Dr. Bai shook his head in embarrassment and said, "If anyone can decipher this ancient script, except for Dr. Fan, I don't think about it as a second person!"

I abruptly got up and said, "Where is he serving his sentence, take me to him." ”

Dr. Bai said, "You wait for me to arrange it, and we will set off immediately!"

Dr. Bai took us back to the desert non-stop, and I remember that there was a prison for felons on the Gobi Desert, and Fan Chongyi was held there.

I looked out the window of the car at the vast Gobi and said, "How long has Fan Chongyi been locked up?"

Dr. Bai said, "It's been about fifteen years! I still heard about him from my mentor. Although Fan Chongyi is much younger than my mentor, his mentor respects him very much. And, very much with some of his views. It was because my supervisor admired Fan Chongyi very much and gave me a project for his research that I knew that there was such a person. ”

Dr. Bai sighed: "Fifteen years have passed, and probably no one in the academic world remembers Fan Chongyi, right? In the academic world, if you can't keep outstanding research results, it means that you will be eliminated, and you can only be called a scholar, not a scholar!"

Dr. Bai was obviously sighing, but I didn't enlighten him, and directly diverted the topic: "What does that Fan Chongyi mainly study?

"No!" Dr. Bai shook his head and said, "Fan Chongyi claimed to be cracking the code left by his predecessors in the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang? Unlocking that mystery will cause an unprecedented shock in the archaeological world. ”

I wondered, "What secrets can Dunhuang have? Could it be that it is also a forbidden area for mythology?"

Ren Tianqing took Dr. Bai's words and said, "There is no forbidden area in Dunhuang. The Detective had similar suspicions, and later rejected the idea outright. ”

"From the historical record, the first large-scale excavation of the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang was like Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty, and the first golden age was in the Tang Dynasty. The Second Golden Age began with the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms and ended at the end of the Yuan Dynasty. ”

"These periods, in addition to the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, were also the heyday of the Divine Exploration Hands, especially the Tang Dynasty, which was also the first golden age of the Divine Exploration Hands. If the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang are forbidden areas of mythology, even if there is no official record, there will be a corresponding code for exploring the gods. There is no record in the Detective Hand literature, which means that it is not a forbidden area. ”

I nodded slightly, and asked Dr. Bai again, "Then Fan Chongyi, why do you say that there is a secret code hidden in the Mogao Grottoes?"

Dr. Bai said: "Fan Chongyi denied the founder of the Mogao Grottoes from the very beginning, and it is generally believed that the first person to excavate the Mogao Grottoes was a traveling monk named Lezun, who traveled to the Mogao Grottoes in the pre-Qin era and excavated the first grotto as a place for himself to worship the Buddha. Then, some people began to dig the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang one after another. ”

Fan Chongyi thinks that this statement is not correct, and his reason is very simple, that is, no one has found the location of the Lezun Grottoes so far, which is equivalent to the loss of the holy land by later generations of disciples, which is extremely unlikely to happen in religion. ”

Moreover, the academic community generally believes that the time when Buddhism was introduced to China was during the period of Emperor Ming of the Han Dynasty, that is, at the end of the Western Han Dynasty, which is too large for the time span of the legendary Lezun to build the Mogao Grottoes in the former Qin. Therefore, he has always believed that Lezun does not exist. In other words, the cave he dug was not in Dunhuang. ”

Dr. Bai paused here when he said this: "Fan Chongyi thinks that the real founder of the Mogao Grottoes should be a group of merchant organizations who traveled to and from the Western Regions, and they established the Mogao Grottoes in order to ask the gods and Buddhas to bless them to enter and exit the desert smoothly. Moreover, this merchant organization spanned the change of dynasties, and continued to excavate the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang at different times in various names. ”

"The real purpose of those merchants is actually to find a secret buried in the desert. Every clue they found was recorded in the form of murals or carvings in the Mogao Grottoes. He has always believed that there is a large-scale wordless book hidden in the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang. There are secrets that will shock the world. ”

Dr. Bai said: "His statement has been scoffed at by many scholars. Some people say that he is grandstanding, while others think that he is whimsical and making up stories. However, there are also people who support his ideas, and my mentor is one of them. ”

"At that time, my mentor also united several scholars to secure personnel and funds for Fan Chongyi, so that he could continue to study the secrets of the Dunhuang Book of Heaven. Fan Chongyi stayed in Dunhuang for five years. During this period, he also got back a lot of academic achievements, but none of them had anything to do with the Dunhuang Book of Heaven. ”

I can understand what Dr. Bai said. After all, no one would unconditionally support Fan Chongyi to do fruitless or even whimsical research. He got some of his academic work back in order to continue to fight for research funding. However, his main focus was still on the study of the Dunhuang Book of Heaven.

I asked, "What about then? He brought back the results?"

Dr. Bai said: "The last time Fan Chongyi appeared, he brought back the Heavenly Book of Broken Characters. He said that that was his most important research achievement, and the secret of Dunhuang was in the book of broken characters. Soon after that, he killed someone?"

I turned to Dr. Bai, "Who did he kill, and why did he kill anyone?"

Dr. Bai said: "He killed his assistant, and I don't know what that assistant was called. Fan Chongyi killed his assistant with an ancient dagger in the research room. The fingerprints on the murder weapon and the bloodstains on his clothes can prove that Fan Chongyi killed someone, and he himself confessed to the murder. ”

According to his own confession, his motive for killing was that he was provoked by the discovery that his assistant was stealing his research results. However, this reason for stealing research results was unthinkable in the era in which he lived. Many people think that it should be attributed to love killing. However, Fan Chongyi himself has never admitted it. ”

"Originally, Fan Chongyi should have been sentenced to death. However, in the last months before the execution, a patented invention was made. The sentence was commuted to a suspended death sentence, and the following year he was commuted to life imprisonment and sent to the Gobi Desert Prison to serve his sentence. After that, there was no news of Fan Chongyi. ”

I tapped the lighter with my finger and said, "Can you help me check Fan Chongyi's origin and background?"

Dr. Bai said: "Before leaving, I will ask someone to retrieve Fan Chongyi's information, and there should be news soon." ”

It didn't take long for the institute to send information to Dr. Bai: "The information I can find is that Fan Chongyi is an orphan, who was fostered in an orphanage before the age of eight, and adopted after the age of eight. He was adopted by an ordinary working family, and there is no flaw in the information. ”

I squinted my eyes and said, "The more perfect the information, the easier it is to be fake." Do you think that an ordinary person will have some kind of leaping thinking, and directly change his thinking from studying Dunhuang culture to studying Dunhuang Heavenly Books?"

"No!" Dr. Bai hesitated, "unless, he's inspired in some way, or...... Or a secret that no one else knows in the first place. ”

"That's what I meant!" I continued, "let's put aside the second possibility. If someone inspires him, let's do it. Who was the person who inspired him to explore the Dunhuang code? And why did he let him explore the code? Who did Fan Chongyi have the closest relationship with before he was imprisoned?

Dr. Bai said: "There is no information to check on this matter, after all, it was fifteen years ago. The criminal police officer who handled the case at that time may have retired, and these details are quite troublesome to verify. ”

"Hmm!" I also know that I am a bit of a strong man. I just leaned on the saddle and didn't discuss these things anymore.

When we arrived at the Gobi Prison, the warden said with a sad face: "The Fan Chongyi you are looking for has already escaped from prison a year ago. The warden at the time was also disciplined......"

"Escaped?" I wondered, "How did he escape?"

In the eyes of outsiders, prisons are roughly the same, but in fact, there are also grades in prison. In general, small local prisons are used to hold minor prisoners for less than five years, and those who have served more than five years of life are sent to larger prisons, such as those sentenced to life imprisonment, who are sent to remote prisons.

It's like the Gobi prison where we are now, where the felons are held. These people know that they will probably not be able to leave prison for decades, and they are all vicious people before they enter prison, and the possibility of escaping from prison is very high.

Only by imprisoning them in a deserted place like the Gobi Desert can they completely stop thinking of escaping from prison. In the vast Gobi, only prison is a safe place, and even if they escape, they will not be able to leave the desert outside, so they can only obediently stay and serve their sentences.

In fact, there are similar prisons in every country, for example: Alcatraz Island in Meiguo, and Siberian prison in Russia. Although Fan Chongyi committed homicide, he was also a literati in the final analysis, how could he escape from the high-security prison and survive on the Gobi Desert.

The prison warden said embarrassedly: "Fan Chongyi has always behaved very well. Besides, the previous prison director took good care of him, and no one expected that he would be able to escape from prison. ”

"Show me the file!" When I got the file out of the warden's hand, I didn't have much hope, but I only turned a page and stood up suddenly: "It's him!"

When Ye Xun came up, his face also changed: "Bring me all the files of Fan Chongyi!"

It's not that the two of us were surprised, but what we saw was too amazing - Fan Chongyi was the one who led us when we entered Tianshakou.