Chapter Eighty-Eight: A Narrow Escape from Death (1)

Time was running short, so Cha Wenbin and I hauled over more rubble and dumped it into the drainage ditch. That became our stepping-stone, and the higher we piled it, the safer we were. The fish were already packed so tightly in the water, barely a finger’s depth deep, that Cha Wenbin pulled out a little vial from his pocket. The moment he opened it, a pungent stench hit me.

“Sulfur?”

“Pour it in. It might do some good.”

With that, he emptied the sulfur powder from the vial all around the mound of stones we had built. Sure enough, the fish could not stand it either and began surging upstream.

Taking advantage of the moment, I jumped down first and hooked my hands into the copper plate. The instant I tried to lift it, I realized it was far too heavy for me to move alone. Fatty quickly had a bright idea and tossed his rope down.

“Thread it through the plate and we’ll pull together.”

I passed the rope through the hole in the copper plate, climbed back up, and the three of us strained together at last to drag the lid aside. Beneath it was a round opening wide enough for one person, and heaven knew where it led. But there was no time to wonder. The dam we had built upstream could collapse at any moment. This was a true race against both time and death.

If we went down and the dam gave way, we would likely drown. If we stayed up there and got trapped, we would freeze or starve. If the water reached us before we even got into the passage, then all three of us would likely end up as fish food.

Compared one by one, I personally thought drowning was the gentlest option. The other two were a little too cruel. With an arm around each of their shoulders, I said, “Boys, I’m going down first. Once we get out of here, we go straight back to Guangdong and live like decent men. Wenbin, forget about whoever else. This has nothing to do with us.”

I had said all I could say. Cha Wenbin naturally had nothing more to add. Fatty and I had only followed him in for the ride. Perhaps he had not expected it to come to such a desperate pass. He nodded at me and said, “If you don’t mind that I can’t run a business, then take me with you.”

“I’m going.”

With that, I jumped first. Beneath the copper plate everything was slippery and slick with mud. The moment I let go, it felt like I had shot down a slide, racing outward until I skidded more than fifty meters before stopping. Looking around, I saw that this was another large water channel. Behind me was a hole, and the channel connected directly out of it. Straight ahead was another pool, into which the channel’s water was draining.

Right behind me, Cha Wenbin slid down after me. Fatty was the last. By the time he made it down, water had already begun flowing through the channel, which meant the dam we had built was most likely already starting to fail.

As soon as Fatty landed, he shouted, “Lucky I’ve got a big life! A few seconds later and you’d never have seen me again!”

“Then why were you so slow?”

“I had to seal the copper plate back up. Otherwise, once those things got out, where would we be? What is this place, anyway? Are we out or not?”

He asked me, but how would I know? All I knew was that we were now in a cramped space of less than ten square meters, and everything around us was stone, nothing but stone.

Cha Wenbin pointed at the watercourse. “If what we just passed through counts as the burial passage, then this should be the side corridor. There ought to be a door connecting it to the outside. As long as we find that door, we can get out.”

“Master Cha, we don’t have a magic brush, and we’re not some kind of immortal artisan. In a place this small, where do you expect to find a door?” Fatty was right. There wasn’t even room to turn around to relieve yourself, let alone anything as grand as a door. The place was so tiny that even sitting down felt crowded.

“There,” said Cha Wenbin.

His eyes were fixed on the small pool of water in front of us. To me, it was only a little larger than an iron pot on a country stove, though it was a very regular circle.

Cha Wenbin went on, “Since the burial chamber itself was placed in water, the tomb door should also be natural. That pool is probably the best possible tomb entrance. From the standpoint of security, as long as the upstream water keeps flowing, no one can crawl backward into the tomb passage. The force of the current, combined with this slope, is enough to stop any grave robber.”

Fatty thought about it and agreed it made sense. “Going up is death too. Even if someone came with diving gear, the moment he pried open that copper disc, the fish above would tear him to pieces.”

That meant our only way out was the pool before us.

“Swim?”

Fatty had already started stripping off his clothes. He shot me a look. “What else can we do?”

“If we go in, there are only two outcomes,” I said. “One, we drown anyway. Two, the fish eat us alive.” I pointed back at the water channel. “The holes in that copper plate are as wide as a finger. You can bet that over the years, a few fry or something has leaked through. Fatty, maybe those things are just waiting for you to jump in!”

Staring at the water, Fatty stopped halfway through taking off his clothes. “Young Master Xia, if that’s the case, then we’ve truly got no way out. No, no, I’d rather starve than be eaten. At least leave a whole corpse.”

Before facing absolute death, I did not want to make the risk any greater. Even if Cha Wenbin’s judgment was flawless, our chances of surviving a jump would still not be more than thirty percent.

“You willing to gamble?” I asked Cha Wenbin.

He shook his head and fell into thought. A person only gets one life. Better to live badly than die well. I did not think he intended to hand his life over here.

Time passed little by little. When I checked my watch, it was already afternoon. Fatty was snoring loudly in place, while I stared blankly at the pool. Cha Wenbin kept tossing stones around on the ground.

“Xiaoyi, I just cast a divination,” he said. “The omen is favorable. I don’t know whether you believe in that sort of thing, but I have a feeling we’ll be fine.”

I did not know whether he was trying to comfort me. I also did not want anything to happen. So I asked him in return, “If you were the tomb owner, or the one who designed this tomb, would you plan to let anyone walk out alive?”

Cha Wenbin froze. Then I saw him shake his head at me.

“No.”

“I don’t know as much as you two do, but I can tell when a tomb is built this meticulously, it won’t leave any loophole untouched. So we’re going to die, it’s just a matter of sooner or later, right?”

He kept looking at me, just staring. Then, after a while, he smiled.

“Are you afraid of death?”

My answer was just as direct. “Of course I am. Who isn’t?”

“Then I’ll tell you, I lied to you just now.”

Cha Wenbin arranged a few stones on the ground to show me their shape, then said, “I wanted to comfort you, but in the end you’re still a rational man. Your conclusion is correct: anyone who comes in here is walking toward death. I did indeed cast a divination just now, and I got the Water hexagram. It’s a very interesting one, and it matches our present situation almost perfectly.”

“Explain it to me, Master Cha.”

Using stones, Cha Wenbin drew a pattern on the ground: the top line broken, the second line solid, and the third line broken again. He said, “This is the Water hexagram, the twenty-ninth of the sixty-four hexagrams. Its oracle goes roughly like this: the moon shines bright upon the water, yet only the reflection can be seen and not the source; a foolish man thinks there is treasure and reaches down for it, but after all the groping, he finds nothing but emptiness.”

He continued, “In the Eight Trigrams, Water represents the dark and mysterious. You could call it the dark hexagram. From the oracle alone, you can read it like this: there seems to be a road ahead, but it is really a trap. Once one falls to the bottom of the pit, the outcome is inevitably perilous. In this hexagram, the upper and lower lines are both Water, which is exactly our present situation. Above us is water, below us is water, and yet this water is full of danger. Anyone who rashly goes down will die without a complete body.”

“Then can I understand it like this: when we were on top just now, that first line you mentioned was also extremely dangerous? The treasures in the water channel were like the moon reflected on the water. If we had gone down to snatch them, we would have been gnawed clean by those fish, and in the end there would indeed be nothing left.”

“Exactly,” he said.

“But Wenbin, we escaped that disaster just now because we weren’t greedy, weren’t we?”

“We Daoists also have a saying: the Great Way numbers fifty, Heaven generates forty-nine, and man escapes through the one hidden path. The Great Way of heaven and earth originally has fifty parts, but heaven has manifested only forty-nine, so the Way itself is incomplete. There is always a sliver of life in all things. We just passed through that sliver.”

“Then there can be another sliver. My grandfather used to say that as long as I grew up and stayed away from crooked paths, I’d amount to something.”

Hearing me say that, Cha Wenbin seemed to remember something. He rummaged through his bag for a while, then said excitedly, “I remember now. You still have a treasure with me.”

Carefully, he unwrapped a layer of cloth. It turned out to be the compass my grandfather had left behind years ago.

“If you hadn’t mentioned it, I would have forgotten. It’s been many years since I used this.”

Cha Wenbin stood, steadied his breathing, and laid the compass flat in his palm. I glanced at it. The needle inside was spinning continuously. Not fast, but with no sign of stopping.

Cha Wenbin said to me, “If we get out alive, I’m going to study this compass properly. It has shaken me too many times already.”

“It’s just a piece of junk. My father nearly used it as a corner stone for the wall.”

“It has no north or south, and it doesn’t rely on magnetism. It’s nothing like our compasses at all. But it can tell life from death. Watch carefully.”

As he spoke, Cha Wenbin put his middle finger to his mouth, bit down hard, then gently squeezed a single drop of blood onto the center of the compass. An astonishing thing happened. I actually saw the drop of blood slowly seep into it, and on the jade-green surface of the compass, a faint red line began to appear.