Fatty gave me a pat and I found that he was trembling all over, just like me.
We’ve finally arrived, I said to myself. Fuck, it wasn’t easy. I could practically feel the tears pouring down my face.
The whole building was dark and there weren’t any light sources, so the atmosphere seemed kind of ominous. I never thought that the Zhang family’s ancient building would be so huge.
Where are they? The eagerness in my heart burst out and I gave a loud shout, “Zhang Qiling!”
It echoed in the empty cave. I even shouted several more times until the echoes practically filled the whole space.
It’s absolutely impossible not to hear that, I thought to myself. If they’re still alive, they couldn’t have missed it.
As the echoes slowly disappeared, the whole space returned to the kind of silence that made people feel cold all over.
I gasped for breath as I waited for a response to come from anywhere.
I waited for a long time, but the silence wasn’t broken and my unease began to increase. The nightmare that had always existed in the back of my mind reared its head.
What if all of them are really dead?
The problem that I had been unwilling to consider had now rushed to the forefront and I could no longer escape.
There was no reply and everything was as quiet as hell. It was almost as if we were the first group of visitors in nearly a thousand years. Even the sleeping dead couldn’t be awakened.
“Let’s go.” Fatty patted me on the shoulder and added, “Whether they’re dead or alive, you have to see it with your own eyes. Didn’t you say so yourself?”
I lit a cigarette, took three consecutive puffs, and then threw it to the ground, “Let’s go!”
The Zhang Jialou’s door was completely gray, and when I touched it, I found that it was all dust. The door was badly decayed, and the window paper on it was so completely rotten that you could see the darkness inside.
I looked at those checkered windows—typical Qing Dynasty architecture; it was indeed Yangshi Lei’s style.
“Look here,” Fatty said to me. I saw that dust had been knocked off in several places on the windowpane. Fatty gave it a push and the door opened.
The door shaft gave a shrill creak and then dust surged everywhere.
Fatty and I immediately took a step back, covered our mouths, and waited for the dust to slowly settle.
We looked each other in the eye and Fatty made an “after you” gesture. I tilted my head and said, “Didn’t you lead the way before?”
Fatty said, “This is giving you a chance to perform. If you can’t do it, then I will.”
I took a deep breath and stepped towards the door, “Well then, don’t mind if I do.”
It was dark inside and I could see a huge space when I swept the area with my flashlight. It was a huge floor with four pillars standing in the middle of the hall.
There was nothing on this floor, only a lot of equipment spread out in the middle of the room.
As we walked over, we found that it was indeed Poker-Face’s equipment bag, but it was covered in white dust. Fatty looked at the beams overhead—they undoubtedly matched the Qing Dynasty’s architectural style—and saw countless patterns on the ceiling. Right now, the whole building was miserably white no matter what angle you looked at it.
“Why is this place so big?” Fatty squatted down and shook a package that I saw contained food. The white dust on it was shaken up so much that I suddenly felt uncomfortable and immediately pulled him back.
He covered his mouth and looked at his hands, which were already a burning red.
“Strong alkali dust,” he said. “That deformed brother didn’t lie to us. It seems that Little Brother and the others came into contact with it; otherwise, the equipment wouldn’t be covered in such thick powder.”
“But here’s the thing, where is everyone?” I asked. It wasn’t like they had all melted away; there would definitely be some traces.
I thought the atmosphere was a bit strange, but I couldn’t say what the problem was. Fatty told me to treat my wound first since there was strong alkali dust here. If it touched my wound, I’d be in trouble.
I didn’t notice in the chaos just now that the place the bug had bitten was no longer bleeding. But if it was left untreated, it would probably fester.
After I wrapped it up, I looked at Fatty’s watch. He asked me if we should split up and look for them separately, but after thinking it over, I didn’t agree. Who knew what would happen in this building? If the two of us were going to die, we’d die together. And once it was over, there wouldn’t be so much trouble.
Fatty turned on his flashlight and slowly shook the powder off of the equipment bit by bit. When he saw that many of the bags were open, he went up to take inventory. “Gas masks and flashlights aren’t here,” he said. “They probably put their equipment down here and went for some light exploration.”
There was a huge hole in the hall’s ceiling, which was probably formed by corrosion. The edge of the hole was very irregular, and there were many rotting pieces of wood on the ground that were covered in the thick white powder. They almost looked like cotton. We shined our flashlights upwards and saw that the ceiling on the upper floor looked the same as the one on this floor.
The first floor was clear at a glance, so we walked to the side. According to feng shui theories and the usual design habits of Yangshi Lei, the best location of the stairs should be at the edge of the building, generally in the east. Of course, for such a large structure, there should be stairs in all four directions; otherwise, the running distance would be too long and troublesome.
But we looked around the hall several times and didn’t find any stairs going up. Fatty muttered, “Could the stairs be outside? In a lot of the ancient buildings’ designs, there would be a staircase that wound all the way up. It was specially designed for viewing.”
Damn it, there’s nothing good to view in this place. After taking a turn around the outside of the building, I found that Yangshi Lei agreed with my idea. There weren’t any stairs outside, so they probably also thought that there was nothing to look at here.
Shit, don’t tell me everyone in the Zhang family is like Ximen Chuixue (1) and they all fly up with their swords so they don’t need stairs.
Back inside the building, Fatty went to look for rope in the equipment bags, only to find that it wasn’t there either. “Maybe there aren’t any stairs in this place and they took the rope to get upstairs.”
“There must be a place where ropes can be used.” There was strong alkali powder everywhere, no gas masks, and dust was flying everywhere we walked. Not to mention inhaling it, just blinking might make your eyes go blind in an instant.
Just when I was at a loss as to what to do, I suddenly remembered the feng shui problem that Xiao Hua had told me about by the lake. Zhang Jialou was located in a place where the bones were laid to absorb the essence of the land. The so-called Dragon House Treasure Hall was built just for the purpose of long-term peace, but the Zhang Jialou devoured the dragon spirit and destroyed the dragon vein.
I seemed to have heard before that some places needed to scrap the stairs in order to achieve some feng shui effect.
But scrapping them entirely wasn’t really necessary, they just couldn’t build visible stairs. That meant that there had to be a place to go up to the second floor, and the invisible stairs were marked somewhere.
We continued our search and soon focused our attention on several pillars that were carved with several Qilin. Their bodies looked like dragons and there were several of them that had especially prominent heads.
Fatty stomped his feet, grabbed some of the floating dust that had been kicked up, and dodged to the side. When the dust had calmed down, he wrapped his clothes around his mouth and nose and climbed up.
This was indeed the place. We stepped on the Qilin’s head and quickly climbed to the top of the pillar, but when we pushed, we found that the floor above didn’t move.
“It’s stuck,” Fatty said. When he spoke, a large amount of white powder was shaken off. Fatty immediately turned around, jumped down, and ran away, coughing incessantly. The sputum that came out was already bloody.
“We can’t stay in this place for too long. Even if the mechanism isn’t triggered, our internal organs will rot after staying here for so long.” When he said this, I suddenly heard a crack. I looked over and saw that the Qilin he had stepped on just now had actually moved and a staircase came down from above.
Fatty and I looked at each other and immediately climbed up carefully. When we shined our flashlights around, our hearts shook. We could see that there were numerous shelves on the second floor of this ancient building. At first glance, there were hundreds of them stacked up one by one like the upper, middle, and lower floors of a train, but with more layers.
What made us uncomfortable was that the shelves were full of those iron figurines.
<Chapter 46> <Table of Contents><Chapter 48>
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TN Notes:
(1) Fictional protagonist of the wuxia novel series “Lu Xiaofeng” by Gu Long
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Updated 3/28/2021
MereBear's Translation 