Chapter 39 Strange Hole

The three of us stopped at the entrance of the hole and Fatty threw a glow stick into it. It rolled about four or five meters into the narrow hole, but we didn’t see anything strange. “Is this a fucking grave robbers’ tunnel?” Fatty touched the edge of the hole and immediately answered his own question. He was very experienced and could tell how old something was and what tools were used just by touching it. “Gentlemen, this is a natural hole.”

Such a small hole inside a mountain wasn’t unusual at all. It might have been a bubble in the magma when the rocks had formed, or it might have been a cavity formed after years of oxidation and dissolution of calcium carbonate.

Did they really abandon this tomb passage just because they dug a small hole?

Fatty looked at the words at the mouth of the cave and said, “Mr. Naïve, is this one of your failed attempts to sound like a know-it-all? What’s so strange about this thing?”

I’m not the one that proposed this theory, I thought to myself. It was Poker-Face. But it was too difficult to shift the blame to him.

I told them what the words on the stone tablet said and then added, “There’s no denying that they dug up to this point and then abandoned the whole tomb passage. They must have encountered something strange or there was some kind of incident that occurred. This carved stone tablet indicates that whatever it was must be related to this hole.”

“But this is a fucking tomb. Who are these words engraved for, the dead? Did they know that this tomb would be robbed?” Fatty scratched his crotch, “Mr. Naïve, I think your theory’s a bust. This tomb passage wasn’t abandoned.”

Fatty had always been able to find the faults in my theories. I wanted to refute him, but when I thought about it, I knew that he was right. Fatty saw me hesitate and continued, “Think about it. You’re building an ancient tomb and discover a hole, which you decide to enter. Aren’t you pretty fucking stupid? Do you love to enter holes so much that you enter one you can’t get out of? And you even put up a sign outside saying you won’t be able to get out if you enter it? If this South Sea country was full of shitty hooligans and idiots who loved to enter holes everywhere, then it’s not surprising it was destroyed.”

I secretly scolded him, just a few words would’ve been enough! Don’t you know you’re refuting Poker-Face? Do you have the guts to say something even more offensive?

Poker-Face touched the engraved words and said, “These words weren’t engraved by the tomb builders.”

Fatty and I looked at each other, and I was the first to understand, “When they were building the tomb, they dug up this tablet. That’s why they abandoned this passage.”

Fuck, this was a closed rock stratum, not a cave. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the interior of the rock stratum was completely sealed, so how could an engraved tablet be dug up from inside of it?

Moreover, seal script was completely standardized after the Qin Dynasty unified the country and was still widely used during the Han Dynasty (1). We knew that the South Sea King’s tomb was from the Han Dynasty, which meant that they had found the stone tablet in the middle of this mountain while they were digging. It was the equivalent of us trying to build something inside the mountain now and finding out there was a stone tablet that had existed for hundreds of millions of years. And on that stone tablet were words written in simplified Chinese that read: “One world, one dream”. (2)

If this was the case, I would also abandon this passage. Hell, I’d even abandon the whole tomb itself.

Poker-Face touched the inscriptions and said to me, “I have to go into the hole and have a look. You wait here.”

<Chapter 38><Table of Contents><Chapter 40>

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TN Notes:

(1) For those getting confused like me, the Qin Dynasty (from 221 to 206 BC) came before the Han Dynasty (206 B.C. to 220 A.D).

(2) The system of simplified Chinese characters was established in the 1930s. Fun fact, “one world, one dream” was the slogan for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing

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I’m sorry, I’m not feeling it today. I tried, but my motivation just disappeared like their clothes. One second it was there, the next it was gone. This is also Poker-face’s long-awaited chance to escape from the two naked weirdos lol. Hope he doesn’t lose his memory like he did in that Tamutuo meteor….