Chapter 479: Zhang Family Genealogy

The corpse in this black wooden coffin should be someone from the thirty-fourth generation of the Zhang family. Based on some information in the epitaph, he was born in the mid-Qing dynasty, and his name was Zhang Shengqing.

I won't go into detail about his life—the core point is this person's lifespan. According to the epitaph, he lived to be over a hundred and seventy years old.

Longevity seems to be another characteristic of this family.

This person died in a gang fight, which should have been during the most intense border conflicts. He died somewhere near Korea, and his clansmen brought him back to be buried in the Zhang family ancient building.

This person's contributions to the entire family were written after the biography, in great detail. Aside from all sorts of strange rhetoric, two points were mentioned most frequently: the first was his parents, who seemed to be quite meritorious people.

Therefore, he had an innate advantage. The second point was: "He opened countless tombs, acquired many spoils, used them to stabilize the Zhu family's dynasty, and reaped substantial profits."

With these two merits, he was buried in the building tomb.

From this, it can be inferred that the Zhang family had a relationship with the imperial family of that time, and even did many things for them.

This could also explain why the Zhang family managed to survive every period of upheaval and continue their lineage for so long.

This is a bit like the mysterious families in many novels, who live in seclusion in the mountains all year round, guarding their closely guarded secrets—whether martial arts, military strategy, or even sorcery.

Then, every day someone would observe the stars at night, and when they found that the world was about to fall into chaos, they would send a few people into the world to stir things up and reap some benefits.

Fortunately, there are really a lot of people with the surname Zhang, and every dynasty has some impressive Zhangs, otherwise I would have definitely made more associations.

"I'm reminded of Zhang Tianshi. Could Zhang Tianshi also be a member of the Zhang family?" Fatty said.

"Hard to say—they're all impressive people," I said. Actually, what I cared about more, and what gave me a lot of information, were the many details in the biography.

First, I confirmed that the Zhang family had always been active in northern China. All of the birthplaces and activity locations here were almost entirely in northern China, near the Korean border, which is to say, near the Changbai Mountains.

In ancient China, that place was not really part of the Central Plains; it was mostly under the control of minority ethnic groups. The Zhang family was clearly a large Han clan living among other ethnic groups.

To survive in a place like that shows how powerful their influence was.

Second, I was basically certain that the Zhang family had many branches. For example, the branch this person belonged to was called "Chessboard Zhang."

Although these branches all belonged to the main Zhang family, because there were so many members, they formed branches just like the Eight Banners of the Manchu. The Zhang family had five branches.

This person should have been buried after the ancient building was completed. At this point I also thought of the Thousand-Hand Tomb downstairs and realized that those hands might not be what I had imagined.

Could it be that during the relocation of the ancient building, there were too many corpses in the previous ancient building to transport the coffins to the new one, so certain unimportant people were buried there with a hand representing the body? Moreover, I could see from between the lines that the "Chessboard Zhang" branch held a very high status in the Zhang family, because the "Chessboard Zhang" possessed the Qilin.

It was still unclear what this metaphor meant, but I could vaguely guess the key.

After reading the epitaph, Fatty winked at me and pointed at the large black coffin next to us, meaning: Should we open it and have some fun? I looked at the coffin beside me. The black wooden coffin was made of the same wood as the ancient building, painted with three layers of black lacquer, giving it a solemn and imposing appearance.

Fatty wiped the dust off with his hand. Due to the long passage of time, the black lacquer had cracked in many places, revealing the old wood color.

My architecture student habit kicked in—I realized another function of the quicksand layer at the very bottom.

There is an abundant underground water system here, and the interior of the mountain is very damp, which has a severe corrosive effect on the wooden ancient building.

The quicksand layer we passed through earlier was a moisture barrier to prevent water vapor from rising upward. I estimate that there is more than one such layer of quicksand underground.

Our feet could step on the stone slabs beneath the quicksand, and below those stone slabs, there might be even more quicksand.

I looked at the coffin and felt we had to open it. No matter how many times I've been through it, I'm still terrified of opening a coffin, but at this point, how could we just pretend not to see? The Zhang family follows the Northern School tradition, and Fatty said we should treat it with Northern School etiquette. I thought to myself, actually it's Northern School etiquette for robbing tombs.

The Northern School of tomb raiding has been in decline for a long time. On one hand, tomb raiders nowadays are increasingly profit-driven and their equipment is more and more advanced.

They have no intention of following these tedious rites; on the other hand, the rules of the Northern School have led to fewer and fewer successors, unlike the Southern School, which has no distinction of family status—as long as you follow me, I'll teach you, all for the final monetary gain.

Therefore, the skills of the Southern School have not only not been broken, but have continued to develop.

I asked Fatty how to proceed. Fatty used his clothes as a broom to gather the dust in the room, filling it with dust.

Coughing, he scooped up a handful of dust and went to the southeast corner of the room. He stuck a few cigarettes in it and was about to light them when he realized something was wrong, and asked me: "Tianzhen, what brand are your cigarettes?"

"Yellow Crane Tower," I said.

"Come, come, swap." Fatty took my cigarettes, "We can't let Little Brother's ancestors smoke my eight-yuan-a-pack ones. This is our first visit; we can't make Little Brother lose face."

With that, Fatty lit the cigarettes and bowed toward the corner: "Um… we are friends with your Zhang Qiling. We're really not here to rob the tomb this time. We're… we're… consider it a social visit. After seeing all the elders, um… we'll also fill in some homework for Little Zhang.

As you know, the kids in your family all have bad memories. Um, Little Zhang doesn't know where he's gone, so I was planning to ask for directions. If you know, then don't do anything, don't say anything. If you don't know, just stay as you are.

Respectfully yours, Amitabha, you bald donkey actually dare to compete with this poor Taoist for the nun."

I thought, what a mess, and slapped him, pulling him up.

The two of them flung out iron spikes, inserting them into the cracks on both sides of the coffin lid. First they pried up the coffin nails, then took a deep breath and carefully pushed the heavy lid to one side.

When the coffin lid hit the ground, the entire floor trembled. Covering our mouths and noses, we fanned away the dust and saw a cotton-like substance inside the coffin. I poked at it with my iron spike and found it was a strange kind of fungus, like a spider web covered in bits of white torn cotton.

Fatty used his iron spike to push aside that layer, revealing the corpse inside.

The corpse had already completely decomposed, leaving only a skeleton. Around it were some burial items, very few in number, all wrapped in that strange "cotton." Fatty used his spike to lift one out—it was a small dagger.

The dagger's sheath had rotted away until it looked like a piece of eight-treasure Osmanthus cake; the gems on it resembled red cherries and green raisins.

I pulled out the dagger and found it was a black gold short knife, slightly shorter than Poker-face's one and of a different design. The blade emitted a black gleam under the flashlight, looking incredibly sharp.

The handle was also badly decayed. Holding the blade edge, I knocked the handle against the coffin board to knock off the rotten bits, leaving not much behind. I was about to toss it back into the coffin.

Fatty immediately stopped me: "What's wrong with you? Finally we find something, and you're being picky. Keep it. Take it out and make a new handle—could be a birthday gift for Xiao Ge."

"Who knows when his birthday is?" I said.

Fatty took the black gold short knife, wrapped it up, and put it in his backpack, saying, "I bet he doesn't even know what a birthday is.

Just pick some sunny day, tell him it's his birthday, and that's it. With his personality, he won't ask what a birthday means."

That's a good idea too, I thought. I wondered if there was a holiday for deaf-mutes. For someone as quiet as him, having his birthday on that day would be fitting.

The image of Poker-face blowing out birthday candles sent a chill through me, like seeing a ghost blow out a lamp. I quickly stopped thinking about it.

Fatty poked around a bit more and found the other stuff had all rotted into lumps. He cursed, "The Zhang family wasn't wealthy, huh? With a welcome gift like this, it's embarrassing for Xiao Ge."

"The Zhang family values strength, not money," I said. "You can tell from the epitaph that the Zhang family was a big clan that used its grave-robbing advantages to gain power and protection.

In the long history of China, having money alone is useless."

Fatty took all three cigarettes, pinched off the ash-covered butts, and took the last few drags. When I asked why, he said that since they were already rotted to this point, they probably had no grudges, and he couldn't let this cheapskate get off easy.

I said, "Why are you so mercenary?" Fatty just snickered.

After finishing the cigarettes, he used the iron spike to poke at the bones.

We found the corpse's left hand; two of the finger bones were very long.

This was the first time I saw the complete skeleton of such abnormally long fingers. There were many scars on the joints of the bones. Clearly, training fingers like that must have been quite painful. At the same time, I noticed that many of the large joints, such as shoulders and wrists, had very strange bone spurs.

Fatty said that was probably an aftereffect of the bone-shrinking technique.

The bone-shrinking technique often requires dislocating joints. Doing it repeatedly would definitely cause habitual dislocation. To overcome that, you have to train specific muscles around the joints.

Those muscles are extremely hard to train; you might see little progress even after years. The muscle was only the size of a crescent moon on a contractor's forehead, but you have to work it into a banana shape, so naturally it's extremely painful.

Fatty said he once had a chance to learn that skill. A master he knew said his bone structure was suitable for shrinking. Fatty trained for one day, beat up the master, and then fled.

On the skull of this corpse, I saw two bullet holes, very irregular—probably from iron shot pellets.

The bullets entered at one spot but didn't exit, so the shot must have been fired at close range (if from farther, there would have been many sesame-sized holes). The iron pellets stayed inside the brain. This elder must have died in great pain.

No matter how formidable the Zhang family members were, they were helpless against firearms.

We thought there were no more clues and decided to close the coffin lid. When we lifted it, I saw many characters carved on the inside of the lid.

We turned it over and found it was a simple family tree. The names of parents and ancestors were all listed, and children were in their respective positions.

What struck me as odd was that this person's parents both had the surname Zhang. He had two sons, one of whom was already married, and that daughter-in-law also had the surname Zhang. His two daughters were married off, and their husbands' families were all surnamed Zhang.

"Do you find anything off about this?" I asked Fatty.

"How old do you think this guy was when he died?" Fatty said. "He had four kids—impressive."

"The main purpose of the feudal hierarchical system in ancient China was to reproduce and expand family power. He might have started having children very early,"

I said. "Besides, the Zhang family has unusually long lifespans. If they wanted to have kids, they could still be full of energy even after a football team.

That's not the irregularity I'm talking about." With that, I pointed out all the surnames to him.

"Could they have changed their surnames?"

I shook my head: "We can be almost certain it's intermarriage within the clan. The Zhang family is a closed family; they don't have marriage relations with outsiders."

We put the lid back on and hammered in the nails. I said, "I need to go to the next room. These epitaphs are very important; I want to study them carefully to get more information."