Chapter 63 Behind the Bronze Door

As we walked over, we saw that there was a bowl-shaped depression in front of Fatty, as if the ground had been hit by a huge lead ball.

The sunken area was about ten by ten meters. He had cleaned off the mud covering it and revealed the pattern underneath, which was arranged in the shape of a bowl.

Of course, Fatty hadn’t completely wiped all the mud away, and many places were still covered in it, but we could already tell that the pattern on this disk was different from the ones on the walls.

When we squatted down next to Fatty and examined it, I immediately noticed that some of these patterns were actually the same as what I had seen in the German’s notes from before.

“Tortoise shell.” Fatty looked at me. “Do you still have the notebook?”

I took it out and compared it with the pattern, finding that although they weren’t exactly the same, their arrangement and meaning should be similar.

“What are you thinking?”

“This is a mural, a mural carved on bronze,” Fatty said. “This should depict the origin of this bronze cave.”

“Do you understand it?”

“I can only guess. No one would dare say that they can fully understand these things,” Fatty said. “Look at all the reliefs on this disk. We have to find the first one and interpret it from there.”

So, we cleaned all the black mud off of the disk, lit one of the last three cold fireworks, and began to search for the source of all the reliefs.

In fact, there was no need to look. The source was at the center of this disk.

When Fatty used a flashlight to illuminate it, we saw a strange ball there, the top of which was covered in holes.

“Is this a hornet’s nest?” Zhang Haixing asked.

“No,” I said, catching Fatty’s eye. We both knew what it was.

“This is a meteorite,” I said. “We’ve also seen it beneath a mountain, deep underground in the Queen of the West’s ancient city.”

Following the relief in the center, we looked around for the direction that the other relief sculptures went in. This was my strong point, as I was better at distinguishing what order pictures and paintings went in. Although carvings and brushwork were different, people’s ideologies were the same. I definitely wouldn’t be wrong as long as these relief sculptures were carved by people.

I soon found the second pattern, which had also been drawn in the German’s notebook. I immediately understood what it meant.

This wasn’t a tortoise shell but the scene when the meteorite fell. People were standing on the ground, watching as a huge meteorite split into several pieces in the sky. These split pieces turned into fireballs of different sizes in mid-air.

I looked around and suddenly realized how this huge bronze cave had been created.

Fatty also had the same idea and looked at me before saying, “You’re right. This thing was formed in outer space. It’s a metal meteorite.”

“It’s like a bubble. The hollow meteorite crashed into the mountain long ago and solidified here. After being discovered, someone broke through the meteorite’s shell and polished and carved these things inside,” I said.

So, these huge bronze installations embedded deep in the earth’s crust were all fragments of that huge meteorite.

I was reminded of the giant bronze door in Changbai Mountain’s underground strata, the meteorite under the Queen of the West’s ancient city, the ancient bronze tree under Qinling Mountain, and the bronze cave here under the Himalayas.

I touched the metal underneath and wondered, how could there be bronze meteorites? Is this really bronze?

According to all the signs we found along the way, this meteorite passed over more than half of China or even a ninth of the earth. It breached the atmosphere in East China, disintegrated, broke into several pieces, and then crashed deep into the Earth’s crust.

Of course, it was also possible that the opposite was true and it entered from the west. In that case, there may be some parts we hadn’t found that had crashed into the sea.

I looked at the patterns. If they were absolutely accurate and the meteorite had crashed in from the east, then the mother meteorite should be the one under Changbai Mountain.

According to the comparison in the picture, that meteorite was N times bigger than the one we were standing in now. If it was hollow inside, then it was at least a few square kilometers in size.

When I looked down at the relief sculpture, my nerves tensed up and I suddenly started sweating.

Judging from the extent to which these meteorites had penetrated the earth, they had been completely embedded deep in the rock. In other words, they must have struck the rock layer a long time ago. The impact was so large that it melted the rock, which caused the meteorites to be completely embedded.

If that was the case, I estimated that all but the meteorite under the Queen of the West’s ancient city had these delicate patterns on them.

How did the ancients discover these meteorites that struck the Earth’s embedded rock layer hundreds of millions of years ago? It was obvious that these ancient people had tracked the mother meteorite’s falling trajectory and found several of them.

But this kind of thing was completely impossible if you thought about what level the ancients were at. They wouldn’t have even known of the existence of these meteorites because the fragmented pieces were in rock formations deep underground.

“Don’t worry about it,” Fatty said after listening to my analysis. “Look at this picture. It shows a collapsed house, the ground cracked, the mountain split in half, and there’s the meteorite in the rock layer. The rock layer is obviously very unstable.”

“Why? Were the rocks affected by earthquake tremors?”

“I don’t know, but do you think this painting is a bit like an earthly phenomenon?”

“Like what?”

“Plant seeds sprouting,” Fatty said.

I shuddered at his words, but then I shook my head, “Impossible. Do you think these meteorites are some kind of seeds that germinate?”

“I just feel like it might be a possibility,” Fatty said. “But the meaning of this relief is very clear: either this rock caused an earthquake or the mountain burst open and the meteorite was exposed after an earthquake. Didn’t you learn this before? What’s the point of going over it again?”

After thinking for a moment, I suddenly understood the principle, “Almond cake.”

“What? Cake? Now that you mention it, I am pretty hungry. But where can I find a cake for you?”

“No, I mean that if you cut a cake that has a lot of almonds, there will always be a few almonds in the cut part. You can’t cut it and find that both sides of the slice are only cake and the almonds are all wrapped up in the interior. Even hard things are the same. If there’s a bubble in the steel, the fracture must be in the place where that bubble is because any impurity changes the stability of all the materials.”

“So you’re saying…”

“As long as there was an earthquake, any crack in the rock layer would definitely expose these bronze meteorites.”

“Seems to make sense.”

“Go on,” Zhang Haixing said.

When we looked down, we saw a relief sculpture on the side that showed someone carving on the exposed part of the meteorite. Numerous people were chiseling the rock in front of the meteorite to expose the bronze and carving delicate patterns on it. Upon seeing this, Fatty suddenly leaned close to me and said, “Look, who are these people? Why do they…why do they have so many hands, like spiders?”

“King Wannu,”(1) I said while rubbing my eyes hard.

At this time, Fatty suddenly jerked his head back and grabbed the wall with his hand. He then looked into the depths of the cave, but there was nothing there and no sound could be heard.

I was startled by his actions, but Fatty ignored me and shouted, “Who’s there?!”

I suddenly found that Zhang Haixing was no longer beside me. After listening to us just now, she probably got bored and left.

“Maybe it’s the old woman,” I said to Fatty.

“No, she’s over there.” Fatty pointed behind me. When I looked back, I saw Zhang Haixing squatting down in another place.

“What happened?” I was also feeling a little nervous now.

“I just felt like someone was watching me,” Fatty said.

The two of us stared over there for a long time, but there was no movement. Fatty turned around and clicked his tongue, “Am I getting old and paranoid?”

Before he had finished speaking, Zhang Haixing called over to us, “Just ignore it. Come over here and take a look. There’s a better one.”

“What the hell is it?”

“There’s a person here,” Zhang Haixing said.

<Chapter 62><Table of Contents><Chapter 64>

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TN Notes:

(1) King (or Emperor if you prefer) Wannu of the Dong Xia dynasty was mentioned in “Palace of Doom” when Wu Xie and A Ning were at the bronze door right before fighting off the weird birds. It was the large black corpse that had twelve arms twisted together behind his back. He was also the one that kidnapped/enslaved Wang Canghai.

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Updated 1/9/2022