Chapter 4: The Descent of Ma Zhiyue

  What Grandfather said, even if I didn't try, I knew it wouldn't be an easy thing to do. With my own strength alone, it might be very difficult to accomplish. At this moment, I urgently need someone to help me. The people in the village are definitely not suitable, and thinking of Ye Hua's strange behavior that night makes me feel cold all over.

  Just as I was at a loss for what to do, I thought of someone - Ma Si Zhe!

  Ma Si Zhe was my roommate in college, and I hung out with him for four years. It's worth mentioning that this guy is quite a character.

  I went to a university in the south, and basically everyone at school was from the south, Ma Si Zhe was no exception. The first thing he said to me was 'You northeasterners can really drink, huh?'

  I really want to know who instilled in these Northeasterners the idea that they can drink.

  "There might be some drinkable ones, but I'm not one of them, I'm allergic to alcohol."

  "Really? Then you drink a mouthful and I want to see what your allergy is like."

  ‘…….’

  Ma Si Zhe is an atypical southerner. The two of us have very different personalities, I am the kind of person who is very careful and cautious about everything, calculating every step, and will not do anything impulsively without being absolutely sure.

  Ma Si Zhe and I are just the opposite, he is that kind of person who does things with great enthusiasm, doing first and talking later, not considering the consequences much. Between the two of us, I think he's more like a Northeastern Chinese man, straightforward and unpretentious.

  For a whole year in our first year, we were all emitting different magnetic fields and didn't have much intersection with each other. The most dialogue was also maintained at

  "Are you bringing me lunch?" Ma Si Zhe said

  "It's okay" or "Never mind"

  "Then you bring it to me."

  ‘……’

  or

  "Did you finish reading that reasoning last time?" Ma Si Zhe asked me from the upper bunk.

  Not yet

  "Oh... The culprit is that adopted daughter"

  ‘……’

  Or else

  "Help me ask for a leave of absence, I may be late" I said anxiously on the phone while driving.

  After a while, Ma Si Zhe's phone call came: 'Sun Yi, you don't need to come'

  What's wrong?

  I told the teacher you crashed the car

  ‘……’

  Then I didn't dare go to class for two weeks.

  The real catalyst for becoming sworn brothers was that I discovered Marx's little secret. In fact, it wasn't me who discovered it, but rather Marx insisted on telling me with a thick skin.

  I chose swimming as an elective in physical education, and Ma Si Zhe did too. One time when we were changing clothes, I inadvertently saw a tattoo on Ma Si Zhe's waist, which was a string of characters that I couldn't understand.

  I kept staring at him, and Ma Si Zhe said 'if you have any curiosity just ask'

  I somewhat embarrassingly said 'Ah, nothing, just, when did you get that tattoo?'

  "I've had it since I was little, now the color is a bit faded, when I was young the color was deeper" Ma Si Zhe said nonchalantly, before I could ask, he suddenly continued "Not only me, my dad has it too, my uncle also has it"

  Their family wouldn't be a mafia gang, or else their ancestral tattoos would be some kind of tradition. I could only awkwardly nod my head and didn't dare to continue asking. Unexpectedly, Ma Si Zhe started talking non-stop without me even asking.

  "To be honest, no one has ever asked me about this tattoo before. My grandfather was an intellectual who moved from Changsha to Hangzhou for a living and had nothing to his name, so he could only work with the local farmers in the fields."

  What he meant by "Di Chuan Zi" was a colloquial term used to refer to tomb raiders in the past. It seems that they are not from an underworld family, but rather a tomb-raiding family. I cautiously looked around at the people coming and going from the changing room, afraid that someone might overhear our conversation.

  I'd rather faint now than listen to him talk about his grandfather's years as a tomb raider.

  Maybe one of these days things will be exposed and I'll be silenced.

  "When I was young, I thought my grandfather was particularly handsome. He went up the mountain and down to the sea, and he had robbed many tombs, all of which were major cases back then."

  My right eyelid twitched suddenly, I thought I didn't hear anything, I didn't hear anything.

  Later, when my grandfather died, he instructed that all the males in our family must get this tattoo at the age of nine. Although we didn't know the reason, we all followed his instructions. Ma Si Zhe said while looking at his own tattoo.

  I felt a lot more at ease after hearing this. It turned out that his grandfather had already passed away, so there was nothing to be afraid of anymore, it was all in the past. However, stealing national cultural relics is not a small matter, how could Ma Si Zhe be so calm and casual about telling me, an outsider, like this?

  At the farewell dinner after graduation, I suddenly thought of asking Ma Si Zhe, "In those days when we were not familiar with each other, how did you suddenly think of telling me that thing?"

  Ma Si Zhe belched, slammed the table in anger and shouted: "Damn it! Sun Yi, I treated you like a brother when I told you that. It turns out you thought we were not familiar with each other at that time."

  Maybe it's because of my personality, I'm naturally slow to warm up. And I didn't think we were familiar enough to share secrets with each other. I said a bit embarrassingly 'From then on, I absolutely consider you as a buddy, purely'

  "That's about it," Ma Si Zhe said vaguely.

  It's true, since then I have been respectful to Master Ma, not daring to disobey him in the slightest. All because I know that Master Ma's uncle is still engaged in underground work, yes, the illegal kind.

  Ma Si Zhe asked me to go back home with him during the summer vacation to see what real antiques are. His family runs an antique shop called "Meng Xi Tang", and I couldn't control my curiosity about antiques, so I went back to Hangzhou with him.

  As soon as I walked into their home, I felt a chill run down my spine. The temperature inside the house was unusually low. Right in front of me, on the wall facing the door, there was a painting of a fierce tiger sniffing roses. Underneath the painting were two armchairs and on the table was a pot of orchids. I looked around and saw that the room wasn't very big, but it was decorated with an antique flavor, like the set of some ancient drama.

  I whispered to Ma Si Zhe, "Isn't this an antique shop? Where are the antiques?"

  Karl Marx smiled and said "under your butt"

  I looked down at the stool under my butt and thought, no way, if this thing is an antique you'd let me sit on it?

  At this time a twelve or thirteen year old boy walked in carrying two cups of tea. The child was wearing traditional Chinese clothing and had a serious expression that didn't seem like a kid's.

  "Hiring child labor is against the law," I said to Marx after taking a sip of tea.

  Ma Si Zhe glared at me and said 'The cup you're using to drink tea now is still a cultural relic, shouldn't I report you?'

  I took a glance at the teacup in my hand, which had a very special design. It didn't seem to be for drinking tea, but rather looked like a wine vessel. What was special about it was that ancient wine vessels were all made of bronze, whereas this cup was made of ceramic.

  Although I am very interested in cultural relics and antiques, my knowledge of porcelain is relatively weak.

  I suddenly felt that the teacup looked very familiar, and I had a feeling that I had seen it somewhere before. When I saw the green bamboo painted on it, I suddenly remembered! This is one of the Jiu Long Zhu teacups!

  Jiulong Suite Bamboo is a set of ritual vessels. There are nine kinds, namely: Jia, Dou, Gu, Shang Qi, Tian Zun, Di Zun, Tong Geng, Xiang and Bian. The ritual vessels used to be only these few, but the special feature of Jiulong Suite Bamboo lies in that before filling with wine, the whole body is white, as the wine slowly flows in, the cup begins to change slowly, a green dragon appears on the cup. People who see it all exclaim in surprise.

  This is a firing technology that is hundreds of years ahead, and no one knows how the ancients did it. It's just amazing the wisdom of our ancestors. A few years ago, in a central appraisal program, one of the nine dragon bamboo appeared, which was identified as a fake by experts.

  So to this day, the whereabouts of Jiulongtus bamboo are an unsolved mystery in the archaeological community. Some people speculate that it may have flowed abroad, while others speculate that it is in the hands of a certain low-key collector.

  In short, no one has ever seen the true form of Jiulongtaozhu. And the teacup in my hand is, according to my observation, one of the Jiulongtaozhus.

  I recall Ma Si Zhe telling me about his grandfather's story before, and suddenly I feel that this thing is real and it's not impossible.

  I hastily put the cup on the table and wiped my hands. Now I couldn't continue sitting on this stool either. Who knows if this armchair is also an antique from a hundred years ago, the pressure on my butt was too great.

  "What's the hurry, what's wrong?" Seeing me stand up, Ma Si Zhe pushed me onto the stool. I brushed his hand aside with a "pa" sound, and the cup was swept to the ground by me. Looking at the broken pieces of the cup on the ground, I suppressed my urge to kneel down in front of Ma Si Zhe.

  In my heart, I think: if you want money, I don't have it; if you want my life, although I'm reluctant to give it up, if you insist, I'll give it to you.

  Ma Si Zhe looked at me with a martyr's expression of going to death, the muscles on his face couldn't help but twitch, and finally burst out laughing.

  "You look like you're scaring a bear" Ma Si Zhe almost laughed to death on his chair at home.

  I realized I was being played and just as I wanted to punch him, a slender man walked out of the crescent gate.

  "Ma Zhe, you have a friend coming?" It seems that Ma Zhe is the nickname for Ma Si Zhe. It seems like whatever is lacking will be called out. From what I know, in the past few years at university, Ma Si Zhe has not once passed Marxist Philosophy (Ma Zhe).

  "You're at home today, how unusual. This is my uncle, this is my classmate, Sun Yi"

  It turned out that this was Ma Si's uncle, and I stretched out my hand to shake his. His uncle's palm was dry, dark, thin, but very powerful, with calluses on the inside of his hands, presumably from years of physical labor.

  His uncle just exchanged a few pleasantries with me, then hurried away on some urgent matter. To this day, the only impression his uncle left on me is a pair of hands covered in calluses.

  After my uncle left, I thought of the time when Ma Si Zhe cheated me. With a sly smile, he said: "Only you would believe it, who else's family would be so foolish as to take out a cultural relic worth hundreds of years and show it off?" Ma Si Zhe's northeastern dialect was even more fluent than mine.

  "You're speaking so proudly as if you're introducing yourself"

  Having been with Marx Zhe for a long time, I started to speak more and more like him, although I realized it wasn't a good direction, but still couldn't change.

  The next month was spent in Hangzhou, indulging in the hospitality of Ma Zhiyuan and having a great time. I also gained insight into the industrial chain of the Ma family business, which wasn't as simple as it seemed on the surface.

  Their family has not yet fully extricated themselves from the dark side of operations, in other words, they are self-sufficient. They bring artifacts out of the tomb and take them to their own store to resell. The leftovers that they don't want are taken to the stores under their control. Relying on his grandfather's connections, this chain has been operating until today.

  After returning from Hangzhou, I dare not to be rude to Ma Si Zhe again. Every day, I attend to him before and after riding horseback, every day begging him, looking forward to the day when I can go to his home to see those treasures that cannot be seen in the market.

  It's been almost five years since I graduated from university, and as expected, I've been working on something related to archaeology. As for Ma Si Zhe, he went back home to help his old man with the family business.

  Nowadays when I encounter such a thing, the first person I think of is Ma Si Zhe.

  Three days after I made the phone call, I met Ma Si at the train station.