Chapter 58 The Coffin That Was Removed

The size and scale of the stone chamber were very common, and there weren’t any polishings or reliefs. My obvious first reaction was to use my flashlight to find a way to move on, but Fatty’s flashlight was looking at what was inside.

There were wooden boxes all around, and if you didn’t look carefully, you’d think they were short coffins. But in the middle of all these boxes was an actual coffin that looked very strange—not appearance-wise, but as if it shouldn’t be here.

The area around the boxes was very messy, and it felt like someone had moved them so as to make room to put the coffin here. The problem was that the coffin hadn’t even been placed properly and was lying at an oblique angle.

Fatty was particularly interested in the boxes and kept telling me to look at one but I firmly stopped him. When we reached the side of the coffin, we saw a lot of strange tools lying beside it. They were completely rusted, but we knew at a glance that they were modern.

“Someone’s been here, but not Little Brother and the others. These tools seem to have been here a long time.” Fatty kicked several of them. When I looked closer, I found that they were small accessories used to make brackets for lifting, sliding, and supporting the transport of the coffin.

“These things should all belong to the archaeological team that came at the end of the 1970s. It seems that they carried this coffin here from somewhere else.”

Fatty picked up a small tool from the ground, blew the dust off of it, and said, “Did they want to take this coffin out?”

I looked at it.

The coffin was made of wood and had iron sheets wrapped around its four corners to protect it. It hadn’t been opened and was left here practically intact.

“Why?” I asked. “This coffin isn’t very impressive and they didn’t even take it out!”

“Don’t say that. We can’t guess what was on the archeological team’s mind. If you try, you’ll just get a headache,” Fatty said. “Don’t worry about it, let’s keep going. You’ll know what God wants you to know. If we know where the coffin was carried out from, there will be more clues.”

“Wait!” I said. I had suddenly noticed a strange phenomenon on the coffin, “Do you think we’ve seen the pattern on this coffin somewhere before?”

“Where have you seen it?” Fatty was puzzled.

“We saw the same pattern on the coffin upstairs in Zhang Qiling’s tomb,” I said. “Is this also a generation of Zhang Qiling?”

“If it’s here, then it would be the first generation of Zhang Qiling,” Fatty said. He then looked at me and gave a tsk before grabbing my hand and saying, “Wait a minute, Mr. Naïve. I want to remind you of something.”

“What?”

“Could this coffin be what the archaeological team wanted to transport out of the tomb? Maybe because it’s the first generation Zhang Qiling? If so, do you think there are any key secrets hidden in there? Of course, this is all just my speculation but think about your past entanglements. At this point, we’ll never come in again after we leave. I’m putting myself in your position and thinking about you. Do you want to open this coffin and have a look?”

“You want to do it yourself, don’t you?” I asked him.

Fatty shook his head and said very seriously, “No, I just want to leave safely now. But thinking of your past…maybe the answer is in this coffin. Just open it, Mr. Naïve. It will only take three minutes. Since you want to know, you should try it.”

I looked at his expression and realized that he didn’t seem to be joking. In fact, everything he had said was right and his conjecture was pretty reasonable.

“You’re right.” I looked at the ceiling above my head, but there didn’t seem to be any movement. “Fuck, let’s do it. Let’s have a look.”

Prying open coffins without tools was a hassle. We took out the iron pick but found that the top of the wooden coffin was sealed so tightly that even a crack couldn’t be found. Finally, Fatty used his sharp eyes to look down and said, “Reversed, reversed! The coffin was placed upside down. They really don’t respect people!”

I looked down—sure enough, the entire coffin was upside down. The way they had placed it didn’t seem strange at first because it was a square coffin.

After Fatty and I studied it, we found that it was impossible to turn over the coffin with just our strength and it was impossible to pry open the lid from this angle. Fatty said that no matter what, we could just punch a hole in the back part of the coffin and pierce through the bottom.

We used our iron picks as hammers and beat at the coffin bit by bit. Fatty made a determined effort to follow what he said was a three-minute agreement. He soon smashed a crack in the coffin’s base, which made it much easier to handle. We stuck the iron picks in and started prying the wood apart. After a while, we managed to pry out a crack at the bottom of the coffin that was as long as an arm and as wide as a coke bottle.

As Fatty inserted the iron pick into the crack and moved it around, I said, “Shove everything that’s in there aside. I want to see the genealogy on the back of the coffin lid.” 

“There’s no way to set it aside, we have to get it all out!” Fatty said.

Fatty was truly an opportunist, but I couldn’t care about that right now and just told him to do it quickly. He put on gloves and stuck his hand directly into the coffin. He soon grabbed something and started pulling it out, but when he was only halfway through, he gave a loud shout.

What he pulled out turned out to be a wet corpse’s hand.

“Don’t be surprised! It’s not like you haven’t seen it before!” I said.

“No, look at the fingers,” he said.

I saw that all of the fingers on this hand had rings on them, which gave off a very strange glow that was unlike any gem or metal. Moreover, the shape of the rings was very strange—with only a single glance, I knew it wasn’t the style of the Central Plains at that time, but maybe something from the Western Regions, or even something from Nepal.

The fingernails of the wet corpse were very long, but there didn’t seem to be any danger. Fatty took the rings off one by one and put them directly into his pocket while saying, “I was startled by the wealth of this hand! I thought the Zhang family was a very simple and low-key ethnic group. I figured they were like Little Brother, who only needs to breathe and drink dew every day.”

It’s very valuable to feed Little Brother! I said in my heart. Even for such a big shot, the phone bill for calling the Public Security Bureau to report his disappearance was far higher than that of a few antiques. And we were friends with Little Brother—I heard some other people say that the price to hire Mute Zhang for a tomb robbery was too high to be true. The appearance fee alone was definitely higher than Jay Chou, even though he couldn’t sing.

Fatty handed me the last ring after removing it, “Come on, Mr. Naïve. Look at it. Just give an estimate.”

“Didn’t you say you don’t want any money?”

“I didn’t say that. I said you should open it. But I didn’t say I wouldn’t steal anything. Open the coffin for three minutes and lead the sheep for only a few seconds. It won’t delay you.”

I glanced at it. It was a jade ring, the value of which couldn’t be estimated. “It can fall anywhere between garbage and a national treasure,” I said. “When we go back, I’ll ask for you. Now hurry up and continue.”

“You don’t have to say it twice,” Fatty said. He gripped the wet corpse’s hand and pulled the whole body out of the coffin bit by bit. When the head was pulled out of the gap, I couldn’t help letting out a gasp.

“Why does this corpse have such long hair?” I asked. The hair grew so long that it enveloped many parts of the body.

Pretending to be calm, Fatty took a deep breath and said, “The ancients had long hair. It’s the so-called long-hair-fluttering-disheveled look. You haven’t seen many ancient plays in which the prisoners had hair like this. They could all be in a Sassoon commercial.”

I shook my head and whispered, “But it’s not usually that long. This hair is long enough to hang yourself without bothering others. It’s probably enough to jump rope with.”

“It’s not surprising that many people have long hair after death,” Fatty said.

How was it possible? With the length of this hair, it must’ve grown for hundreds of years. It was like fucking kelp! I didn’t want to think about it anymore and said, “Fine, let’s just forget about it and hurry up!”

Fatty poked the body with an iron pick. When he found that there weren’t any signs of it changing, he immediately searched the whole body. Coming up empty, he threw it aside. The body seemed to have oxidized, so after it fell to the ground, it smashed into several pieces—it had shrunk so much, in fact, that it fell apart.

I told myself that such treatment was too disrespectful, so I immediately apologized. Fatty paid it no mind and said, “Dead bodies that don’t change into moving corpses aren’t good. There’s no need to be afraid of such people who don’t make progress.” As he said this, he continued to look in the coffin with his flashlight.

“But this is the ancestor of the Zhang family,” I said.

“Cut the crap, have you found what you’re looking for?” Fatty asked me.

But at this time, I found that something was wrong. I pulled Fatty over and said in horror, “Shit! Why is the liquid inside the body green? Was it a miluotuo’s body?”

The dismembered body was lying on the stone. The clothes covering it had decayed into lumps of rotting matter, so we couldn’t tell what they had looked like when originally worn. There was liquid flowing out from the inside, which was too green to be human. The hair covered almost all parts of the body, and only the wide mouth on the face could be seen. There was quite a lot of liquid, which continued to spread across the stone floor.

This was the first time I had seen such a situation, and I could feel myself break out in a cold sweat. “It doesn’t make sense!” Fatty said. “The body was wet, so all of the body fluids should be mixed with the liquid in the coffin. Where did this green liquid come from?”

“In the bones,” I said. “There was green fluid in the bones—probably in the bone marrow.”

But what had me worried was that a wicked man like Fatty, who wasn’t squeamish at all, was obviously uncomfortable and started retreating. The arrogance from just now had completely vanished.

I slapped Fatty and said, “Do you want to give me an explanation or give me a suggestion—what should we do now?”

“Don’t joke,” Fatty said. “This isn’t the time to joke. I’m thinking of a painful past!”

“What past? Is this your old lover?” I asked him.

“This kind of old lover is what your family’s old lover was like!” Fatty said. “I have a very good friend who died exactly like this corpse.”

Fatty pressed the body’s chest with an iron pick and tried to lift the its hair—a collar appeared on the neck in front of us.

“Sure enough…” Fatty said.

“Spit it out, we still have business to attend to!”

“This man died of very serious corpse poisoning. This Zhang family ancestor must have died miserably. He should’ve been interred alive after drinking traditional Chinese medicine. His corpse probably showed signs of changing after death. This green body fluid should be caused by the corpse poisoning reaching the bones. Because he was interred alive and still had cartilage at that time, these body fluids were sealed in the bone marrow,” Fatty said. “I’ve only seen this neck collar once. It was used to prevent the corpse from changing. You see, there’s a lot of ancient jade on it.”

“Is there any danger now?” I asked him.

Fatty shook his head, “No, I don’t think so since it’s like this. Even if it was a zombie, it would be a disabled one. We don’t need to be afraid of that, but I am afraid that these things are poisonous. If inhaled, our nasal cavities will be in even more trouble considering how our respiratory tracts are already damaged. It’s easy to have an accident. But it seems that this was definitely not the first generation Zhang Qiling.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He didn’t have the precious blood. Zhang Qiling wouldn’t be affected by corpse poisoning.”

“Then why was the pattern on his coffin the same as the one on the other Zhang Qiling’s coffin?” I asked.

“Maybe the design doesn’t mark his identity, but marks his accidental death,” Fatty said.

This was beyond our ability to judge, and no one knew what the situation was like at that time.

I looked around—on our way in, we didn’t find any signs of a coffin being carried, so this coffin must have been transported from inside. They took the coffin from inside and left it here at random. The project was quite huge and consumed a lot of energy, so if this thing really wasn’t important, why would they spend so much effort to lift it?

“Mr. Naïve!” Fatty called from behind me. 

I turned my head, “What?”

“I was wrong,” Fatty said. “This thing is still dangerous.” When I turned my head, I saw that the body on the ground had grown an inch of black hair. At first glance, it looked like a big hedgehog.

<Chapter 57> <Table of Contents><Chapter 59>

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Updated 4/26/2021