Chapter 40 Ancestors of Miluotuo

What made my blood run cold was that it was too big.

It was a huge black ball of flesh with no facial features, and all we could see was that it was covered in black hair. It looked just like a huge, wet meatball covered in black hair.

Only half of it was sticking out from the edge of the entrance, as if a shy person were secretly looking at us.

Before I could look at it any more, Fatty shouted, “Shit… fucking run!” Then he turned the flashlight in the other direction.

We practically rolled and crawled into the depths of the tunnel. After a few steps, the passage made a sharp right turn and we rushed out—there was a cave in front of us.

Fatty shined the flashlight around and found a pool in the cave. He rushed over and then turned back to me and said, “This is it! Look at the mirror!”

I didn’t have time to look at such a thing. I searched our surroundings and suddenly noticed a stone door at the entrance of the cave. I immediately said to Fatty, “Help me block this first!”

He came to help me push it closed and we managed to block the entrance. “What the hell was that?” He asked.

“The miluotuo’s ancestor,” I said, thinking that nothing was surprising in this place.

We waited behind the door for a long time, but nothing happened.

“These ancestors might be more manageable.” Fatty wanted to open the door a crack but I quickly grabbed him and said, “No, maybe the ancestors are just old and slow.”

The two of us pressed our ears against the door and listened closely, but there was no sound behind it.

“What should we do?” Fatty asked.

I only saw a head just now and the passage was very narrow, so I didn’t know if it could come in. I figured that maybe it was stuck at the entrance and said, “If it’s behind the door, we’re not even sure if we can kill it. Don’t move yet. Just wait.”

Fatty thought for a moment, “Fine. Then come with me and I’ll show you something.”

I looked at the door before following him down the stone beam near the pool. He used his flashlight to illuminate the water and I immediately saw the scene he had mentioned earlier.

It was a big mirror that was six or seven meters wide. With the flashlight, I could see that the ancient building displayed in it was pale and white. But it wasn’t as clear as Fatty had said, and many details couldn’t be seen. The Zhang family’s ancient building in the huge underwater mirror was as quiet as a picture. The whole building was shrouded in a dark blue light and I didn’t see any sign of flashlights flickering.

Fatty pointed to a spot and said, “This is it. I saw them resting here before.”

There was nothing in that place now. Not to mention people, there weren’t even any flashlight beams.

Is it because the flashlights died? I wondered. But I knew it was unlikely.

Poker-Face and the others were carrying two kinds of flashlights. In addition to the most basic “Wolf-Eye” (1) flashlight, there were also some hand-powered ones. Although the range and intensity of these lights couldn’t be compared with the “Wolf-Eye” ones, they wouldn’t have a battery problem. As long as your hands were strong, you could use them for thousands of hours. The purpose of this configuration was to maximize the lighting time. You could use the “Wolf-Eye” flashlight during exploration and the hand-held flashlights while resting and camping. The hand-held flashlights also had a reserve battery that could be changed out in the time it took to masturbate. They could even be used for forty minutes up to an hour.

With this distribution of lighting power—plus spare batteries, glow sticks, and cold fireworks—we could extend the expedition’s lighting time more than a hundred times. And staying in a cave for ten days or even half a month wasn’t a problem.

At that time, when the store owner explained the flashlight’s reserve battery to Fatty, Fatty joked that if he counted the times he beat the plane, he could charge up the flashlight. (2)

“Look at how quiet it is inside. You don’t think Little Brother and the others were fucking melted by strong alkali, do you?” Fatty murmured. “That deformed freak was right. We’re too late.”

I shook my head and said, “I won’t give up until I see evidence that they’re dead. Even if they’ve melted, I’ll find their bones and bring them back. Besides, the real situation may be different. They might be deep in the building and we can’t see them. Or maybe the flashlights were turned off because they can use these blue lights to do a lot of things.”

“It makes sense. That dead old woman is stingy,” Fatty said. “Maybe their condition isn’t good and they’re too lazy to take the time to recharge their flashlights. Or maybe they’re simply asleep. Let’s not think too much about it. First, study what’s going on with the mirror, comrade. As a college student, you’ve seen a lot of things and can help me analyze it. I really think it’s too weird.”

I waded through the water and took a few steps around the mirror, finding that it was attached to the stone beam with copper nails. The whole shape was like a round fan.

The mirror was entirely made of copper. The brass was shiny like polished gold foil, and the two sides were sloped upwards. In fact, it was more like a large basin immersed in water. In other words, I thought it was more appropriate to think of it like a giant hot pot. The edge of the mirror was carved with animal patterns. I couldn’t determine the dynasty by the style, but I noticed that the patterns hadn’t been cast on. They were carved by someone using the silk carving method.

If the mirror wasn’t very smooth, I would think that it was actually more like a “reflection” than a mirror.

I stroked these carvings and soon realized that my first impression was wrong. This thing wasn’t copper, but a gilded mirror. I didn’t know what kind of material was used to stick the extremely smooth gold foil on the surface to maintain such high reflectivity for such a long time.

It happened to be the thing I was most familiar with, though—gold gilding was my old profession.

The workmanship of the mirror was amazing. If you stood on the water’s surface, the smooth mirror’s surface was almost integrated with the water’s surface. When walking in the water, the waves would tremble and the underwater mirror would also produce ripples. The flashlight reflected off of these ripples to the four walls of the cave in such a way that it looked as if the whole cave was fluctuating. The scene was very beautiful and dreamy.

I dove under the water and looked at the back of the mirror with my waterproof “Wolf-Eye” flashlight. There were more than a dozen huge buttons on the back of the mirror that formed a huge star map. There were many ancient seal characters in the middle of the map, but I didn’t know what most of them meant. The outer edge had a lot of patterns similar to the eight divinatory trigrams of the “Book of Changes”, which enclosed the star map inside.

I dove back and forth several times, trying to understand the contents of the ancient seal script. But I soon found that it was impossible. This script used special brushwork that looked strange, and it was very difficult for me to identify. I could only recognize the words “heaven and earth”, “longevity”, and “spring stream”, but it was difficult to link them into a phrase.

I surfaced and climbed back onto the beam, certain that there wasn’t any kind of mechanism in the mirror itself. It was only as thick as a palm, which didn’t leave much room to set up a mechanism.

If there was something strange inside, then the only possibility was that there was a huge LCD display in the mirror that was connected to a monitor in the Zhang family’s ancient building. But based on the antiquity of this mirror, it must have been made before the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Not only was it impossible for there to be an LCD display, but even glass lenses hadn’t appeared at that time.

To a large extent, this was an old thing, just like those bronze mechanisms found in Siguniang Mountain’s cliff cave that had all been brought out from the previous Zhang family’s ancient building. But if it wasn’t the mirror itself, then what was going on? Was the Zhang family’s ancient building really in this mirror?

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<Chapter 39> <Table of Contents><Chapter 41>

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TN Notes:

(1) Apparently it’s a brand

(2) If you couldn’t tell, “beat the plane” is a euphemism for jerking off lol.

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Updated 3/7/2021