"Of course, you can't just carry that treasure around everywhere—it would shatter at the slightest jolt." He lowered his voice, pretending to be mysterious. "If it weren't for my wide connections, this thing would have ended up overseas long ago. You could say I'm serving the people."

I chuckled, "Look at you, aren't you just a grave robber? I think you're just too scared to sell it. This is a national treasure—don't you want your head anymore!"

With my words exposing him, the old man's face turned green. But since he needed something from me, he had to hold it in and said, "That's not quite fair. Every trade has its own rules. Back in the day, your grandfather made quite a name for himself as a tomb raider in Changsha..."

My face must have looked terrible. I gritted my teeth, "If you mention my grandfather again, I won't even look at it!"

"Alright, alright, I'll stop. Just take a look for me so I can get out of here quickly."

I unfolded the white sheet of paper. At a glance, I could tell it was a well-preserved silk manuscript from the Warring States period. But it wasn't the one my grandfather had stolen back then. Although this one was also quite old, it was probably a later counterfeit—an antique forgery, which put it in a rather awkward position. So I smiled, "This should be a Han dynasty fake. How should I put it? If you say it's fake, it's not exactly fake; if you say it's real, it's not exactly real either. Who knows if it's a faithful copy or just made up? So I really don't know what to say."

"So, is this the one your grandfather stole?"

"To tell you the truth, my grandfather didn't even get a chance to look at the one he stole before it was tricked away by that American. I really can't answer your question." I thought to myself, it's not hard to fool you, and I even put on a very sincere expression. That Old Frank actually believed me and sighed, "That's really unfortunate. Looks like unless we find that American, there's no hope."

"Why are you all so obsessed with this scroll?" I asked. It was strange—collecting ancient books is all about fate, and trying to find a complete set of twenty Warring States volumes is just too greedy.

"Young man, to be honest, I'm really not a grave robber. Look at me—do I look like I could handle that kind of action? But my friend is a real expert. I don't know what he's up to, but I'm sure he has his reasons." He chuckled and shook his head. "It's not my place to ask too much, right? Anyway, I'll be on my way." With that, he left without looking back.

I looked down and saw that his photocopy was still in my hand. Suddenly, I noticed a pattern on the paper—a human face like a fox, with two pupil-less eyes that seemed three-dimensional, as if they were bulging out of the paper. It made me gasp. I had never seen this silk manuscript before; it must be a rare piece. I figured that when Harold Brooks got out, I could use this photocopy to make a few fake rubbings for fun. I hurried outside to take a look, and saw Old Frank heading back.

I figured he must be coming back for this thing, so I rushed back, grabbed my digital camera and took a picture of it, then picked up the paper and walked out the door. I ran right into Old Frank's nose. "You forgot your stuff," I said.

My grandfather was a tomb raider in Changsha, which is what people usually call a "grave robber."

The reason my grandfather got into this line of work wasn't unusual at all. In today's terms, it was a hereditary trade. When my great-great-grandfather was thirteen, there was a drought in central China. In those days, a drought meant famine—you couldn't buy food even if you had money. There was nothing in the corners of Changsha back then, except for lots of ancient tombs. So people lived off the land, and in this case, off the tombs. The whole village would go grave robbing together. No one knows how many people starved to death in the Changsha area during those years, but not a single person from their village died. In fact, they all looked well-fed and shiny-faced. That was all thanks to trading what they dug up with foreigners for food.

As time went on, tomb robbing, like anything else, developed its own culture. By my grandfather's generation, there were already rules and different schools. Back then, tomb robbers were divided into northern and southern factions. The southern faction was my grandfather's group, skilled at using the Luoyang shovel to probe the soil. The real experts could judge the depth and era of a tomb just by the smell. Nowadays, novels always mention the Luoyang shovel, but actually, the northern faction didn't use it at all. They specialized in accurately determining the location and structure of tombs—what's called "dragon-seeking and acupoint-finding." But the northerners were a bit odd. According to my grandfather, they weren't straightforward and had too many tricks up their sleeves. When robbing a tomb, instead of just grabbing the goods and leaving, they'd make a big fuss, nitpicking over everything. Nowadays, you'd call that bureaucratic. The southern faction had fewer rules and never avoided the dead. The northerners called the southerners "mongrels" who ruined relics, saying that every tomb they raided collapsed and that they'd even drag out corpses to sell. The southerners called the northerners hypocrites—thieves pretending to be something else. Eventually, things got so bad that they almost went to war, with incidents like "corpse battles" breaking out. In the end, the two factions split along the Yangtze River. The northern faction called it "grave robbing," while the southern faction called it "panning for sand" or "panning for earth." The Luoyang shovel was actually invented after the split, and the northerners never bothered to use it.