The Treasure Keeper

My name is Bai Buer, a small fry from the lower reaches of the Nine Rivers in Tianjin, and my trade is dealing in jade artifacts.

This line of work, the jade business, has never cooled off throughout the ages, regardless of dynastic changes. As a result, the number of people involved in this trade is as plentiful as the fry flooding the rivers in April and May: before one wave is fully digested, another has already spawned. Relying on some inherited skills, I run a tiny jade shop by the banks of the Hai River, just outside Yudong Gate, called Old Studio Hall.

The events I'm about to recount took place when I was twenty-eight, right around my birthday. Perhaps good fortune was at my door, for from opening to closing that day, I sold two jade Buddha pendants and over a dozen southern red agate bracelets. The profit wasn’t much, but for a struggling shop like mine, it was an auspicious sign.

Around six or seven in the evening, as darkness began to settle outside and I was preparing to close up, the half-shut door was suddenly pushed open from the outside, and in walked a man. He was over sixty, clad in a tight vest, yellow high-top rubber boots, leggings, and a bulging deerskin satchel slung across his back—who knew what he carried inside. On his right hand, he wore an extra-long glove reaching well past his elbow, almost up to his armpit. Dressed like this in such weather, he looked oddly out of place and was sweating profusely.

Seeing a customer, I hurriedly stuffed the volume of "The Flower-Examiner's Record" I’d just pulled fr