Daomu Biji: Restart

The tomb was very hot, so I took off my rubber gloves and rubbed my face with a towel. I carefully examined the murals with my flashlight and felt the coolness in my heart begin to spread. The murals were coated in something like egg whites, which would prevent their oxidation and enable them to be seen clearly.

As I looked carefully, I saw that the old cracks on them were very obvious, meaning that these murals were much older than the tomb itself.

It was too difficult to tell what style they were, but my intuition was telling me that these murals were from the Song Dynasty. The paintings were done very skillfully and a cursory glance showed that they all depicted dark clouds and lightning strikes. But if I looked very carefully, I could see all kinds of thunder gods painted on the clouds covering the walls.

At the lower end of the mural, there were countless rocks, trees, and pavilions set up in the mountains. There were also a lot of little people in white robes who had their ears facing the pavilions in the mountains, as if they were listening to the thunder in the sky.

Fatty looked at the spirit tablets one by one and read the names on them, seemingly at a total loss (1). "Mr. Naïve, this tomb is too small and looks so new. How can there be such beautiful murals here?" He asked me.

"If I’ve guessed correctly, these murals were taken from other tombs." I said faintly. The world had changed so much during the Republic that it was impossible for skilled painters like this to paint such decorations in a tomb.

Fatty had gotten it all wrong. This wasn’t a big tomb, but the Yang family's own ancestral grave that was built during the Republic. When the Yang family's ancestors built this tomb, they cut the murals from other ancient tombs and stuck them in their own tomb for decoration.

I had seen some township entrepreneurs' aesthetics that were just like this. They wanted to express their own aesthetics, but the way they did it left people speechless.

This wall covered in murals was very precious, and the thunder gods were painted vividly and full of verve. I had heard Uncle Three say before that some grave robbers in Luoyang were very skilled in painting and calligraphy even though they looked like common villagers. They only washed their clothes once a year, but they knew how to read these kinds of paintings.

The Yang family may have been one of them.

I figured these murals were probably stolen from a Song Dynasty tomb, and the contents were actually related to listening to thunder. Yang Daguang's ancestors may have been exposed to listening to thunder very early, so Yang Daguang learned the mystery of thunder when he inherited the ancestral teachings. It was also possible that Yang Daguang saw these murals and discovered the mysteries in them when he was paying respects to his ancestors here, thus becoming interested in listening to thunder.

But why did these murals from a Song Dynasty tomb have contents related to listening to thunder? Whose tomb were they originally from? Why was the owner so interested in thunder?

I was finding it more and more interesting.

When I told Fatty my thoughts, he refused to accept it, "It's fucking impossible. If it's the Yang family’s ancestral grave, then where are the coffins? Where are Uncle Yang, Great-Uncle Yang, and Great-Great-Uncle Yang? Why are there only these spirit tablets? There can't be so few fucking things here."

How would I know? I said to myself. “Maybe they’re buried elsewhere and this is just the place to pay their respects. Maybe they all died in a tomb and their bones couldn’t be found.”

Fatty kicked the rotten offerings and said, “If that’s the case, then why did Yang Daguang come back to pay his respects so piously? If the bodies aren’t here, it doesn't matter where you go to worship. You can just take the tablets with you.”

He had a point. If Yang Daguang often came back to pay his respects, then it meant that the bodies must be in the tomb.

But there was nothing in the tomb except for these spirit tablets. Fatty went to check the murals out and knocked on all the walls, but they were all solid and firm. After searching for half a day and finding nothing, Fatty sat down on the ground with a curse and started smoking. "Let me tell you, we really can’t go grave robbing without Little Brother. What’s this situation? This is a regression of historical proportions, an unforgivable defeat. We’ve forgotten our roots."

I lay down on the ground to see the connection point between the murals and the floor. I wanted to see how they could cut the murals from the Song Dynasty tomb so completely. A long time ago, a group of missionaries used tape to pull off the murals on many historical sites in western China, causing extensive damage. But these murals were so complete that they almost looked like they were painted directly on the wall. After thinking about it, I grabbed Fatty's cigarette and held it up to the joint between the wall and the floor. I saw that the smoke floating up had a very slight tilt to it.

I moved the cigarette across the whole gap, noticing that the smoke tilted more in the middle part.

There was air coming out from behind the wall, the flow so subtle that people couldn’t feel it. The wall was sturdy on both sides and lighter in the middle. There was a foreign material in the middle of the wall that was lighter than brick, so both sides of the wall sank while the middle was arched. That was why there was more airflow coming from the middle.

"There’s a space behind this wall," I said to Fatty. "This is a rotating door and the shaft is in the middle of the wall. The whole wall can rotate."

"But how do we open it?" Fatty asked me. If it was Little Brother, he would have already found the way to open it, but I didn't have that ability.

Fatty pushed one side of it hard, but it didn’t move. When he threw his body at both sides and it still didn’t budge, he picked up a shovel and hit the brick floor without an ounce of hesitation. I understood his intention and immediately went to help.

Just like a dog digging a hole, we smashed through the blue bricks on the ground, dug under the wall, and then dug through to the opposite side. Fatty had soon dug a sizeable hole, revealing that the area behind the wall really was empty.

Once Fatty made the hole bigger, I moved to look into it and saw that it was completely dark. I stuck my hand in, turned on my phone’s camera, took a few photos, and then retreated.

When I pulled up the photos, I saw that the flash made everything look pale and frightening. We could make out several strange things standing on the wall opposite our wall that looked like a row of hanging corpses.

A closer look showed that they were old coffins that were half-buried vertically in the wall. The rotten wood coffin planks were tied to nearby bamboo shelves, and they were so worn in many places that we could see inside the coffins. These coffins had to belong to the Yang family. Fatty had finally found the dozen Uncle Yangs he had been dreaming of.

When I look at the photo, I wondered why they had been buried like this. I scrolled to the second photo, which was of the whole space behind the wall. It was very vague, but I could clearly tell that the space behind the wall was a large rectangular tomb. There was an old sarcophagus in the middle of the tomb that was painted red. From a distance, it almost seemed to match the details in the murals outside. But strangely enough, there was a huge thing hanging above the sarcophagus that looked like a big upside-down bell.

Fatty and I climbed in and turned our flashlights on. He went to check out the Yang family's coffins, while my attention was immediately drawn to the sarcophagus that was painted lipstick-red like the murals outside.

As I looked closely at the decorative patterns, I noticed that the outer wall of the sarcophagus was covered in thunder gods, and it was much larger than the photo. When the flashlight shined upon it, I could see that the coffin lid was engraved with cloud patterns that were coiled to form what looked like ears. There were a lot of tricolor characters painted on the clouds that all had a strange feature—their ears were particularly large.

Half of the behemoth above the sarcophagus appeared to be embedded in the apex of the tomb. It looked like an inverted bell when seen up close. It was made of copper and covered in thousands of layers of green and red rust. Based on the decorative patterns, it appeared to be some kind of sound amplifier that was integrated with the sarcophagus, and the body in the sarcophagus used this device to listen to certain sounds. If I included the murals outside, these three things didn’t belong in this tomb. They must have come from other places, and may have even been stolen at the same time.

I looked at Fatty, whose attention was still on the Yang family. I poked my head under the "bell" and listened carefully. I could hear what sounded like a lot of water coming from the surface, which seemed to be flowing groundwater.

Fatty came over and also stuck his head under it to listen. "What's that noise? Someone urinating on it?” He asked curiously.

This running water sound seemed to be coming from the whole dome. I thought for a while, but couldn’t seem to shake the feeling that something was wrong. I immediately climbed out of the grave robbers’ tunnel and saw a bolt of lightning streak across the sky. I didn’t know when it had started, but it was raining heavily outside. The thunder was rumbling and the rain had washed away our bamboo plaque. It was now pouring into the tunnel, so Fatty and I climbed out and built a higher mud pile outside the tunnel. We then put an umbrella over the tunnel entrance and went back in.

As I crawled back to the tomb, I could hear the thunder very clearly in the narrow underground space. In fact, it was even clearer than when I was outside just now. And strangely enough, the thunder reverberating through that strange bell sounded like whispering. It was as if there were countless people whispering at the same time, but I couldn’t understand it even when I listened carefully. All these voices seemed to converge and point right to the sarcophagus.

"This is a bit interesting." Fatty's eyes began to shine and I could tell that his curiosity was piqued. He looked at the sarcophagus and asked, "Is the body in this coffin listening to thunder?"

I handed him the crowbar and then held the flashlight for him. He tacitly inserted it into the gap in the sarcophagus and pushed the lid until a larger gap was formed. We both took a step back in case something came out of the coffin.

After waiting for a while with nothing happening, Fatty breathed a sigh of relief. I wanted to go up and help him push the coffin lid off completely but he pushed me away. "Safety first. You stay away. Let me do this kind of work." He pushed the lid at an oblique angle until the inside of the coffin was completely exposed.

After pushing, he carefully shined the flashlight into the coffin. I had been watching him, so I immediately noticed when his face changed. I wanted to go over, but Fatty waved me to a stop. "Wait. Mentally prepare yourself before coming over. There’s a monster inside."

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TN Notes:

(1) I usually take the figurative route since it’s easier, but this one was too good lol. The literal translation of the Chinese idiom in the raw is: "like a three-meter-high monk, you can't rub his head".

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Oh Fatty, ye of so little faith hahahaha.