"That’s about checking the little video on the USB drive."
Sieg twitched at the corner of his mouth.
Allen Zhang sighed, "Haven’t I told you to take care of your health? Is that thing really so appealing?"
"No way!" Sieg argued.
"Fine then, let me ask you this, how many times did you masturbate yesterday?" Allen Zhang inquired.
"..." Sieg was left speechless and muttered, "That’s my privacy! I have the right not to answer you."
Allen Zhang couldn’t be bothered to argue, "Go wash your face, tidy up a bit, we’ve got a big task to handle."
"What big task?" Sieg asked curiously.
"I’ll be waiting in the car." Allen Zhang didn’t answer him directly but just turned and left.
Allen Zhang waited in the Jeep for a few minutes before Sieg finally showed up, belatedly sitting down and buckling up, asking again, "So what is the job exactly?"
Allen Zhang took out a photo of Black and the task requirements sent by the employer, explaining, "There’s been a burglary by Black people, stealing antiques. The employer has offered a hefty bounty on the black market. I’ve got intel on him, we could definitely grab this lucrative reward!"
"Black people again!?" Sieg felt that it was ridiculous yet somewhat inevitable.
After all, it indeed seemed like something Black people would do, it’d be surprising if they were law-abiding.
Allen Zhang checked the GPS coordinates and drove towards the sewer entrance on West Street, planning to find the hidden antique first since Black was staying at the motel and wouldn’t escape anytime soon.
Getting out of the car, Allen Zhang followed the navigation route searching for the sewer entrance, finally spotting a drainage without water flow but with signs of human tampering.
He kicked the steel covering of the drainage violently and signaled Sieg to go down and explore.
"Why me?" Sieg looked at Allen Zhang with some speechlessness.
"If I needed to crawl down into the sewers myself, why would I even call you here?"
Allen Zhang replied irritably, "Hurry up, there’s no sewage in this abandoned sewer anymore."
Overpowered by Allen Zhang’s authority as General Sect Leader, Sieg had no choice but to comply and crawled into the sewer entrance, fumbling around for a while and found a black wrapped package.
"What the hell is this thing? Steel? It’s so heavy." Sieg struggled to drag the package out, looking at the bulging wrap and feeling a bit skeptical about life.
Allen Zhang asked him to open it and check if the antique inside was intact, Sieg immediately did so, unzipping it.
A golden Guanyin statue partially revealed itself, stunning Sieg who hadn’t seen much of the world, "WTF!! What’s this?"
Well-crafted and with an ancient look, the faces of the Ten-faced Guanyin appeared lively, depicting various expressions such as happiness, anger, sorrow, evil, calm, grief, and shock, seeming like something that would be displayed in a museum.
But Allen Zhang immediately realized that it was just for show.
The more shiny and lustrous something looks on the surface, the more it indicates that it was recently unearthed.
From the Shang and Zhou dynasties? From last week!
"This must be very valuable, right?" Sieg marveled.
"Not valuable, it’s likely a fake, I don’t even know why Black would steal it," Allen Zhang casually responded.
"If it’s just a fake, would the employer still spend a lot of money to retrieve it?" Sieg hesitated, unable to understand their logic.
"Maybe he himself doesn’t know it’s a fake, or maybe he just wants to vent his anger. There might be some trick to this object, hiding something secret. But that has nothing to do with us." Allen Zhang had no interest in the object, there was no mention in the intel, so why bother? He cared only about the task reward.
Glancing at the time, only twenty minutes had passed, still a long way from the two hours mark.