Chapter 53 A Very Similar Village

Banai was the village where Agui and his family lived, and it was also a typical Yao village, but we had only stayed for a few days, so we had no idea about the topography. I was actually a little surprised by what Yun Cai said.

“How does it look alike?” Fatty grabbed the drawing, brought it over, and then said, “All your villages look the same.”

Yun Cai didn’t answer, but handed the drawing to Agui and said, “Dad, take a look at it.” We all immediately leaned in.

Agui looked at it, and didn’t seem to understand it at first, so Yun Cai rotated it, and then said a few local words to him. Agui suddenly realized what she meant, and scratched his head while saying to us, “Gee, it does seem a bit similar.”

I was curious. We weren’t locals, after all, so we weren’t as sensitive to these kinds of details like those who had lived here for generations were. Plus, women were very meticulous, so we asked Yun Cai to show us.

I originally thought it might have just been because the mountain by the lake was very similar to the mountain around Banai, so it was inevitable that some of the buildings would be similar. But I gasped as soon as Yun Cai pointed it out to us.

It never occurred to me that the similarities Yun Cai would point out would be the roads and fences. Yun Cai told me that at first glance, it was obvious that the roads and fences in the “ancient village under the lake” that I drew were exactly the same as their village. It was only then that she realized the abnormality and began noticing that other parts of the village were very similar.

It was impossible for me to recall the direction of all the bluestone roads and steps in Banai, but I could remember the road near Agui’s house. As soon as I looked at it, I found that it was indeed the case. As long as I changed the drawing to another direction, I could immediately find several paths beside Agui’s house. The intersecting paths were really very similar to those on the drawing.

My back was covered in a cold sweat as I realized how weird this was. The layout I had drawn depicted an ancient village that had sunk to the bottom of the lake, one that might be thousands of years old. But now we were finding that the village at the bottom of the lake and an existing village had countless structural similarities. What the hell was going on?

Was this a coincidence, or was there some sort of mystery at play? Although I tried to suppress my inexplicable feeling of unease, I inevitably shivered as my intuition told me that there might be a big problem here.

I took a few breaths to calm my nerves, and then asked Yun Cai to point out all the similarities to me. I had to judge whether there was a possibility that the similarities were caused by some special or reasonable explanation.

I guess my face was a little scary at that time. Once Yun Cai saw me acting so seriously, she started feeling afraid and didn’t dare speak. It was only when Fatty gave me a pat and told me not to frighten the little sister that I realized I had lost my temper.

We started at the entrance of the village and talked all the way through the end of the village. The more we talked, the cooler my heart became. I immediately realized that this wasn’t something that could be done by chance. From the location of several decorative archways at the entrance of the village, to the large number of bluestone roads and fences, and the arrangement of houses inside, it was really very similar. To create such a situation, there was only one possibility: both Banai and the village at the bottom of the lake were designed by the same person.

But how could someone design a village when villages were formed naturally? For thousands of years, villagers would spontaneously make arrangements to find the most suitable and accessible place to build a house, and then slowly form the roads and housing layout.

What concerned me the most was the width of the villages’ roads. Once a village had been formed— especially a mountain village— the roads were unlikely to change for a long time. That was why they were called “ancient roads and westerly winds”. And when it came to renovating the roads, it was the villagers who did most of the work. It was impossible to remove a whole road and open another one. That was why most of the mountain village roads we walked on had existed during the Jin Dynasty. Even in Hangzhou, the stone roads on those mountains were built by monks in the temple long ago, and now the only thing the government could do was constantly renovate them.

Therefore, it was extremely unusual— bizarre, even—for the ancient roads in Banai to be highly similar to those in the ancient village at the bottom of the lake. It was even more painful for someone like me who had studied architecture. Various things I had learned kept flashing through my mind, but I didn’t know what I was looking for.

Fatty didn’t realize how deep I was thinking, and asked me, “Mr. Naive, have you ever heard of such a thing before?”

I shook my head and told him not to ask me. This wasn’t simply something I would have “heard of”. Two buildings with similar structures… only one person had ever done such a thing in history: Wang Zanghai. The Qujing and Macau cities he had designed were exactly the same, but those were of a city-level category. Cities could be planned, but villages were completely different. I had never heard of two identical villages.

If both villages existed at the same time, then it could be said to be a miracle, or there was some reclusive master here with bad taste. But only one village existed now, and the other had actually sunk to the bottom of the lake.

No matter how many times I told myself not to think in a complicated direction, my intuition kept telling me that what was happening here was definitely not a single line. The fragments I was holding now were only the outermost layer of the “truth onion”.

Fatty saw that I wasn’t reacting, and asked Poker-Face instead, but Poker-Face didn’t answer him either. He didn’t seem interested in this, and just stared blankly at the drawing. Agui ducked his head and said: “According to our legends, it’s said that the village wasn’t there originally, but was in Yangjiao Mountain. Is it really as the fat boss said? The village below the lake is our ancient village? It wasn’t set on fire, but flooded? Then our ancestors must have gone to a similar place outside and built a village according to the original pattern. The mountain by this lake is similar to the mountain beside Banai, anyways.”

I said to him, “Unless your ancestors had a deep knowledge of geomancy, it would be difficult to imitate it to this extent, even if they intended to.”

This degree of similarity had to be accurately planned and measured before the original village was submerged. The Yao people at that time were still in an uncivilized stage and couldn’t have made such accomplishments.

Yun Cai pouted, “Boss, why do you look down on Yao people? Maybe such a person existed at that time?”

I smiled wryly, not because I would like to think so, but because if that were true, then the matter would be very complicated. I replied: “Even if there were such a person, it doesn’t make sense. There wasn’t a need to do something like this. Yao culture isn’t strict with their building plans, so why should Banai be the same as the previous village? It’s not like the layout of this village has a special meaning.”

Many villages in China had been built by experts. For example, there was a Yuyuan village in Zhejiang, which Liu Bowen built based on astrology. The whole village was a huge star chart. But the layout of this ancient village at the bottom of the lake was very irregular, and based on my experience, I couldn’t see anything strange.

“What do you think?” Fatty asked me, “You must have some ideas.”

I did actually have some theories, but they were useless. I shook my head and said: “All I can say for sure is that this was done on purpose, and with a lot of effort. Ordinary people wouldn’t be able to create this similarity even if they wanted to.”

I found it hard to believe that there wasn’t any kind of local legend for such an obvious thing.

Agui had several generations’ worth of memories, and their village was also very old. In other words, this kind of “copy” took place a long time ago, but judging from everything in the Zhang family’s ancient building, this jade mine hadn’t been excavated that long ago. The siphon tide must have occurred after the jade mine was created; otherwise, the mine wouldn’t have been dug.

The three events—the “copy”, the siphon tide, and the jade mining— must have taken place in this order: the copy predated the mining of the jade, which predated the siphon tide.

In other words, the lake didn’t exist before the jade mining, and the village hadn’t been submerged. Even if it had been abandoned, it was still there.

In that case, the local people should have known that there were two identical villages. Even if one of them had later been flooded, there would at least be some legends at this time.

Moreover, the breadth of this legend should have been very wide and spread dozens of miles to other villages.

Agui had said that there was no legend about the village at the bottom of the lake. The hidden ancient village seemed to be an accident that was completely forgotten in the course of history.

<Chapter 52 Happy> <Table of Contents> <Chapter 54 Mirror Plot>

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Updated 9/1/2020