⟪The Mechanism in the Antique Cabinet⟫
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July 18, Sunday.
Today was Ye Huairui’s moving day to his new home.
In the end, he bought “that” seaside villa.
The Jin City police’s operation to capture Yin Jiaming was relatively secretive at the time, and the villa area where they found him was sparsely populated, so there were no witnesses. The police announcement only mentioned that Yin Jiaming was shot and fell into the sea, so the public had no way of knowing the exact location.
Even in The Great Heist of Jin City, regarding the scene where Yin Jiaming was shot, Director Zhao Cuihua, who seemed to have a deep understanding of the case, only made vague references and did not film at the actual location.
Reading the case files didn’t give him such a strong impression, but when Ye Huairui came to see the house in person, he realized just how remote it was.
Even in Jin City, where land was scarce and expensive, this semi-mountainous area was so isolated that not even public buses could reach it. Without a private car, it was nearly impossible to get up or down.
The developer of the time positioned this villa area as a high-end residential zone for the wealthy, built on a cliff with a Portuguese-style European design that balanced aesthetics and privacy. One side faced the sea, while the other side had a private garden, with at least fifty meters between each building.
During the time of the great heist, the villa area had just been completed, and several villas hadn’t even finished basic renovations. Naturally, they hadn’t been officially put on the market yet. At night, only the night watchmen of the construction team were present, making it an ideal hiding place.
Subsequent police investigations revealed that the developer of this villa area had business dealings with Yin Jiaming’s father, Mr. He, but this couldn’t be used as evidence that they were accomplices of Yin Jiaming.
After searching the villa, the police also didn’t find the missing jewels or any trace of the other three accomplices.
Thirty-nine years passed after that.
Whether by coincidence or fate, most of the properties in this villa area were sold, except for this particular house, which remained vacant for nearly forty years without any owner—until Mr. Ye bought it and gave it to his son.
As the saying goes, “A house uninhabited is prone to decay.”
Even though it was considered a top-tier luxury home back then, after being vacant for so many years, both its exterior and interior became quite old.
However, the house was still in relatively good condition. With some electrical and plumbing upgrades, a fresh coat of paint on the walls, and a polish for the floors, it would be ready for occupancy.
Although Mr. Ye didn’t know that this house was somewhat of a “haunted house” in a certain sense, he was quite surprised when he heard that his son had chosen a villa that was three or four decades old. He repeatedly asked his son if he was sure he didn’t want to consider other houses.
Ye Huairui, of course, wasn’t considering any other options.
If it weren’t for the fact that this house was the last place where Yin Jiaming had been seen, he wouldn’t have wanted to buy a house at all.
Since his son liked it, Mr. Ye naturally had no objections.
With the real estate agent’s full efforts, all the transfer procedures were completed within half a month.
Mr. Ye then hired a renovation company to refurbish the house and purchased matching furniture. Within a month, the villa was perfectly arranged, just waiting for the new owner to move in.
So, on this day, Ye Huairui drove himself, bringing two suitcases of belongings and seven or eight boxes of books, and moved into the seaside villa located in the semi-mountainous area.
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“Yes, everything is fine here. No problems at all.”
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
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By this time, it was already eleven o’clock at night.
Ye Huairui came out with the bowl of noodles and sat at the dining table to eat.
Next to the dining table was an arched window facing the seaside cliff. According to the police files left by the Jin City police, when Yin Jiaming was shot and fled into the villa, he broke through this window’s glass and fell into the sea below the cliff.
At this moment, thirty-nine years later, Ye Huairui sat in front of the same window, observing the intricate European-style carvings on the window frame under the light of the wall lamp, and couldn’t help but imagine the scene Yin Jiaming saw in his final moments…
“Sigh!”
Ye Huairui let out a low sigh and murmured to himself:
“If only I could see it with my own eyes…”
Of course, Ye Huairui was just speaking hypothetically.
This isn’t a science fiction novel; there’s no time travel.
Even if there were, his interest in the case was merely curiosity, not an obsession that would drive him to travel back thirty-nine years to experience it firsthand.
Moreover, Ye Huairui admitted that even he, in an era lacking modern tools and where even DNA testing took two years, wouldn’t have done better than the Jin City police of that time.
“…It looks like it’s going to rain.”
Ye Huairui felt the oppressive pressure outside the window and picked up a mouthful of noodles.
In the height of summer, Jin City almost always had thunderstorms.
Today had been unusually hot and stuffy, and Ye Huairui had been worried about a sudden downpour while moving. It had held off until now, but it finally seemed like it was going to rain.
“Boom!”
A deep rumble of thunder echoed in the distance.
At the same time, Ye Huairui suddenly heard a loud “bang.”
Startled, he dropped his chopsticks and jumped to his feet.
The sound was very clear to Ye Huairui. It came from the direction of the wall facing the window.
He looked in that direction and saw an antique cabinet.
Ye Huairui frowned.
This cabinet was an old piece that came with the villa, with the wood embedded into the wall.
The renovation team had previously thought the cabinet was quite old and its style rather outdated, not really fitting a young person’s taste, so they asked Ye Huairui if he wanted it removed.
Ye Huairui thought that the cabinet was an antique and didn’t want to bother with the hassle, so he had the renovation team leave it as it was.
In fact, it wasn’t just this cabinet. Ye Huairui hadn’t allowed the renovation team to alter any of the villa’s other furnishings unless they were already decayed.
Ye Huairui didn’t have much luggage and hadn’t had time to buy new things, so naturally, he didn’t have any decorations to fill the antique cabinet.
But how could an empty cabinet make the sound of a heavy object falling?
Cautiously, Ye Huairui walked up to the cabinet and knocked on its wall.
“Knock knock knock.”
The cabinet’s sound was deep, indicating that the wood was of good quality.
“…Could it be thermal expansion and contraction?”
Ye Huairui wondered suspiciously.
Then, in the next second, an even louder “bang” shattered his hypothesis.
This time, Ye Huairui heard it clearly. The sound indeed came from deep within the cabinet—or more precisely, from the wall behind the cabinet.
Ye Huairui’s scalp tingled.
He had seen the floor plan of this house and had been in and out of the villa countless times during the purchase, renovation, and moving process, but he never remembered there being any space behind that wall!
Even though Ye Huairui was a young man standing at 1.82 meters tall, he felt a bit scared at this moment.
He hesitated for thirty seconds over whether to call the police because of two unexplained loud noises, but ultimately decided to investigate on his own first.
So, Ye Huairui took a deep breath and began to feel around the antique cabinet.
The cabinet was deep but had no drawers or doors. Apart from the shelves, it only had intricately designed walls and an empty bottom panel.
“Knock, knock knock.”
Ye Huairui lightly tapped different spots on the bottom panel, hearing solid, dull echoes similar to tapping on a forehead.
It wasn’t until he tapped the lower left corner that he heard two distinctly different, crisp echoes, like tapping on a belly.
Ye Huairui: “…”
—No way!?
At this moment, Ye Huairui’s mind was filled with nothing but ‘shock’.
He began to carefully explore the area with the unusual sound, meticulously feeling around the contours of the antique cabinet, not missing a single nook or cranny.
After two minutes of fiddling, he finally found something unusual on the inside of two “V”-shaped shelves.
Ye Huairui turned on his phone’s flashlight, crouched down, and closely examined the object he had discovered.
It seemed to be a protruding wooden strip, about one centimeter in length, width, and height, a small, square piece that was conspicuously wedged in the center of the “V.” It couldn’t be pressed or pulled out.
For some reason, the word ‘mechanism’ immediately popped into Ye Huairui’s mind.
He tried moving the small block in various directions.
At first, it seemed to be firmly embedded in the cabinet’s design, not budging at all.
It wasn’t until Ye Huairui turned it to the right that he suddenly heard a “click,” and the entire small cube slid down along the edge of the “V” decoration, fitting perfectly into a similarly sized groove at the edge.
—It really is a mechanism!?
Ye Huairui was so shocked that he didn’t know how to react.
At this moment, the thunder outside grew closer, and raindrops began to fall, pattering against the window glass and drifting into the living room through the open window.
But Ye Huairui couldn’t care less about that now.
His entire focus was on the mechanism of the cabinet.
Ye Huairui crouched down to carefully observe the structure of the mechanism and suddenly had a flash of inspiration.
The small cube had been positioned at the very top of the “V,” like a pin or a bolt in a door lock.
And now that it had slid open, could it mean that…
With this thought, Ye Huairui placed his hands on either side of the “V”-shaped shelf and tried turning it to the right.
Although it felt heavy, it actually moved.
Ye Huairui: “!!”
He felt like a player on the verge of completing an escape room game, feeling nervous, anxious, and excited as he continued to manipulate the mechanism.
When he had turned the “V” exactly ninety degrees to the right, transforming it into a “＜” shape, he finally heard a series of dull, dry sounds of metal and wood scraping against each other.
Then, a section of the lower left corner of the cabinet slid to the left, revealing a hidden door in the wall behind it, just large enough for a person to crawl through.
uh…. “there’s no time travel“… I have a feeling Huairui just jinxed himself? 😅
Oh right… if he ends up getting a husband (or is it wife? I’m still confused. He seems academic so I think he’s the shou…), it’s not really a jinx… it’s a blessing instead…
Yes, he’s the shou. Well, if he can’t find a husband in the present, he will from the past 🙊🙊🙊 (Low-key also wanted to find one from the past but it ain’t possible)
I’m not going to scratch out the time travel thing yet 🙈 either the future one going to the past or the past one going to the future (this is fiction after all). Since the genre mentions butterfly effect my first thought is the future going to the past…but it still can be done via the writing. I guess we’ll see later 🙈