Daomu Biji: Restart

Fatty kept it very brief, but my hair was standing on end by the time he was done. I had heard many strange ghost stories in recent years that left me unfazed, but the more I listened to people's stories, the more horrifying they became. The things people could do in this world were really scary, especially in my line of work.

Even though what happened to Liu Sang was still quite strange, Fatty thought that the story was truer than all the other rumors out there.

Liu Sang wasn’t an orphan. Although people said he was a street caller, he still had parents. Liu Sang's dad fought in the counterattack against Vietnam. The Sino-Vietnamese conflict lasted all the way up until 1989 and he was in one of the last squads sent out. When he arrived at the front line and saw the machine guns, he realized that he was really going to fight. He cried all night before going to the battlefield. At that time, his father's squad leader was very proud and mobilized them at dawn, saying that he would definitely take them home.

The squad leader was shot in the head less than ten minutes after going up the hill to the battlefield. The first battle took less than five minutes. The whole platoon lost half its people and he was wounded by falling artillery shells. When he saw the squad leader again, his brain matter was already flowing out of the bullet wound. A person could live for ten minutes even if he was shot in the head. He saw that the squad leader had been crying before death and the tears were still flowing after he had died.

After that, the two remaining squads merged and went to the jungle in Mengdong, where they were considered veterans even though they had only fought once. This time, they managed to fight for sixty hours and the whole mountain was blown bare. At that time, the Chinese were already very good at fighting and the Vietnamese veterans quickly learned the saying “bloody mound” (1).

During the fighting, his father saw a hole in the mountain get blown up and bluestone went flying in the air. After more than ten hours of continuous bombing, a giant hole was blown through the bluestone. But the mountain turned out to be hollow.

When his father’s squad charged for the last time, the Vietnamese retreated into the empty hole. They went in after them and found that there was an ancient tomb with jadeite, golden Buddhas, and Sri Lankan rubies lining both sides of the tomb passage. The tomb belonged to a South Vietnamese prime minister.

The Vietnamese inside put up a fierce resistance. The Chinese fought more than a dozen times and sacrificed several people, but they couldn't get in. When his father’s squad pulled out, they called for a tank to blow the hole and bury all the Vietnamese inside.

In less than thirty minutes, the Vietnamese reinforcements drove them down the mountain again. At this time, the battle on the Eastern Front was over, so Hill 334 had the full support of all the surrounding artillery. They bombarded the nearby mountains to such an extent that the whole landscape had changed and his father couldn’t even find the original mountain.

After he recovered, he told several comrades-in-arms about it, one of whom was Pan Zi. At that time, Pan Zi didn't know Uncle Three. He knew it was easy to get into this business and difficult to get out of it, so he didn’t say anything in the end.

Liu Sang was born after his father came back. When Liu Sang was a teenager, his father divorced his first wife and brought another woman home to marry. Liu Sang began to rebel and ran away from home twice. He ran away the second time because of what transpired after his father was diagnosed with intestinal cancer. He had been living alone with his stepmother, and she had splashed boiling water on him. As he walked to the city hospital to find his father, he begged for food on the streets. But by the time he arrived at the hospital, his father had already died. He never went home after that.

He met Laitou Guzi when he was begging, but it wasn’t because he had good ears. It was because he was talking about his father’s story.

Three years later, the house his father left to his stepmother caught on fire. His stepmother's family had moved in during that time and everyone—including his stepmother’s brother—ended up burning to death. The police said that all the doors and windows were sealed shut with wire and the arsonist had been listening outside the door. A pair of footprints were left in the ash on the ground, along with a square mark that had to be a tape recorder. The arsonist had recorded all their screams.

Listening to thunder was also called listening to the dead. There were rumors in the circle that the dead in underground tombs could be heard through yin ears (2). In order to hear the words of the dead, people would need to hear the words of their dying relatives and use sorcery to gradually enhance their ears. Of course, this was all false information because it really turned out to be resonating thunder.

But since then, Liu Sang's ears had become very good.

Fatty had heard this from Pan Zi's war buddies when they met at the memorial ceremony. Like suspecting someone of stealing an axe (3), those who had never heard this story would just think that Liu Sang looked like an asshole. But Fatty had heard this story, so he felt that Liu Sang's aura was quite menacing whenever he saw him.

People like me always wanted to find some good to balance the bad, but the good couldn’t withstand the scrutiny and the bad had a very solid foundation.

After listening to this depressing story, I felt that my surroundings were dark and oppressive.

But I also trusted my intuition, and I kept feeling that there was something else to this matter. In my opinion, Liu Sang didn’t have that kind of evil character.

As I was thinking things over, Poker-Face pulled out an L-shaped probe and got ready to stab it through the tomb gate.

Someone must’ve opened this tomb before, so the air should’ve been fine, but we weren’t wearing gas masks. It was possible those people had taken a different route and sealed the burial chamber, so we needed to be careful.

The gap in the tomb gate was sealed with something like tung oil, so if there was a large amount of combustible gas inside, it might explode or catch fire as soon as it encountered the oxygen from the opened gate. This was exactly how fire pits originated. Even if we weren’t burned to death, the oxygen here would be used up in an instant. There could also be poisonous gas sealed inside, so if you encountered a sealed tomb gate, you had to drill a small hole to release it. When a hole was opened at the Mawangdui site back then, fire burst out of it for three days (4).

It was safest for Poker-Face to stick his back to the tomb gate, stab the probe into the gap behind him, and look at it through a mirror. I used a flashlight to illuminate him, while Fatty fanned him, "Deep breaths, deep breaths. It’ll be done soon."

Poker-Face looked at him and then pulled the probe out. No fire or gas came out, which meant that the inside wasn’t sealed. We used our phone lights to look at it and saw that the end of the probe had pulled something out of the gap.

It was hair covered in mud.

Fatty looked at me, but I shook my head. I wasn't going to open the gate. Fatty sniffed the probe and suddenly said, "Do you remember the legend of the Mute Emperor?"

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TN Notes:

(1) I’m sure you all know, but the Vietnamese were all about guerilla tactics and using tunnels in the mountains and stuff so the Chinese would blow the tunnels up, hence “bloody mounds” (at least, that’s how I took it). General info on the war here.

(2) “Yin” in this context means the negative principle of Yin and Yang. Yin energy is passive/restive and could probably be associated with death since “Yang” energy is all about life and vitality and stuff.

(3) This is a Chinese idiom that comes from a fable (think along the lines of Aesop’s Fables). The idiom “suspect people of stealing an axe” is used to describe those who, ignoring facts, rely on subjective assumptions to make suspicious judgments of people or situations. The story is here.

(4) Mawangdui in Changsha, Hunan, is a recent (~1970s) Han dynasty archaeological site. The tomb belonged to a 2^nd-century B.C. noblewoman known today as "Lady Dai," wife of Li Cang, the marquis of Dai. The background of how the fire started is here (basically some workers digging a bomb shelter stumbled across the tomb, took a break to light up, and BOOM lol)

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At this point, I'm just over here like "Drama, what drama?" Liu Sang's background is SO DIFFERENT.