The descendants returned home but had no home...
Qingmu muttered those words to himself, inexplicably recalling the scene from his first day in Liuying Lane.
Xia Wenyuan couldn't tell more about the stories of Mulberry Camp and the Hua Family because too much time had passed. Back then, Xia Wenyuan was just a child, but now he was an elderly man in his eighties.
Memories are like winter snow, drifting and dancing in the wind, piling up on the ground, looking thick, but melting into water and disappearing without a trace when the sun shines. Then, another heavy snow falls the following year. As the years go by, only some beautiful and vague impressions of the snow from my childhood remain.
Qingmu's perception of memories was different. His memories weren't like melted snow, but rather like frozen ice. Melted snow leaves no trace, or if it does, it's fleeting. Frozen ice, on the other hand, is very heavy, with a thick layer of ice enveloping blurry shadows, telling you there's something inside, but you can never quite see what it is.
Xia Wenyuan suggested that Qingmu check the Wuzhong County Annals. A large family like the Hua Family had been operating in Wuzhong for at least several hundred years, and it was impossible for them not to be recorded in the county annals of previous dynasties. However, the history of Wuzhong is very complicated, and the county annals have been lost and recompiled several times. It would be too difficult to find the information you want from the vast and extremely chaotic versions.
Qingmu, however, had his own method. He opened his phone and entered a line of text into the Ghost file:
Could you please help me find information about Mulberry Garden, Mulberry Camp, and Hua Family in the Wuzhong County Annals?
He didn't know how the ghost file contacted and awakened the Ghost on the Internet; it was probably something like a virus that sent information to the server in the basement of Mei Yiqiu's experimental building. Of course, it was also possible that strange mechanical consciousnesses on the Internet were exchanging messages with each other.
If it's the latter, then it means the Internet is not only a super brain with consciousness, but also possesses a social structure, which is a bit frightening to think about.
County annals are generally not available online, and even if they are, they are usually in PDF format, making them very difficult to consult. However, what is difficult for humans is not a problem for computers.
Just moments later, the Ghost sent back a message consisting entirely of images of the traditional Chinese characters in vertical format. Besides capturing the content pages, it also highlighted keywords and included a screenshot of the cover of the respective version.
1. The Wanli edition of the Pingjiang Gazetteer of Pingjiang, in its forty volumes of biographies, states: Sang Yun, courtesy name Linxi, was a descendant of Sang Daomao. He was skilled in the Taiyi Dunjia Technique (a form of divination), and was of a reclusive nature. Emperor Shizong summoned him, but he refused to come. He lived in Jiangzuo), where he planted mulberry trees and raised silkworms to cultivate his life. He called his garden "Sangyuan" (Mulberry Garden), and the villagers all became wealthy...
2. Gazetteer of Wu, Qianlong edition, Volume 32, "Records of Customs and Products": The finest silk is the red silk reeled from the Hua Mulberry Garden, which is of superior quality to that produced by the Imperial Textile Bureau. Some say that wild silkworms are fed with human blood, hence the silk is reddish-brown, and the fabric is like blood, so people dare not wear it...
3. Gazetteer of Wu County, Republican Era Edition, Volume 12, Records of Strange Tales: In the Mulberry Garden, there is a mulberry tree several tens of feet tall. Its berries ripen once every three years and can cure children's illnesses. A giant crow, shaped like a falcon, perches on it. It eats people's souls at night, and no one dares to approach it...
Qingmu looked at it and found it a bit strange. The first entry did resemble the style of historical records, but how could someone whose surname was Hua and who lived in Mulberry Garden become surnamed Sang? The next two entries were more like supernatural tales, giving it a feel of reading the Notes from the Thatched Abode of Close Observations.
He then showed the phone to Xia Wenyuan.
Xia Wenyuan put on his glasses, looked at it carefully, and asked, "That's all?"
He didn't ask Qingmu how he managed to find the relevant information in the county annals in such a short time. Even experts in local history, with the aid of computers, might not be able to find what they wanted so quickly and accurately. In his eyes, Qingmu was a remarkable person, far superior to those experts.
That's all.
Qingmu also felt the content was a bit lacking, but he didn't doubt the Ghost's abilities either. Although the county annals were voluminous and extremely troublesome for human search, this amount of information was nothing to a computer, let alone a sentient Internet.
Xia Wenyuan and said, "That's a bit strange. Logically speaking, given the scale and age of the Mulberry Garden, it's impossible that there would only be such a few words! Unless..."
"Unless what?"
"Unless everything I knew as a child was false, but that's truly unbelievable!" Xia Wenyuan said, shaking his head, finding it hard to believe even himself. "Another possibility is that the Hua Family interfered in the compilation of the county annals throughout history."
"Intervene? Why would the Hua Family do this?" Qingmu asked.
"The tallest tree in the forest is the first to be felled by the wind. Just like now, if I could, I wouldn't want the Xia Family to be exposed to the media Tiantian, but unfortunately I can't!" Xia Wenyuan sighed.
Qingmu said, "Back then, the Hua Family's wealth and influence were greater than yours are now?"
"Times are different, so it's hard to compare," Xia Wenyuan nodded. "But given the system of that era, it wasn't difficult to get involved in the compilation of county annals. What was difficult was getting involved in the compilation of all the county annals from the Ming Dynasty to the Republic of China, spanning three dynasties and dozens of emperors. That's something no ordinary person could do. Even the privacy of the emperor's family can be thoroughly investigated over time, let alone that of ordinary people. Moreover..."
Xia Wenyuan, "I always felt that the fire was very suspicious."
Qingmu asked, "What's so strange about it?"
Xia Wenyuan said, "A large family that has been passed down for generations, with brothers, collateral branches, relatives, friends, teachers, students, and old friends all over the world, is probably more intricate than the roots of that thousand-year-old mulberry tree. How could it be burned to ashes in a single fire?"
Qingmu also found it strange that, let alone a large family like the Hua Family, even an ordinary family with a slightly larger population would find it difficult to gather together and burn everything to the ground.
"But you saw that fire with your own eyes, didn't you? It can't be faked."
"It's not quite fake," Xia Wenyuan. "But thinking about it carefully, the Mulberry Garden fire marked the beginning of the War of Resistance against Japan. Not only Huaxia, but the whole world experienced an unprecedented war. Afterwards, the flames of war continued and devastation followed one after another. Considering the timing, it's hard not to speculate that it was an attempt to avoid the war and escape unscathed."
Qingmu thought Xia Wenyuan's words made sense, and then he thought of the record in the county annals that "the descendants of Sang Daomao were skilled in the art of Taiyi Dunjia." Could it be that these people really had the ability to predict the future and knew about the great upheavals that would follow, and therefore used fire to avoid disaster?
Speaking of prophecy, Qingmu recalled being trapped in a zero-dimensional space in Zhao Pengcheng's dream and almost unable to escape. During that time, Zhao Pengcheng experienced almost an entire lifetime. If Qingmu were trapped forever, then theoretically, the lifetime Zhao Pengcheng experienced would be the true history of this world from now on.
But Qingmu escaped with the help of the Crow, something Zhao Pengcheng hadn't anticipated. Because time doesn't flow in zero-dimensional space, the moment Qingmu emerged, time returned to the moment before he was trapped, and Zhao Pengcheng was pulled back as well. However, the experience of that life remained in Zhao Pengcheng's memory, like a lucid dream.
Qingmu saw events decades into the future in Zhao Pengcheng's dream within a dream—wasn't that a form of foresight? If he made no effort and instead chose to live in seclusion, the future world would probably be exactly as Zhao Pengcheng experienced!
So this is why he had to go to the South Pacific. He had to change everything, even if it was just to prevent Bi Shenghua from becoming what Zhao Pengcheng saw.