Chapter 116: 2007's First Shot

My relationship with Old Hai wasn't close enough for us to talk about everything; usually we only communicated on business matters. After we got familiar, I called him "Uncle" out of respect, so him suddenly trying to get chummy struck me as odd. But with the girl there, I couldn't show it, so I casually agreed and asked her, "What's the deal? Did he find something?"

Qin Haiting gave a mischievous grin. "My uncle said he'll tell you when the time comes. I don't know what it's about either, so don't pry."

I cursed under my breath. That old sly fox was probably trying to shake me down again.

On the third day, Old Hai finally arrived. I picked him up at the train station and drove him on the elevated road to the pre-booked hotel. In the car, I asked him what news he'd heard and warned him not to mess with me.

Old Hai was shivering from the cold and said, "A strong dragon doesn't oppress a local snake. I'm on your turf now—how would I dare fool you? But let's not talk here; I'm freezing to death."

I took him to the hotel, dropped off his stuff, and found a private room in the dining hall. I heated up some wine, and after a few cups, he finally warmed up.

Seeing the flush of alcohol reach his neck, I figured he was ready. "Alright, you've eaten and drunk your fill. Spill it—what did you find?"

He smacked his lips, gave a sly grin, pulled a stack of papers from his bag, and slapped them on the table. "Take a look at this."

I picked them up and saw it was a yellowed old newspaper dated 1974. He'd circled a news article with a large black-and-white photo. Though not very clear, I recognized it immediately: it was a picture of a serpent-browed bronze fish, surrounded by other small artifacts that looked like Buddhist beads.

But this fish was different from the one I had and the one Third Uncle had. In the underwater tomb, the statues along the corridor had three fish carved into their foreheads. This one must have been the topmost of the three. That meant all three fish had now surfaced.

I asked Old Hai, "How did you find this newspaper? Is there more to it?"

Old Hai said, "I've been sorting old newspapers for a big boss lately. You know how rich people collect all sorts of stuff. Look, this is a 1974 Guangxi Cultural Evening News. He wanted every issue from January to December. It took me two months to gather them all, and I was checking them ahead of delivery when I stumbled across this article—what a coincidence! That paper only ran for one year in '74 and shut down in '75, so it's rare on the market. Lucky for you, I spotted it just in time; any slower and it would've been gone."

I glanced down. Under the photo was a three-hundred-word article saying the fish had been found in the foundation of a Buddhist pagoda in Guangxi. The pagoda had collapsed naturally from age, and while clearing the ruins, an underground chamber was unearthed containing waterlogged scriptures and reliquaries. Inside one reliquary was this fish. Experts speculated it was a relic of a monk from the late Northern Song Dynasty.

Northern Song? I lit a cigarette, leaned back in my chair, and frowned. This serpent-browed bronze fish—the first one appeared in a vassal's tomb from the late Warring States period; the second was in an early Ming submarine tomb; the third in a Northern Song pagoda crypt. What the hell? The timelines don't match at all.

I flipped through the rest of the paper. There was only that one article about the fish, and it didn't really say anything new—basically worthless. I still knew nothing about the fish, and that depressed me.

Seeing my expression, Old Hai said, "Don't get discouraged. I'm not done yet. There's a much more interesting story behind this."

I frowned. "What do you mean? Can a newspaper really have that much backstory?"

Old Hai nodded. "Of course. If I'd just found a newspaper, I wouldn't have bothered coming all the way to Hangzhou to see you, right? This whole thing goes way back. By the way, you've been in the trade—do you know a man called Chenpi A'si?"

I was startled. Chenpi A'si was a famous old grave robber from Changsha back in the day, a top boss of his generation, like my grandfather. I'd heard he was over ninety now, had gone blind during the hard times, and hadn't been seen since. Nobody knew if he was alive or dead. But his name was still well-known from my grandfather's stories.

Still, he was different from my grandfather. He lived by the blade—not just tomb raiding, but murder, arson, anything for money. Before the revolution, people called him "Baldhead A'si" because he killed like shaving heads, without hesitation.

Old Hai bringing him up surprised me. He wasn't from our generation, and I'd never crossed paths with him. Could the fish be connected to him? If so, the story behind that fish would definitely be worth hearing, even if it had nothing to do with me.

Old Hai saw I wasn't speaking and thought I didn't know. "It's no surprise you don't know about Old Master Chen's story—different generation, after all. But I have to tell you, that bronze fish in the newspaper—he was the one who brought it out of the pagoda crypt. The whole thing wasn't as simple as the paper made it sound." With that, he gave me a brief rundown of what happened back then.

Turns out, in 1974, Chenpi A'si was nearly sixty and still had his sight. It was the time of hardship. Because he'd served as a platoon leader in the Nationalist army in the early Liberation period and later become a bandit for a few years after being scattered, he had no legal identity. If caught, he'd have been killed. He could only move around in the minority areas of Guangxi, not even daring to set foot in the county towns. In the early years of the "Four Olds" campaign, many ancient sites had been destroyed. Chenpi A'si had visited many places in Guangxi, but since Guangxi wasn't part of the Central Plains in ancient times, there weren't many tombs. He'd kept a low profile for years. But then, while passing by Jiaqiaoling, he happened to chat with some local Miao. They'd had a few drinks and mentioned that a pagoda in a temple on Mao'er Mountain had collapsed with a huge noise, causing the ground to sink into a big pit. On the night it fell, many people heard a very strange, horrifying scream.

Chenpi A'si sensed something was off. He'd been to Mao'er Mountain many times; the temples there were built solidly. How could a pagoda just collapse? When he asked more, he learned the pagoda wasn't on Mao'er Mountain itself, but in a mountain range called "Wofo Ridge." The place was odd—surrounded by villages, with a basin about ten-odd square kilometers in the middle at a very low altitude. The vegetation was thick, the tree canopy darkening the sky. The villages sat on the cliffs above, the forest below, with a drop of over a hundred meters—two completely different worlds. There was no path down from the villages; you had to use ropes to descend.

The locals said there must be other entrances to the basin, but the undergrowth was so dense that walking was nearly impossible. Hunters and herb gatherers who went down often got lost, so no one willingly went down unless they had to. The ancient pagoda was built right in the center of that basin. From the cliff, you could only see a tiny spire poking through the dense canopy, covered in vegetation; you couldn't see anything below. The Miao said their ancestors knew about the pagoda for over ten generations, but no one had ever gone down to look. They'd gotten used to it. Then one day, a huge crash came, and when they looked, the spire was gone—the pagoda had collapsed.

There were many legends about the mysterious pagoda. According to some elders, it was built by an ancient eminent monk to suppress a demon. Now that it had fallen, the demon would come out and cause trouble. That strange cry must have been the demon breaking free.

After hearing this, Chenpi A'si found it intriguing. He had a vague feeling that the pagoda's location and the cry the Miao heard in the night didn't add up.

People like him often had a peculiar intuition, able to instinctively extract information from others' accounts and legends. That kind of ability was hard to find in our generation.

After a moment's thought, Chenpi A'si decided to go check it out.

Guangxi has a vast number of mountain ranges, arguably the most in the country. Mao'er Mountain is a major source, spanning Xing'an, Ziyuan, and Longsheng counties. It's the headwaters of the Li, Zi, and Xun Rivers, connecting the Yangtze and Pearl River systems. The area is covered with primeval jungle. The first big mountain the Red Army crossed during the Long March, Laoshanjie, is there. During WWII, several bombers from the American Flying Tigers helping China mysteriously disappeared in that area. So the place had always been shrouded in mystery.

After many twists and turns, Chenpi A'si arrived at a village on Wofo Ridge. Standing on a mound and looking down into the basin, he saw the pagoda was much bigger than he'd imagined. When it fell, it had knocked down several trees, leaving a gap in the green canopy. From the ridge, you couldn't see what was in the gap, but Chenpi A'si immediately noticed that around the collapsed pagoda, all the trees were in disarray from the ground sinking. It seemed that beneath the pagoda, there was indeed something, and its volume was even larger than the pagoda's base.

Hearing this, I already knew it was a "mirror palace." "Mirror palace" was a Changsha dialect term from before Liberation, meaning that beneath a surface building there was an underground structure of the same scale, like a reflection of the building on a lake—symmetrical top and bottom.

In the Northern School, this was also called a "yin-yang shuttle," meaning the whole building was like a shuttle stuck into the ground, one side for the netherworld, the other for the living world. But such ancient tombs or buildings were rare by then, and most surface remains had been destroyed. This term hadn't been mentioned in nearly the ten years before Liberation. For Chenpi A'si to deduce a "mirror palace" underground just from the arrangement of trees—that kind of judgment required immense experience. I silently admired it and focused, letting Old Hai continue.

Once Chenpi A'si made up his mind, greed took hold. In a pagoda crypt, there were only three kinds of things: relics (śarīra), the mummified body of an eminent monk, or a large collection of Buddhist scriptures. Any of them would be priceless.

But as an outsider, it was inconvenient for him to move around here. First, he had a special identity and a poor background; second, there were constant conflicts between the Miao and Han at the time. The villages here were all Miao strongholds, and barging in might arouse suspicion.

After much deliberation, he came up with a plan. He hired a local Miao guide at a high price and told the guide that he was an old intellectual sent to support the border region. He said that one of his students had fallen off a cliff. The Miao people were simple and ignorant of the world; how could they suspect a trick? Upon hearing that someone had fallen, they immediately notified the whole village. Young Miao men tied a rope to a basket and lowered Chenpi A'si, along with a few young helpers, down the cliff.

According to Chenpi A'si's own recollection afterward, the descent of over a hundred meters was a hellish experience. The cliff was extremely steep, and his entire weight was supported by a single rattan rope, with his butt wrapped in a basket. When the wind blew, he would spin like a top, extremely unstable. By the time he passed through the dense canopy and reached the bottom of the jungle, he had barely half a life left.

Inside the forest, there was almost no sunlight, the light was extremely dim, and the air was filled with the smell of marsh gas. There were many types of trees, but without exception, all places were covered with green moss. The mud was very soft, almost impossible to stand on.

After Chenpi A'si came down, he pretended to be exhausted (in reality, he was truly scared stiff) and sat there panting. The Miao chief, seeing that he was not young and looked like a little old man, told him to wait there for them to return. The chief himself lit a torch and called out to others to search in the direction Chenpi A'si had indicated.

As soon as they left, Chenpi A'si immediately took out his compass and, following the bearings he had memorized, plunged deeper into the jungle. He estimated that with such a large area, the Miao villagers would take a whole night to go back and forth. With his skills, he should have enough time to find the entrance to the "Mirror Palace" and make a round trip. Unfortunately, he hadn't brought enough equipment this time; whether he could enter the palace would depend on his own luck.

After walking aimlessly through the jungle for a full four hours, relying on his compass and his years of experience traveling across the country, Chenpi A'si finally arrived at the area he had mapped out on "Wofo Ridge," that is, the area around the pagoda and the monastery ruins. As he went deeper, Chenpi A'si saw more and more broken walls and crumbling eaves. Clearly, the ancient buildings here had completely disappeared, leaving only foundations and broken walls, almost merged with the vegetation, so it was hard to tell what they originally were. But judging by the scale, the monastery had a very large area. Although the pagoda had fallen somewhere within this area, it was difficult to see exactly where.

Chenpi A'si was, after all, not young anymore. After walking around, he felt a bit short of breath. Just as he was about to sit down and rest, suddenly a flash caught his eye. The vegetation covering an entire wall on the side suddenly contracted, as if something was wrapped inside. Chenpi A'si was startled. He rolled away and at the same time flipped out an iron pellet. Turning back to look, he saw that inside the vines and grass covering the wall, there was a corpse dressed as a Miao. It was almost withered, but for some reason, the corpse's belly was faintly bulging, as if there was something inside it.