Xu Xingzhi, a small moving worker, earns a living every day, and his pocket is cleaner than his face.
That day he was at a garage sale and accidentally bought an old thing that no one wanted. The moment the fingertips touched, a line of small pale gold characters floated up from under the glaze:
[Ming Dynasty, Yongle period, sweet white glaze, dark engraved dragon goblet, No. 7311]
From that day on, all objects in the world were numbered in his eyes: dynasty, year, category, and origin.
Pick up leaks at street stalls, cut off details at auctions, and chase after a few clues from city to city. Chasing it deep, he will return to the night when the artifact was born.
Others bet on luck, but he looked at the answer.
But the more he looked, the more frightened he became.
Even the fakes that just came out of the kiln last month have numbers. Note the genuine ones, and the fake ones too, in a neat format, as if they were written by the same hand.
Someone had already tampered with this account: writing false things as true, and writing true things as false.
And the last line of this account has a "zero" written on it.
