After Zeng Mu and Fu Ping finished reading the notes, they found no useful clues. The pages contained nothing but recorded conversations, and none of the accounts offered anything worthwhile. They were not even as useful as their own.
"There doesn't seem to be anything here. What exactly did you spend those two hours doing?" Fu Ping had been on the receiving end these past few days, but now he finally had a chance to stop holding his tongue.
"Take a look at this." Yao Chun pulled the little fish from inside his clothes.
The purple fish lay in his open palm. Both men looked at it with expressions of intrigued surprise.
"Hey, this little purple fish is really unusual. Pretty, too. Did you buy it at the market? Wait, did you buy it from that old fisherman at the end?" Fu Ping never took his eyes off the fish. He kept feeling that part of it was missing, but he could not tell from this side.
"All right, so this is what you found. Tell us, then, what's so special about this little purple fish?" Zeng Mu knew Yao Chun would not joke around at a time like this. If he did, he had better be prepared for Zeng Mu to knock a couple of lumps onto his head.
"First, let me ask you two: you can't identify this little fish's species, can you?" Yao Chun asked teasingly, like a cat toying with mice.
"No." Both answered so bluntly that Yao Chun's hopes of amusing himself at their expense came to nothing.
"All right, I'll get straight to it." His voice returned to normal. "This is an ornamental fish, supposedly a special variety brought over from the Viking Dynasty. It's worth quite a bit. Care to guess how much?"