The Lost Tomb : Sea Of Sands

Chapter 61: Hidden Room

Liang Wan asked him, "Can't you come forward and talk to me?"

The other side said, "It was already very dangerous for you to come to Hangzhou and contact us. What I need to do now is separate myself from that incident, so if I don't need to contact you, I won't. Moreover, the less contact I have with that important person, the safer they'll be. So one of your most important tasks now is to be my liaison with Li Cu. The rest isn't important. And everything in that package may give you a better contextual understanding of the incident."

Liang Wan hung up the phone and pondered over all the information the man had given her. She felt that the logic seemed smooth on the surface, but if things were so dangerous and secretive, wouldn't it be dangerous for him to say these things over the phone? If the people he was being so cautious about were powerful enough to control who he met, then it seemed obvious that he would turn to the phone. But in the TV dramas, wasn't it easier to monitor phones rather than meetings?

Maybe each party had different ways of doing things, but whatever the case, she didn't care much.

And on top of all that, she felt like she knew Li Cu very well. Why did he suddenly become so important? Why did that guy want her to be a liaison?

She looked at the neon lights across the street. It was almost dawn now, and there were still about four or five hours before the Chongqing hotpot restaurant opened. It was better to sleep now, but she was worried and knew that at this juncture, she couldn't sleep even if she wanted to.

So she opened her suitcase, pulled out a pair of leggings (her only pair of pants), put them on, and then found a pair of flats. Wrapped in a coat, she walked downstairs and approached the hotpot restaurant across the way.

She peeked inside. It was dark, the door was barred with a big lock, and the frosted glass was greasy all over. It was obviously impossible to get in early.

Liang Wan looked around and saw an iron fire escape on the side of the building. Based on its position, it was clearly not up to code, but the iron gate wasn't locked very tight, so she might be able to squeeze through with her petite body.

It looked like the stairs reached the second floor, but that door was tightly locked. Since the stairs were outside the building, however, she could climb up to the neon sign by walking on the ledge to reach the building's outer wall. Although it was very dangerous, it was the only way.

Liang Wan initially thought that it was just the third window beside the ladder, which might not be so difficult. So she squeezed through the iron gate and came to the second floor. Then, she began to count one, two, and three to see how far the third window was. After counting once, she was a little doubtful and counted again. It turned out that there were only two windows on the second floor of this Chongqing hotpot restaurant, and there was no third window at all.

Strange things happen every year, especially this year. This guy was talking nonsense. Didn't he say that there were three windows? Why were there only two?

Liang Wan became extremely angry, thinking that such a bastard was too unreliable. Had he been a gangster since he was a kid, so he couldn't even count?

This Chongqing hotpot restaurant, like the hotel, was a renovated farmers' house. The two houses faced each other, and one was a small hotel while the other was a restaurant that had transformed various farmers' houses. The result was very clear. There were really no shutters or exhaust fan vents, only two square windows.

"You can't just mess with me." Liang Wan muttered to herself. At the same time, she looked up from time to time to see if the man was wrong, and was actually talking about the second window. But the exterior wall was clean and bare, and there was nothing. Unable to understand, she lay on the railing, looking around and thinking. She hoped that there were other Chongqing hotpot restaurants around.

In this way, she looked back at the other side and saw that the lights in her room were still on, and some of the words on the hotel's neon lights were off. She saw that in her room, under the lights, someone was standing alone at her window.

The man was also looking in her direction. She stared at the figure for half a minute and suddenly realized that someone was in her room.

"You fool, trying to divert the tiger away from the mountain?!" Liang Wan was so furious that she couldn't help uttering a curse.

She took out her cell phone and wanted to call the police, but quickly forgot to dial 110 in the chaos of desperately running down the stairs and sprinting back over to the hotel. She patted the front desk and said, "There's a thief in my room."

The front desk called the old security guard who was still asleep. The three rushed to the second floor, opened the door of Liang Wan's room, and went in to have a look. There was no one in the room and the lock was fine.

They all looked at each other, and the old security guard uttered a few dirty words in the local dialect.

Liang Wan was puzzled. When she went to the window and looked out, her heart thumped.

She found a very strange phenomenon: the angle she saw through the window was different from the one she had seen from the hotpot restaurant opposite. In other words, she thought the man was standing in her room, but in fact, the man was in the room next to hers.

The window she saw was the one from next door, and she had made a mistake.

But another problem came to mind: there was only one window in each room, and her room was the third one, which meant when she went back to count her room number, the figure she saw in the window was definitely in the third room.

But now when she looked through the window of her room, she found that her room wasn't facing the second floor.

In other words, the window of the third room she counted outside wasn't her room.

Which meant that one of the two rooms next to hers— or the next one over— probably had two windows. She turned to ask the man if she was right, but he shook his head and said, "That's impossible. All our room types are the same. Each room only has one window."

Liang Wan was just about to refute him and pull him to the opposite side to look, when she suddenly remembered what the man had said on the phone just now: the third window opposite on the west side.

She suddenly understood the secret.

After the man left, she found the hotel's stationary paper, spread it on the table, and began to draw a picture.

She first drew the order of the farmers' houses on both sides of the road, then the order of the hotels here, and then deduced little by little according to the size.

Soon, she was sure that if this was the case, and all the rooms in this hotel were in the same pattern as what the staff had said, then the third window seen from Chongqing hotpot restaurant opposite was definitely not the so-called third room, but probably the fourth room.

Yes, there must be a hidden space between her room and the second room next door!