Shen Qiufeng crouched on the floor of the side room and noticed several loose bricks along the edge. Someone had clearly pried at them before. She found an abandoned pair of scissors, jammed the tip into the crack between the bricks, and pried with all her might. The brick flipped up鈥攂ut underneath was just empty dirt, damp and bare.



"Was I overthinking it?" She couldn't let it go. She got up, circled the room three times, knocked on the walls, listened for echoes. All solid. Where were the clues?



She decided to go to the county cultural center to do some research. An old researcher named Wang received her. When he heard she was looking into the history of the Shen family's old house in Huaixi, he searched for a while. There was a brief record: the Shen house was built in the late Qing dynasty by Shen Wance. But the county annals had very little about Shen Wance鈥攐nly a single line: "Moved to Huaixi in the third year of Tongzhi, skilled in carpentry, built his house at the foot of Camel Peak Mountain beside the Yang River."



The county archives were in the basement of the old government building. The air was thick with the smell of mothballs. Researcher Wang produced a rolled-up volume of thread-bound county annals and spread it on the table. Shen Qiufeng leaned in, reading word by word. Finally, in the "Biographies 路 Transient Residents" section, she found Shen Wance's name. The annotation was slightly longer than what Researcher Wang had mentioned: "Originally from Guiping, Guangxi. Fled warfare to Huaixi. The locals know nothing of his story."



"Warfare?" Shen Qiufeng's heart jolted. The third year of Tongzhi was the very year the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom fell at Tianjing. And Guiping, Guangxi鈥攖hat was the birthplace of the Taiping Rebellion. Could the Shen family have ties to the Taiping rebels?



She asked Researcher Wang, "Is there anything more about Shen Wance? His descendants? Details about the old house?"



When he learned she was a Shen, Researcher Wang told her, "Among the older generation in Huaixi, there's always been a legend that the Shen family's old house hides 'something.' But no one knows what."



By the time she returned to Huaixi, it was already dark. Shen Qiufeng pushed open the old house's door and studied the structure by flashlight. The house faced south with its back to the north. The northwest side room was the Gen position, which in feng shui was the place where qi gathers and wind is stored. She walked to the main hall and looked up at the heavy crossbeams. One of them was coated with slightly lighter paint than the others-nd was thicker by a full circle. She fetched a stepladder to get a closer look.



The beam was carved with intricate cloud patterns. And deep in the pattern grooves, there seemed to be a hair-thin seam. The paint here was noticeably thinner, as if it had been deliberately worn away.



She climbed up and ran her fingertip along the seam. The crack was horizontal, about a foot long, as if it had been deliberately cut. She tried scraping at it with her fingernail鈥攏o give.



"Grandfather's disappearance, Father's illness, Zhou Dehou's forced demolition, and Shen Wance's flight from disaster." Shen Qiufeng sat on the ladder, resting the flashlight on her knee, the beam casting a circle of light on the opposite wall. The old house's beams loomed silently above her, beam after beam, spanning over a hundred years. She suddenly felt this wasn't just a house. It was a vessel鈥攃arrying the secrets of generations of Shens. And now someone had brought a bulldozer to smash it open.



She suddenly remembered something her father used to say when she was little: every Shen man had to polish the bronze mirror. Could the bronze mirror hold the key to unlocking the mechanism?