Chapter 80 Old Haunt

We continued to move forward, looking for a way out of the snow valley, and finally found a place to climb that was hidden by the snow. I scraped the snow off with a mountain pick bit by bit, looking for a foothold on the rock so that I could climb up. We rested on the rock wall that night, and it wasn’t until noon the next day that we climbed the thirty-meter-high cliff.

I followed Poker-Face as we continued to move forward with difficulty. At dusk, we might not have walked more than twenty kilometers, but we found traces of snowmelt all around. Poker-Face put his ear to the ground to listen, touched the ground bit by bit, and finally found the gap that had been buried by the snow.

After dark, the temperature dropped much lower than expected. We entered the gap and came to the hot spring where we had rested before. We made a fire to keep warm and boiled some soup.

I had no appetite and didn’t want to eat anything, and Poker-Face didn’t seem to want to eat anything either. After taking a break at the crevice, we continued to walk further inside. By this time, I already knew exactly where Poker-Face was going—he was heading towards the bronze door. That place had completely overturned my worldview and I wholeheartedly didn’t want to see it again.

But it was obvious that that was Poker-Face’s destination. If we continued walking all the way inside this crevice, we would soon reach that place and could bypass the entire Heavenly Palace in the Clouds.

I thought about those human-faced birds but didn’t know what the situation was like now. That night, I had a dream that Poker-Face and I said goodbye to each other before we arrived at the bronze door. Then he went in and left me alone at the door. As soon as I looked back, countless human-faced birds were staring at me, which startled me awake. When I woke up, I saw that Poker-Face wasn’t sleeping but was sorting out all his things.

When I asked him what he was doing, he said, “I’m looking at what you can use. I’ll leave it with you. You may need it on your way back.”

I was surprised, “What about you?”

“In this place, it doesn’t matter even if I’m as bare as a newborn. I’m already very close to my destination,” he said. “You don’t need to go in again. It’s too dangerous.”

I watched in surprise as Poker-Face took out two ghost seals from his pack, weighed them in his hands, and then handed one to me.

“Since you’re here, I think you should know something,” he said. “Take this ghost seal back with you, I only need one.”

“Where did you get this other one?”

“Granny Huo gave it to me,” Poker-Face said. “You weren’t aware of it at the time.”

“What is this thing for?” I got straight to the point, no longer interested in knowing what was going on in the background.

“It’s used to open the door,” Poker-Face said.

When I took the ghost seal, he added, “When you bring this thing to the bronze door, it will open. Ten years from now, if you still remember me, you can take this thing and open the door. You might see me inside.”

“What exactly is behind that door?” I asked him. “Why are you going in?”

“I can’t tell you what’s behind the door,” Poker-Face said. “I can only tell you one thing. Many years ago, I carried a secret and found what you call the Mystic Nine. In the Zhang family’s ancestral practice, retention has always been the biggest goal. The Zhang family’s whole development process is centered around the hope that during troubled times, the family can survive and thus retain the mass burial at the Zhang family’s ancient building. Judging from the information I received, only the patriarch can know the huge secret, and the Zhang family has known this secret since the very beginning. This secret has run throughout China’s long history, but no one knows what it is. We only know that the secret itself exists and that it has a critical time node, which has now arrived. After the Zhang family’s last remaining hope was dashed, I found the Mystic Nine at that time. I was hoping to use their strength to help the Zhang family and jointly undertake this obligation so that the secret wouldn’t be discovered, but none of them kept their promise.

“The core of the secret I want to protect is behind this bronze door. Guarding it will take time. I will enter the bronze door for ten years and wait for the next successor.”

“Why did none of them keep their promise?”

“Because in the nearly one hundred years that have passed, all the people who guarded the secret were Zhang family members, thus weakening our power. In our previous agreement, the people in the Mystic Nine were to take turns to guard the secret.”

“None of them went?”

Poker-Face nodded, “I am the last Zhang Qiling of the Zhang family, and I must be the guardian in the days to come. Since you are here, however, I want to tell you that ten years from now, if you still remember me, you can open this huge bronze door to replace me.”

“Wait a minute.” After digesting all this information, I asked, “You mean, the Mystic Nine takes turns, and your Zhang family has been rotating for several generations?”

When Poker-Face nodded, I asked him, “If that’s the case, then according to the promise, whose turn is it now?”

“Yours,” Poker-Face said.

Mine? I paused, “Do you mean that I should go behind this bronze door and stay there for ten years?”

Poker-Face nodded. I was just about to say that he had made it all clear when he suddenly reached out and pressed the back of my neck. I immediately lost consciousness.

That was the last time I saw Poker-Face. When I woke up, all traces of him had disappeared, with the exception of the ghost seal he had left me.

I went crazy looking for him, squeezing into the deep crevice only to find that there was no path. The one we came out of before was unexpectedly closed.

I remembered when Poker-Face had disappeared in front of me when he crawled inside on our last visit. Did he activate some mechanism at that time to create a later path?

I stayed there for three days in utter despair until the snowstorm slowly subsided.

There’s nothing to say about the journey back.

I finally returned to Hangzhou. While I was walking beside West Lake, it began to drizzle. As I recalled everything I had experienced before and thought about everyone’s ending, I suddenly felt very tired.

I didn’t know why, but my tears began to flow down. I went back to my shop as if it were the old days when nothing ever happened.

I thought that after I had finished all this, there would still be something left, but I didn’t think that there would be nothing left at all.

I did realize, however, that I couldn’t stop yet. I still had to go on, because there were still another ten years to go.

<Chapter 79> <Table of Contents><Chapter 81>

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TN Note: Hello you beautiful people!!! Hope you’ve enjoyed the reading so far, lord knows it’s been a roller coaster lol. So as far as I can tell, there’s one more chapter to the main story, then about 30-ish extra chapters (I think. I had trouble finding them on the official Daomu Biji website but they’re def in the Amazon version) and 2 postscripts. I’m just going to keep the numbers going for posterity’s sake but figured I’d give you all a heads up in case you cared.

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Updated 11/19/2021