county, there was a disharmonious rustling of noises. The sound turned out to be a gang of grave robbers that was digging a hole in a tomb. The gang of grave robbers came from a family grave robber gang. There were five members in the gang, and they were all relatives that carried the same surname.
At that moment, there was a person named Yuan Shucai, who was working at the top in the robbers’ hole. The comrades above him quickly pulled him up from the hole.
Yuan Shucai brought out a basket of soil, and one of his brothers quickly took over the basket to pour the soil into the deep groove faraway.
“Shucai,” an elderly grave robber called. “See the water yet?”
“No, dad!” Yuan Shucai answered. “I’ve looked. It is quite dry. I reckon, in another few meters, we will be able to enter!”
“Alright!” The old man tied the rope on himself to climb into the robber hole personally.
“Dad, I’m not tired, let me go down and dig some more!” Yuan Shucai said.
“It’s okay, let me do it!” the old man said. “Save some energy. When it’s through, we will depend on you to enter!”
He didn’t wait for Yuan Shucai to respond, but went ahead into the robber hole.
“Bro Shucai,” a young man, aged about nineteen, came before Yuan Shucai and asked, “I think this is too small, would there be anything good in there?”
“How would I know? Why didn’t you ask my dad earlier?” Yuan Shucai lit up a cigarette and started smoking casually.
“Your dad wouldn’t even let us talk!” The young man pushed Yuan Shucai and asked, “Bro, Ah Niu sent me a letter, told me to follow them to Haixiang to work in a factory, as their pay is thousand and five per month!”
“Oh? Then… You don’t want to work with us anymore?” Yuan Shucai puffed out a ring of smoke.
“Mm, I think, we are taking such a big risk to empty buckets and enter the pit, but we couldn’t even earn much. I might as well work for someone in the factory! Emptying buckets ain’t a long-term trade, dealing with the dead everyday, and it’s… It’s illegal…”
“Humph! Look at yourself!” Yuan Shucai replied in disdain. “Let me tell you, the reason why we can’t earn much is because we don’t have any good contacts. We have the good stuff, but we can’t sell at a good price! Just you wait, in the future, I will be the biggest success in Qinshan!”
Just when Yuan Shucai said this, there was a huge noise from the robber hole, and a cloud of dust that puffed out from it!
“Ah! No! It collapsed!” Yuan Shucai jumped up and quickly ran to pull the rope with his brothers. But, after pulling on the rope for a while, it still wasn’t moving at all!
“You! All of you, put in more effort, okay! My dad is underneath!” Yuan Shucai was screaming crazily. “Hurry up! Pull!”
“Ah…”
The brothers tried their best to pull it together. But they had never expected that, the person woud not be pulled out, but that the rope would suddenly be broken instead. Everyone of them shook and fell on the ground, one after another.
…
After a few days.
To a hidden storehouse that was located on Qinshan Flower Market Street, Yuan Shucai and his two brothers sent the relics that they had unearthed. The one buying the relics was a woman that looked extremely beautiful and coldly elegant. The grave robbers called her Gege!
Looking at Yuan Shucai and the others who were bringing forth the stealings, the woman didn’t even find anyone to appraise the goods, but went ahead and told her underling to take out two thousand dollars to pass to Yuan Shucai!
“Big… Big sis!” Yuan Shucai bottled up at first, then finally said, blushing, “Can… Can you give more? I asked in the market, and the jade that we found last time, the jade alone costs about six to seven thousand dollars! But you only have given us four hundred dollars. Everything, in total, we aren’t even getting more than a thousand dollars!”
“Humph! Country bumpkin!” the woman said arrogantly. “If you have the ability to do so, sell them at the market for such a fee. You can even sell them for ten thousand dollars! That is, if you wanted to enter the police station the next day…”
Then, Gege turned around and leave.
“Big sis!” Yuan Shucai stopped her again. “Please! My dad, he, due to a mistake, he is dead! Consider it a funeral expense, so then you could pay more, right?”
“The hell I could!” Gege had her eyes wide open as she scolded. “What are you trying to do? Oh, all of your grave excavation workers are here to mourn over your poverty? Your dad died, and for that, I have to pay more? What do you think you are doing? Do you think I am here as a charity?”
“No, that’s not what I meant!” Yuan Shucai explained, with his face all blushed with embarrassment. “Big sis, listen to me, you can’t be that unreasonable. We have found you so many good things, all this time. There were many things that cost a fortune! You… You can’t just keep giving me wholesale pricing, right?”
“Yeah,” Yuan Shucai’s brothers added, “We risked our lives to go underground, so you can’t just dismiss us, right?”
“Yo? What’s going on today?” Gege pouted and scolded impatiently. “You country bumpkins are trying to rebel? Do you still want to do business? Let me tell you, there’s only so much money, so take it or leave it!”
“Alright then! We don’t want the money!” Yuan Shucai was irritated and shouted, as he pointed at the items that he had laid down earlier, “We are taking all of these items back!”
“How dare you! Try to touch them and see what happens!” Gege pointed at Yuan Shucai’s nose when she spat out the words, “I tell you, out of the whole of Qinshan, only I will be able to buy your things! If you want to fleece me here, you’d better be careful of your heads!”
“I… I am afraid you might fail…” Yuan Shucai was equally angry, as he lowered his head and wanted to turn back, but accidentally knocked into Gege instead.
“Ya! You bloody beggars! You don’t want to live anymore?! Hey, knock them down!”
The henchmen behind Gege swarmed forward after receiving the command. They landed punches and kicks on Yuan Shucai and his brother, who were all brutally beaten up.
In the end, the few of them and the trishaw that had delivered the goods were all thrown out by the henchmen, like rubbish!
Hualala…
Gege then threw the two thousand dollars out the door. The money was then all over the floor, and many of the notes fell into the mud puddles…
…
Around midnight that same day, in one of the villas on Flower Market Street.
The woman named Gege had just finished a strenuous exercise session with a boss named Huang Jing, and the both of them were sleeping soundly in each other’s embrace.
As it turned out, Huang Jing was the big boss behind the scenes, the biggest relics seller in Qinshan! He was a little over fifty years old, but he still maintained his skills and had fun with Miss Gege every night. All of his business was basically passed on to Gege, who acted on his behalf.
That night, when the two of them were in a deep sleep, Huang Jing suddenly heard some noises in the bedroom. When he opened his eyes, he was shocked as he saw a few masked people looking for something in the bedroom.
“Ah!!
Huang Jing shouted and pushed away his blanket to flee, but he was caught by a masked man on the spot. Gege woke up too. But before she could even scream, she was suppressed by a masked man too.
The masked men were none other than Yuan Shucai and his brothers. Originally, Yuan Shucai never thought of killing anyone, and only wanted to take the storehouse keys to take away the relics in the storehouse. He didn’t expect that he would have startled Huang Jing and Gege, leaving them with no other choice but violence.
Then, Yuan Shucai, who felt that he was pushed into a corner now, finally made a move to kill. He seized Gege by her throat, until she died, while another brother of his did the same to Huang Jing.
After murdering them both, Yuan Shucai and the rest panicked, as they did not know what to do next. In the end, Yuan Shucai figured out a way. He thought that he was a grave robber, and so he might as well bury the two of them in other people’s tombs.
Then, their bodies would be hard to discover. As long as no one found the dead bodies, they would not be suspected. Then, the few brothers took action separately.
When Gege died, she was naked, so Yuan Shucai just simply grabbed an ancient costume from the couch and placed it on her. That costume was a genuine item from the Qing Dynasty that Huang Jing brought back from his travels to add to his personal collection. Yuan Shucai had no idea what it was, as he only wanted to put some clothes on the woman. That’s how it came into being in the Female Corpse in Ancient Costume Case that startled Qinshan!
That night, his brothers hid the two dead bodies into someone else’s ancestral tomb, while Yuan Shucai used the keys that he found to open up the storehouse and take away the relics!
At the beginning, they wanted to stay in Qinshan and continue their business. But the good times were cut short, as the government suddenly wanted to rebuild the Qinshan Bridge and the locals were asked to move the tombs. Then, they unearthed Gege’s dead body.
Yuan Shucai thought the crime that he had committed would be exposed, so he and his brothers ran away with the relics and jewelry that he had stolen. They left Qinshan…