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Many people tried to investigate Seven Fingers’ background before, and found that he worked in an engineering brigade in Inner Mongolia in the 1980s. After that, however, they couldn’t find anything else.

By the 1990s, there were no traces of the Inner Mongolia engineering brigade, and nobody know where the members had gone. They must have been doing confidential mining projects in some parts of the country, and were later merged with other units, so it was basically a dead end.

The buildings with Seven Fingers’ mark were mostly in the north because that was where the brigade had been most active. But there were a few scattered throughout the south.

Creating such a strange bit of architectural design had to be done during construction, and couldn’t have been done by one person. I said to Xiao Hua: “Is it possible that Seven Fingers isn’t one person, but seven people?”

Xiao Hua frowned: “Why do you say that?”

“I’m familiar with this kind of work. I know how many people would participate in such a project, from the design drawings to the final construction of the house. It’s absolutely impossible to hide the internal structure of the house in the early stages without being discovered. That’s why I think it has to be an organization, and one that most likely has seven people.”

It had been an age when creativity and personality were suppressed. If there was a group of young people who wanted to realize some strange ideas in their architectural designs, then this was the only method they could use.

I suddenly thought of something and asked, “When was the most recent Seven Finger building built?”

“None have been discovered since the mid-1990s.”

In China’s fastest-growing era, where various institutional transformations were taking place, a team consisting of seven people actually wasn’t that small. It was also impossible for all of them to continuously move in one direction during such a tumultuous period in history. They had gathered because of their interests, so when the times started changing and the humanities started to be liberated, their original outlet for venting gradually became less important.

As a result, Seven Fingers may have been dissolved after the mid-1990s. Based on the amount of time that had passed between this building being constructed and the mid-1990s— and even up until today— the Seven Fingers members certainly weren’t young. Maybe some of them had even died.

Of course, this was all just a theory.

I turned on my cell-phone and started taking pictures of the piano. If someone was in the house, then there had to be a hint on the piano.

The piano was very large and heavy, and made of solid wood. I could even see that many of the wires inside hadn’t been strung yet.

Truthfully, the piano was very ordinary. It must have been a foreign concession the previous owner of the house had left behind, but I really didn’t know anything about musical instruments. I studied it carefully, but didn’t find anything besides the noticeable lack of oxidation traces at the end of the piano wire. This indicated that the piano’s restoration was a recent affair.

Xiao Hua and I grabbed the cloth that had originally covered the piano and spread it on the ground, finding that there was a picture on it.

It was a section cut design drawing. I immediately recognized that it was the drawing of this old house we were currently in. There was the very obvious design of the hall, the heavy correlation between the basement and the second floor, the two stairs, and the ventilation structure of the fireplace. Some of the decorations on the outside were typical of mansions made by Italian designers imitating the French at that time. I had seen many such cases when I was studying back at school, and had actually gone to many concessions (1) to sketch on the spot.

But this wasn’t part of the design drawing’s main focus. I was surprised to find that this small house only occupied less than a tenth of the design drawing, and someone had painted a huge black shadow in the area below the house.

The shadow was at least ten times as large as the house, and the irregular edges seemed natural. It looked like a huge ugly creature was crawling below the building.

“What is this?” Xiao Hua and I looked at each other at the same time.

“Is there a foreign object under this house?” I started asking questions. “Or was this house built on a huge foreign object?”

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TN Notes:

(1) I’m pretty sure he means the places that used to be occupied by foreign powers. Here’s info on concessions that happened in China in the 20th Century. You can even think along the lines of the “Shanghai French Concession”

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