Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio
After reading the traitor’s notes and Tao Xiang’s remarks, Zhao Yu and Cui Lizhu were stunned. “Oh my god!” they both exclaimed.
Cui Lizhu pressed her chest to ease her rapid heartbeat. “I knew it was going to be something big. Why are my feelings always so accurate? Boss, now I understand what my dad was doing. He was indeed planning something big other than a robbery.”
Zhao Yu sighed. “Yes, he’s really the king of thieves,” he said. “No one ever matched his ambition. This is the ultimate treasure. But I doubt that he intended to take it even if he found it.”
“I think if my dad did find it, he would probably hand it over to the government. Maybe he thought it could make up for his mistakes and he would be able to be enlisted and offered amnesty,” Cui Lizhu said.
Zhao Yu reviewed the Kun Dui hexagram. Now he finally understood what this hexagram meant. It turned out that Tao Xiang’s notebook was about a collection of amazing treasures. It could be traced to a theft thirty years ago. In that year, he snuck into a wealthy businessman’s house and stole a lot of valuable goods, many of which were precious historical manuscripts.
Tao Xiang was an expert in his business. In order to determine the value of these manuscripts and find out how much they could sell for, he studied them carefully. Then, he was drawn in by the notes of a traitor from the Republic of China. After more research, Tao Xiang confirmed that the notes were, in fact, a document belonging to the top-secret documents of the military command. It recorded the military command’s interrogation of a traitor named Liu Dianchen.
After the victory of the War of Resistance against Japan, the military command executed a large number of traitors. Liu Dianchen was the most notorious of those they executed. Because of this, the value of the notes was obvious. However, to Tao Xiang’s surprise, the record of the interrogation of Liu Dianchen didn’t say much about how he became a traitor but instead mainly talked about a mysterious batch of gold and treasure.
The notes said that Liu Dianchen had participated in the Japanese movements and knew their secrets. The military command wanted to investigate what he told them. Liu Dianchen had been actively cooperating with the investigation and had drawn many sketches to help them. Despite this, the interrogation was not successful, so Liu Dianchen was executed in secret.
Tao Xiang was so clever that he instinctively realized the value of the notes might be far beyond his imagination. Therefore, he spent a lot of time to study them. Later, he read many related materials and was shocked to find the ultimate treasures. These could be traced to the distant period during which the Anti-Japanese War occurred. At that time, the Japanese occupied the Northeast and established the puppet government. They subdued the Soviet Union and attempted to annex the whole of China.
Because the Japanese were too far away from the mainland, they formulated an evil policy of maintaining war through war, using China’s resources to serve their war. Therefore, in the more than ten years that they occupied Northeast China, they gradually amassed a large amount of wealth through oppression and exploitation. They searched through what they obtained from civilian wealth and used it to make weapons and form an army.
Their ambition eventually failed due to the bombing in Hiroshima. In 1945, Japan was defeated. They declared unconditional surrender, and the army withdrew in a hurry. Because of the sudden defeat and the involvement of the Soviets, the Japanese had no time to carry away the huge treasures they had left in the Northeast. Although some of the treasure was found after the Republic of China took over the regime, it was far from enough. A considerable part of it had disappeared.
Some people said that the remaining treasures had been smuggled to Japan by the Japanese. Another view was that the Japanese high-ranking officials had hidden the remaining treasures in a secret base so they could come back for them in the future. For a long time, no one found any information on the remaining treasures. However, Tao Xiang’s notes showed that the remaining treasures indeed existed. And the man who could prove it was the traitor Liu Dianchen.
Back during the war, Liu Dianchen was the director of the Ministry of Construction of the Puppet Manchukuo Government. Because of many military construction projects, he had contact with senior officers in the Japanese Guandong Army. During the interrogation, Liu Dianchen confirmed that at a meeting with the senior Japanese officers at the end of the war, he had heard from outside the conference room that they were discussing the treasure.
Later, through various inquiries, he also learned that the Japanese army had no time to rebuild a base to hide the treasures, so they hid those they couldn’t take with them in a place similar to the fortress of Holmozin. Holmozin Fortress, also known as Shengshan Fortress, was a huge military base established by the Japanese Frontier Guard in the northeast of China after the September 18th Incident. They hollowed out the mountains and built a large military fortress that contained powerful weapons and war resources, as well as battle rooms, forts, and so on.
In order not to let others find out about the secret fortress, they brought in a large number of Chinese people from other areas to build the fortress since they were not familiar with the local landscape. After the completion of the construction, they brutally murdered the Chinese people they brought in. This was where the “Thousand People’s Pit” came from.
Of course, there was more than one Japanese fortress in Guandong. Others, such as Dongning Fortress and Hutou Fortress, were much larger in size than Shengshan Fortress. According to Liu Dianchen’s notes, the Japanese had buried the treasures in one of the secret fortresses. It might not be the largest, but it was the hardest to find.
He had said that in order to keep this secret, the Japanese must have killed many people. They most likely killed all the people involved in the secret transportation of the treasures. As for the location of the fortress, only the senior officers would have known it.
The notes listed the names of the senior Japanese officers who might know the secret location. However, according to Tao Xiang’s remarks later, the names of these senior Japanese officers were either fake or they had died during the evacuation. Tao Xiang also, through many inquiries, discovered some bad news. It was said that the Japanese senior officers who had participated in the treasure-hiding operation were assassinated on their way home.
Maybe it was a coincidence, or maybe it was a directive from Japan’s highest authority. They would rather kill their own people than let others find out the secret of the treasures.
