Qin Li misunderstood what Shen Tang meant and took the trouble to explain, "Because it's a family trade, he spent plenty of time following his elders into tombs when he was young. But that was all in the past. After he was sentenced to exile, he turned over a new leaf. He's been on the straight and narrow for years."
Though he had gone straight, his experience remained.
As soon as Shen Tang heard this, she knew Qin Li had misunderstood. "That's not what I mean. I'm just surprised Gong Su has such a wide circle of friends. He even knows someone in that line of work. Ordinarily, someone like that... I thought Gong Su wouldn't care for..."
The people who robbed tombs loved nothing more than graves with lavish burial goods.
They could go three years without a job, then make enough to live on for the next three.
And in this era, the only people with the means to enjoy lavish burials were noble families, aristocrats, marquises, kings, and generals. Someone as scrupulous as Qin Li shouldn't have liked that sort of person. Even when he used to keep retainers, surely he wouldn't have hired a tomb robber?
A faint smile played at Qin Li's lips. "Fate brought us together."
Under normal circumstances, he certainly wouldn't have befriended someone whose family trade was robbing tombs, let alone recommended him to his lord. But they had met during the calamity of their kingdom's destruction. Back then, that retainer wasn't a retainer yet. He was a prisoner who had been caught after a botched job and sentenced to exile in shackles. Without some unexpected turn of events, he would have died on the road to exile; even if he survived, he would have been half-dead.
Then their country fell.
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