Volume 5Chapter 21: The moat

I was completely dazed for several minutes after landing, and my mind didn’t know what was going on, or whether I was dead or alive. Then a spicy liquid spurted out of my throat and back into my windpipe, and I coughed non-stop. Blood spurted out of my nose and ran down my chin.

It took half a cigarette for me to recover, and I felt my body slowly returning to me. I sat up shakily. It was dark and I couldn’t see anything. I touched the ground and it was all dry stones and sand. The bottom of the moat was dry. Fortunately, the stones were relatively flat, otherwise I would have been killed by the fall.

The gas mask was cracked, and one of the lenses was broken. I touched it and found that the entire gas mask was concave. I touched the front again and found that there was a sharp stone where my face had fallen. It seemed that it was fortunate that the mask protected me, and my face was not smashed. However, this time, the gas mask was completely useless.

I struggled to remove the buckle and carefully took it off my face. Only then did I realize that the mask had split into four pieces and could no longer be worn.

Without the mask, the sulfur smell in the air was even stronger, but after a few breaths, I didn’t feel any discomfort. It seemed that what Pan Zi had said about the intensity of the poison gas here was not true, or the air quality at the bottom of the moat was still acceptable. I cursed in my heart, threw the mask on the ground, spit out the blood remaining in my mouth, and looked up.

The moat was at least ten meters high, and it was gray and murky above. I could only see the flashlights of the fat man and his friends shining down from above, moving around, seemingly searching for me. I could also hear some shouts, but I didn’t know if it was because I had fallen, my ears were full of the buzzing sound of the moment I landed, and I really couldn’t tell what they were saying.

I tried to call out a few times, but as soon as I used my breath, a sharp pain spread from my chest to the surrounding area, and my voice immediately turned into a moan. I didn’t know what I was saying, or even if I was making any sound at all.

In order to let the fat man and the others know that I was still alive, I picked up the gas mask I had just thrown away and knocked it on the ground, making a “cracking” sound. The sound was not loud, but at the bottom of the quiet moat, it bounced off the ground and echoed, very loud.

After knocking for a while, suddenly a cold firework was thrown down from above and landed next to me. I swore and moved away. Then I saw the head of a person above me poking out of the bridge section. It seemed to be Fatso from the size of the head.

I climbed over and picked up the cold firecracker and waved it at him. He saw it immediately and yelled, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying at all, so I just made a few meaningless sounds. The fat guy retracted his head and soon after, a rope was thrown down from above, dangling to the bottom of the riverbed. The fat guy started to climb down with an automatic rifle on his back.

It was only ten meters, or the height of a fourth or fifth floor. It wasn’t very high, but it wasn’t short either. The fat guy slid down to the bottom in a flash, let go of the rope, pointed around with his gun, and then ran over and squatted down, asking, “Are you all right?”

I was hoarse and weak, and said, “Are you all right? Try falling once!”

The fat guy saw that I could still joke around, and he let out a sigh of relief. He whistled to the top, and soon, Pan Zi and Shunzi came down from above with their equipment.

They helped me up, first putting me on a rock on the side, and then letting Shunzi hold me down while she took out a medical bag and examined me.

I was a little relieved when I saw the medical bag, and I thought to myself, “Luckily I was well prepared. Pan Zi made sure I didn’t have a broken bone, took out some bandages, and helped me bandage up the bigger wounds. Then he scolded me, ”I told you to stop, but you kept jumping.

I was furious and shouted at him, “You’re the one who told me to stop, but I was already in mid-air. You didn’t tell me to stop until I was almost there. This isn’t a video that you can rewind!” I didn’t finish my sentence before I felt a sharp pain in my chest and I almost twisted in agony.

Pan Zi was shocked and quickly held me down to stop me from moving.

I gritted my teeth and wanted to scold him, but the pain was too great and I couldn’t even speak.

The fat guy handed me a water bottle and said, “But you’re lucky. At this height, with rocks below, most people would be dead or disabled.”

I took the water bottle and thought to myself that it should be called cheap luck. I must have hit those two iron chains and survived. I don’t know if I’m lucky or unlucky, but I’ve been falling from great heights recently and I’ve never died.

After drinking some water, the blood in my mouth was washed away and my throat felt a little better. I asked him what it was that had just happened. Pan Zi said that this time they had seen it clearly and it must have been a strange bird, and it was very large, as tall as a person.

The fat man said, “Damn it, the person I saw over there on the path of the gods might have been this thing, a human-headed bird, possibly a kind of owl.”

Shunzi looked up and said, “It’s strange. Those strange birds don’t seem to be flying down anymore.”

I also looked up at the ceiling, and sure enough, the invisible pressure had disappeared, and nothing was swooping down.

“Is there something strange here? Are they afraid to come down?”

Pan Zi was also a little hesitant. The fat man said, “Let’s do this. I’ll go look around first. If there’s a problem here, we’ll go up right away. You guys stay here. Xiao Wu, you take a break first.”

I nodded, and Pan Zi said that he and I would go together, and the two of us walked in two directions.

Not long after, the fat guy who was searching on one side whistled at us, as if he had discovered something.

Pan Zi raised his gun and looked in the direction of the fat man. We saw that the fat man had already walked far along the bridge, and the light of his flashlight was blurred. In the range of his flashlight, we saw a large black shadow behind him, as if there were many people standing in the darkness in the distance. The shadows were intertwined and stretched out in a continuous line, and it was impossible to count how many there were.

We all became on guard. Pan Zi clicked the lock and Shun Zi pulled out his hunting knife. Pan Zi shouted at the fat man, “What’s going on? What is it?”

The fat man shouted over there, “You’ll know if you come and take a look.”

From what we felt on the bridge just now, the moat was nearly 60 meters wide and very deep. Compared to the absolute width of the river, the place where the fat man was standing was actually not far from us, but because of the thick darkness around us, we couldn’t see clearly what he was shining his flashlight at.

However, from the tone of the fat man’s voice, it seemed that there was no danger there.

Shunzi looked at me and asked if I could walk and if I wanted to go and take a look. I nodded and he helped me up. We limped along, three of us, towards where the fat guy was standing.

The bottom of the moat was full of uneven black stones, some of which were huge. It was clear that the original construction must have been a huge project. The large, crisscrossing black shadows that the fat guy was shining on were just below the bridge abutments of the stone bridge above.

After walking to the side of the fat man, the shadows became clear. I walked up close and took the flashlight from the fat man to shine it on it before I could see what it was.

Where the fat man was standing, a fault appeared in the riverbed. Below the fault was a ditch about one meter deep. The ditch was about 20 meters wide, and countless life-sized ancient human and horse figurines, mixed with bronze carriage wrecks were lined up in the ditch, stretching for miles. If you got close to a few of them, you could see that the surface of the human figurines had been severely corroded, their faces were blurred, and you couldn’t tell their facial features. Many of the human figurines were holding bronze objects, which were also covered in a greenish-bluish patina.

Most of these figurines are standing, very close together, but many have collapsed and broken, leaning to one side or the other. From where I am standing, it seems that everything in the area within the range of my eyesight and the light from my flashlight is made up of these things, a large, dark shadow, at the bottom of the eerie mausoleum.

“What are these things?” Shunzi was dumbfounded when she saw them for the first time.

“These seem to be funerary figurines. These are horse and chariot figurines, which symbolize the welcoming or imperial procession when the emperor travels…” I stammered. ”Strange, how the hell did these things get here? Shouldn’t they be placed in the underground crypt or the burial pit?”

The fat man also knew this, and he also found it strange. This place is a royal tomb, not a place for children’s play. The number of things in the underground palace and the arrangement of all the sacrificial offerings in the burial pit are quite particular, unlike the tombs of the general public, which can be done at will. The imperial tombs are particular about a kind of energy and momentum. This practice of piling up the sacrificial offerings in the open air is equivalent to a mouse spot on a piece of fine white jade. It is a big taboo, and if the emperor saw it at the time, he would definitely be exiled. Although Dongxia was a small and secretive country on the edge of the country at the time, since Wang Zanghai, who was famous for building tombs, would definitely not make such a low-level mistake.

The fat man climbed down the ditch, took out his gun with one hand and shone a flashlight at the headless figurine with the other, and said to me, “The clothing looks like Yuan clothing, the clothing of a minority.” He then tried to touch it with his hand.

I reminded him, “Don’t move it around. This thing is mysterious. It’s just sitting here. Who knows what’s going on.”

The fat man didn’t think so: “What’s there to be afraid of? It can’t come back to life, can it?” But my words still had some effect, and he retracted his hand, picked up his gun, took out his flashlight in one hand, and pulled out the hunting knife in his waist with the other hand. He poked the figurine a few times, but it didn’t react at all. He turned his head and said, “It’s real, a stone man.”

Pan Zi looked curious and climbed down the ditch, too. He walked over to the fat man. I still felt a little uncomfortable, so I said, “Be careful.”

The fat man waved his hand, showing his disdain for talking to me. He put the hunting knife back into the sheath and tried to lift the nearest terracotta warrior, asking, “Xiao Wu, you’re in this line of work. Are these things valuable?”

I nodded and told him, “This thing has a bit of a twist. Even if you don’t say the whole thing, some people want it locally. I know that the head of a terracotta warrior is worth 2 million, and it’s still a beauty. The horse heads are rarer than human heads, and the price is hard to say.”

The fat man looked around with a pained expression, and said, “It’s a pity, this stuff is not easy to carry…”

I still felt very strange. These things shouldn’t be here. People say that behind every object in an ancient tomb is a story. What is the significance of these things being here, or is there a story?

Judging from the distance between the two sides, these human figurines are standing in the deepest part of the moat in the middle of the moat. When the mausoleum was first built, these things should have been submerged at the bottom of the moat, covered by the water surface. The blurred faces of the human figurines are also evidence that they were submerged in the water for a long time. In other words, when the mausoleum was first built, the people above could not see the existence of these things.

So what is the significance of placing these human figurines here? Could these be construction waste, or substandard human figurines? Did the craftsmen just throw the waste into the moat? It doesn’t look like that, the figurines are so neatly arranged, it doesn’t look like they were just thrown in.

I can’t fathom the minds of the ancients, I thought to myself. If I hadn’t fallen, I wouldn’t have been able to see what was under the bridge. It was a coincidence, was this heaven trying to show me something?

At this moment, the fat man suddenly said, “Have you noticed that all the terracotta warriors here are facing the same direction and making walking motions, which is very different from what we see in the market.”

I hadn’t noticed it before, but when the fat man said it, I looked at it in the same way, and it was indeed the case.

It is very common for the burial figurines to be lined up in one direction, and I have never seen a situation where they are facing in all directions, but the walking movements that the fat man described were very peculiar, and I had never seen them before. I carefully shone my flashlight on the lower part of the figurines, and suddenly, a strange feeling came over me.

“These people…” I frowned and said, “seem to be marching.”

“Marching?” Pan Zi looked at me.

I nodded: “From the clothing and accessories of the figures in the carriage, this is an imperial procession. Look at these horses, these carriages, and the movements of these people. They are all heading in the same direction. These figures are arranged in this way, and their movements seem to be expressing such a dynamic scene.”

We all looked in the direction of the procession of human figurines, and saw that this strange procession of human figurines extended into the darkness of the deep moat, and it was impossible to know where their “destination” was.