Daomu Biji: The Mystic Nine

He didn’t know how long he had been sleeping, but when Qi Tiezui woke up, he found himself in a guest room at the defense headquarters. There was a cup of water beside the bed, and other than the basic necessities, the room was completely bare and undecorated.

He remembered that someone named Tan Caifu had studied abroad before, and wrote a book mentioning that in order to maintain the spirit of a soldier, the Prussian emperor only kept an iron bed and basin in his bedroom. Qi Tiezui wondered if Fo Ye's bedroom was the same. If so, that would explain his single-minded focus in his everyday life.

The cup had been made many years ago by a customer who was a Jingdezhen (1) merchant in thanks for one of Qi Tiezui’s divinations. The merchant had made a total of seventy-three colored porcelain cups, and Qi Tiezui had given them to Fo Ye when the Nine Gates had gathered. Since one of them was so casually placed in a guest room, he assumed Fo Ye had directly allocated the rest to headquarters as tableware. In light of this, sending Fo Ye things in the future would depend on whether they could be used on the frontlines.

After drinking the cool water, Qi Tiezui felt the pressure in his chest slightly ease. He knew that this depression didn’t come from an illness, but from the tragic scene he had witnessed earlier. And it was all because of what he had said. The Qi family was happy with knowing their fates, but even though he knew he hadn’t been in the wrong and Fo Ye's family didn’t want or need his self-pity, he still blamed himself. When he thought of the child's eyes, his heart felt unbearably choked up. That arm… for such a young child to lose an arm… it was really….

He put on his clothes and walked out of the guest room, finding a guard waiting for him at the door: "Ba Ye, are you done resting?" Knowing that Fo Ye definitely hadn’t rested and was still working, Qi Tiezui wanted to help, so he nodded to the guard. "Lead the way, soldier."

As they reached Zhang Qishan's office, another soldier brushed passed them on his way out of the room. Qi Tiezui noticed that the soldier's face looked very similar to the child who had been probing the coffin hole, and figured he must have been the child’s older brother. Qi Tiezui felt a wave of sadness surge up in his heart. How many other children were out there in China now, unable to enjoy their youth? And war was fast approaching. Maybe the next time he saw this child would be on the battlefield.

Zhang Qishan's office used to be the residence of a local lord, and was very spacious. Zhang Qishan had turned the desk lamp on, and there was a tray on the table that was holding the object he had taken from the coffin. Now that it had been cleaned, it was clear to see that it was a black animal claw with some strange patterns on it. It appeared to be a fragment of dragon bone (2).

In the twenty-fifth year of Guangxu (3), Wang Yirong was taking medicine for a disease when he accidentally discovered that there were ancient characters on the dragon bones used in Chinese medicine. Wang Yirong was an epigrapher (4), antique dealer, and the director of the Chinese Imperial Academy, so this discovery was truly a stroke of luck. It was a common rule for pharmacists in the old days to sell dragon bones without any words on them, so after the medicine farmers collected the dragon bones, they would scrape the words off with a knife before selling them. The medicine that Wang Yirong took must have been comprised of inferior ingredients, which was something that people of his status shouldn’t have encountered. But it was because of this coincidence that the study of oracle bone inscriptions came about. Otherwise, the practice of “dragon bones” in traditional Chinese medicine would have resulted in the Shang Dynasty’s history continuing to be eaten by people.

But why was an oracle bone fragment in this big coffin? Was the coffin owner preserved using traditional Chinese medicine? But in pharmacology, dragon bones were ground into a powder that was used to absorb the pus from open wounds. The whole dragon bone could even be directly boiled in medicine dregs to treat internal diseases, but it was very unsightly. If it wasn’t for preserving the corpse, then were all the funerary objects in this coffin oracle bones? How interesting. If this person was buried with pieces of oracle bone, then did that mean there was hidden information recorded on them?

Qi Tiezui came up behind Zhang Qishan and looked down at the oracle bone, but he couldn’t make anything out since it was only a fragment.

Before he had left the courtyard to go to the guest room to sleep, he asked Fo Ye what the child had felt in the coffin to make him so afraid. He remembered Zhang Qishan's answer, which was also concerning. Zhang Qishan was puzzled: "I can’t figure it out. When my fingers first touched it, I found that the body was lying on its stomach."

There were many mysteries surrounding the Zhang family's double-fingered probing skill, of which Qi Tiezui only knew bits and pieces. Needless to say, the whistle hole opened above the corpse’s face in the coffin, because jade and pearls—which were often the most precious items—were placed inside the corpse’s mouth. The northern school of grave robbers inherited the Faqiu Zhonglang Jiang’s (5) practice of not taking all the things from the coffin, so the double-fingered probing technique was the most economical way of dealing with a fierce coffin. After taking the treasure from the ancient corpse’s mouth, they would immediately withdraw their hand. This was the earliest method used, but the Zhang family later developed their own finger technique. When they entered the coffin, the first thing they would do was break the corpse’s jaw with their fingers so that the body couldn’t bite.

If they were to reach down with one hand and find the body lying face down, however, it would really go against common sense. Qi Tiezui had recalled at that time that all the Japanese spies’ bodies he had seen on the train were lying on their stomachs, and he couldn’t help but wonder what it meant.

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TN Notes:

(1) Prefecture-level city in Jiangxi province that’s famous for porcelain

(2) Dragon bone is a vital component of many traditional Chinese medical remedies. It’s actually fossilized animal bone, which is high in calcium, potassium, sodium and other trace elements. The bones are cooked and ground into a powder before being used. They’re usually combined with a number of herbs for different formulas. Seems like “dragon bones” are also called “oracle bones”. More info here

(3) Qing emperor Guangxu or Guang-hsu (1875-1908). So this is like 1900.

(4) Someone who studies inscriptions

(5) I left the pinyin. Characters are 发丘中郎将. It’s basically like an official tomb robbing position in the dynastic governments. I think this is more along the lines of “Ghost Blows Out the Light” stuff because what I’m finding is that Chinese Warlord Cao Cao took his subordinates around looting graves. In order to raise the efficiency of the tomb robbery, two posts were specially set up: Faqiu Zhonglang Jiang and Mojin Xiaowei (none of this is actually proven. People just kind of believe it anyways lol).  Fa means "excavation", Qiu means "mound" or “tomb” or “grave”. Zhonglang Jiang and Xiaowei were the two military commander positions at the time. The position of Zhonglang Jiang is second only to the general, which is a bit similar to the reserve of high-level generals. Here’s someone’s essay (take it with a grain of salt lol)