Volume 7 Chapter 5: The Real Secret of the Video Tape

Lou Wai Lau is not far from my shop. I hurried back, and Wang Meng had already left at 5:15, never staying for more than half a minute. I unlocked the door and went into the back room. I took the tapes that Ah Ning had brought back to her and went to look for my own tapes. The fat guy followed me in and helped me plug in the power.

But I didn’t intend to watch it again, instead I rummaged through a few drawers and found a screwdriver.

Fatso couldn’t understand and asked me what I was doing. I was in a daze and didn’t bother to answer him, I just started to disassemble the tape.

If I’m thinking correctly, this thing is really very, very simple, and I’ve even done it many times.

Two tapes, one of which was blank, which meant that the content inside was not important at all. The other tape was the one he had sent me, not the content inside, so it didn’t matter if it was blank or had images. There was only one reason why he had sent me this tape, a reason that couldn’t be simpler. And my guess was very easy to verify.

I had played with a lot of these things in middle school, and it wasn’t hard to take apart. In a flash, I separated the tape, and then I carefully picked it up and shook it, and the fat guy watching me let out a scream.

Inside the plastic shell of the tape, on one side, there was indeed a piece of paper stuck to it.

“Damn it, how did you think of that?” the fat guy exclaimed in surprise.

I couldn’t help but laugh, and I said to him, “That’s what you thought of.” I tore off the thing and, after looking at it, I let out a cry of “Oh my!” and felt my heart twist.

It was a piece of note paper with a dozen words written very sloppily on it.

No. 349-5, Kunlun Road, Ercan Lane, Golmud City, Qinghai Province.

Anyone who can read can tell that it is an address in Golmud City.

“Damn it.” I couldn’t help but speak in Beijing dialect. I wiped the sweat from my head and felt a sense of joy. I had finally guessed the right thing. It turned out that I had really thought too much.

This was killing two birds with one stone. First, it could protect the object from being damaged during long-distance transportation. Second, if the object was intercepted by someone, the other party wouldn’t be able to guess what was inside it for a while, especially if the content of the video tape was attractive enough to capture the attention of the interceptor.

I knew that the person the sender was trying to protect against was my third uncle, because only he would be surprised by the content of the tape.

This was obvious if you thought about it, because if he had sent it directly to this address, the tape would have ended up in my uncle’s hands, just like the copy of the Silk Manuscript.

Once I had figured this out, I felt very refreshed, and immediately opened another tape. This tape contained not a piece of paper, but an old brass key, the kind of key used on the most popular 480 locks in the 1980s.

When I unfolded it, I could see that the key was quite old, with the copper skin blackened. On the back of the key handle was a piece of tape with a series of illegible numbers: 306.

“It seems that the sender wants to invite you over,” The fat guy said, “They even opened up the room for you.”