Chapter 77: Main Text Chapter Seventy-Eight: The Mystery of Symbols, Codes, and Hints

Main Text Chapter Seventy-Eight: The Mystery of Symbols, Codes, and Hints

Professor Sun finished speaking, then stood up and ushered us toward the door. I thought, This old man is really strange; when we first came in, he was speaking perfectly fine, so why did he change his face just like that? From the way he started talking, it seemed he was already prepared to tell us something, but later, for some reason, he figured out my and Da Jin Ya's identities, so he became stern and harsh. Maybe he thought we two were swindlers, trying to fool him.

If I followed my usual temperament, since the talk has gone this far, without anyone chasing me off, I would definitely just stand up and leave on my own. But this time is no small matter; it might be a life‑or‑death major affair, and besides me and Pangzi, it could also involve the lives of Professor Chen and Shirley Yang.

I said to Professor Sun, 'Professor, Professor, could you hear me out for one last sentence? I don't know how you smelled that we have earth‑spirit qi on us, but I and this gold‑toothed fellow are truly not antiquities dealers; we worked for a long time with the archaeological team, Beijing's Chen JiuRen—Professor Chen, have you heard of him? We were just working under him.'

Professor Sun hearing me say Chen JiuRen's name, blinked slightly and asked, 'Old Chen? You mean you two worked in his archaeological team?'

I quickly nodded and said, 'Yes, I think you two are the towering figures of the archaeological world; in our archaeological circles, just mentioning your great names makes anyone tremble.'

Professor Chen's expression eased a little, and he waved a hand: 'Kid, don't flatter me; I know my own worth. Since you know Old Chen, stay here and let those two avoid us for a moment.'

When I sensed from Professor Sun's words that there might be an opening, I had Da Jin Ya and Old Liu step out first, leaving me alone to confer privately with Professor Sun.

After Da Jin Ya and the others left, Professor Sun bolted the door, asked me some things about Professor Chen, and I briefly told him how I went with Professor Chen and others to the Xinjiang desert to seek the Jingjue Ancient City.

Professor Sun sighed after hearing that and said, 'Old Chen and I are old acquaintances; I've also heard of that desert accident. Frankly, it's already not bad that his old bones weren't buried in the sand. I wanted to go to Beijing to visit him, but I heard he went to the United States for treatment, and I don't know if I'll ever see him again in my lifetime. Old Chen once helped me, and since you're his acquaintance, I won't hide some things from you anymore.'

That's exactly what I was waiting for Professor Sun to say, so I hurriedly asked, 'I feel that this bruise that suddenly appeared on my back looks just like an eyeball, and it seems related to the Jingjue Ancient City we saw deep in the desert. The people of the Jingjue Kingdom's Ghost Cave Clan all worship the power of the eyeball, so I think I've been struck by some kind of curse, but I've also heard it's not an eyeball but a character, so I'd like you to tell me what this character actually means, so I can prepare myself mentally. Of course, I'm someone who has died seven or eight times already, so I don't really care about my own safety, but Professor Chen probably shows the same symptom, and what worries me most is him.'

Professor Sun told me, 'It's not that I don't want to tell you; these matters simply cannot be spoken of, and knowing them would do you no good. But I can clearly tell you that the mark on your back is definitely not some kind of curse or nonsense; it won't affect your health, so rest assured.'

The more I listened, the more anxious I became—this isn't equivalent to saying nothing at all, but Professor Sun's saying it's not a curse did ease my mental burden a little. Yet the more he refuses to speak, the more I want to know: what undisclosed information could still be hidden in a piece of writing from thousands of years ago, especially now that this very character has appeared on my body?

After my repeated pressing, Professor Sun finally had to divulge a few things:

Professor Sun has long studied the antiquities of the Yellow River basin; he is an expert in ancient scripts and skilled at deciphering and translating ancient secret writings.

In ancient times, Cangjie invented characters; the emergence of writing ended humanity's barbaric history of knot‑tying for record‑keeping, causing writing to contain vast amounts of information that encompass the mysteries of all things in nature, and today it has been transmitted with four pronunciations: level, rising, departing, and entering.

However, in the earliest era, writing actually had eight pronunciations; the amount of information contained in those is unimaginable to ordinary people, but this extra information was monopolized by the ruling class, and the other four pronunciations became a confidential language used solely to record major events that ordinary people were not allowed to know.

On tortoise shells and bamboo slips unearthed in later generations, there are many ancient characters resembling oracle bone script, yet no one could ever decipher them. Some say the heavenly book has no characters, or that a heavenly book without characters exists, but that's a distortion; the heavenly book is actually an ancient form of encrypted information—it has surface‑level information, but if you don't know how to crack it, even if it's right before your eyes you still can't understand it. Professor Sun has spent his whole life dealing with these unrecognized heavenly books, but progress has always been slight; it's been a step‑by‑step struggle, exhausting his intellect, and he has produced no notable results.

It was not until 1978 that archaeologists excavating at Rice Warehouse Mountain uncovered a Tang dynasty tomb. This tomb had been looted many times, with six or seven robber holes; the occupant's corpse had long been destroyed, the burial chamber was rotted and sunken, most of the grave goods had been stolen, and the remaining items were almost all severely corroded.

Based on various clues, the tomb's occupant should have been the Grand Historian Li Chunfeng, who oversaw astronomy, calendrics, and yin‑yang numerology in the imperial palace. The Tang dynasty's technology, culture, and economy represented a pinnacle of Chinese civilization, and as the famed 'scientist' Li Chunfeng, who enjoyed great renown in the Tang, his tomb ought to have contained many valuable research‑worthy artifacts and materials—unfortunately they were all destroyed, which is an enormous loss, and every archaeologist on site felt deep regret.

But the cleaning work still had to continue, and as it proceeded deeper, a huge surprise emerged from the decayed coffin: archaeologists discovered a sandwich layer in the coffin lid above the occupant's head.

The coffin lid actually had a sandwich layer—something nobody had anticipated, not even the most experienced experts had ever seen such a layer in a coffin board. Everyone carefully opened the lid's sandwich layer, finding a cowhide wrapping; unwrapping that revealed oilcloth and red lacquer enclosing an object, which turned out to be a flawless white jade box. The box was entirely gilded and inlaid with silver, its stone surface carved with a winged spirit beast pattern, and the latch on the lid was made of pure gold.

Because it was hidden in the sandwich layer of the coffin board, it managed to evade grave robbers all these years and has been preserved to the present.

An experienced expert took one look and knew it was an object of the Tang imperial household, likely a gift bestowed by the emperor on Li Chunfeng, and since he had placed it in such a concealed coffin‑board sandwich layer, its importance was obvious; they immediately sent the jade box back to the headquarters of the archaeological team.

Inside the box made of a single piece of mutton‑fat jade, many important items were found, including a piece of dragon bone (a kind of turtle shell) covered entirely with 'heavenly book' characters, which was named the 'Dragon Bone Aberrant Script Record'. There was also a thin gold plate, not large, with its four corners shaped like beast heads; both sides were densely engraved with numerous characters, resembling a table—some of the characters could be recognized, others could not—and it was then named the 'Beast Horn Mystic Script Gold Plate'.

Thus the experts in ancient scripts, Professor Sun and others, were tasked with unlocking the secrets of that dragon bone and gold plate. Professor Sun accepted the assignment, locked himself in his research room, and began working day and night without rest.

Professor Sun had seen this 'Dragon Bone Aberrant Script Record' many times before; the ancient characters on it he could recall even with his eyes closed, yet he could never analyze what those characters actually were, what they meant, or what content was recorded using this strange script.

This so‑called 'heavenly book' is a hurdle faced by researchers of Chinese ancient characters; if you can't get past it, there's no progress at all, but once you make even a slight breakthrough, the remaining problems can be readily solved—yet this obstacle is simply too great.

Some scholars argue that the 'heavenly book' is the writing left behind by a vanished civilization, but this claim falls apart on its own, because some of the ancient characters unearthed together with the heavenly book are easily readable, and carbon‑14 dating shows they belong to the Yin‑Shang period, meaning they are products of the same era, not remnants of a prehistoric civilization.

After more than a month of repeated deliberation and research, Professor Sun finally solved the mystery of the heavenly book. By comparing it with the 'Beast Horn Mystic Script Gold Plate' unearthed from Li Chunfeng's tomb, he discovered that the ancients' use of the heavenly book on dragon bone was actually an encrypted text.

As early as the Tang dynasty, Li Chunfeng had already deciphered this ancient encrypted text; to honor his achievement, the emperor had a special gold medal cast and awarded it to Li Chunfeng as a commemoration, and the characters and symbols on that medal are precisely Li Chunfeng's correspondence table for the heavenly book.

Actually, the heavenly book is quite simple: it uses annotations of the four secret tones, rather than having the characters carved into the dragon bone, but only a few people who can read those secret pronunciations are able to comprehend the content.

Li Chunfeng drew inspiration from the 'Detailed Examination of Annotations on the Eight Classics', thereby finding a method to fathom heavenly secrets and crack the heavenly book's mystery. Professor Sun, enlightened by the 'Beast Horn Mystic Script Gold Plate', grasped how to interpret the heavenly book, causing an upheaval in the archaeological world; vast amounts of ancient confidential texts were deciphered, much information left people stunned, and many established historical conclusions will have to be rewritten.

Taking all factors into account, the superiors issued the following directive regarding Professor Sun's decrypted information: treat it with caution, and refrain from making it public to the outside world until a definite conclusion is reached.

Professor Sun told me, 'Calling the mark on your back an ancient encrypted character isn't quite right; this symbol isn't part of the heavenly book either. I also saw this symbol on a turtle shell unearthed at Ancient Field, and it represents some special thing for which the people of that time had no precise word. I'd like to call it a pictograph, which is more fitting—a pictograph being a symbolic sign. However, I'm still unclear about what this symbol means. It appears mixed in with the heavenly‑book encrypted text, and in the dragon bone unearthed at Ancient Field, one piece of the heavenly‑book content seems to be a record of a disaster. Because it was just excavated and time was pressing, I only had a quick look and haven't yet been able to analyze the symbol's meaning properly. I never expected that on the way back, the military aircraft would crash and be destroyed, so those secrets may never be known.'

I asked Professor Sun, 'Isn't this something so important that you didn't leave a rubbing or any record of it? Although you think the mark on my back isn't some kind of curse or omen, I still find this too suspicious; if I don't know the details, I'll never be able to put my mind at ease. Please tell me, what does the text inscribed on that bone shell generally say? Is it related to the Ghost Cave of Xinjiang? I swear to Chairman Mao that I will not leak even half a word.'

Professor Sun, nervously, suddenly stood up and said, 'I can't say it; once spoken, it would shake heaven and earth.'