Daomu Biji: Restart

I had no memory of this at all. Of course, the bond between me and my Uncle Three was very complicated. He took me to do too many strange things, so not only did I not have any memory of this matter, but I also only had a general theme in my memories of many other things that had happened. For example, those many summers of catching all kinds of bugs was eventually unified into catching crickets in my mind.

As Jin Wantang spoke, I didn't interrupt and just looked at him quietly. To be honest, I had trained myself to maintain an indifferent attitude towards such secrets and clues because I dared not cling to them so easily.

He went on talking about what happened back then.

At that time, the game was very similar to playing house. Everyone pretended to be an archaeological team member, just like those kids who picked their favorite One Piece character to play fight. But because I was too young back then, I had little memory of it.

Jin Wantang believed that Uncle Three was trying to recreate what really happened at the Xisha underwater tomb at that time. Qi Yu wasn’t important to the whole story, so Uncle Three took me to make up the numbers.

When they replayed the series of events that time, they actually discovered a very important clue. It was because I had participated in the whole process that I was able to stir up some of their fragmented memories.

That important clue was related to Qi Yu—the person I was playing—and all of my Qi Yu-related training started after that game.

Jin Wantang's reasoning process wasn’t rigorous, so there’s no need to repeat it here. I’ll only record what his conclusions were.

First, some people had hoped that Qi Yu was still alive, so they trained me to learn his handwriting. In essence, did these people want to believe that Qi Yu was me?

But I was a child, so even if the handwriting was the same, why would they push themselves to believe that Qi Yu was me?

Unless it was possible that others might believe it. In other words, did many people think that Qi Yu might become a child?

But why would anyone believe that a person could become a child?

Considering the experiments they did at that time, I couldn’t discount the possibility that in addition to immortality, they might have desired to regain their youth.

In other words, did they come up with a ridiculous plan at that time? Uncle Three might have lied to others by saying that Qi Yu had taken too much medicine and rejuvenated himself. Since he couldn't reveal the fact that he had lied, he began to secretly train me to have traces of Qi Yu’s characteristics so as to make others think that I might be a childlike Qi Yu.

Fatty looked at me and said, "Mr. Naïve, I can't believe you’re Edogawa Conan. You look like a child, but you’re actually a famous detective on Gushan Road."⁽¹⁾

I thought this statement was pretty funny, but it seemed to be possible. "In this case, Qi Yu should have died,” I said to Jin Wantang. “Why would Xiao Hua look for him?"

"The key question is: where did Qi Yu really go? Xiao Hua definitely wasn’t looking for you, the person acting as a scapegoat. What he was looking for was the real Qi Yu. So does this mean that Master Hua believed that Qi Yu wasn’t actually dead?"

What does that mean?

I couldn’t seem to find any logic to it, but Jin Wantang continued talking, "I don't know if Master Hua finally found the answer in the end, but there is a problem that we can think about."

He coughed a few times, leaving some traces of blood on his mouth that gave me a bad feeling.

He didn't seem to notice and just kept talking, "Did those individuals your Uncle Three wanted to lie to actually believe in this?"

"Only a fool would believe it," Fatty said.

I didn’t think so. First of all, there was a period of time when I had wondered why I had some strange memories and why my handwriting was the same as that of my predecessor. If this kind of thing wasn’t directly explained by the person involved, then all the secrecy was actually quite scary and convincing.

This matter had always existed in Jin Wantang's heart, but it was only recently that a man came to him and told him that he was very good at Qimen Dunjia. As that man had stood in Jin Wantang's shop at the time, Jin Wantang felt that his posture was very familiar.

****

TN Notes:

(1) The main character in Detective Conan is Kudo Shinichi. He gets turned into a child after ingesting some lethal poison, so he adopts the pseudonym Edogawa Conan to hide from those who poisoned him. (Fun fact, family names traditionally come first in Japanese so I just stuck with it here). Gushan Road is in Hangzhou where Wu Xie lived (lives? Not sure if Rain Village is their permanent residence now).