Volume 5 Chapter 38 Snake-Eyed Copper Fish

I really didn’t want to hand over the snake-eyed copper fish, but I remembered what Uncle San had said, and I took it out in a fit of heat. I didn’t expect Aning and the others to react so strongly.

After a long time, one of them finally reacted and asked me, “Where did you get it? You… are simply a god. Could it be that you were in the Luwu Palace… This is the secret text of the dragon fish! I always thought there was only one, but I never thought…”

I didn’t want to talk about it with them, so I waved my hand and said, ‘Does anyone here know how to read it?’

A-Ning immediately shouted, ‘Old Wu!’ A Chinese man came over and, when he saw the fish in my hand, his face changed. He rushed over and shouted, ‘Oh my God!’

I said to him, ”Can you translate it?” He nodded vigorously, as if receiving a sacred object, and then began shining the flashlight on the scales of the fish. Soon, a large number of Jurchen characters appeared on the ground, and someone immediately began to copy them down.

A-Ning’s men were really something. They could translate while copying, which was much better than Hua’s monk. After they finished copying, I understood the basic meaning. I was confused by what I heard, and it was all rather ambiguous, but the more I heard, the clearer it became, almost like a narrative poem. I couldn’t record everything, but there were a few passages that left a deep impression on me.

The entire text was very concise, beginning with a few sentences that indicated that the secret hidden in this dragon fish cipher was very important. Wang Zanghai had recorded it, hoping that it would never see the light of day, but if anyone saw it, he hoped that the person was Han and not Jurchen.

The rest of the record is about what happened after he was captured and taken to Dongxia. It is very similar to the record on the mural, but it also mentions that in order to obtain treasures that Dongxia did not have, he led people to dig up many ancient tombs, and secretly placed copper fish in the most spiritual places, so that the secret would have a chance to be discovered.

I looked at it and said, “Ah,” and thought to myself, “This is it.” Looking further, the content behind it was beyond my wildest imagination—it was recorded that during the process of renovating the Dongxia imperial tomb, he gradually discovered a strange secret of the Dongxia king.

The reason why I was so shocked was because Hua had told me about the first half of this section, that is, the Dongxia Wan Nuwang was a monster that crawled out of the ground, a demon, and what I heard about this section happened to be related to what Hua had said.

It says that Wang Zanghai was trapped here for ten years, and was once led to see an underground gate called a miracle. It is said that the Wan Nuwang of successive dynasties were not hereditary, but all crawled out of that underground gate after the death of the previous generation. And that underground gate could only be opened when the previous Wan Nuwang died, otherwise, the hellish fire would burn everything that opened the door, making Changbai Mountain without daylight. I felt like a volcano was erupting as I listened, and I thought to myself, “Could it be that the King of the Ten Thousand Slaves crawled out of a volcano?”

He was lucky enough to witness this change of kings, and what made him feel so scared was that the King of the Ten Thousand Slaves who crawled out of the underground gate was actually a monster, not a human at all.

The records say that the underground gate is located under the imperial tombs at the bottom of Changbai Mountain, and that it dates back to ancient times, probably from the Xia Dynasty.

I thought of that strange bird and broke out in a cold sweat, but the even more bizarre content was still to come.

On another bronze fish, it even recorded his secret sneak into the underground door. I couldn’t understand any of it, and I didn’t know what they were talking about. Obviously, he carved it after he came back in a state of extreme shock, and it was a bit incoherent.

The fat guy was listening too, and couldn’t help but interrupt: “Didn’t they say that the fire of hell would burn away everything about the person who opened the door? This is bullshit.“

I thought he must have used some method that we didn’t know about, but the records here were really messy. At this time, someone suddenly came to report that they had found another mark.

We went over to take a look and saw that several coffins in the coffin well had been opened, and the contents had all been listed out. On one side of the coffin well, someone had even opened a secret door, and another mark appeared inside the secret door.

”Didn’t you guys leave this mark?“ asked Ning.

”No, we’re also very confused.” I pretended not to know.

A man next to me reported, “The coffins here are all fake, they’re just made of jade. The real coffins aren’t here. We just opened it and activated the insect-repelling jade mechanism, and all the centipedes came out. Now we’ve carefully looked around and found a secret passage. It seems to be a double-layered tomb. The real coffins may still be down here. This was a popular burial method during the Yuan Dynasty.”

I looked at the huge coffin made of jade and glass, and my heart was shocked. I looked at the open secret door again and found that this secret door was very unusual, because this secret passage was very steep, as if it was aimed at the depth of excavation. I let out a “Oh” and it seemed that the place where the oil bottle wouldn’t let me go was here.

A-Ning looked at me and seemed to think the same thing as I did. She waved her hand to let people go down, but no one moved. They all looked at me and the fat man.