Chapter 53: Raging Sea: Still Untitled

Fatty said after finishing and coughed a few more times, spitting out several mouthfuls of saliva. I was anxious to hear more and urged him to continue. Fatty scratched his back and said, "Even hanging yourself you need to catch your breath. This happened too fast, I can't describe it all at once. You'll have to give me time to organize my words."

Seeing him like that, his face pale and his voice sounding weird and off-kilter, I figured there was still water in his windpipe, so I forcefully patted his back a few times. He curled up from my pats and coughed up a bunch of sticky stuff, then said, "Alright, alright, keep that up and you'll beat me to death!"

I pressed, "Alright then, hurry up and tell me. What exactly did you encounter?"

He cleared his nose and then briefly recounted what they had encountered. It all happened very fast, so his account was somewhat chaotic, but I still got a general idea of the sequence of events.

It turned out that when he saw me standing there dumbly staring at the porcelain painting, he called out to me a few more times. But I was so focused at the time that I didn't hear him at all. Seeing no response, he didn't come to urge me again. Probably with his mind on those valuable jade pendants, he went back first to work. At that moment, he was thinking that after I finished browsing, I would naturally come over too. The two side chambers were only five or six steps apart, so there couldn't possibly be any accident.

However, what he saw next completely captured his attention, to the point that he completely forgot about my existence and didn't even notice when the stone door disappeared.

He returned to the side of the coffin, and the two of them scooped out water together. Soon the corpse floated to the surface. Fatty took a closer look and was horrified. It turned out that the lumps he had originally thought were heads were actually women's plump breasts, so fat they sagged down, dragging across the twisted torso. Fatty was stunned; he really hadn't expected this to be a female corpse.

But logically, if there were twelve hands, there should be twelve breasts. Yet there were only five on the front. Could there be more on the back? They wondered how to lift the corpse out of the coffin.

Fatty first tried using the gun as a hook to drag the corpse out, but the body was too soft, almost entirely waxified, slippery with no place to get a grip. Wearing gloves made it even worse; it was like squeezing soap—one squeeze and a layer of oil came off, disgustingly. Finally, Poker-face came up with an idea. They took off their clothes, one wrapping the head, the other the feet, threaded the gun through as a carrying pole, and together they lifted her out and placed her on the ground.

Under the strong light of the exploration lamp, the corpse rapidly dried and turned black. Now they could see clearly. The other breasts had been cut off, leaving bowl-sized scars on both sides of the body. Her body wasn't actually twisted; it was just that the excess fat had piled up like a mountain.

At the time, they didn't think about why the female corpse's belly was so big; they just assumed she was too fat. They didn't realize she had died during childbirth, with something else inside her belly.

After the corpse was lifted out, the stone tablet underneath was revealed. Poker-face said it was a coffin weight stone, meant to prevent the coffin from floating if the airtight structure of this underwater tomb was compromised. The stone was very rough, with only a line of large characters carved on it.

Fatty looked at it a few times, couldn't understand it, and then thought of me. Only then did the two of them notice that the door in the wall had disappeared. Fatty panicked, not so much worried about me as about whether he could get out himself. Poker-face told him not to be afraid, saying the door would appear in due time and that panicking was useless. The most important thing now was to finish what they were doing. Seeing how calm he was, Fatty relaxed.

The two tried to lift the stone tablet out of the coffin, but found it was very heavy, and the edges had been sealed with pine resin, firmly stuck to the bottom of the coffin. Fatty thought this didn't make sense. He knocked hard on the tablet and suddenly discovered that it was hollow underneath.

They lit a fire stick to melt all the pine resin, then moved the stone aside, revealing a large hole. Although Fatty was a bit crude, he had a wealth of experience. He was so shocked his jaw dropped. This hole wasn't something the tomb designer had purposely made here—it was a grave robber's tunnel! This was an explosive discovery. Putting aside other aspects, just the positioning of this tunnel was unparalleled. It had tunneled directly beneath the coffin. If not for that stone blocking it, the corpse inside would probably have been dragged down into the hole long ago. The most bizarre thing was that this tomb was underwater—how could such a tunnel have been dug?

Moreover, if this tomb had a vertical elevator-like structure, then beneath the coffin there should have been another burial chamber. How could there be space for such a deep hole? Fatty immediately concluded that our assumptions about the tomb's mechanisms might be wrong. With that, the whole matter plunged back into confusion. Both fell silent. Fatty knew full well that because of this hole, the site's arrangement for nourishing qi and preserving the corpse had been disrupted. Although the corpse had already waxified and could no longer undergo a zombification, the site's momentum was gone, inevitably affecting the tomb's feng shui. Though they didn't yet know the overall changes, it could suddenly turn from an auspicious site into a dire one. Fatty wasn't highly accomplished in feng shui, but being from the Northern School, he knew such a shift was very bad.

Yet he wasn't a specialist in that area. When he tried to think deeper, his brain couldn't handle it. He thought the characters on the stone tablet might be key, so he copied them down. At that moment, he heard Poker-face, who was crouching beside the female corpse, suddenly yell, "Damn it!"

He turned his head and saw that Poker-face's left hand was tightly gripped by a small, white-haired hand extending from inside the female corpse. Fatty hadn't expected a dead infant inside the woman's belly, and was startled. But he reacted quickly. Getting a grip, he immediately grabbed his gun and shot a volley of darts at the corpse's belly. It seemed to hit the right spot; Poker-face broke free at once. Fatty was about to shoot more when Poker-face yelled, "You can't kill it with shooting! Run!" Then he pulled him to crawl into the grave robber's tunnel under the coffin.

Fatty saw the remaining coffin fluid flowing down into it, disgustingly, and hesitated to step in. But he turned back to see the outline of a face bulging from the female corpse's belly, as if desperately trying to burrow out. The skin on the belly was stretched so thin it was transparent, and he could even make out the facial features of the thing inside. A chill ran down his spine. He thought, "A wise man knows when to retreat," gritted his teeth, and followed into the tunnel.

The tunnel had been dug through the bricks, very skillfully. Only half of each brick was chipped away, naturally forming an arched brick beam at the top of the tunnel, so nothing above would collapse down. This craftsmanship really took skill; it probably couldn't have been done in just a few days.

Poker-face had already crawled several steps in, and Fatty scrambled after him. He didn't know where the tunnel led. After crawling only a few steps, he suddenly noticed the tunnel sloping downward, and water began to appear below. But the section with water didn't seem long. He saw light diffusing in, guessed it might be me, and dived into the water. After swimming just a few strokes, the space widened into a large pool. By then both of them were out of breath. They surfaced desperately, and as soon as they emerged, they saw me aiming my dart gun at them.

Hearing this, I couldn't help saying, "So you only saw one hand too."

Fatty said, "Your Uncle Fatty isn't really afraid of that thing, but even this little brother, who's so skilled, ran away when he saw it. Why would I try to show off? But come to think of it, I still don't understand why we had to run. Little brother, what was that thing? Was it really that dangerous? To me, it looked like a few darts would have done the job."

Poker-face rubbed his wrist and said, "That was only a white-haired hànbá. Cutting off its head would kill it, but once it died, a large amount of corpse poison would evaporate. With this limited air, it wouldn't be worth it."

I was surprised. The hànbá is said in legend to be a ghost that causes drought; it's also said that a zombie left too long in a corpse-nurturing site can transform into a bá. The Book of Songs mentions, "The hànbá brings disaster, like a scorching blaze." There are many such tales, but I never imagined it would look like this. However, these details weren't important. Coming into this ancient tomb, I was already prepared to see strange things. It was the grave robber's tunnel that was extraordinary—it led to this pool. That seemed unlikely. I guessed that the tunnel entrance under the pool was probably just one exit. The digger, unsure of the main coffin's location, might have tunneled toward several possible directions, and this was just one of them. Thinking this, I asked if they had found any branches. Fatty shook his head, saying no, the tunnel was short and clearly went straight through. I wasn't discouraged by this either—after all, with a brick tunnel, it was easy to conceal an opening with bricks.

Since this tunnel hadn't broken the airtight structure, its entrance must also have been inside this tomb. Finding it wouldn't be much use. I guessed that after entering the side chamber through the spring, the chamber was still in a doorless state, so he had no choice but to dig a passage. But he really had bad luck: digging toward the side chamber, he hit the coffin weight stone; digging toward the side room, he hit a pool. I wondered if he had managed to break into the main chamber.

As I was thinking, Fatty suddenly said, "Can a hànbá swim?"

I was startled, not sure what he meant. He pointed at the water. I turned to look and saw a large number of bubbles rising from the center of the pool.