Chapter 155: Mark

I crouched down and once again tried to identify these strange foreign symbols, but still to no avail—the lines were too messy. Although I could tell they were the same word we had just seen at the square opening, I couldn't break down which letters formed it, and I even began to doubt whether it was English at all.

Fatty was also curious: "Are you sure this wasn't left by that Third Uncle of yours?"

Panzi nodded, indicating absolute certainty. "Third Uncle wouldn't be that flashy. When he leaves a mark, he usually just chips out a notch. This definitely wasn't left by Third Uncle. I think we'd better be careful—marks aren't always meant to guide."

I understood what he meant—if this mark wasn't a guide, then it might be a warning of danger.

However, after seeing that symbol in the Underwater Tomb, nothing dangerous had happened. Besides, there were only two corridors—either this one or that one. Neither was certain, so picking either was the same; hesitating now seemed pointless.

Fatty still took the lead, and I followed behind him into the corridor.

It was very wide inside, wide enough for two Jiefang trucks to drive side by side. As soon as Fatty entered, he said this was a mule path—a passage for mule carts during construction. That was indeed possible, because I had never seen such a wide tomb passage. Faint traces of old cart ruts could still be seen on the ground. But strangely, the corridor was actually very cold; the temperature had dropped significantly, and a cold wind was blowing from inside, as if it connected to the outside. We all knew that ancient tombs emphasized airtightness, so where was this wind coming from?

"This is a natural draft," Panzi said, infected by the atmosphere, lowering his voice to me. "Our ancestors called it 'ghost breathing.' It often happens in large tombs, but it's not dangerous."

"Is there an explanation? How does it form?" I asked.

Panzi shook his head. "Most of what's been passed down is just a saying; nobody has studied it, and it's best not to study it."

I thought to myself that was true. In those days, tomb robbing was for survival; as long as you knew whether it was dangerous or not, you didn't have time to worry about how all the strange phenomena occurred.

The first section of the corridor was fairly flat, but later we began to find collapses and cracked ground. Many black stone slabs had been pried up from the floor, making the surface uneven. This was natural damage from crustal movements. On both sides of the corridor, at intervals, there were reinforcing arch beams carved with single dragons coiling around pillars, many of which were cracked. I thought that without these reinforcements, the corridor would have collapsed long ago.

We walked in silence for seventy or eighty meters when Fatty suddenly stopped and said ahead, "A door?"

We all stopped and shone our flashlights ahead. At the end of the corridor was a black stone tomb door. The eaves and roof tiles on the door were carved with patterns of cloud dragons, grass dragons, and two lions playing with a ball. The door leaf seemed to be metal. The left door was carved with a sheep, and the right door with another unknown creature. Approaching, we saw the stone door was tightly shut; the seams and bolt holes were sealed with copper slurry. But on the left door, on the sheep's belly, someone had blasted a basin-sized hole, and the cold wind was blowing out from it.

"This isn't a door," I pushed at it. "If it can't be opened, it's not a door. This is a sealing stone—made by stacking large black stones and then sealing them with molten copper to freeze them into a solid whole, shaped like a door. Fatty is right; this corridor is a mule path, built so wide to make it easier for mules to drag these stones."

Fatty crouched down and looked at the hole in the tomb door. "There are sealing stones in the tomb passage. It seems this passage is quite important—it can reach the center of the underground palace. So we're on the right path. That mark really was guiding us. And the hole is already opened; they've gone in." As he spoke, he stuck half his head in and extended his flashlight to see inside.

We asked him what it was like and what was inside. He said, "Still a tomb passage, with another sealing stone inside. Looks like Emperor Wannu lacked a sense of security since childhood."

I said, "Bullshit. Even your door has three locks. Sealing stones come in at least three—'three thousand worlds,' get it?" Fatty didn't hear what I said. He put his flashlight inside, then shrank himself and darted through the hole in the door, reaching the other side of the sealing stone. I heard him stutter and mutter to himself, "Damn, it's cold."

Panzi handed him the gun, then crawled in after him. I followed, with Shunzi bringing up the rear. We all crawled through the hole. Sure enough, on the other side was still a tomb passage, the temperature even lower than the previous side, making our bodies tense up immediately. Straight ahead was another sealing stone, but this one was cruder, without the eaves of the outer one. The sealing stone also had a blasted hole, even larger than the previous one.

We didn't stop and continued crawling through. Behind it was the same—the tomb passage continued, and again there was a sealing stone with a hole in it.

"Damn, this fucking endless," Fatty muttered.

I said, "This is normal. Ordinary sealing stones weigh seven or eight tons. A longer tomb passage can have six or seven layers of sealing stones. These are actually good ones—probably only half the thickness. Our ancestors had no explosives, so they had no way to deal with a tomb blocked by sealing stones."

As we spoke, we passed through the last sealing stone. Before us appeared a cross intersection. Another tomb passage crossed perpendicularly with the one we were in, and this intersecting passage was half again as wide and much taller than the corridor we were in.

We walked one by one to the center of the intersection and found that this tomb passage was not the black color of before, but a deep red, covered with a large continuous scroll of vivid murals, stretching as far as our flashlights could not reach. Even the ceiling of the passage was covered with colorful murals.

I exclaimed in admiration, "This must be the main tomb passage—a straight path leading directly to the coffin chamber, the central axis of the entire underground palace. Otherwise, it wouldn't be decorated so splendidly."

"Stop gawking, we're thieves. Same old question—which way do we go?" Fatty asked. "Quick, look around—are there any guiding marks nearby?"

After several traverses through narrow passageways, we had long lost our sense of direction. To distinguish which end of this main tomb passage led to the center of the underground palace and which led to the main tomb entrance, we had to rely on predecessors' clues, otherwise we'd have to flip a coin to guess.

Our flashlight beams swept back and forth across the tomb passage, searching for that symbol. The red murals emitted an unsettling light. The murals here were in the same style as the ones we saw in the hot spring crevices before entering the mountain—all celestial chariots riding clouds and court ladies, seemingly without any special meaning. Of course, an archaeologist might make something of them, but to us, murals without narrative were purely decorative; we couldn't understand the symbolism.

We had only been searching for a short while when Panzi suddenly grunted "Hmm" from one side and waved us over.

We crowded over and sure enough, found another symbol carved in the corner of the tomb passage wall.

"Well, ain't that convenient—we've run into a living Lei Feng of the grave-robbing world," Fatty said. "We just follow along all the way."

But at this moment I shook my head, because I noticed that this symbol was different from the ones we had seen before.