Chapter 65 Incomprehensible Riddle

“Who’s there?” Fatty quickly moved his flashlight over there, immediately revealing something rising up from the bronze ground on one side.

It was like a pillar, about as thick as the mouth of a bowl and as tall as half a person, with very complicated lines carved on it. The complexity of the lines on this pillar was a hundred times more exquisite than those on the surrounding walls.

On both sides of the pillar were two wing-like things hanging from the top that also looked to be made of bronze.

“Is it a flying stick?” Fatty asked.

“Is there a mechanism under here?” I knocked on the ground as Fatty walked towards the stick. But after a few steps, he suddenly stopped and pointed his light in another direction, revealing a similar pillar.

He turned the flashlight bit by bit and we found that similar pillars had risen up every four or five steps. All of them together formed a circle around the corpse.

“What the hell are these things?” The three of us were silent for a while before Fatty muttered to himself, “I have to say, it’s a bit boring.”

“This is a support frame,” Zhang Haixing said. “This corpse must have originally been covered with something similar to a lid. We must have triggered something which caused the pillars to rise up and lift the lid. But where’s the lid?”

“Yeah, it’s empty here. The thing I’m most afraid of is empty places. I don’t even have a chance to pick anything up.”

“What did we trigger?” I was still very concerned about this, “Did our weight trigger it?”

“Maybe the disk under our feet has a design that can sense the changes in weight and the mechanism was activated when we came over here.”

“Let’s give it a try,” I said while motioning to them. All three of us withdrew from the disk.

Sure enough, after a moment of hesitation, the surrounding pillars slowly and noiselessly sunk into the ground.

Zhang Haixing squatted down and looked at the edges of the pillars on the ground before saying, “The gaps are cleverly hidden in the patterns. Do you think there are many similar mechanisms in this chamber?”

“Do you mean to say there’s something in all of these walls?”

“Otherwise, don’t you think this place is a little too empty?” Zhang Haixing asked.

I sighed. If a place looked empty, it meant that there was something hidden in the wall. This kind of statement was a little like deceiving others to deceive yourself.

But if there really was nothing at all, was this the same damn thing Little Brother saw after he entered the bronze door? Was he staring at these iron walls every day?

What a terrible way to live.

If this really was the case, then maybe the so-called “Ultimate” was really nothing. Maybe it was just an empty chamber representing the idea that the end of everything is nothing. If so, everything we had imagined before was nothing but our own delusions.

Everything belonged to yin and yang, which belonged to primal chaos, which in turn belonged to absolute nothingness.

I took a deep breath. If this was the case, then we were defeated by a philosophical concept.

No, it couldn’t be like this. So many things had happened, it couldn’t be like this. Poker-face wasn’t such a delicate person.

Fatty suddenly spoke up at this moment, “Mr. Naïve, I remember you told me that your grandfather had a prerequisite for considering problems, that is, the purpose. Everyone has a purpose when doing something.”

I nodded. This was indeed what my grandfather used to say.

“Then what would you say is the purpose of this place?” Fatty asked.

“Don’t listen to some baseless truth. Many ancient people did things for no reason at all,” Zhang Haixing said. “Perhaps everything was done here completely willfully and superstitiously.”

“This so-called willfulness and superstition are done for a reason, which is inherent in itself. It’s not groundless,” I argued. “Fatty’s right. There has to be a reason, especially since there’s such a complicated pattern carved here. We can analyze it from this direction.” When I touched these patterns, my mind suddenly flashed back to my previous experience at the Qinling Mountains.(1)

“Directional thinking…direction, direction.” I turned to Fatty and asked, “Is that the word I used just now?”

“Yes,” Fatty said. “What’s the matter, do you have an idea?”

“Do you have a canteen?” I asked him.

When Fatty handed me his canteen, I turned it over and poured all the water on the ground. Fatty cringed and said that that was all that was left, but I didn’t have time to talk to him as I dropped to the ground and turned on my flashlight. I watched the water seep into the gaps and begin to flow along them bit by bit, just like a flower blooming on the creviced floor.

Fatty looked at me in surprise and asked, “How did you think of that?”

“I’ve seen something similar before,” I said. “The water will fill in these fine lines and likely form a pattern.”

The three of us stood in a triangle and watched the water flow. It almost seemed like it was guided around by a strange force as the pattern became more and more complicated and strange.

After more than ten minutes, the current gradually stopped and an indescribably complex pattern appeared in front of us.

The three of us stood on the three corners of the pattern, looked down at the shape, and were completely silent for half an hour before Fatty finally said, “Is this a grass mud horse?”(2)

I watched, my eyes practically glued to it, before sighing in frustration. Indeed, this shape was nothing significant. If anything, it looked very similar to an alpaca.

If this shape was the answer, then we weren’t getting any hints. It appeared the problem was more complicated than we thought.

“If we’re talking to God, then we’re obviously disturbing his nap,” I said.

“Do it again in the same place,” Zhang Haixing said. “The trajectory of the water’s movement is very smooth so I don’t think it’s an accident. Your method should be correct. We’ll do it again in the same place, and if the same pattern forms, the grass mud horse must also have a meaning. It’s not like it matters.”

We waited for the water in the lines on the ground to dry up slowly. When it was completely dry, Zhang Haixing took out her canteen and poured it in the same spot as before.

The water did the same thing, flowing along the lines rapidly in all directions.

This time, the shape formed was like an upside-down egg with a lot of hairs on it.

“Once again, we’ve disturbed God’s sleep and he’s telling us to boil some eggs,” Fatty said. “Why don’t we wait until he wakes up?”

Completely different patterns indicated that the water’s directional flow was random. I pinched my eyebrows, squatted down to smoke, and thought to myself, fuck, this is really embarrassing.

This place was like a completely incomprehensible riddle that only had the two words “the Ultimate”. There was no direction in which to think, no hints, nor even any connections.

It was like taking someone to the beach, saying the two words “braised pork” to them, and then walking away. In this case, people would either look for braised pork on the beach or come up with many profound but mysterious conclusions. For example, there’s nothing on the beach but I have braised pork in my heart so it’s the same as me having it.

Zhang Haixing still didn’t believe anything was abnormal and said, “It’s strange, but the water flows very smoothly in these patterns. It must be set up to guide the liquid.”

“Maybe it’s not supposed to be water but wine. That’s why I said it was wise to bring some at that time and you pedantic people would regret not bringing it.” As Fatty said this, he turned his empty canteen over. “Mr. Naïve, don’t pour any more water out of your canteen. We don’t have any water left. If anything happens, we’ll have to drink each other’s urine.”

“Not water.” I frowned and suddenly remembered the analysis we did after seeing those patterns in the Qinling Mountains at that time. I took a deep breath.

“Not water.” I pulled the dagger from my waist, “It’s blood.”

I moved very fast and cut my hand open before Fatty could even register what I had said.

Having seen Little Brother cut his hand before, I was already very experienced. The place where he cut his palm was where the blood flowed the fastest and at the greatest volume, but it was easy to stop the bleeding.

I kept cutting. It took two or three minutes before I felt the pain, but by this time, the blood had dripped onto the ground and began to spread along the lines like the water before.

This time, the flow rate was much faster than that of the water, and like tiny tentacles probing outward, the blood seeped through the patterns at a rapid speed.

“The density of blood is different. These patterns were specially designed for guiding blood,” I said. “There must be no mistakes this time.”

“Fuck, it’s on the wall,” Fatty said. When he pointed his flashlight over there, we could see countless blood streaks beginning to climb up the wall. With me at the center, the blood kept searching for its own path, forming various routes in the patterns and drawing a huge pattern.

That’s right! I crowed secretly while pressing the palm of my hand and squeezing more blood out.

“Do you want to stop the bleeding first?” Zhang Haixing asked as she looked at my hand.

I felt a little cold and didn’t know how much blood I had shed, but I shook my head because I didn’t want to fall short of my success. Although the blood in the patterns was very thin, there was a lot of space here and I didn’t know if I had bled enough.

I haven’t reached my limit. I think.

“There are many frames,” Fatty said. “Your blood’s drawn a lot of doors.”

I looked in the direction Fatty was pointing, but as soon as my foot moved, my vision went black and I fainted.

<Chapter 64><Table of Contents><Chapter 66>

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TN Notes:

(1) So most of us probably thought back to Vol 7 when he was with Xiao Hua in that cave in the cliff (ugh, that poor pig), but Tiffany researched it and says: “Since it’s Qinling Mountains, Wu Xie is talking about the bronze tree in Vol 3’s “Bronze Tree of Death”. There were patterns all over the tree, and they found the blood could run along the patterns, and the bronze tree was used for blood sacrifice.”

(2) The Grass Mud Horse or Cǎonímǎ (草泥马) is a Chinese internet meme/pun widely used as a euphemism for the cursing cào nǐ mā (肏你妈) aka “fuck your mother”. It looks like an alpaca or llama if that helps.

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Has anybody else been wondering where the fuck Feng went??!!!!! Like, did he get swept away and killed in the mud?! Author, you’re so bad about remembering the cannon fodder! I’m also with Fatty, the scary monster was a letdown! A freaking pillar?! Come on! Give us some more action! I’m also slightly concerned at how eager Wu Xie is to slice his hand open (remember his bug dream from not too long ago where he nearly bled out? “Expert” my ass. Leave it to Poker-face, sweetie. You clearly lack the skills lol.

Updated 1/16/2022