Chapter 69 Change Your Way of Thinking

I rubbed my face and said to Fatty, “We have to think about it differently.”

“Change it quickly then,” Fatty said. “Don’t hesitate. I’ll change my attitude first and you can change your way of thinking.”

“All the bases for our thinking just now come from our previous experiences,” I said to him. “We’ve gone through too much in the past and keep connecting what we saw then with what’s here now, hoping that it’s all the same, right?”

Fatty nodded and said that none of us wanted to spend such a long time analyzing a problem only to find out that what happened here had nothing to do with what we had experienced before. This was especially true if it was something like Little Brother just coming here to spend the summer and conveniently stopping a calamity or whatever.

“In this way, we’ve ended up skipping over countless details and barbarically connecting a lot of things together,” I said. “For example, when I saw so many boxes here, I thought about whether it was the same as another meteorite I had seen before. This is forcibly connecting our thinking from A to Z, even though we don’t know how many other points are connected between the two. In this way, we’ve formed a very bad, simplistic way of thinking by basically saying that because Z is like that, so is A.”

“Fuck off, you college student,” Fatty said. “Can you speak the human language? Who can possibly understand what you’re saying?”

“Let me give you an example,” I said. “If you think about it the other way around, if the meteorite under the Queen of the West’s city had holes that were artificially dug and weren’t formed naturally, then these patterns here wouldn’t mark the pattern of the holes at all but where to dig the holes.”

Fatty frowned but I continued, “This is only an example, but it tells us that we’ll never get results if we think like this. We have to discard all of our previous experiences and consider the problem by itself so as not to go astray.”

It was obvious that Fatty still didn’t understand but he said to me, “Do what you think is right. But how do we start?”

“Extrapolate from the absolute facts that have already taken place.” I was preaching a little bit at this point. “We don’t have many absolute facts now, and only one basic thing can be confirmed: my blood is able to flow on these lines to form regular patterns. That is to say, the people who carved these patterns used special techniques to make this phenomenon possible. At the very least, anyone who carves patterns should know more about this kind of blood than we do.”

“Agreed. But saying that doesn’t help us,” Fatty said.

“Who knows more about this kind of blood than we do? Where did our impression of this blood come from?” I pointed to my wound. “The Zhang family’s Little Brother. There’s no doubt that these patterns have something to do with the Zhang family.”

“This kind of blood may not necessarily be unique to the Zhang family since you also have it. Aren’t you surnamed Wu? So that means this type of blood can be acquired.”

Fatty’s remarks were reasonable. I sighed and said to myself, now we have a direction to go in—determine what kind of origin and characteristics this Qilin blood has so that we can make a second inference. I thought Zhang Haixing might know something so I reminded myself to ask her about it later.

Fatty continued, “What’s more, everything you’ve said up ‘til now is tantamount to saying nothing.”

“Not necessarily,” I retorted. “Only people with Qilin blood who enter this chamber can see the information shown by these lines. Don’t you think that one of the functions of these lines is identification?”

“Agreed.”

“But they could use a more ingenious way for identifying common people, such as making a mechanism the size of a washbasin. Why is the whole pattern all over the cave itself? There must be a reason why such large quantities are needed.”

“Didn’t you say before that there wasn’t any reason for many of the ancients’ actions? Perhaps it was to flaunt the strength of their craft!”

“That kind of behavior was generally directed towards emperors. The tomb of the first emperor, Qin Shihuang, is a good example since it curried favor with the emperor. The craftsmen themselves wouldn’t make something too exaggerated, but many jade carving masters would create formidable, detailed works. Even if they boasted of their skills, this was only something that could be completed with their own ability so they would certainly show off. These lines deep under the mountain must not have been completed by a single person. Instead, a group of people must have completed such an exquisite thing, the purpose of which was definitely to please someone.”

“So the owner here—the master of those craftsmen—was someone who liked complicated patterns?” Fatty summarized it for me. “Or, in other words, this design has practical uses. Hold on, I want to write this down.”

Fatty believed in writing everything down, so he took out a notebook and wrote down the possibilities I had just mentioned, with any inferences divided into two directions.

I continued, “If it’s a matter of personal preference, few people in this world would like to go to a place, create a beautiful room, and then walk away. Even if there were such a person, it may not be a coincidence that he has such strength and ability. Therefore, we can infer that this man wasn’t playing around when building this place. It was useful for him to build it, and he would come often and even stay in it.”

When I said this, Fatty and I both looked back at the place where the man had shed his skin.

“Bingo, is this the guy?”

“Not necessarily considering how this guy was locked in here and turned into skin and bones.”

“Huang Yaoshi (1) held Zhou Botong accountable for his wife’s death and basically kept him trapped in a cave on Peach Blossom Island,” Fatty said. “Since this thing here was locked in, maybe it’s like a nice prison cell and there’s a very sick tusi who likes to lock up his enemies here and watch them rot day by day.”

“Our third fact is that the corpse is in a very abnormal state and doesn’t look like an ordinary corpse. That means there are two possibilities: one is that this person was inherently abnormal; the other is that this person started to become abnormal only after he came here.”

“There’s still no way to prove this, and even if we find a body, we don’t know how long it would take for this change to happen. I think this body has been here for a long time. Moreover, this place was full of mud at that time, and we don’t know whether those black things caused the corpse to change.”

I nodded and suddenly found that at this point in our analysis, a conclusion had begun to appear, “Where did the mud come from? Is there any place here where the mud could’ve infiltrated in from?”

Fatty shook his head. In fact, the mud looked more like coffin fluid than real mud. We hadn’t seen it anywhere else along the way and this cave was completely closed off so that meant that the mud must have been poured in here by the people who built it. But whatever it was, it must have been done before the bronze door was closed and sealed.

We had pieced several facts together, the first of which was that this place couldn’t be entered again once it had been built; or, at the very least, it was very inconvenient to access it. Thus, it wasn’t built for appreciation or for showing off. It was disposable.

Second, these lines would be completely covered by mud, so they weren’t ornamental. This also proved that it was disposable. And why would you want to pour mud here? Was this a place for storing mud? If so, why build such a beautiful place? If this was a storage space, then it should be obvious that the patterns would be helpful for storage; otherwise, a warehouse need not be so awesome.

No one in Chinese history had ever built such a great warehouse.

From any other point of view, this mud didn’t exist for storage but served some other purpose in this place.

Third, there was a very strange change in the corpse, along with mechanisms surrounding the body.

I smacked my forehead, “This is an ancient tomb. Oh my God, this is a tomb.”

Enclosed space, exquisite interior decoration, a corpse, and mechanisms set around the corpse.

To some extent, this was an ancient tomb.

“Is this mud really corpse liquid?” Fatty asked. “Corpse liquid poured in to protect the body? Then why did the tomb owner lock himself up?”

I sucked in a sharp breath and said, “It’s not the corpse that was buried, it’s the thing inside the corpse. It’s a human coffin. Someone stuffed the real body into this corpse.”

“They locked—fuck me, does that…” Fatty jumped up. “When the coffin was put here, this person was still alive?”

“They put a dead object into his stomach, locked it in here, filled it with mud, sealed it up, and used a living person as a coffin. But for what?”

Of course, it was for the dead thing.

But the corpse was empty when we saw it and the contents inside of it were gone.

<Chapter 68> <Table of Contents><Chapter 70>

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TN Notes:

(1) Fictional character in the wuxia novel “The Legend of the Condor Heroes”

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For a second, I thought maybe it was the hexagonal bell in the corpse’s chest cavity, but then I remembered that Poker-face was the one that got the bell and put it in the mountain (I’m assuming he put it behind the bronze door) so I don’t think that’s right. *Gasp* What’s if it’s a monster?! Or “the ultimate”?! So many questions!!! lol. I wonder if Fatty and Wu Xie are going to wait for the whole Zhang crew to roll up and try to bleed them dry? But it sounds like they need someone with that special blood and I doubt there are that many running around if the Zhang family was willing to bleed children dry… On another note, I had a shit day so I’m taking the rest of the night off. But at least I got 2 chapters out for you guys! Yay!

Updated 1/16/2022