The Lost Tomb Vol. 7

Chapter 4: Found

They were really old files that had been gnawed apart by rats, and were covered in droppings. I picked one up and found that it must have been an old document from that time, because it was completely grey with age.

If someone flipped through it, however, they would definitely see differently. I told Wang Meng to look carefully to see what was suspicious.

He crept around the pile of documents and soon found something. I went over and saw that there were several piles of documents lying neatly on the ground. Four piles had been put together side by side to form a square.

Wang Meng said: "Boss, do you think this person was too tired to stand and read the documents here, so he used these to make a stool?"

I nodded. Indeed, I could almost picture the situation. The man must have sat on the file stool at that time so that he could look at everything more carefully.

I turned in a full circle to see which direction the man had been facing when he was sitting down. At this time, I found that if he was facing the back, the nearby rack could be used to hold a flashlight. As I recreated the situation in my mind, I put my flashlight up and looked down at my feet. After removing the dust, I saw several old cigarette butts in front of me, as well as a pile of documents.

A folder here weighed at least four to five kilos, so it was impossible to carry scattered documents in your hand. The pile of documents in front of me may have been used by him as a table, and what he had been looking at was placed on it. Smoking while reading... this son of a bitch was quite laid back.

But it was still useless. We were surrounded by documents, and it was impossible to speculate what he was looking for. Maybe he found the documents he wanted and took them away.

As if I were under a spell, I made a few moves to open the document. I couldn't help thinking of the handwriting on the seal and an unexpected thought occurred.

Leaving aside the rest, if the seal was really written by "me", what would I think of the document?

I asked Wang Meng to pass me a folder, then opened it and put it on the "table" in front of me. I then picked it up and flipped through it. I recalled my usual habit of folding the pages I had read with my right hand while I thought about them. Whenever I reached a certain thickness, I would put them aside and straighten them out.

This was one of the habits I picked up, because whenever I did rubbings, the whole table usually ended up full of paper and was very messy. I liked to keep these messy things a certain distance away from me so that I could distinguish them from the other documents, but they still had to be within easy reach.

I looked around to see if there was any place within close distance where I could put things. At this time, I saw a pile of papers sitting on a box by my right hand that fit the bill.

At this moment, my heart thumped and I was a little hesitant. If I was right, wasn't that proof that I was the one who had been reading things here?! But after a moment's hesitation, I brought the paper over to me. Who cared? I had already died once anyways. What was there to worry about with this sort of thing?

I put the stack of documents on the pile in front of me. The first one was a form that looked like an allowance budget, and had several names on it. The maximum allowance was 447.92 yuan. I wasn't very clear about the wage system at that time, but such a high allowance was definitely astronomical back then. This was the kind of allowance that was generally given to the Soviets, but I wasn't interested in it. I noticed a line in the corner of the form: "Expatriate allowance form for the archaeological project at the Zhangjiapu site in Xisha, Guangxi."