Volume 5 Chapter 26 Markings

I squatted down and tried to identify the strange foreign symbols again, but to no avail. The lines were too messy. Although I could see that it was the same word as the one we saw in the square hole, I couldn’t figure out which letters it was made up of. I even doubted whether it was English.

The fat guy was also curious: “Are you sure it wasn’t left by your third uncle?”

Pan Zi nodded, indicating that he was absolutely certain. “Third Uncle didn’t do anything fancy like this. If he wanted to leave a mark, he would just knock a hole in the wall. This definitely wasn’t left by Third Uncle. I think we should be careful. Marks aren’t always used to guide the way.”

I understood what he meant. If this mark wasn’t a guide, then it could be a dangerous warning.

But after I saw the symbol in the underwater tomb, nothing dangerous happened. There were only two corridors, so if I didn’t take this one, I would have to take the other one. If I wasn’t sure about either one, it didn’t matter which one I took. At this point, it didn’t seem to make sense to hesitate.

The fat guy led the way, and I followed him into the corridor.

It was so wide that two trucks could drive side by side. As soon as he entered, he said that this was a mule track, a track for mules during construction. This was indeed possible, because I had never seen such a wide tomb passage. The tracks of the vehicles from that time can still be faintly seen on the ground, but the strangest thing is that the inside of the tunnel is very cold. The temperature has dropped by an unknown number of degrees, and there is a cold wind blowing from inside, as if it is connected to the outside. We all know that no matter what ancient tomb is very particular about its airtightness, so where is this wind coming from?

“This is a natural draft,” Pan Zi said, lowering his voice and infecting the atmosphere. “Our ancestors said this is called ghost gasping, and this kind of thing often happens in large tombs, but there is no danger.”

“Is there an explanation? How did it happen?” I asked.

Pan Zi shook his head, ‘Most of the stories that have been passed down are just that, stories. No one has ever studied them, and it’s best not to study them.’

I thought to myself, in that era, tomb robbers were only concerned with survival, so long as they knew whether or not it was dangerous, they didn’t have time to worry about how strange phenomena were created.

The first part of the tunnel was relatively flat, but later on we began to see collapses and ground fissures. Many black stone slabs were raised from the ground, making the ground undulate. This was natural damage caused by crustal movement. Every so often on both sides of the tunnel there were reinforced arches, all of which were carved with single dragons coiling around pillars. Many of them were cracked. I thought that if it weren’t for this reinforcement, the tunnel would have collapsed long ago.

We walked in silence for 70 or 80 meters, when the fat guy suddenly stopped and said, “A door?”

We all stopped and shone our flashlights forward. At the end of the tunnel, we saw a black stone tomb door. The eaves and the tiling on the door were all carved with patterns of dragons, grass dragons, and two lions playing with a ball. The door seemed to be made of metal, and on the left door was carved a sheep, and on the right door was carved another unknown thing. When I looked closer, the stone door was tightly closed, and the door gap and latch were sealed with copper paste. But on the left door, on the belly of the sheep, there was a broken hole the size of a washbasin, and the cold wind was blowing out of it.

“This is not a door.” I pushed it: “If it can’t be opened, it’s not a door. This is a seal stone, made of large black stones, then sealed with molten copper and frozen into a whole, made to look like a door. The fat man was right. This tunnel is a mule track. It was built so wide to make it easier for mules to drag these stones.”

The fat man squatted down and looked at the hole in the tomb door: “There are sealing stones in the tomb passage. It seems that this tomb passage should be quite important, leading to the center of the underground palace. The road is correct, and the mark seems to really be leading us. And the hole is already open, they have already gone in.” He said, sticking his head in half, and reaching in with a flashlight to shine inside.

We asked him how it was, and what was inside.

He said, “It’s still a tomb passage, and there’s another sealing stone inside. It seems that the Emperor of Ten Thousand People lacked a sense of security from a young age.”

I said, “Bullshit! Your family’s door has three locks, and there are at least three sealing stones. Do you understand?”

The fat guy didn’t hear what I said. He put the flashlight inside, hunched over, and slipped into the hole in the door, to the opposite side of the sealing stone. I heard him stammer and mutter, “Fuck, it’s cold.”

Pan Zi handed him the gun, and then he climbed in after him. I followed behind, and Shunzi was at the back, all of us climbing into the hole. Sure enough, it was still a tomb passage, and the temperature was even lower than the other side. There was still a sealing stone directly in front of us, but this one was more simple, without the eaves on the outside. A hole had been blown in the sealing stone, and it was even bigger than the one before.

We didn’t stop, and continued to climb over. It was the same behind us, the tunnel continued, and there was another stone in front of us with a hole in it.

“Fuck, it’s never ending,” the fat guy said.

I said, “This is normal. A normal stone is seven or eight tons. A longer tunnel will have six or seven stones. These are the good ones, and they may only be half as thick. Our ancestors didn’t have explosives, so they had no way of dealing with these ancient tombs with stone blocks blocking the way.”

As we spoke, we passed through the last stone seal, and a crossroads appeared before us. Another tomb passage, perpendicular to the one we were in, passed in front of us. This tomb passage was half as wide as the one we were in, and much taller.

We walked to the center of the intersection and found that this tunnel was not the black color of the previous one, but a bright red color, with a large number of vivid murals that were almost continuous, covering the area that the flashlight could not reach. Even the ceiling of the tunnel was covered with colorful murals.

I exclaimed, “This must be the main tunnel, which leads directly to the coffin hall. It is the central axis of the entire underground palace. Otherwise, it would not be so gorgeously decorated.”

“Don’t be so sentimental. We’re thieves, and we’re still having the same problem. Where are we going?” the fat guy asked. ‘Quickly look around. Are there any signs nearby?’

After passing through several narrow tunnels, we had already lost our sense of direction. To distinguish between the main tomb passage, which leads to the center of the underground palace, and the main tomb door, we could only rely on the advice of our predecessors, otherwise we would have to toss a coin to guess.

Our flashlights scratched back and forth in the tunnel, looking for that symbol. The red murals emitted a kind of light that made people feel very insecure. The murals here were the same style as the ones we saw in the cracks of the hot springs before entering the mountain. They were all about celestial chariots and ladies in the clouds, and there didn’t seem to be any special significance. Of course, if you let an archaeologist talk, they can still say something, but in our opinion, murals that don’t have a narrative are purely decorative, and we can’t understand the symbolic meaning.

After searching for a while, Pan Zi suddenly said “hmm” and beckoned us over.

We went over and sure enough found another symbol, carved into the corner of the tomb wall.

“This is a godsend. We’ve run into a Comrade Lei Feng of the tomb-digging world,” said the fat man. “We just have to follow it all the way.”

I shook my head at this point, because it seemed that this symbol was different from the ones we had seen before.