I was startled by Fang Mingjie's words.
He had lent that Evil Buddha statue to Li Fuguang's grandfather to study!
"How could you just let someone else study that thing?"
"Did you offer it to him, or did he ask for it?"
"He asked for it himself..."
Fang Mingjie said, "He saw it when I took it out and asked me what it was. I said I didn't know. He said he was very interested in Buddhism and had never seen such a strange Buddha statue before, so he wanted to study it."
"And since he'd taken me in, I lent it to him to play around with..."
I couldn't help feeling helpless.
That Evil Buddha statue was an evil object, the object of the entire organization's faith.
It certainly wasn't anything good.
Li Fuguang's grandfather had probably done something to that Evil Buddha statue, causing some problem with Li Fuguang's birth.
You could say tonight's conversation with Fang Mingjie had yielded a lot, or you could say it hadn't yielded much.
The main problem was that he knew nothing, and knew little about that organization either.
But at least we knew who the organization's current leader was.
As long as we knew this person's name and general characteristics, we should be able to track him down with today's technology.
I asked Fang Mingjie another question. "After you lent that Buddha statue to Old Man Tang, did you get it back?"
Fang Mingjie hurriedly nodded. "Of course I had to get it back. I was still counting on selling it for some money. After staying at their house for a week, I put the Buddha statue back in the box and took the box into the mountains."
"Which mountain?" I asked.
Fang Mingjie said, "The mountains near Pear Blossom Village.