Anh’s investigative instincts were sharper than Liem had ever realized. Armed with the land-trust documents, she spent the next two days asking questions in the automotive shops of Little Saigon. She finally tracked down Master Ba Tran, a retired mechanic known for his esoteric modifications, to a small, dusty garage tucked away behind a bustling Pho restaurant.
Liem and Anh found Master Ba hunched over a workbench, meticulously polishing a carburetor. He was a frail man, his hands gnarled with age, his eyes cloudy.
“Master Ba,” Anh began, her voice respectful but firm. “We need to talk about a 1998 Toyota Camry. The one you sold to Kevin Nguyen.”
Master Ba’s hands froze. His head snapped up, a flash of fear in his eyes. “The Camry? I… I just sold it. Nothing special.”
Anh laid the copy of the land-trust document on the workbench, pointing to the clause that implicated Kevin. “He bought it for my father, Liem. And this document explains why.”
Master Ba’s face crumbled. He stared at the paper, then at Liem, a tremor running through his body. He sank onto a stool, covering his face with his hands. “He promised… he promised it would be quick. A scare.”
“What did you do, Master Ba?” Liem asked, his voice low and dangerous.
Tears streamed down Master Ba’s wrinkled cheeks. “Kevin… he came to me. He knew about my gambling debt, $35,000 to his business partner. He offered to wipe it clean. Plus another $5,000 cash.”
He took a ragged breath. “He gave me an object. An old spirit-talisman coil. He said his grandfather, your father, Master Liem, had it in his workshop years ago. He told me to install it behind the Camry’s radio, wired to the dead frequency.”
Liem felt a jolt of recognition. His father had indeed tinkered with odd spiritual objects, believing in unseen forces.
“He called it the *Đường Âm*,” Master Ba choked out, using the Vietnamese term for the Shadow Boulevard. “He said it was to give you a fright, make you ‘see reason’ about the land. But I knew… I knew it would do more than fright.”
Master Ba looked up, his eyes filled with genuine terror and remorse. “It’s designed to shatter the driver’s mind with fear. To break them. It feeds on their terror, until they lose all sense of reality.”
The confession hung in the air, a poisonous truth. Kevin hadn’t just bought a car; he had engineered a spiritual weapon, using their own ancestral beliefs against Liem, hoping to drive him insane and seize the inheritance. The betrayal was deeper, colder than Liem could have ever imagined.
➡️ Read CHAPTER 11 to continue the story
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