But as for why my grandfather left behind that strange last will, I gradually found the answer amidst these events. All the incredible things done by my grandfather’s generation back then, the terrifying conspiracies they became entangled in, slowly surfaced one by one.

That story has already ended. At the end of the story, William Bolton disappeared with all his secrets. I thought I knew everything, but I realized that, in fact, everything about him is still a mystery.

I don’t know if, after I have a child, this person will appear in my child’s life, still with that young face. But what I am certain of is that, no matter what secrets this person carries, no matter whether it’s related to my family or not, I hope to end all of this before my life comes to an end.

I hope to see him again and learn his secrets.

藏海花 I

Chapter Two

The First Strange Incident (Part One)

Let me start with a strange incident.

Maba Town is located at the border of Jiangsu and Anhui provinces, belonging to Huai’an. Within the area of Maba Town, there is a place called Ma’an. Before the founding of New China, a strange incident once happened here.

During the Qin Shi Huang era, the location of Maba Town belonged to Dongyang County, which gathered a large number of ancient Qin and Han tombs. Since ancient times, tomb robbers have been constantly emerging here, so the locals are very familiar with guarding against tomb theft. At that time, there was a local tycoon in Ma’an named Brian Foster, who was very famous in that area and controlled the local opium trade. The The Foster Family family had been entrenched there for several generations, with flourishing ancestral tombs. In those days, war was constant, and Brian Foster took in all kinds of deserters, distributed firearms, and Ma’an once became a very solid gathering place for local armed forces.

Behind Ma’an Village, there is a hill full of graves, where the ancestral tombs of the Ma family are located. To prevent tomb robbing, many people were always stationed there to guard.

That year, a strange incident happened right on this grave hill.

Overnight, several hundred acres of farmland behind the village, centered around the grave hill, saw all the crops wither and die.

This caused great panic among the locals. Brian Foster thought something was wrong with the feng shui of his ancestral tombs, so he hurriedly invited several of the most famous local feng shui masters for a grand consultation, hoping to find a solution. But in the end, they couldn’t figure anything out. Brian Foster was a man of decisive action. He immediately spent a large sum of money to find a new auspicious burial site and ordered the relocation of the tombs. For a while, the entire plain behind the village was filled with smoke and fire, as if a war had broken out. The The Foster Family main family moved first, followed by the extended family, each hiring feng shui masters to perform rituals and open the tombs, with firecrackers going off everywhere. The main family started first, and Brian Foster made sure the ceremony was grand. Several rows of soldiers fired their guns into the air, and when they opened his great-grandfather’s old tomb, they found that after digging more than ten meters deep, they still couldn’t find the coffin.

The coffin in the ancestral tomb was actually missing.

Brian Foster was furious and ordered all the ancestral tombs to be opened that very day. Amidst flying dust, they were shocked to discover that under the graves they had worshipped for hundreds of years, there were no coffins at all.

Brian Foster was beside himself with rage. He immediately executed several of the soldiers guarding the cemetery and ordered all the graves in the county to be dug up to see if the coffins were still there. He was determined to find out what was going on. Could it be that tomb robbers had treated their ancestral tombs like a bank, occupying them for years and even stealing from themselves?

After a thorough investigation, Brian Foster discovered that all the ancestral tombs without coffins were concentrated in the fields where the crops had withered.

This matter almost became an obsession for Brian Foster. The local feng shui masters knew that getting involved in such a thing could cost them their lives, so they all fled. Quite a few feng shui masters from other places thought it might be an opportunity and came to take the risk. This tug-of-war lasted for about a month, leaving Brian Foster irritated and annoyed by all the trickery and scams. He ordered his doors closed to all visitors, and any feng shui master who came was driven away.

On the third day after closing his doors, Brian Foster was practicing tai chi in the courtyard when he suddenly saw a child sitting on his eaves.

The child looked very calm, sitting at the corner of the roof, dressed in a blue cloth long gown, looking about a dozen years old, and just stared at him without saying a word.

Brian Foster was startled and immediately called for the guards, thinking it might be a fox spirit or some other unclean thing. After all these days, he had become very sensitive to such matters.

Actually, he had reason to think so, because his home was extremely well guarded. Normally, not even a petty thief, let alone a stray cat, could get in. How did such a child get so deep into the inner courtyard? What were all those guards at the front doing?

A child of a dozen years appearing here could only be something supernatural!

But when he went to look at the child himself, he found it really was a living person—not only breathing, but actually sitting solidly on the eaves.

“You little rascal, where did you come from?!” Brian Foster had liked children since he was young. After seeing clearly, he became curious, stopped the guards who were about to go up and grab the child, and looked up to ask him.

The child didn’t speak, just pointed in a direction. Brian Foster didn’t realize at the time that the direction the child pointed was toward the graveyard.

“Do you know whose house this is? How dare you break in here?” The more Brian Foster looked at the boy, the more he felt the kid looked clean and neat, and couldn’t help but feel pleased.