Chapter 1

Xie Yuchen didn’t like winter in Russia at all. The doorman at the Saint Isaac’s Cathedral side office hadn’t come yet, so he was left standing outside the door as the snow fell heavily from the sky. Russians didn’t go out in this kind of weather. There was only one old man who seemed to be spreading salt and watching him from under a distant street lamp.

Xie Yuchen stood tall, wearing a large padded windbreaker and a big white felt hat with black trim on it.

It was getting late. If the doorman didn’t open the door soon, he would definitely freeze to death on his way back.

Just as he was thinking this, the door finally opened. A Russian priest stuck his head out, looking at them bleary-eyed.

“Chinese?” The priest asked in extremely fluent Chinese.

When Xie Yuchen nodded, the priest said, “You’re early.” Then he noticed a man behind Xie Yuchen. This man was very tall and wearing a thick black coat, fur cap, and sunglasses.

“Your email said that you were coming alone.”

“This is at my own expense.”

The priest looked at the tall man and confirmed, “Are you sure? We can only bear the expenses of one person.”

“Rest assured.”

The door was finally opened, releasing a wave of heat that had Xie Yuchen stepping in immediately.

The man in the pure black coat behind him didn’t hurry in, but walked in slowly. He seemed to have a slight aversion to the heat.

When they entered the corridor, they saw that the walls were decorated in the typical style of a Russian Orthodox Church. They were full of complicated murals in gray and black tones with no saturation. The lighting was also dim, which gave off a very sinister aura.

There wasn’t much stale air in the old building. It was a big tourist attraction, so the breath of so many people helped keep the air fresh.

“They’re paying for me and you’re paying for you, right?” The tall man confirmed with Xie Yuchen as he took off his coat. Xie Yuchen patted him as if to appease him.

After the two of them had taken off their coats, they both felt much lighter. The priest then said to them, “That thing is on the ceiling of the church’s central hall.”

“Did everyone else leave?”

“No, they all want to watch.”

As they walked, they saw more priests appear in the corridor, all holding cell phones. There were also a few young Russian men and women, who seemed to be friends of the priests and had come to watch the show.

Xie Yuchen sighed and turned to look at the tall man, who mouthed at him, “If these Russians aren’t afraid of death, then so be it.”

Xie Yuchen turned to the Chinese-speaking priest, “People may die. If it notices that you’re taking pictures of it, you’ll die faster.”

“Life has ups and downs like this, my friend.” The Chinese-speaking priest smiled at them.

The tall man obviously appreciated these words, for he laughed and hooked his arm around the priest’s shoulder before patting him.

The three people continued walking deep into the corridor. They could see a glass door at the end, behind which was the main hall of the church. This huge church space was dozens of stories high and had domes and walls that were covered in narrative murals. It also had extremely expensive chandeliers hanging above the place of worship.

The onlookers didn’t stray too close to them, but followed them from a distance of about thirty steps.

“What’s the background story?” The tall man asked.

“Under the floor of this church, there are seventeen sixteenth-century sarcophagi, which were moved here from the ruins of other churches destroyed by the Germans during World War II. There are various religious figures buried inside. Sixty years ago, there was a Chinese person who kept a corpse in a sarcophagus here. There’s a problem with the corpse right now.”

“An orthodox church like this, why keep a Chinese person’s corpse?”

“It was done without permission; left here illegally, if you will. They don’t even know how the body was put there because very few people know the entrance to the area where the sarcophagi are stored.”

“It was only discovered now?”

“My friend, the sarcophagi in this kind of church generally won’t be opened. If there wasn’t something wrong with that corpse, you wouldn’t ever know what was inside,” the priest said. “It wasn’t until yesterday morning that we discovered the mutation.”

With that said, they had finally reached the glass door at the end of the corridor. The priest said a few Russian words into a walkie-talkie, seemingly informing the people in the motor room that they had arrived. Then, the lights behind the glass door were all turned on. The chapel’s lighting was so amazing that it suddenly looked as if a bright white light was shot out from behind the glass. The door was like the light door to Heaven.

The lights were usually only turned on to this intensity for important religious occasions, but now they had been turned on for Xie Yuchen and the other two.

The glass door was pushed open, and three people went into the brightly lit room. Xie Yuchen looked up and saw what the priest had been talking about.

There was a mummy floating in mid-air. It was close to the chapel’s dome and was very high off the ground. From this distance, Xie Yuchen could also see that the mummy was wearing a Taoist robe. It was rotten for the most part, but its shape was still fairly complete. The most prominent thing was that the mummy’s hair was in a top knot. This man must have been a real Taoist priest, but he had been dead for decades.

The dome was covered in complicated murals of the Vatican that were separated by exquisite golden partitions. It was extremely incompatible with the aura of a Taoist priest.

“The body of a Taoist priest was hidden in a sarcophagus in the Orthodox Church. That person was really quite talented,” the tall man smiled. “How do the Russians know that this matter is related to us?”

“There was a sixty-year-old newspaper hidden in the sarcophagus. The newspaper was soaked in oil, and there was an article on it that had been circled with a calligraphy brush. The article was about our family dealing with similar events, and the contact information on it was still active. Whoever left this corpse here sixty years ago wanted people to contact our home when something went wrong with the body.” As they were talking, they passed by a big hole in the ground. It looked as if the marble floor had collapsed, revealing the space below. The whole church had originally been elevated by about half a person’s height, and there was a large space below that turned out to be a basement. The sarcophagi were scattered in this space.

At this time, there was a stone coffin under the hole. The coffin lid had been broken and turned over, which seemed to indicate that the Taoist priest’s floating body had come out of it.

“How is it floating?”

“Legend has it that before a corpse becomes immortal, it will become lighter than ash. Did this corpse fail to become immortal?”

“You won’t let me come with you when you usually deal with this kind of thing. Is it very difficult?”

Xie Yuchen nodded and looked up at the corpse, which was too high to reach. He sighed, “It’s very difficult.”

Sixty years ago, a man went to the Soviet Union and hid the body of a Chinese Taoist priest beneath a church in St. Petersburg. Xie Yuchen could actually guess the logic behind this strange behavior.

“Maybe you can explain it to me first before I go up there.”

“According to metaphysics, someone is stopping it from becoming immortal, so it moved here from the mountains of China. Immortality depends on the cooperation of the earth and the air. This is a foreign country where the earth and air are frozen. Moreover, the combination of yin and yang is different from that of China. This corpse was transforming here for sixty years and finally began to emerge, but the environment is different now so it failed. How great must the hatred be for someone to destroy this person’s spiritual practice like this?

“Do you really believe that?”

Xie Yuchen laughed, “There’s also the conventional possibility that someone is doing something. But whatever the case, I won’t know until I go up and take a long. You’re not going.”

When things were different, there were bound to be secrets. Xie Yuchen hoped that this was just a metaphysical problem.

The taller man seemed to agree that this was reasonable. But he knew that Xie Yuchen wouldn’t go up immediately, which was extremely unwise. Xie Yuchen needed time to think and observe, so the tall man figured he could find something to do on his own.

He glanced at the priest and asked, “Are there any other strange things happening in the church, especially the kind that are unremarkable?”

The priest thought for a moment and then looked at the nearby hole in the floor. It seemed that he wanted to say something, but found it difficult to do so. The tall man immediately understood and said to Xie Yuchen, “Take your time.” He then jumped into the hole, squatting down in the basement below.

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