The Lou Wai Lou is not far from my shop, and I hurriedly ran back. Wang Meng gets off work at a quarter past five and never stays even half a minute longer, so he had already locked up. I unlocked the door and went inside. The tapes that A Ning brought had already been taken back by her, so I dug out a few of my own tapes. The fat guy followed me in and helped me connect the power supply.

However, I didn’t plan to watch it again. Instead, I rummaged through a few drawers and found a screwdriver. The fat guy looked confused and asked me what I was doing. I was too flustered to answer him and just started to disassemble the tape.

If I was thinking correctly, this was indeed very, very simple—something I had done many times before. Among the two tapes, one of them was a blank video tape, which meant that the content inside was not important at all. What they were sending me was the tape itself, not the content inside, so it could be blank or contain images; it didn’t matter. The only reason they sent this tape was a simple one, too simple to ignore. My hypothesis was also very easy to verify.

Back in middle school, I had fiddled with this kind of thing quite a bit. It wasn’t difficult to take apart; in just a few moves, I separated the tape. Then, I carefully picked it up and shook it a little, causing the fat guy to gasp in surprise.

Inside the video tape, sure enough, on the inner side of one of the plastic shells, there was something stuck.

“Damn it! How did you think of that?” the fat guy exclaimed in astonishment.

I grinned and didn’t bother to laugh, patting him on the back: “That was your idea.” I tore off the thing, and upon seeing it, I gasped, feeling my heart twist.

It was a piece of note paper with a scrawled message containing a dozen or so words:
“No. 349-5, De’er Can Alley, Kunlun Road, Golmud City, Qinghai Province.”

Anyone who could read would recognize that as an address in Golmud City.

“Damn it,” I couldn’t help but speak in my Beijing accent. I wiped the sweat from my forehead, feeling a sense of joy. Finally, I had found something I was looking for. It turned out I had been overthinking things.

This was killing two birds with one stone: first, it could protect the contents from damage during long-distance transport, and second, if this thing was intercepted, the other party wouldn’t think to check for hidden items inside, especially if the content of the video tape was enough to capture the attention of the interceptor.

I understood now that the person the other side needed to guard against was my third uncle, because only he would be surprised by the content of the tape. In fact, he was indeed captivated by what was inside.

It became clear with a little deduction that if he had directly sent this address, given the circumstances at the time, it would inevitably end up in my third uncle’s hands, just like the initial copy of the Warring States silk manuscript.

Having figured all this out, I felt incredibly refreshed and immediately disassembled the other tape. However, instead of a piece of paper, this tape contained an old brass key, the kind that was most popular in the 1980s for 480 locks.

As I picked it up and unfolded it, I noticed the key was quite aged, with the brass tarnished. On the back of the key’s handle, there was tape with a series of blurry numbers written on it: 306.

“It seems that the other party wants to invite you over,” the fat man said from the side. “They’ve even prepared a room for you.”