The majestic sister-in-law of the Red Chamber

The chief executive's room is a two-storey small suite. Although it is not big in size, it is very luxuriously decorated.

The outside is a living room and study room. All the furniture is made of mahogany. The pen holder and pen holder on the desk are even made of nanmu. The decorations and the carvings of suet white jade are all placed so casually.

Situ Meng pinched his fingers and made a rough estimate. The value of the things in this room is tens of thousands of taels of silver. This is not counting the red sandalwood frame and double-sided Suzhou embroidery that separates the study room from the bedroom. illustration screen.

"Zhaza, I can't imagine that this mere chief executive who resells private salt is even more extravagant than me, a prince! It seems that they have earned a lot of black-hearted money over the years!" Situ Meng said while talking, Once again, I worked with Lin Tian in a division of labor, and quickly searched in this study.

Lin Tian didn't say anything, and went directly to the desk, gently squeezed the lock with his right hand, and the lock opened immediately.However, when Lin Tian opened the drawer, he was a little dumbfounded, because there was nothing in the drawer, it was empty.

If she hadn't seen the chief executive put the black account that Cao Changrong handed over to him in this drawer, she would have thought it was empty in the first place!

Lin Tian, ​​who doesn't believe in evil, directly took out the entire drawer from the cabinet, and then carefully searched it up and down, inside and out, even taking into account the height difference between the inside and the outside, and so on. The drawer was directly smashed into powder, but still nothing was found. In the end, he had no choice but to admit that the drawer was indeed just the most common drawer, without any interlayers or hidden compartments inside.

Lin Tian, ​​who didn't believe in evil, gave up checking the drawer, but turned his eyes to the sturdy desk.First, she gently took out all the drawers on the desk and put them on the floor, and then opened the cabinet door on the other side of the desk.

After checking everything and making sure that there is no problem, Lin Tian reached out to move the entire desk to have a look.At this time, a scene that surprised her happened. Even though she had exhausted all her strength, the desk did not move at all, as if the whole desk was completely grown on the ground.

Lin Tian's eyes lit up immediately, and he gestured at Situ Meng, and the two of them gathered around the table to investigate carefully. Lin Tian even got into the table, and kept moving around gently with his hands. knocking.

Sure enough, hard work paid off. After a while, Lin Tian discovered that there was a hollow space where the table connected to the ground. Originally, she wanted to break the desk violently and get rid of the black book that might be hidden inside. Come out, but was stopped by Situ Meng.

"Don't worry, let's look carefully! Since this is an important transshipment base for them, there must be a lot of secrets. Since this desk is completely fixed on the ground, there must be a deeper purpose, absolutely not It's as simple as just one hidden grid!

If it is broken directly, I am afraid it will destroy the mechanism in it!If there is a secret room or something, it will probably be locked automatically, making it impossible to find it.Xiaotian, look carefully to see if there are any mechanisms or the like inside this desk! "

"En!" Lin Tian nodded, and searched seriously again. Following the metal sensor detected in the place he found just now, he quickly found the place where the control mechanism was located.

It turned out that at the lower right corner of the desk, close to the ground, there was a small bump. If Lin Tian hadn't searched all the way along the mechanism, such a small spot would have been easily overlooked as a defect in making the desk. drop it!

So without hesitation, Lin Tian reached out and pressed down on the bump.

"Creak... creak..." After a few sounds, the floor under the desk suddenly split open on one side, and a dark hole appeared under the desk, and a short staircase also appeared in front of the two of them at the same time .

"Go down and have a look!" Lin Tian said, took out a torch from his sleeve, lit an oil lamp next to it, and walked down first with it in his hand.

Situ Meng didn't hesitate, and followed Lin Tian closely, and entered the tunnel together.

The secret room was not as huge as they had expected, it was only about ten square meters, and there were more than a dozen large boxes stacked on the left hand side, all of which were hung with gleaming big locks, and it was unknown what was inside.

There is a small bookcase near the wall in the middle, and there are many books in it, but there are no text descriptions on the covers of these books except for numbers.

On the wall on the right hand side there is a hole more than one foot wide and three inches thick, and there is a big box under the hole. in the box.

It seems that the chief executive used this mechanism to slide the account book in the drawer directly into the secret room along the secret passage. Even if Cao Changrong wanted to steal the account book back while the chief executive was away, it would be completely impossible. up.

"This Chief Manager is really cautious!" Situ Meng said, and opened the "Little Red Coat" directly, but after looking through it for a long time, he could see that this thing was an account book!

Probably because the content written in it is completely one hammer and one stick. .

"Xiaotian, look, what's going on here?" Situ Meng said, and handed the booklet in his hand to Lin Tian.

After a few glances, Lin Tian returned the book to Situ Meng, and then quickly rummaged through the bookcase. While searching, he explained to Situ Meng: "This book must be written in code. As long as you find the corresponding cipherbook, you can easily translate the contents inside! I found it, it should be this!"

As Lin Tian said, he found a booklet from the cabinet with a blank cover and no words that had been read many times, and handed it to Situ Meng, saying: "Those numbers, the first one is the number of pages, The second is the number of lines, and the third is the number of words, try to translate it, and you should be able to understand the contents of the account book!"

Taking advantage of the time when Situ Meng was busy translating the account books, Lin Tian randomly checked a few books with different labels on the bookcase and looked at them. Sure enough, they were all the same as the black account books he had read before. How to write it!

So she quickly took these booklets from the bookcase, and put them neatly into the box on the right, planning to pack them all up and take them away later.

After finishing all this, Lin Tian came to the pile of boxes on the left, the metal function was activated, and after the lock was opened, the unique color of gold shone charmingly under the reflection of the oil lamp.

Even Lin Tian, ​​who has never been short of money since he came to this world, couldn't hold back under the huge visual impact, and couldn't help swallowing in secret.

Immediately, Lin Tian didn't hesitate, and quickly opened the other boxes. Sure enough, except for the gold bars stacked in the five boxes, the other boxes were all filled with 50 taels of large silver ingots.Just a rough estimate of the ten or so boxes of gold and silver, the value has already exceeded 50 taels of silver.

And these are probably less than a month's income. Thinking of this, Lin Tian couldn't help but gasped.

"Xiaotian, come here quickly. I probably looked through this account. Oh my God! The salt that the Cao Gang transports to them every day has reached [-] deniers, which is almost catching up with the daily salt output of the salt farm. This means that one percent of the country's population can only eat the high-priced private salt they sell, and all the money has flowed into their pockets! This, this, this……"

Situ Meng was stunned by the figures he had calculated, but Lin Tian sighed, and said, "I'm afraid it's more than that! After all, this is just one of their stocking points, how can a small vice-guild leader of the Cao Gang To be qualified to sit on an equal footing with them, at best, is just a servant they hired to run errands! Don't forget what the chief executive said before.

This private sale of official salt involves three of the four founding kings with different surnames, the government of Liguo, the government of Qi, the four families of King Jia Shixue of Jinling, and the well-known royal family of the imperial merchants. The Shen family is all involved!

Could they be satisfied with this mere one percent!You know, before my brother was about to take over the mess of the salt industry, the salt tax in the treasury dropped by more than half!As a result, the country's annual tax revenue has been reduced by more than [-]%!

Moreover, don't forget, whether it is the Shen family or the Xue family, they are all wealthy imperial merchants, and they have a lot of water and land caravans in their hands!It doesn't make sense that these goods are only transported by the Cao Gang, so why don't you do anything yourself! "

"Hiss..." Situ Meng suddenly took a breath, feeling the horror of it all the more.

"Okay, don't think too much about it! This kind of black den, let's eradicate one by one! One day we will bring all of them behind the scenes to justice! It's not too early, and the evidence has been found. Let's leave quickly!" After Lin Tian finished speaking, he bent down and picked up the box full of books.

"Xiaotian, look quickly, there seems to be a mechanism here!" Situ Meng suddenly pointed at the junction of the ground and the wall that was vacated after Lin Tian moved the box, and exclaimed softly.

"What?" Lin Tian put down the box, and squatted on the ground with Situ Meng to examine it carefully.

"Boom...boom..." Lin Tian tapped here and there, suddenly, a faint smile appeared on his face, and then he turned towards a corner of the wall, and suddenly a A small square opening, this time the opening is smaller than before, and there are no stairs, only a vertically downward soft body hanging on the edge of the opening.

"Mengmeng, you wait up there, I'll go down to see the situation!" After Lin Tian finished speaking, he disappeared into the entrance of the cave in an instant.

In the secret room, Situ Meng waited in a hurry to get angry, and felt that every minute and every second was a long torment. Fortunately, Lin Tian went fast and came back quickly. After only a quarter of an hour, the Has jumped out of the hole.

"Hehe, Mengmeng, we are really lucky today! This is their so-called secret escape channel!" Lin Tian said, pulling Situ Meng up, and said: "Let's restore everything above to its original state. Then get out of here!"

When the two put the upper desk drawer in place, closed the cabinet door, and restored the oil lamp to its original position, they went to the secret room again, took those account books, and walked forward through the secret escape passage. On the edge of Longhu Lake is a shoal full of reeds.

With the bright moonlight in the sky, Lin Tian sharply saw a small boat tied to the reeds. It seemed that this was really the escape route that the chief executive had prepared for him just in case. .

At the moment, both of them are eager to return home, and they are not in the mood to enjoy the scenery at all. After Lin Tian whistled, within a short time, their two horses ran over by themselves. gallop away.