Diao Zhuo laid out everything he knew — the full story of Diao Jun, Rao Qinghui, and the details he had pieced together. Ba Yunye was somewhat taken aback, and after the initial astonishment passed, she smiled and shook her head. “You waited until now to tell me all this… so you’re Diao Jun’s son… Tell me — you wouldn’t be doing something like in one of those dramas, would you? You hear that my sister caused a whole car to crash, so you deliberately get close to me, seduce me, and pull some kind of ‘son’s revenge’ arc?”

“What if I am?”

“Nothing much. Goodbye.” Ba Yunye pretended to be angry and turned to walk away.

Diao Zhuo was quick. He caught her. “I haven’t done anything to you yet — where are you running off to?”

“What am I supposed to do, wait until you’ve ripped off my arms and legs before I make a move?”

“So when it comes to fighting, you actually know you can’t beat me.”

Ba Yunye reconsidered and muttered to herself, “What am I running for — even if it came to blows, this guy wouldn’t necessarily be able to pull me apart…”

“Even if I were here for revenge, it would be…” Diao Zhuo leaned down and murmured something into her ear, and somehow the woman with the hide of a rhinoceros actually turned scarlet. She jabbed him hard in the chest with her elbow and snapped, “Say it loudly if you dare!”

Diao Zhuo glanced around, drew a deep breath, and began, “I’ll—”

“Shut up!” Ba Yunye lunged forward and clapped her hand over his mouth. “You absolute menace, you’d actually say it!”

Diao Zhuo closed his hand around her wrist and peeled her fingers away. “Call me ‘grandson’ one more time and I’ll say the whole thing out loud right now.”

“Fair enough — you’re my grandson.” Ba Yunye laughed.

“Are you ever going to drop it?” He looked at her sideways. “You two weren’t even blood sisters. What revenge am I supposed to be taking?”

Ba Yunye blurted out, “Good thing we weren’t blood sisters — otherwise, if your father had really been involved with my eldest sister, you’d have to call me your little aunt.”

Diao Zhuo forced a single question through his teeth: “Little aunt?”

“Yes!” she answered without missing a beat.

“Ba Yunye, I swear I won’t let this go!”

Ba Yunye, deciding it was time to move on, waved a dismissive hand to signal the matter was closed. “So what if Song Fan is dead? He lied through his teeth — he had it coming long ago.”

“Don’t you find it strange? Song Fan, Zhang Chenguang — one dead in the Badain Jaran Desert, one missing on Yuzhu Peak, whereabouts unknown?”

Ba Yunye went quiet. She repeated his words slowly: “One died in the desert, one went missing on Yuzhu Peak… what a coincidence…” She looked at Diao Zhuo, then after a long pause, hesitated: “That’s right — among my sister’s belongings, there was a man’s wallet. That wallet… could it be your father’s?” Ba Yunye pulled up a family photo stored on her phone and showed it to him.

He didn’t need to say anything. The look on his face said it all.

“So this is what you looked like as a child. Boys really do change as they grow up.” Ba Yunye looked at the photo with curiosity. “Your father’s wallet was with my eldest sister… This…” She sighed. “Besides the family photo, there were three landscape photographs tucked inside.”

“Landscape photographs… Xi’an?”

She shook her head. “One might be Gama Mountain in Qiang Tang.”

Something clicked for Diao Zhuo. No wonder she had kept photographing Gama Mountain so intently when they found Zou Kaigui’s remains. “The other two?”

“One is definitely Yuzhu Peak. And the other one… I’m not sure where it is, but you can tell it’s a lake in a desert, and the color is rather beautiful. I’ve read quite a few desert travel accounts and asked herdsmen on the edges of the Taklamakan and workers involved in desert erosion control — no one has ever seen a lake like it. I don’t know whether it’s in a desert outside of China, or whether it’s not in a desert at all…”

That description resembled Old Wang’s account of Maiden’s Lake in several respects. So Diao Zhuo ventured, “A pink, heart-shaped lake?”

Ba Yunye’s eyes went wide. “How did you know!”

She listened to everything Diao Zhuo had learned at the police station, and when he finished, she looked utterly deflated — slumped, listless, her voice carrying a thread of helplessness. She hadn’t thought the three photographs her eldest sister had left behind held any particular significance. A few years back, when Long Ge had come to Yunnan to negotiate a guesthouse deal, she had invited him and Ma He to eat a mushroom hot pot at the courtyard of the old orphanage, and in the course of conversation she had taken out the photos to show them. Apart from that, she couldn’t recall anyone else who had handled those photographs.

Now that the photos had leaked, the only people it could have been were those two. So — was it Long Ge, who was as much a father and brother to her as anyone, or was it Ma He, her close friend? If the photographs were her sister’s final message — evidence that could prove she had not been involved in Diao Jun’s marriage — what then? And if there was some enormous secret buried within them, what then?

She felt a chill rise from the soles of her feet all the way to the top of her head. She didn’t want to believe that one or both of them had been approaching her with hidden motives, and she genuinely could not think of what connection either of them could possibly have to the geological survey team’s accident. Going by the timeline, Long Ge would have been barely over twenty at the time, and Ma He only fifteen or sixteen. Neither of them could have known Ba Xiye.

Or perhaps they hadn’t come because of Ba Xiye at all?

She remembered that Long Ge had first crossed her path back when he was driving routes in Yunnan — it had been a chance encounter, born from a reservoir rescue involving a child. Now he had money and a solid reputation in the industry. Apart from being perpetually single at his age, she couldn’t imagine what he was lacking. Ma He had come over from a team called “Scorching Sun” three years ago, having apparently had a bitter falling out with his former business partners over financial disputes. He always said he’d been cheated out of his money by people he’d trusted, which had cost him his marriage and his right to see his daughter. For that reason, whenever he had a free moment, he would move heaven and earth to sneak off and spend some time with his daughter. Looking at these two men, Ba Yunye could see no cracks in them — no conceivable possibility that they were embedded in her life for the sake of some hidden agenda.

“Maiden’s Lake…” Ba Yunye sighed and crouched at the roadside, staring blankly into the distance, her eyelids drooping, sighing and shaking her head at intervals. Diao Zhuo had never seen her look so defeated.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean it was them. Since the wallet was your sister’s belongings, after the accident it may well have been treated as material evidence or an important item of interest, and combed through carefully by whoever handled the accident. Because of that, there’s no way of knowing how many people may have seen those photographs.” Diao Zhuo crouched down and patted her on the shoulder. “We can’t be certain.”

Those words were like a shaft of sunlight breaking through after overcast skies, instantly sweeping away the layers of gloom that had settled over Ba Yunye. When a person is being driven by their own emotions, they only hear what they want to hear — that was undeniably true. She recalled that Long Ge had once offered to ask around among the colleagues he knew well, to see if anyone recognized where the photos had been taken. From there, it wasn’t impossible that someone had photographed the photos in passing and passed them along to an interested third party. As long as someone else had seen those photographs — even just one other person — the weight on her chest eased considerably.

“But why did Zhang Chenguang go to Yuzhu Peak? Why was Song Fan trying to find Maiden’s Lake from the photograph? If we knew who had been calling Song Fan — and why the police took it so seriously — we’d have a rough idea of what Song Fan had been involved in behind the scenes. Unfortunately, the police aren’t saying a word. Nothing gets disclosed before charges are laid.” She snapped her fingers and suddenly reverted to her usual breezy self. “Could it be that the three photographs somehow hint at a treasure map?”

A treasure map?

Diao Zhuo suddenly thought of the rumor that the geological survey team had possessed data on a gold deposit. But as someone with professional expertise, he knew very well that the location of gold deposits was no secret in the industry. As early as fifty years ago, geological experts had identified a gold deposit at Sanshandao in Shandong Province. Since then, gold deposits had been found in provinces across the country — everywhere except Shanghai — and by 2007, China’s gold output had already overtaken South Africa’s, making China the world’s leading gold producer. The extraction of a gold deposit typically plays out over several decades; it was not something a small group of people could achieve overnight by digging in the ground somewhere. In other words, even if you knew that gold existed somewhere across this country, that didn’t mean you had the means to actually mine it.

He wrote the characters “YN, N, M” in the palm of her hand. “These are the words my grandfather left behind as he was dying — four letters, and he kept murmuring something with a sound like ‘Ba.’ Before I knew you had three photographs in your possession, I couldn’t make sense of any of it. Now I’m quite certain that the ‘Ba’ is not a number — it’s the surname Ba. The wallet didn’t end up in your sister’s hands by chance, and between the letters and the photographs, there may be some kind of connection.”

Ba Yunye thought hard, then eventually shrugged. “Even if there is a connection, it’s the kind that only someone with your specialized knowledge could understand. How would I know?”

“Neither of them could be sure at the time that the photographs or the letters would end up in any particular person’s hands. If the message were too obscure or too technical — something that left people bewildered and with no starting point — leaving it at all would have been pointless.”

“So it would have to be something that anyone who saw it could immediately associate with something, with just a slight tie to geology or surveying — like coordinates, mapping, rock strata, something like that.”

That sentence seemed to give Diao Zhuo a significant jolt. He thought rapidly for a few seconds and asked, “The order the photographs were arranged in — do you remember it?”

“Yuzhu Peak, Gama Mountain, Maiden’s Lake.”

“The letter Y — what does it bring to mind?”

Ba Yunye looked completely blank.

“N?”

“North latitude.” This one Ba Yunye knew well — GPS positioning came up constantly when scouting off-road routes.

“If the two N’s refer to north latitude in a coordinate — then Y and M…”Diao Zhuo sank into deep thought.

“If it were coordinates, it would be something like N, S, W, E,” Ba Yunye said, not particularly invested. “Even someone as academically hopeless as me knows that Y has nothing to do with coordinates… Could it be elevation?”

“The abbreviation for elevation above sea level is ASL.”

She turned it over in her mind, recalling a few terms her eldest sister had occasionally mentioned. “…Average borehole diameter, or maybe quantitative rapid chromatographic analysis?”

“You actually know those terms?”

She preened a little and raised an eyebrow. “Did I get it right?”

Diao Zhuo shook his head. “If terms that specialized were required to decode it, you’d need to be an industry insider to crack it. At the time, neither of them could guarantee that their descendants would work in geology.”

She spread her hands, indicating she had nothing further to offer.

“Besides the photographs, did Teacher Ba leave behind anything else?”

Ba Yunye paused, and was unexpectedly moved. He had called her eldest sister “Teacher Ba” — perhaps he too believed what she believed: that her sister had not been the one to interfere in his parents’ marriage. She sprang up and launched herself at him with the force of a tiger pouncing on its prey. “I genuinely adore you to death!”

Diao Zhuo was knocked back two full steps before regaining his footing. He put a hand on her waist to steady her and looked at her wordlessly.

She cupped his face in her hands. “Can I kiss you?”

Diao Zhuo stared straight ahead. “You’re actually asking my permission now?”

“I’m making a rare effort to respect you…”

Diao Zhuo let out a cold snort. “I don’t need your respect.”

Ba Yunye grinned wickedly. “So I can do whatever I want with you?”

Diao Zhuo reached out and tilted her chin up with one finger. “Go right ahead.”

Looking at him like this, Ba Yunye could no longer remember how he had first appeared — that serious, expressionless, utterly composed face he had worn at the start. It seemed she really was a bad influence. Not only was she herself unruly, she had apparently corrupted a decent man in the process. She laughed into his chest for a good while, and it was quite some time before she remembered the question he had asked before she’d veered off topic.

“My sister didn’t leave behind any other clues that I know of — unless you count a pile of research papers and her old laptop from years ago… though the police came to look through everything after the accident, and they apparently didn’t find anything. Oh — wait! The black-and-white photo of Yuzhu Peak had a date written on the back of it.”

“What did it say?”

“Such-and-such year, July, photographed at Yuzhu Peak. The year itself is too blurry to read.”

“The abbreviation for year is Y. The abbreviation for month is M.”

Ba Yunye’s eyes went wide. “It can’t be that neat, can it? Year and north latitude?”

“Y most likely stands for the year in question, and M stands for the number seven.”

“And of course the year had to be the one part that’s smudged!”

“Can you make out who the person in the photograph is?”

“Can’t see their face at all.”

“I’ll go back and look through the survey diaries… or maybe I’ll make another trip to Yuzhu Peak and pin down the exact shooting location.”

“The latitude of Gama Mountain?”

“Getting coordinate data for some of the mountain ranges in Qiang Tang wouldn’t be hard for me. The tricky part right now is the year the Yuzhu Peak photograph was taken.” Diao Zhuo felt as though a thread of possibility was coming into view. “Tomorrow, let’s have Old Wang take us to Maiden’s Lake.”

Ba Yunye hesitated slightly. “And Long Ge and Ma He…”

“Your call.” To stay alert to a conspiracy without letting fear of it paralyze you — that was Diao Zhuo’s manner. Besides, having only three photographs to go on wouldn’t get anyone very far regardless.

She pressed her lips together, as if arriving at a decision. “They’re comrades from the same trench. I trust them.”

The two walked on aimlessly for a stretch, and then Ba Yunye suddenly asked, “Is there still any hope of finding Zhang Chenguang?”

“In temperatures like that, the odds of him surviving were extremely slim. When the several rescue teams failed to locate him within forty-eight hours, we all pulled back. I heard that another group went up the mountain in June to search, but apparently also came back empty-handed. All we can do now is hope that someday some mountaineer happens to stumble across his body.” Diao Zhuo’s brow furrowed slightly.

Ba Yunye smiled, inserting a joke to lighten the mood. “So we were actually at the Yuzhu Peak base camp and crossed paths back in April — and it took heaven dragging us through another half year before I finally managed to wriggle my way in and get hold of you.”

“Wriggle your way in?” What kind of description was that?

“The emphasis is on the ‘getting hold of’ part.”

Diao Zhuo pointed upward. “The old fellow up there threw obstacles in the way for half a year, and even that couldn’t stop you.”

“This is what you’d call…” She edged closer with a scheming look, leaned her head against his shoulder, and her hand quietly crept behind him. “Man! Conquers! Heaven!”

A sharp crack rang out — and she was gone in a flash, sprinting into the distance. Diao Zhuo stood where he was, the side of his backside smarting faintly, reigning in the swearing that rose to his lips, and through gritted teeth uttered a single word under his breath: Damn.