"I heard it was a pair of shoes." Liao Tieshan recalled.
"Shoes?"
Shen Boxia frowned. "What kind of shoes?"
"Black cloth shoes." Liao Tieshan's gaze grew deep, as though he were recalling the scene from that day. "I heard from those who escaped back to the ship that they looked like the layered cloth shoes old people wore."
"There were no patterns on the uppers. They looked no different from ordinary shoes."
He paused.
After organizing his thoughts, he continued, "But those shoes were kept in an antique chest."
"That chest itself was an old item from the Chen Family."
"There were Chen Family men on the ship. Under interrogation, they said it had been dug out of an ancient tomb from the previous dynasty. The chest looked wrong to begin with, carved all over with runes, its lid secured with three copper locks."
"The brothers hijacked the ship at the time."
"They moved the cargo onto the deck. Someone got curious and pried open the chest. Inside was that pair of shoes."
"When did people start dying?" Shen Boxia asked again.
"After the chest was opened."
Liao Tieshan answered with certainty, "Nothing happened during the transport, but after the chest was opened, the man who pried it open died first. He died on the spot, collapsing to the ground."
"I heard—"
"Everything below his ankles turned black, as if something had stained them."
"What happened after that?" Shen Boxia asked.
"After that, people started dying one after another. First those nearby, then those a little farther away. But the deaths didn't happen that quickly, so many people managed to escape back to the ships."
"We had seven or eight ships at the time."
"I was on one of them. My job was to receive the brothers from the cargo