138: Chapter 138 Cannot Wait

Ultimately, the main members of The Pu Family were all arrested. Among them, the leaders Pu Wenqing, Pu Yuanheng, and Pu Rengui were sentenced to immediate execution, while the remaining clan members were either exiled to the border or forced into government slavery.

The Pu Family's properties across various regions were all seized, and all involved officials and craftsmen were severely punished.

But to Hu Tian's surprise, the final volume of the documents recorded an unsolved mystery.

During the investigation, Hao Yulin discovered that The Pu Family had transferred a large amount of assets and information in advance before the seizure.

The whereabouts of these assets and information were never clarified.

The final paragraph of the document read: "I have ascertained that several months before the family's assets were seized, the Pu clan secretly went to sea. It is rumored that they loaded all their family treasures and documents onto ships and transported them to the South Seas. I sent people to investigate, but the clues went cold, and their whereabouts could not be determined. I expect that the remnants of the Pu clan will surely make a comeback; I hope Your Majesty remains vigilant..."

After reading the last page, Hu Tian slowly put down the document, his mood extremely complex.

He hadn't expected that this batch of documents he salvaged from the Donghu Island shipwreck would actually record such a little-known piece of history.

Even more shocking to him was that this history revealed not just the crimes of a family, but a conspiracy of technical theft spanning centuries and involving multiple countries.

He sat in his chair, his gaze falling on the restored porcelain on the table.

This porcelain was the crystallization of the wisdom of Chinese craftsmen.

But hundreds of years ago, these techniques were stolen through various means, ultimately leading to the decline of the Chinese porcelain industry.

In Hu Tian's mind, that sentence surfaced.

"If this object emerges, the world shall know the gravity of the harm caused by the foreign barbarians."

Could it also be related to the Pu clan?

Hu Tian's fingers tapped rapidly on the keyboard, and a large amount of historical data regarding the Pu clan of Fujian Province gradually appeared on the screen.

The first things he searched for were some scattered records from the Fujian local chronicles of the qing dynasty.

In the Quanzhou area of Fujian Province, the Pu clan was originally an influential maritime merchant family. For generations, they operated overseas trade, dealing with locations across Arabia, Persia, and the South Seas.

But strangely, the records concerning this family suddenly vanished without a trace after the seventh year of Yongzheng Emperor.

Hu Tian's brow furrowed as he continued to search deeper.

On an academic forum specializing in the history of Southern Fujian families, he found some more detailed information.

Some scholars pointed out that the ancestors of the Pu clan could indeed be traced back to Jewish merchants who settled in China during the Song and Yuan Dynasties.

These merchants conducted business in the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou areas, intermarried with locals, and gradually integrated into Chinese society, yet they maintained close ties with the overseas Jewish merchant community.

By the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the Pu clan had become completely Sinicized, but their special status in overseas trade allowed them to navigate with ease between China and the West.

Hu Tian opened several historical archive databases and finally found a key piece of information in a scanned copy of a qing dynasty Ministry of Justice archive.

The archive showed that in the seventh month of the seventh year of Yongzheng Emperor, the Governor-General of Min-Zhe, Hao Yulin, memorialized the imperial court, stating that the Pu clan of Quanzhou was suspected of colluding with foreign barbarians and illicitly selling imperial secrets. Thirteen people, including the Pu clan leader Pu Wende, had been apprehended.

However, right after the case was concluded, several main members of the Pu clan were actually snatched away while being escorted, and their whereabouts became unknown.

Hu Tian's heart rate accelerated.

He immediately compared the timeline: In the sixth month of the seventh year of Yongzheng Emperor, The Pu Family was seized; in the seventh month, the leaders Pu Wenqing, Pu Yuanheng, and Pu Rengui were sentenced to immediate execution, while some Pu clan members were snatched away during their escort to exile; in early August, Hao Yulin submitted a secret memorial to Yongzheng Emperor, saying: "If this object emerges, the world shall know the gravity of the harm caused by the foreign barbarians"; three days later, Hao Yulin was assassinated at home.

The timing was indeed too coincidental.

Hu Tian pondered for a moment and then typed "Hao Yulin assassination case" into the search box.

This time, he found even more relevant historical records.

The Draft History of Qing had a brief record: "In the eighth month of the third year of Yongzheng Emperor, the Governor-General of Min-Zhe, Hao Yulin, was ordered to investigate a smuggling case in Fujian. He was assassinated while in office, and the killer's whereabouts are unknown."

But in some unofficial historical notes, Hu Tian found more details.

An attendant of Hao Yulin who was present at the time later mentioned in a private account that there were seven assassins that night. Their movements were extremely agile, and the weapons they used were quite strange, unlike those used by martial artists of the Central Plains.

Even more bizarrely, after succeeding, these assassins did not flee the scene but committed suicide on the spot, leaving not a single survivor.

In Hu Tian's mind, a complete picture gradually came together.

As a bridge between China and the West, the Pu clan stole Chinese technical intelligence for the East India Company, gaining enormous profits.

But they never expected that Yongzheng Emperor would send Hao Yulin to thoroughly investigate the case.

When the Pu clan realized their crimes were being exposed, they transferred a large amount of assets and technical data in advance and arranged a team of death soldiers, prepared to eliminate the person who posed the greatest threat to them at the necessary moment.

Hao Yulin was the person they had to get rid of.

Of course, Hao Yulin's death was one aspect, but that secret memorial exposing their crimes also had to be found so that the matter could potentially be suppressed.

History played a great joke like this; the secret memorial never reached Yongzheng Emperor's hands and was ultimately sunk in the sea at Donghu Island.

The more Hu Tian thought about it, the more terrifying it became.

Hao Yulin must have discovered an even greater secret after seizing The Pu Family assets.

He also discovered something else.

After the Yongzheng era, records regarding the Pu clan almost completely disappeared.

But in some literature researching the history of overseas Chinese, he found some clues.

Some scholars pointed out that in several Southeast Asian countries, especially Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, there exist some mysterious Chinese families. Although they integrated into local society long ago, they still maintain some kind of hidden connection.

In the genealogies of these families, many people's ancestral home is Quanzhou, Fujian Province, and their surnames often contain characters like 'Pu', 'Pu', or 'Bo'.

Hu Tian's heart stirred.

He remembered the sentence mentioned in the document: The remnants of the Pu clan will surely make a comeback.

Could it be that the descendants of the Pu clan are still active overseas today?

Are they still continuing their ancestors' "business," continuing to act as "middlemen" for certain forces to steal Chinese technology and intelligence?

The more Hu Tian thought, the more he felt a chill down his spine.

He turned off the computer, stood up, and went to the window of the villa's hall, looking at the afterglow of the setting sun outside.

It was already dusk, and the entire courtyard was silent.

Hu Tian stood by the window, his mind unable to settle.

That coastal reef outside the mouth of the Min River was like a magnet, pulling at his thoughts.

Hao Yulin's secret memorial, the secrets of the Pu clan, the conspiracy of the East India Company...

All the clues ultimately pointed to that reef.

But he glanced at his phone screen; the message Zhou Waner sent this morning was still on the interface.

"Tian Ge, taking the high-speed rail tonight. I'll arrive at Binhai Station around 8:00 PM. Will you come pick me up?"

It was followed by a coquettish emoji.

The corners of Hu Tian's mouth curled up slightly as he tucked the phone back into his pocket.

The matter of investigating the treasure could wait, but the matter of his girlfriend could not.

He took a deep breath and silently calculated his itinerary in his mind: Today is Friday; go pick up Zhou Waner in a bit, spend the two days of the weekend accompanying her around Binhai, send her back to Jinling on Sunday, and then set off early Monday morning for the sea area near the Matsu Islands to explore the reef.

When coming back from there, he could just take a detour to Magic City to catch that Christies auction.

The timing could barely be linked together.

He turned back to sit on the sofa, reopened his tablet, brought up the interface, and locked the coordinates on that reef area twelve nautical miles east-southeast of the Min River Estuary.

On the interface, that deep red signal point was still pulsing steadily, as if waiting quietly at the dark bottom of the sea for nearly three hundred years, waiting for someone to bring it out of the water.

Hu Tian stared at those coordinates for a long time before finally turning off the tablet and getting up to wash up.

Things couldn't be rushed; he had seen too many cases of failure due to impatience. One must remain calm in all matters.

8:20 PM.

The afterglow of the moon still spread across the Binhai Station square. Hu Tian parked the car in the pickup area and leaned against the car door waiting.

Inside the station, crowds were surging. Travelers of all kinds dragged their suitcases out in a stream, but Zhou Waner's figure was nowhere to be seen.

Just as he was about to pull out his phone to call, a pair of hands suddenly reached out from behind, covering Hu Tian's eyes, while a coquettish voice sounded.

"Guess who I am?"

Two warm, soft hands covered Hu Tian's eyes from behind, carrying a faint scent of gardenia.

Hu Tian didn't move. The corners of his mouth curved as he said unhurriedly, "Waner, a graduate student in the Department of Cultural Relics and Museology at Jinling University, height 1.65 meters, likes oat lattes, doesn't like cilantro..."

"I hate you!"

Zhou Waner came around from behind to face him, poked his chest with feigned anger, and then laughed again.

She was wearing an off-white knit cardigan, her hair tied casually in a low ponytail with a few stray strands falling by her ears. Her eyes were bright, carrying the kind of relaxation and joy one has upon seeing a familiar person after a journey.

Hu Tian took the suitcase from her hand and habitually rubbed her head: "Wait long?"

"I suddenly got off the train early, thinking I'd give you a fright."

Zhou Waner stood on her tiptoes and brushed her shoulder against his arm. "I'm starving. What are we eating?"

"You decide."

"Then let's have seafood; I haven't had it in so long."

The two got into the car and headed toward the downtown area of Binhai.

Zhou Waner chattered all the way about things in Jinling, saying her supervisor was recently working on a research project about the Maritime Silk Road, that the department organized an internal visit to the Nanjing Museum, and that she had found a qing dynasty local chronicle of Fujian at a second-hand book stall in the Confucius Temple for only thirty yuan.

Speaking of this, she suddenly pulled a yellowed pamphlet out of her backpack and handed it to Hu Tian.

"Aren't you researching things from Fujian lately? I flipped through it, and some of the records inside are quite interesting."

Hu Tian stopped the car at a red light, glanced down, and saw four characters written on the cover: miscellaneous records of the fujian sea.

His heart stirred slightly. Maintaining a calm expression, he asked casually, "Where did you find this?"

"A stall run by an old man over by the Confucius Temple. He said it was collected from an old residence. I don't know if it's real or fake."

Zhou Waner took the book back and leaned against the seat back, stretching. "Anyway, I think the handwriting looks quite old. Can you help me take a look?"