Lu Zhou returned to Suzhou to take over his grandfather's old-house restoration shop. His bank account held just 83.6 yuan.
His cousin tricked him into signing a demolition agreement, his girlfriend ran off with a construction foreman, and a bulldozer was already blocking the entrance.
Late that night, Lu Zhou touched the severed roof beam
[Touch successful: Reading great-grandfather Lu Shenzhi's dying obsession: Find his missing eldest daughter, Lu Aqiao.]
[Reward: Beginner Appraisal, Mother-of-Pearl Inlay Craftsmanship.]
Lu Zhou said nothing. He turned around and dug up three jars of Yuan Shikai silver dollars.
The next day, his cousin laughed at him in front of the bulldozer, saying he was asking for trouble. Lu Zhou scattered the silver dollars across the ground. “Go ahead and move it. You won't be able to answer for what's buried beneath this house.”
Later, he found a bloodstained Jinghai saber wedged into a crack in the roof beam and opened a 1941 safe-deposit box at HSBC.
When Great-Aunt Lu Aqiao, who lived on Hong Kong Island, saw the saber, she slapped his cousin across the face. “Get to the ancestral hall and kneel.”
Later still, foreigners came to seize the secret of the “Black Ship” sunken off Zhoushan.
Lu Zhou held a press conference and shoved a microphone in the face of a fake foreigner. “German-made soles, a replacement watch strap, and a Patek Philippe 5227 that only came out last year. Who are you?”
Everyone knew Master Lu was a genius at restoring old houses. No one knew that what his fingertips touched was a family's blood and tears spanning nearly a century, and a hidden history of resistance against Japan deliberately buried.
Super nice. Chinese people don't lie to Chinese people