Chapter 20 The Ancient Building is the Strangest Sight in the World

Over the next two hours, Fatty gave us a detailed account of the whole process of their entry into the Zhang family’s ancient building. Fatty’s narration was extremely vivid and would be a very good-looking short story if I wrote it down completely. But I obviously didn’t have much time and could only choose the most critical parts to write down.

The entrance in the mountains was more than ten miles away from the magic lake. Although that seemed like such a huge distance, it was really just a mountain away. Fatty pointed to the cliff opposite the lake and said that it was on the other side.

The entrance was a stone tunnel hidden behind a large tree. It had been cut into the mountain at a downward angle. This large tree practically grew horizontal on the mountain and its trunk was covered in vines. In fact, there was only enough space for one person to fit between the trunk and the mountain, so people had to squeeze into the gap to find the entrance.

Fatty figured this strange-looking tree was specially planted to cover the entrance, but Granny Huo disagreed. She said that trees like that were more conspicuous on the mountain, so it was probably due to changes in the rock stratum that the project had caused. The tree probably didn’t look like that originally.

The most likely explanation was that the nearby project loosened the rock and soil layers here. After the craftsman left, part of the tree roots broke and fell on the rocks but didn’t die. Over time, this scene slowly took shape.

But they didn’t bother thinking about it too much since it didn’t make much sense. They cut down some of the vines hanging on the tree and finally found the entrance.

After they entered the tunnel, they were blocked by a lot of mechanisms that turned out to be very thick stone walls. These mechanisms opened very strangely and they had to use the passwords Xiao Hua and I provided in order to crack them. But after opening that first one, the journey between each blocking mechanism was very calm and peaceful.

As they walked further in, the passage became so narrow that they practically had to crawl, but that was the norm with grave robbers’ tunnels. The basic shape of the whole passage was square and there were a lot of decayed and cracked logs that had been abandoned on the ground. Fatty thought they were the remnants the local people had left behind when they dragged the coffins inside.

Everything suddenly changed at the third mechanism, which was the one we had provided the wrong password for when we were at Sichuan’s Siguniang Mountain. It really was very strange when we thought about it carefully, because Fatty said that the stone door opened and nothing fatal happened even though they had pressed the wrong buttons.

What was even stranger was that they had walked through the whole passage and found almost no signs of any mechanisms. Poker-face was the first to discover this since he had a deep understanding of tombs and mechanisms, and his judgment was credible. In other words, it seemed as if the secret carvings for opening the stone doors were mere decorations and their only function was to remove the doors.

This was very strange, because it took so much energy to set up such a complicated password thousands of kilometers away on Siguniang Mountain, but when the password was actually used, it was just a decoration. It seemed too unreasonable. They became even more uneasy when faced with this situation because it meant two possibilities: the first was that there really was no mechanism here and they were being too cautious; the second was that the mechanism here was beyond Poker-Face’s scope of expertise.

They soon discovered that the situation they encountered wasn’t the first one, but they weren’t entirely sure whether it was the second one either.

They passed through the stone door with the wrong password and continued their journey along the low passage. It was only after they had gone about one or two kilometers that they realized something was wrong.

When the incident happened, Fatty was the first to see a very strange light in front of him. He thought that they had finally arrived at the Zhang family’s ancient building and was extremely excited, but they still had to approach it cautiously. It took them almost three hours to grope their way through the hundred-meter section of tunnel and it wasn’t until they came to the light that they realized that everything wasn’t what they had thought—it was sunlight.

Fatty poked through the vines in that place and walked out, only to find that they had actually reached a hidden valley. It turned out that the end of the passage was also an exit on the mountainside.

I could almost empathize with that feeling. It was just like when you went to a very grueling talent show and won first place, only to find that the prize was just a merit certificate.

Even if the prize was a lump of shit, it would’ve been better than this. By the same token, it would’ve been better for them to go to the end of the tunnel and find it completely sealed than to go out to this strange sight.

They climbed out of the mouth of the tunnel and made their way up the mountainside. But when they reached the top of the mountain, they found themselves still near the part of the mountain where the entrance was located. They had seen many sights before but this really made them feel incredulous. After such a long journey, they had actually come directly out of the mountain. They thought that the stone path leading to the Zhang family’s ancient building would be underground like the subway, but it turned out that it was aboveground like the light rail. In the end, they decided to continue moving forward.

They searched the mountain for a long time but didn’t find any other entrances. Based on their deductions, the tunnel to the Zhang family’s ancient building that was marked on the Yangshi Lei drawing was an almost straight stone path, but the one they had gone down didn’t lead to any ancient building.

Granny Huo didn’t think it was a fake at all and figured something must have gone wrong. They climbed over the mountain, returned to the entrance behind the large tree again, and began passing through the doors according to the instructions I had written at that time. The result this time was even more incredible. They came out, but the exit was on another mountain this time.

They were at the foot of a mountain and there was a very beautiful waterfall beside it.

They told themselves that something must’ve gone wrong, and it didn’t take them long to realize that this was the result of the wrong password we had given them.

At that time, Fatty also thought of the same question we had back in Sichuan. For example, was it a fake defense mechanism? It was possible that the people who opened this ancient tomb remembered the password wrong. If some mistake occurred with the Zhang family’s descendants, or if the information relating to the password was missing due to war or other social factors, at least their descendants wouldn’t be killed by their ancestors’ traps because they had started the mechanism wrongly.

Since moving graves and holding mass burials in the Zhang family’s ancient building required a lot of work to relocate the bodies, such mistakes were likely to occur. In such a case, the builders of this ancient building would certainly take this into consideration. Would they use some weak traps to make a fake defense mechanism to avoid mistakenly killing future generations?

On the other hand, they triggered the trap in the tunnel because we provided the wrong password, which made the original tunnel to the ancient building turn into another one that led them outside. This was plausible, but the theory was later rejected because it was still a question of probability. Granny Huo said that if this was the case, then the mechanism had no meaning. Even if the password was wrong, everyone could keep trying without having to worry about any danger.

It was the same as the mechanism problem I had encountered in Siguniang Mountain. It was the kind of problem that required logic. When I heard this, I almost immediately guessed what would happen next, “It’s the number of times. The key is the number of mistakes.”

“Yes!” Fatty nodded. “Shit, I told them that at the time, but there was nothing we could do. Granny Huo said that we were all alive and the stone door could be opened, which proved that there shouldn’t be anything wrong with the password. She believed we must have overlooked something when we passed through the tunnel, so we turned back again.”

It was this decision that changed things beyond comprehension.

<Chapter 19> <Table of Contents><Chapter 21>

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Updated 1/19/2021