"Three Six Five, Eight Skills, Tomb of the Emperor in Jinjiamenli.

Liuzi Road, Actor Road, Orchid Thousand-Hand Gumen Crossing.

Red handkerchief, life-seeking ghost, yin and yang relatives cry."

This is a limerick passed down by word of mouth from the older generation. I think most people, like me, didn’t quite understand what the poem said when they first heard it.

What does it mean.

But after that incident, I suddenly understood the meaning expressed in it. It was telling people this story, a legend, or even...

A world...

A story about the Lower Eight Gates...

Xiamen?

What are the lower eight gates?

As the saying goes, the eight upper sects are officials, the lower eight sects are merchants, and the lower eight sects are naturally thieves.

As the name suggests, the Lower Eight Gates are composed of eight professions.

People in the world call them "gold, skin, hanging, tread, flat, strip, hanging, willow".

Translated into words that you can understand, it is, "The Stealing Gate, the Gu Gate, the Organ Gate, the Phoenix Gate, the Thousand Gates, the Witch Gate, the Red Handkerchief, and the Suo Ming Gate", a total of eight gates.

As for the story I want to tell you, I will start from the next eight gates.

…… ……

2009, autumn.

"Ring ring ring..."

A rapid ringing of the phone woke me up from my dream. I rubbed my eyes and wanted to curse, but I saw the word "Old Man" clearly displayed on the screen of my phone, so I decisively put away my anger and pressed the answer button.

.

But the strange thing is that no one spoke on the other end of the phone. There was just a busy tone, and after more than ten seconds, there were occasionally a few indistinct words, which sounded like "two..."

Seven...four...seven...seven...six..."

"What the hell is this signal?" I frowned and cursed before dialing back.

But what surprised me was that after I called four or five times in a row, the message on the other side of the phone was: "The number you dialed cannot be connected at the moment. Please try again later."

I glanced at the phone, frowned and said, "What the hell is going on?"

After saying that, I looked at the time on my phone - 8:45, and murmured to myself: "Shouldn't the old man be in Xinzhou talking to Yinglao Qi at the gate? How can I make a good call?

Me?"

Just when I was surprised, there was a knock on the door.

"Bang bang bang... bang bang bang..."

The knock on the door was very urgent and hard. If the door hadn't been strong enough, it would have been removed by this person by now.

Hearing the knock on the door, I cursed angrily: "Who is it? Are you going to go crazy this morning?"

After that, I put on a coat and walked out quickly to open the door.

The man who knocked on the door is called Li Ming. He is a new guy in our family. He is a few years younger than me. He is very hard-working and smart. He has a good relationship with me on weekdays. We often smoke and spank together.

, in my impression, this guy does things in a measured way and is definitely not such a reckless person.

When I saw it was Li Ming, I cursed angrily: "Are you crazy today? Or are you so fucking itchy that you need a beating? Are you knocking on the door so hard?"

When Li Ming saw me opening the door, he couldn't hide the anxious look on his face and said loudly: "Little Hu, it's bad, something big has happened!"

I frowned and asked in surprise: "What's wrong? What happened? Why are you so anxious?"

Li Ming said anxiously: "Master, something happened!"

I shouted in surprise: "What? Something happened to my old man? What happened?"

Li Ming nodded and said: "Three months ago, when the Master of Ying Hall was collecting things in the countryside of Xinzhou, he accidentally discovered an ancient tomb. I heard that it was a Tang tomb from the Tang Dynasty, and the scale was quite large. I originally thought

They went down to the ground with Hall Master Ying to knock down Tang Dou, but who would have thought that the two of them, together with more than a dozen brothers, suddenly lost contact with the brothers outside before they arrived at the place. No, the heads of the family asked them to hurry up

I’ll ask you to come over and discuss this matter together.”

…… ……

Yiyuanzhai, the largest antique shop in Beijing, is also an industry inherited by generations of our Hu family.

To put it nicely, we at Yiyuanzhai are in the serious business of antique calligraphy and painting.

But to put it bluntly, our Yiyuanzhai ancestors have been members of the thieves family in the Eight Gates for generations.

Stealing, what is stealing?

Anything taken without money is considered theft.

Among the eight lower sects, the stealing sect has been the leader since ancient times. Why?

Because the stolen door is the largest and there are the most people.

The more people there are, the more natural branches there will be and the most rules.

Our Hu family has a golden word among thieves, which is "asking the sky with a compass to see the universe, asking three questions from a tomb and five dusk".

To put it bluntly, it’s like looking for dragons, asking for their acupoints, and fighting on the ground to touch Captain Jin.

However, due to the protective development of the national team's ancient tombs and the continuous improvement of policies after the 1970s, in my lifetime, the bandit family has begun to fade away and has slowly withdrawn from the stage of history.

Not only that, even the Eight Lower Sects have begun to slowly fade out of people's sight, and many sects can only be heard occasionally from the mouths of storytellers.

As for me, my surname is Hu Mingtian, I am a third-generation descendant of the Hu family. I have been extremely aggressive since I was a child. Fights were commonplace. In the end, our old man had no choice but to ask someone to find a connection and send me to be a pawn.

Bing, he just returned home from the army this year. Although his temper has been somewhat restrained, he still has no interest in inheriting Yiyuanzhai at home.

Yiyuanzhai, main hall.

The name of this hall is Cup of Plum Blossoms, taken from a poem by Li Shangyin - "Drinking Alone in a Small Garden", "Half a dragon's beard mat, drinking lightly from an agate cup. Spring is uncertain every year, but I believe in plum blossoms before the year ends."

When I arrived at the Bei Mei Hall, there were already seven people sitting there, both men and women. Except for the second boss, Uncle Xu, whom I knew, it was my first time to meet the rest of them.

I strode into Beimei Hall and said to Uncle Xu, "Uncle, what happened to our old man?"

Uncle Xu looked at me and said with a serious face: "You are here! Xiao Hu, please sit down and talk first."

I nodded and found a chair closest to the outside to sit down.

Seeing me sitting down, Uncle Xu said: "Since everyone is here, let's talk about business!"

After saying this, Uncle Xu waved his hand, and a young girl came out from behind a screen at the edge of the Cup Plum Hall, dragging a large plate in her hand. The plate was covered with a piece of red cloth, and there were bulges under the cloth.

, I don’t know what was put there.

The little girl dragged the plate to the center of Cup Plum Hall, stood still, saluted everyone around her, and placed the plate on the table next to Uncle Xu.

Uncle Xu slowly said: "Maybe some of you know why I brought you here today, and maybe some of you don't know why. But whether you know it or not, according to the rules, I still have to explain the reason."

Uncle Xu paused, and after scanning a circle of people present, he said slowly: "I think you have heard that Ying Laoqi, the leader of our Yiyuan Zhai in Xinzhou, Shanxi, was born three months ago.

When I was receiving the goods in my hometown, I accidentally received this thing..."

With that said, Uncle Xu slowly opened the red cloth covering the plate.

As the red cloth was lifted away little by little, a palm-sized blue-white round jade leaked out.

This jade has an odd shape and simple carving. From a distance, it looks like a coiled green dragon, with the dragon head in the middle and a pair of large eyes with extremely uncoordinated proportions protruding from the outside. But when you look closer, it looks like a dragon.

A white toad crouching on the ground.

What's even weirder is that as soon as the jade appeared, the temperature in the entire cup plum hall seemed to have dropped by more than ten degrees, and even a thin layer of frost appeared on the glass.

"Owl kiss beads!"

After seeing this thing, four of the seven people in Beimei Hall screamed.

A fat woman was the first to lose her temper. She said slowly in a tone that sounded like a hen making a sound after its neck was stepped on: "There are recent rumors in the world that these owl kiss beads are a pair.

One ice and one fire, called the owl kissing the phoenix luan, is

The left and right eyes of Mahakala, the bodyguard of the Buddha. In the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, they were found in a tomb of the Tang Dynasty by a gold-touching captain named Monkey King, and their whereabouts were unknown. Unexpectedly, this

The owl-kissed pearl actually fell into Yiyuanzhai’s hands today.”

Uncle Xu looked at the woman and said, "Sister Li, you really know everything about ancient and modern times."

A dark-faced middle-aged man next to him looked at the owl-kissed bead with a greedy light in his eyes, but he still asked calmly: "Second Master Xu, you called us all here today, and what's the matter?"

What does it mean to take out this owl kiss bead?"

Uncle Xu looked at the dark-skinned middle-aged man and said slowly: "I want to ask some of you for a favor, and these owl kiss beads are the reward."

"oh?"

Hearing Uncle Xu's words, several people couldn't help but be surprised.

The dark middle-aged man frowned and asked, "What do you need us to do?"
To be continued...