Volume 4Chapter 3: Mirror Palace
To Chen Pi A Si, dead people were the most ordinary things. Not to mention the mummies and zongzi that came out of the tombs, he had killed so many people that he couldn’t even count them all. When he saw a corpse, he felt relieved. He thought to himself, “Where did this unlucky ghost come from to die here? It’s even dried up like a squid and still scares people.”
Although he thought this way, Chen Pi A-si still had the iron bullet stuck in his hand. He had trained himself in this skill of hitting iron bullets with his bare hands since he was a child, and he could hit the bull’s-eye every time. Moreover, he could throw the iron bullet very fast, and an ordinary person might be blinded before they even saw the movement in his hand.
Judging from the Miao people’s attire, they had been dead for two or three years, and their clothes were mostly in tatters. Fortunately, they were wrapped in a large amount of ferns and creeping vines, which preserved the characteristics of Miao people’s clothing. But after being exposed to the sun and rain, how come the corpse hasn’t rotted away, but instead feels a little dehydrated?
The corpse’s stomach was still throbbing, and the more Chen Pi Ashi looked, the more he felt that something was wrong. He is a man who has his own special way of doing things. If it were me, I would have run away at that moment. But Chen Pi A Si has always believed in acting first and being strong. In the blink of an eye, he had already fired three iron marbles, all of which hit the corpse’s stomach.
The force of the iron balls was so great that they almost cut the corpse in half. As soon as the lower half fell off, Chen Pi A Si saw a mass of yellow, unidentified mucus inside, wrapped around a large number of eggs. Many of the eggs had hatched, and piles of white worms were wriggling inside. Hanging around were things he was very familiar with – beehives, and from the hole in the corpse, a large number of ground wasps crawled out.
Chen Pi A Si cursed, thinking to himself, “What bad luck! It turns out that the ground wasps had made a nest in the corpse. The ground hornets are extremely poisonous and fierce, and now he was in trouble.
Seeing a layer of black mist rising, the ground hornets began to gather. Chen Pi A Si quickly pulled out the PLA folding shovel he always carried with him from his bag, and suddenly scooped up a handful of wet mud from the ground, slapped it on the corpse’s severed body, sealing all the ground hornets that gushed out, and then turned and ran.
The ground was already swarming with hornets, so he patted them away with his clothes and ran around aimlessly. Fortunately, he had been quick with his shovel, and only had to pay for a few bags. When he stopped panting and patted the remaining hornets off his body, he didn’t know where he had run to.
Chen Pi Ashi pulled out the stings in his body, which made him grimace in pain. He was still wondering how there could be hornets making nests in a human corpse. These poisonous bees are usually underground, like ants. In the deep rainforests of Guangxi, you can sometimes see beehives that look like small hills. People think they are ant nests and open them to look for ants, but before they can understand what is going on, they are swarmed by bees.
In places like Guangxi and Yunnan, people don’t know much about insects, so Chen Pi Asu could only blame his bad luck. As he dealt with the stings, he looked around. After climbing over a hill, he suddenly froze.
He saw a huge stone tower at the base of the hill in front of him. The tower was estimated to be hexagonal (unrecognizable), majestic, and with a wide eave and beam. Using a knife to scrape away the moss and creeping plants on it, the relief carvings on the tower were very exquisite, but it was obvious that the tower had been burned, with black scorch marks on all parts, possibly due to a fire.
The tower body, top, and finial had all cracked and fallen to the ground, and broken into N sections. Because the tower was too heavy, a large part of it sank into the soil of the rainforest, and countless trees were crushed under it.
Chen Pi A-si was experienced and knew that a tower generally consisted of a crypt, a base, a body, a top and a finial. The top of the pagoda should have a pedestal, lotus, bowl, wheel and pearl. There are also pagodas with a canopy, halo, moon and pearl on top of the wheel. In short, there should be a pearl-shaped object on top of the pagoda, which is quite valuable.
He followed the tower to the edge of the pagoda. When the pagoda fell, it may have hit a huge “spruce” tree on the way down, and the pagoda broke in mid-air, with the pagoda head inserted into the ground upside down and the base shattered. Chen Pi A-si looked at the extent of the damage and determined that the treasure ball must have become a “treasure cake” and was scrapped.
He returned to the base of the pagoda, where half of the broken wall was still standing. He climbed in, and inside was a mess of rocks. Unfortunately, not only had the area been sealed off during the construction of the pagoda, but a large amount of rubble and broken bricks had also fallen on top of it during the collapse.
Chen Pi A-si looked at his compass. It was already very dark when he came down, and now the moon had already risen. He hadn’t brought a torch, and after walking so far, he didn’t know how to get back. It looked like he should pretend to be lost and wait for the Miao people to come and rescue him. Thinking about this, he first used broken branches and dead leaves to build a large bonfire at the base of the pagoda to attract the attention of others. He then climbed to the highest point of the remaining pagoda base to see what the surrounding area looked like.
Based on what he saw from the “Reclining Buddha Ridge” and what he saw now, the area he was in at this time should be the area where the trees were growing very disorderly. The ground should be lower than the surrounding area because when the “mixed fill soil” was backfilled into the underground palace, due to the special climate in Guangxi, the soil layer was too moist and did not set properly.
As a result, many air bubbles formed in the soil, and when a large shock occurred, the soil layer collapsed like a steamed bun. In this way, Chen Pi A-si judged two things: one was that the underground palace was very large, but not deep, and he would definitely be able to dig it out in less than 20 minutes. Second, the soil should be relatively soft and not too physically demanding.
At this point, he was hesitant. Should he enter the underground palace now or come back later? It didn’t seem too difficult to come back again. However, Chen Pi A Si, like all tomb robbers, knew that there was something down there, and he absolutely couldn’t resist his curiosity.
Finally, he gritted his teeth and said, “Damn it, I don’t care. I’m going to take whatever’s down there. If those Hmong barbarians find their way here, I’ll kill them all and throw them into the underground palace.
Chen Pi A-si took out his folding shovel. He didn’t bring a Luoyang shovel, and there was no way to locate it. Besides, pagodas are rare. There was no coffin inside, and there was no way to tell if there was one. He dug a hole next to the base of the pagoda.
Soon he reached the ceiling of the underground palace. It was not made of stone, but of a whole trunk of bent wood that had been squared off. He was overjoyed, and used a jigsaw to cut off a corner. The fallen wood fell into the underground palace, and soon there was a sound of it hitting the ground. He hurriedly shone his flashlight inside.
The “Palace of Mirrors” was symmetrical from top to bottom, which meant that for every layer of towers above, there should be the same number of layers of underground palaces below. Looking down from above, there was no floor between each level, and the bottom was pitch black.
When the flashlight shone down, there was a white mist-like substance, which was really impossible to describe.
Chen Pi’s thoughts turned to what the Miao people had said, that the tower was home to a monster, and he couldn’t help but feel a little worried. But this fleeting worry was quickly replaced by a surge of excitement. He felt that the air in the underground palace was fine, so he put his feet on the curved wooden roof and hung upside down, with his head facing down into the underground palace, and all the strength of his body was concentrated on his feet.
After he had fallen in, he first adjusted his movements and then looked at the other side of the curved wooden roof of the underground palace. This kind of underground palace is functional and does not have any traps like an ancient tomb, or many decorations. After looking around, Chen Pi A-si discovered that on the other side of the curved wooden ceiling, there were a large number of scriptures on the ceiling.
The scriptures were carved into the curved wood and sealed with vermilion lacquer. Chen Pi A-si didn’t know many Chinese characters, so of course he couldn’t understand the scriptures.
But he instinctively felt that this should be something to suppress demons or subdue evil spirits. He couldn’t help but mutter to himself, “Could it be that something is really sealed underneath here?”
Looking down, he saw more clearly that each layer had a circle of protruding extensions, and from top to bottom, each layer looked a bit like a staircase. All the statues had their faces turned downward, looking down at the bottom of the underground palace. There were a total of more than ten layers in the underground palace, filled with Arhats in various postures, numbering more than a hundred.
The nearest Arhat statue was not far from him. Chen Pi Ashi was hanging upside down. When he saw the expression on the Arhat statue, he suddenly felt a chill. It turned out that all the Arhat statues were rolling their eyes, and their expressions were unspeakably solemn, unlike those he had seen before.
Upon closer inspection, he realized that it was the pupils of the eyes. Because the colors were too realistic, when the flashlight was shone on them, the reflection was too strong, causing an illusion. But as his flashlight swept over them, the Arhats suddenly became hideous, as if their expressions had changed. They looked terrifying, and he wondered if that was how they had been designed in the first place.
So Chen Pi A Si looked at the Arhats and felt very uneasy, but he didn’t understand what he was afraid of, and he couldn’t help but have the idea of retreating.
His flashlight continued to move around the ground, trying to see something other than the Arhats. At this moment, his hand suddenly froze, and the light beam of the flashlight stopped at a certain position.
On the protrusion about six or seven floors above him, he saw a strange Arhat statue. This Arhat statue was different from the others. His face was not looking down, but was raised, facing Chen Pi A Si directly, staring at his eyes. The flashlight shone on it, and in a flash, a hideous white face was revealed. If it wasn’t still, it would almost be thought that a ghost was encountered.
Chen Pi A Si was suddenly scared and his whole body went cold. He couldn’t move at all, and felt his feet start to go weak and his body start to slide down.
When it comes to ghosts, Chen Pi A Si is not really afraid. He has killed so many people, and can be said to be extremely evil. But people in his era were more or less superstitious, and Chen Pi A Si thought that he was able to survive all these years because of the blessings of his ancestors.
(People always need some kind of belief. People in the Eight Outer Branches worship Guan Gong. Tomb robbers in the Northern School worship Zhong Kui, but the Southern School generally don’t. However, there is a saying in Changsha that they worshiped the “Yellow King” for a period of time.)
(What is the Yellow King? The Yellow King is Huang Chao, the one who “covered the entire city in gold armor.” Why worship this person? According to the elders, there are several reasons. First, this person can be said to be the champion of killing. According to folk legend, Huang Chao killed eight million people, and those who were counted were doomed to die. What does this mean? It means that he had a target for killing people, and he didn’t consider his mission accomplished until he had killed eight million people. It is also not known whether this is a novel or a Chinese folk legend, but Huang Chao is the reincarnation of Mucalinda (not Yi Jianlian). This master saved his mother by releasing 8 million hungry ghosts from hell, so the Buddha allowed him to reincarnate and kill them one by one. In other words, he went back to recruit migrant workers for the Buddha.
He was not afraid of the statue’s face facing up, but when this face happened to be facing him, he felt something was wrong. Could it be that the builders at the time, knowing that he would come down from this position to open a hole, had specially placed this thing here to scare him?