At first glance

I froze at first glance and immediately understood what had happened: “Oh my God, I’ve got the order wrong!”

I had been doing rubbings for so long that everything on the rubbings was upside down. I read all the upright articles upside down. I was used to reading from left to right, but this could be read from either side, and the meaning was completely opposite.

“Fuck,” I cursed, thinking to myself that Uncle San’s cultural level was not high, and that he was a fake scholar who was proficient in the left and right ways of the side door. He didn’t even use his brain when writing, and this blood-written book was simply enough to make people vomit blood.

“Now you don’t doubt it, do you?” Wen Jin said.

I nodded awkwardly. “What happened next?”

Her face changed again, and she said, “I still don’t understand what happened next. When we woke up, we were no longer in the underwater tomb, but in a basement. It was very old, like a bomb shelter from the 1950s or 1960s. There was a black sarcophagus inside, and we could see the exit of the basement, but it was sealed shut. We couldn’t open it, and according to the date on the watch, it had been more than a week since we had fainted.

“Was it the sanatorium in Golmud?” I asked.

She nodded and paused: “We are a few people short. Qi Ling is no longer with us, and the others are trapped there. Moreover, we have discovered that we are being watched.”