Chapter 366: Ancient Building at Yin Mountain: A Strikingly Similar Village

Banai was the village where Agui and his family lived, a typical Yao village. But we had only stayed there for a few days and didn't have a good sense of the village layout. When Yuncai said that, I was really a bit surprised.

"What looks similar?" Fatty took the picture. "Aren't all the villages around here pretty much the same?"

Yuncai didn't dare to be definitive. She handed the picture to Agui and said, "Dad, take a look." We immediately gathered around.

Agui looked at it. At first he seemed not to understand. Yuncai turned the picture around and said a few words to him in their local dialect. Then he suddenly realized, scratched his head and said, "Eh! It really is a bit similar."

I became interested. After all, we weren't locals; we weren't as sensitive to many details as people who had lived here for generations. Also, women were especially attentive, so I asked her to point out the similarities to us.

I had originally thought that maybe the mountain terrain under the lake was similar to the mountains around Banai, which caused some of the village buildings leaning against the mountain to be similar. But when Yuncai spoke, I gasped.

The similarities she pointed out were actually the roads and fences.

Yuncai told me that the first time she looked at the picture, she clearly noticed that the layout of the roads and fences in my drawing of the "underwater ancient village" was exactly the same as in their village. This made her realize something was off, and then she began to notice that many other parts of the village were also very similar.

I couldn't recall all the cobblestone roads and stairways of Banai village, but I remembered the roads near Agui's house. When I compared them, it was indeed the case. Just by turning the floor plan in a different direction, I could immediately find several small paths next to Agui's house, and their intersections were really very close to those in the picture.

My sorrow instantly turned into cold sweat. This was too much. This floor plan depicted a village sunk under a lake, possibly hundreds or thousands of years old. But now we discover that the underwater village and a real existing village have countless points of high similarity. What the hell is going on? Even though I tried to suppress that inexplicable creepiness, I couldn't help shivering. Intuition told me there might be a huge problem here.

I took a few breaths to suppress my goosebumps, then asked Yuncai to point out all the similarities. I had to determine which similarities could possibly be explained by some special, reasonable cause.

Perhaps at that time my expression was a bit frightening. Yuncai saw how serious I was, got scared, and didn't dare to speak. Fatty patted me and told me not to scare the little sister, and then I realized I had lost my composure.

We started from the village entrance and went all the way to the end. The more we talked, the colder my heart grew. I realized this could not be any coincidence. From the positions of several decorative archways at the village entrance, to the many cobblestone roads inside, the fences, and the arrangement of houses — they were really extremely similar.

For such a situation to occur, there was only one possibility: the ancient village under the lake and Banai were designed by the same designer.

But how could a village be designed by a designer? Villages are naturally formed, adjusted spontaneously by the villagers over thousands of years, finding the most suitable places to build houses and the most reasonable routes, gradually forming the layout of roads and houses.

What bothered me most was the high similarity of the roads. Once a village is formed, especially in mountain villages, roads are something that are unlikely to change over a long period, hence the saying "ancient roads in the west wind." For roads, villagers do at most repairs; they cannot tear up an entire road and open a new one. Many of the roads we walk on in mountain villages have existed since the Jin Dynasty. Even in Hangzhou, those stone paths on the mountains were built long ago by monks in temples; what the government does now is just constant repairs.

Therefore, the high similarity between the ancient roads in Banai village and the roads of the underwater ancient village was extremely abnormal in itself, even eerie. For someone like me who studied architecture, it was even more agonizing. Various things I had seen before kept churning in my mind, but I didn't know what I was looking for.

Fatty hadn't realized how deep my thoughts were. He asked, "Tianzhen, have you ever heard of something like this before?"

I shook my head for him not to ask. This wasn't simply a matter of having "heard of it." In history, only one person had done such a thing with two building complexes of similar structure — Wang Zanghai. The Qujing city he designed was exactly the same as Macau city. But that was on a city level; cities can be planned, while villages are completely different. I had never heard of two identical villages anywhere. Moreover, if both villages existed, it could be considered a wonder or the eccentricity of some reclusive master. But now, one exists while the other is actually sunk at the bottom of a lake.

No matter how I told myself not to think in complicated directions, my intuition always told me that what was happening here was definitely not linear. The fragments I held in my hand were just the outermost layer of the "truth" onion.

Seeing no reaction from me, Fatty went to ask Poker-face. Poker-face didn't answer him either, seeming uninterested, just staring blankly at the picture.

Agui hesitantly said, "We have legends that say the village was originally not in that place, but in Yangjiao Mountain. Maybe it's really like what Boss Fatty said — the village down there is our ancient village. The village wasn't burned down, but flooded. Then our ancestors went to a similar place outside and built a village according to the original layout. After all, the mountains here are similar to the mountains outside!"

I said to him, "Unless your ancestors had profound knowledge of geomancy, even if they intentionally copied it, it would be very difficult to achieve this degree of similarity."

To achieve this similarity, they would have had to carry out precise planning and surveying before the original village was flooded. At that time, the Yao people were still in a primitive stage and couldn't have had such skill.

Yuncai pouted and said, "Boss, why do you look down on the Yao people? Maybe there really was such a person!"

I smiled bitterly. It wasn't that I wanted to think that way, but if it were true, then this matter would be complicated. So I replied, "Even if there were such a person, it doesn't make sense, because there's no need. Yao culture isn't strict about architectural planning. Why would they have to make it exactly like the previous village? The layout of this village itself doesn't have any special hidden meaning."

There are many villages in China built by masters. For example, there's a village called Yuyuan Village in Zhejiang, built by Liu Bowen according to the stars; the whole village is a huge astrolabe. But the floor plan of this underwater ancient village is very unplanned. Based on my experience, I can't see anything suspicious.

"What do you think?" Fatty asked me. "You must have some idea."

Indeed, I had some speculations, but speculations were actually useless. So I shook my head: "I can only say for sure that this was done intentionally and with great effort, because ordinary people couldn't achieve this degree of similarity even if they wanted to." What I found most incomprehensible was that something so obvious had no local legends.

Agui's family had several generations of memory, and their village was also very old. That meant this copying behavior happened even earlier. But judging from some signs in the Zhang family building, the jade mining couldn't have been too late. The flooding of the lake must have occurred after the jade mining started; otherwise, the mine pit couldn't have been built.

Three events: the copying, the lake flooding, and the jade mining. Arranged chronologically, the copying should precede the jade mining, and the lake flooding was last.

That is to say, before the jade mining, that lake did not exist. The village was not submerged; even if it had been abandoned, it was still there.

In that case, the locals should have known that there were two identical villages. Even if one was later flooded, it was so long ago that there should at least be legends.

Moreover, such legends would spread far, even to other villages dozens of miles away.

But Agui said there were no legends mentioning the village at the bottom of the lake. This hidden ancient village seemed like an accident, completely forgotten in the course of history.