Chapter 93: In a Dilemma

There were five of us in all: Cha Wenbin, me, Fatty, Little White, and Old Gu. Old Gu was a researcher, and he was naturally deeply interested in our find; even knowing people spoke of a curse did not bother him in the least.

“In China there’s an old saying,” Old Gu went on. “Even if you know a tiger is on the mountain, you still have to go toward it. You cannot pull a cub from a tiger’s den without entering it. I have spent my whole life in study. If you ask whether I’ve ever caused a truly sensational breakthrough, the answer is no. To this day I’m only a schoolmaster. I’m an old man now; I’m not going to make a fuss over a few spooky matters if I join you for a walk this far.”

Yuan Xiaobai was not going to come this time, and since Master Long’s people were said to have some other business, he told us to bring the sickly one with us. Who that man was, and why he was cursed, we had no idea at all.

When we reached Zhuangyuan Village, everything had changed. A boat waited by the riverbank, Long’s men stayed in the house that had once held guards, and the people who had been there before had disappeared. From what we had seen in the cave, we had brought plenty of supplies—more than enough—including a seal-skin wetsuit, oxygen tanks, and even a bottle of poison, far more potent than the fish-vine extract Fatty had once mentioned.

The sickly fellow had taken nothing with him. He wore so little, even in that cold weather—just a white undershirt, an old-fashioned open-front waistcoat over it, and a pair of black-front, white-bottom cloth shoes on his feet, without socks, his soles bare to the wind.

After changing into his clothes, Fatty warned him, “Brother, once we go down, we’ll be traveling by water.”

The man ignored him completely and instead bent down to comfort the shivering mongrel—the same stray Fatty had nearly killed the other day.

Being treated like air naturally put Fatty in a bad mood, and he muttered, “What a fool.”

Before we left, Master Long raised his wristwatch and said, “This time, what you can carry out is up to you, but there is one condition I must make clear: it is five o’clock now. Before seven o’clock tomorrow morning, every one of you must be out. If that time is exceeded, I will blow up every entrance and exit.”

“Why?”

His expression was grave. “No need for endless explanations. Remember this—if we pass seven tomorrow morning, this entire mountain will sink beneath the water forever.”

I am not a man used to being ordered about; I was about to say something, but Cha Wenbin simply answered, “All right.”

“What if we can’t get out?” I asked him later in the cave.

He answered in that almost casual way of his: “Then you can assume we’re probably dead.” He paused. “We’d only be dragging you all down with us.”

I said no more. With his temperament, he’d say what he needed to say, and if he kept silent, I would not force him.

Fatty stayed behind the sickly man all the way, walking alongside Old Gu and praising him as though he were some heroic internationalist with self-sacrificing spirit, a fighter of the same caliber as Dr. Norman Bethune. With him there, the atmosphere on the way was noticeably lighter.

As soon as we came out of the tunnel, those terrifying apparitions from before were gone. Worse, the river itself had dried up. We could see the underground channel at a glance, its bottom coated in black mud. I went down first. Trusting my memory, I turned, thinking the water vortex that had swallowed us would still be behind me—but there was no opening at all. The mud had risen up to halfway up the iron ladder.

“The path is blocked,” everyone stammered. It was beyond everyone’s expectation. The continuous half-month of rain had probably driven the water level up, suddenly stirring up all the mud and stones accumulated in the underground river.

Fatty took a shovel and tried digging, but to no effect. Within moments, all of us stood with our jaws open—how long could we possibly dig this out by hand?

With his head hanging, Fatty said, “Come on. Go back and tell Master Long the entrance is gone.”

I suggested, “We could go in through yesterday’s exit.”

“The water level in the river has risen by several meters,” Fatty said. “We won’t be able to climb up to that outflow tunnel anyway.” He was right. We had been able to get in that day by sheer blind luck.

In that deadlock, Old Gu suddenly asked, “Cha Wenbin, you said the place you reached seemed to contain a phoenix coffin?”

“It should be,” Cha Wenbin replied. “I only caught a glimpse. We didn’t check the other spots.”

“Such a large-scale tomb would not be for one woman alone unless she were an empress. Even Wu Zetian and Empress Dowager Cixi were laid to rest in shared mausoleums. I haven’t heard of a woman this generation of such extraordinary rank who could be given such an exclusive imperial burial. So I judge there must be a male owner here as well, and he is the true lord of this place.”

“That day, according to geomancy, I judged that coffin to be under that broken section in Kaifeng’s location; I didn’t truly inspect the rest. But this doesn’t matter now.”

“Not necessarily. Have you considered that the group before you may have been digging around here for years? Do you really think they were idling?”

In the past few years, what Top Scholar Village has become is, by the standards of all southern Anhui, nothing short of miraculous. As early as the 1980s it had roads, electric lights, telephones; someone there even owned a private car. Geographically, it is remote. Economically, it has always been a rural settlement since it was founded. Yet this unremarkable hamlet had already raced ahead in material development long before many major places. If not coal, and we have already proven this land cannot yield any, then there is only one explanation: artifact smuggling.

Under the pretext of coal mining, they have spent these years boring hollows all around the hill. From the soil left in the truck beds, they must have found at least more than one ancient tomb. By economic return, they were finding gold by the basketful every day.

Cha Wenbin told Old Gu, “We once suspected that the people of this village might be descendants of tomb keepers. But in this generation they seem to have started looting what they were supposed to guard.”

“That is it,” said Old Gu. “Then this mountain contains not just the one tomb you found, but many. By my experience, what they discovered is likely a set of attendant burials, while yours is the principal tomb. Yet even this is only one of several. The scale of this tombing already exceeds my expectation—very likely larger than the Mausoleum of the First Emperor of Qin. If that is true, we may have made history.”

At that, Old Gu’s eyes were already shining. He squeezed Cha Wenbin’s hand and said, “Young man, I am certain you will soon become the center of attention of the whole world.”

Fatty leaned in and added, “Remember to take me with you.”

While we were still discussing what to do next, that sickly fellow did something very strange. He pressed his ear against the riverbank, then grabbed a handful of mud and, right before my eyes, chewed it.

Then, all at once, it was as if a current ran through him. He surged forward with sudden energy, slipping past me and Fatty in a flash and moving quickly ahead.

Cha Wenbin noticed too. He called out, “My friend, where are you going?”

The man gave no answer, only kept walking, each step faster than before.

“What is he doing?” I asked.

Cha Wenbin tapped my shoulder. “Go, follow him.”

It was not a route we had ever taken. The day we came down, we had been pulled straight into the water. His movements were so peculiar. We followed behind, keeping barely ten meters apart, when after one turn he vanished from sight.

“Where is he?”

Before me now was a straight river corridor, the surrounding hill faces only two men high. I could see straight through it at a glance, yet he had disappeared as if into empty air. If yesterday the water had obscured him, this time how could he vanish? Did he slip between stones?

“Not ghosts,” Fatty snapped. “Look at the footprints.”

Cha Wenbin flashed his miner’s lamp down. There, on the mud, was a line of footprints marching forward in alternation, but each mark seemed to show only the ball of the foot, no heel at all. It reminded me of Cha Wenbin’s old claim: ghosts walk on their toes.

I turned to him. “Is he really a ghost?”

He shook his head. “Impossible. There’s only one explanation: he moved too fast.”

They say someone can run over open water at extreme speed, but that sickly fellow was barefoot in cloth shoes. I could hardly connect that with any such speed. Had I misread what I saw?

“I think there’s something wrong with him,” I said. “I just saw him scooping mud off the ground and eating it.”

Cha Wenbin did the same after hearing me, kneeling and putting a little mud in his mouth with his finger. I saw his lips move a few times, then his eyes widened wide and he shouted, “Follow his prints. Hurry!”

Fatty, talking to himself, mimicked Cha Wenbin and made a lump of black mud as well. Moments later I heard him spit it out with a disgusted cough.

Good night.