The specifics of the entire case were such that Ding Yun's dream came true in part, but not entirely. The ancient tomb theft was indeed linked to the previous gang of thieves, but not to the person who stole Ding Yun's money.
Here's what happened: The leader of the theft ring, the boss, along with his subordinates, stole a lot of money. He didn't dare deposit it in the bank and was also worried about keeping it at home due to security concerns. So, he had a sudden idea and decided to dig up his ancestral tomb. He then stashed all the money inside the coffin of his ancestors, perhaps hoping for their divine protection.
However, while digging up the ancestral tomb, he also unearthed a considerable amount of gold, silver, treasures, and burial objects. After a bit of cleaning and selling, they made a substantial amount of money, comparable to what they earned from a fortnight of their usual risky stakeouts and thefts. Moreover, this endeavor was relatively safe.
Thus, they turned tomb raiding into a part-time job. Initially, they only targeted their own ancestral tombs, gaining experience and restoring them afterward. Only then did they begin to consider raiding other people's ancestral tombs. For this, they conducted extensive research to identify families whose ancestors had once been prosperous. After all, what was the point of digging up the tombs of ancestors who had been poor for eighteen generations? They preferred to target those whose ancestors had lived in wealth.
As they gained more experience, they started consulting ancient texts to find information about higher-tier ancient tombs, such as those of high officials or royalty.
As for the looted Western Zhou tomb, it was not an intentional target. They had learned from various ancient texts that a Tang Dynasty tomb was suspected to be in that area, and they excitedly went to excavate it. After the excavation, they discovered that the Tang tomb had already been looted long ago, possibly centuries prior, and was completely empty, with not even a coffin left.
To uphold the principle of never leaving empty-handed, the group persistently dug around the site, causing damage. Soon after, they found traces beneath the Tang tomb, leading them to a Han Dynasty tomb. They reaped significant rewards from the Han tomb.
They had intended to leave then, but one of them felt they had good luck that day and suggested digging further, thinking there might be another tomb below. That's when they discovered the Western Zhou tomb. The tomb contained precious bronzeware, which were undoubtedly national treasures. However, lacking expertise, they didn't recognize the value of these artifacts, only being excited about the gold found in the Western Han tomb. They considered the items from the Western Zhou tomb as junk and didn't think they were worth much. According to their own accounts, they wouldn't have bothered to carry such heavy items if they couldn't sell the bronze for some money. After moving them, they didn't get a good price, selling them for ten yuan a jin to someone they had transacted with before.
While they were ignorant, experts were not. Based on their descriptions and the site's traces, they immediately identified national-level cultural relics, leading to a full investigation. The case deepened, involving numerous artifact traffickers. It took a year to conclude, not only recovering the batch of national treasures but also rescuing dozens of other batches of second-class national relics that were potentially being smuggled out of the country. This was a meritorious deed!
The individual who stole the original body's money had joined the theft organization too recently for the boss to trust him with tomb raiding, so he was not involved in that aspect. His sole crime was theft.
As for why they targeted the original body, they had actually set their sights on all the people who received money that day. The closure of the steel factory and the known fact that everyone would receive severance pay was common knowledge. The date was not even kept secret from outsiders. With each person receiving an average of over ten thousand yuan in severance, how could these thieves resist? If they hadn't feared the death penalty for robbery, they would have simply taken the money by force instead of resorting to stealth. Some of them even thought that stealing from a few more people and splitting the loot would set them up for life. The original body was somewhat disoriented at the time, with her attention wavering. If not her, then whom would they steal from?
After reading the newspaper, Ding Yun sighed with regret, realizing that the original body's wish might not be perfectly fulfilled. However, upon further consideration, the boss was certainly facing the death penalty, while the thief who stole the original body's money was at most an accomplice, acting under the boss's orders. After all, the money was never actually obtained by that thief; it was all hidden in the coffin by the boss. Thinking this, Ding Yun felt much better, considering this a partial fulfillment of the original body's dying wish.
As for the remaining imperfections, she would have to do her best to compensate by being good to her daughter. With the matter settled, Ding Yun's thoughts were focused on two things: being good to her daughter without spoiling her, and earning money while also opening more mystery boxes to see if her customer level could be upgraded, which would facilitate writing trial reports later.
Compared to the latter, the first aspect, being good to her daughter without raising her improperly, was something Ding Yun accomplished with remarkable ease. Thanks to the responsible school teachers, her daughter was not a mischievous child. Coupled with Ding Yun's kindness, which was not doting, her daughter, in the subsequent years, did not become a child prodigy or an artistic genius. Instead, she grew up to be a healthy, ordinary talented individual, not exceptional but decent, certainly not at the bottom. Ding Yun was satisfied with this, seeing no need for excessive demands.
Conversely, making money and testing the mystery box machine later demanded a considerable effort from Ding Yun. As her supermarket business expanded, certain issues became unavoidable, such as the origin of the items she obtained from mystery boxes and the specifics of accounting. Furthermore, to maintain her leading position, she devised ways to sell items from mystery boxes that were meant for years, even decades, in the future. Explaining the origin of these items was a rather troublesome problem. To address these potential loopholes, Ding Yun spent many years continuously patching them up. And as she added more patches, her entire commercial empire grew larger.
To put it simply, to find a suitable source for some of the high-tech products and home appliances that were difficult to purchase for her supermarket, she had to use the money she had saved over the years to establish corresponding factories. Since she had enough physical examples for the artisans to study and replicate, the factories were not only successfully established but also research and development departments were formed. The entire endeavor then seemed to spiral somewhat out of control.
For items that were hard to buy, Ding Yun established her own factories for production, thus explaining their origin. For items that were unavailable in reality for years or decades to come, Ding Yun naturally followed suit, providing enough physical examples for reverse engineering and then manufacturing them herself. As her supermarket grew larger, the variety of goods increased, and the industries involved expanded. To maintain her unique advantage of having what others did not, she established more and more factories. Moreover, during the development of the supermarket, she encountered business rivalries and underhanded tactics, such as cutting off suppliers. To minimize the occurrence of such situations, twenty years later, Ding Yun's supermarket not only had branches all over the country but also largely supplied its own products, with everything produced in-house and sold exclusively through her own supermarkets. Products were never sold through other channels. Beyond high-tech products, high-end home appliances, and premium cosmetics and skincare, even daily necessities like rice and vegetables were grown and sold from her own farms and vegetable and fruit plantations. All supermarket properties were also primarily purchased or self-built.
In essence, twenty-four years later, as time entered the 21st century, when Ding Yun handed over the entire group to her daughter, who had long since graduated and was familiar with the group's operations, the conglomerate was a perfectly healthy enterprise with ample cash flow, no debt, and a complete logistics and production supply chain, impervious to external pressure. To put it mildly, the combined scale of the planting bases and factories founded by Ding Yun over the years could immediately establish the basic light industrial system and parts of the heavy industrial system of a nation if relocated to any country. Had it not been for the lack of certain heavy industrial factories and the military industry, she could have founded a nation anywhere. This illustrates the immense scale of the overall enterprise and the richness and completeness of its factory types.
After completing the group's property handover, Ding Yun ceased to be involved in the group's affairs. Firstly, her daughter was capable and not a spendthrift. Even if she were, it wouldn't be easy to squander such a large enterprise; the numerous properties alone would take a long time to sell. Moreover, Ding Yun herself had saved a considerable sum of money, ensuring her daughter would not go hungry. Therefore, she was able to let go completely without reservation. On occasion, she would simply urge her daughter to invest more in holographic games. She had secretly played holographic games for over thirty years using a holographic helmet, and the inability to play openly was extremely frustrating. If it had been developed earlier, she could have played openly. Unfortunately, the technological gap was somewhat significant, and Ding Yun could not conveniently bring out the holographic helmet for reverse engineering. Thus, it wasn't until she was over eighty years old that she could use a domestically produced holographic helmet, and even then, its simulation fidelity was only seventy-eight percent. It was merely better than nothing.
By this time, Ding Yun's health had declined significantly. Although she could still live, she found the idea of dragging her aging body, feeling uncomfortable all over, for several more decades unbearable. Therefore, in the end, to verify what could be obtained from top-tier mystery boxes, she used the merit and luck accumulated from years of donations and good deeds, along with some currency, to purchase one of each type of top-tier mystery box. She chose the extreme end of the temporal option, meaning items from a thousand years into the future in this world.
Subsequently, she opened and examined them. After reviewing the specific items obtained, Ding Yun placed those items, along with other previously obtained items that were inconvenient to reveal, into a newly acquired spatial node with a total capacity of one million cubic meters. She then handed the spatial node to her daughter, explaining its usage, its contents, and instructing her to do as she pleased with them. With that, she passed away peacefully, leaving this world.
Ding Yun knew nothing of what happened afterward. Since those items could not be taken away, she left them all to her daughter. As for what her daughter, already sixty years old, would do with those items, she could not control.