Chapter 33 Sea of Black Lights

We tugged on the horses’ reins, but they refused to move. And when Ping Lian saw that Fatty wanted to throw him in, he immediately dodged and started running in circles. Fatty cursed, “Damn dog! You have no spirit of exploration at all!”

Based on their expressions, there had to be something in front of them that they could see but we couldn’t.

I tried to look out of the corner of my eye, but the light in front was so dim that I couldn’t see clearly. Fatty turned his flashlight up to the brightest setting so as to illuminate the maximum distance, but only a few very vague outlines could be seen. That place appeared to be some distance from the stone tablet.

We all glanced at each other, gave up on the dog and the horses, and walked forward. After about two or three hundred steps, we could smell a particularly disgusting burnt odor in front of us. At this time, Fatty saw a circle of corpses sitting around a pool of water.

Every single one of them had been burnt to ashes.

There was porcelain laid out in front of them, and the ceramic figurine of a maid in the middle of the pool. This figurine was half in and half out of the pool, and the part that was out seemed to have been covered in oil and burned.

This kind of burned state was something that we were very familiar with since we had seen it a few days ago. And now, it seemed that the same thing had happened here. Someone had set fire to all of these bodies and burned them to ashes.

When we squatted down to get a closer look, we found that the air was filled with the smell of carbon and grease. The fire had caused the corpses’ torsos to twist and their mouths to open, which made them look especially terrifying.

“This is another group of people,” Fatty said. “Is this self-immolation⁽¹⁾ or did someone burn them?”

I shook my head. I didn’t know. It was possible that the corpses had been sitting in their encirclement in the dark and someone stumbled across them. This person might have been so terrified at the time that they set the corpses on fire. But it was also possible that someone discovered that he was bewitched and used whatever free will he had left to burn the people around him before setting fire to himself. It appeared that even after Old Bing and his team had died, there were still teams finding and entering this place.

“There aren’t many people left for us to find now,” Fatty said. “The people Jin Wantang hired are slowly dying off.”

I sighed and looked back at Ping Lian. It suddenly occurred to me that he had dug up those bodies in the grove before. At that time, Ping Lian hadn’t been afraid of those bodies, and neither had the horses. So why wouldn’t they dare come over now? It almost seemed like Ping Lian and the horses weren’t afraid of these corpses but of something else.

Was it the ceramic figurine? I used my peripheral vision to look at it, but it seemed fine. I even looked straight at it under the flashlight’s glow, but nothing seemed to be wrong with it. Fatty said that we should catch the dog and bring it over. When I told him to stop being so cruel, he said that he would protect it.

After thinking about it, I didn’t believe that the ceramic figurine was the problem. Well, at least not all of it. After all, I had been carrying a piece of that other ceramic figurine with me this whole time and Ping Lian had been friendly towards me.

We went back to where the horses were and tried to pull them forward again, but they resisted with everything they had. In the end, we were left tired and sweaty. It was obviously impossible to force the horses to move forward the whole way, so we had to unload the equipment, divvy up the loads so that they were lighter, and leave any unnecessary food and water behind. We cut open the canned food and gave it to Ping Lian so that he could eat his fill first. Then, we ordered him to keep an eye on the horses and walked inside.

When we passed by those charred bodies again, Fatty smashed the ceramic figurine to pieces to allay some of our fears. But I couldn’t help sighing as I wondered if there were any more corpses further inside.

We continued walking. The path leading to this place was very long, but the terrain gradually began to rise. I looked up and finally saw the three Big Dippers clearly.

This was a natural phenomenon caused by the refraction of ice crystals in the air and seemed to indicate that the terrain here was very special. This kind of situation generally occurred with the sun and the moon, and was called “mock sun” or “mock moon”. ⁽²⁾

One of the three Big Dippers was clear while the two on the side were fuzzy.

“Mr. Naïve,” Fatty said, “do you think the ancient craftsmen who built these tombs used the buildings to tell a story? Do you have any insights?”

I shook my head. At this time, I was thinking that it had something to do with lotus flowers and leaves—which generally referred to paradise—but I hadn’t actually seen the shape of the underground palace myself. It was only when I saw it that I could really determine what it looked like.

Fatty had another question, “Then what else will we encounter before we enter the underground palace? List some possibilities. That way, I can mentally prepare myself.”

“We won’t encounter anything,” I said. “The journey will be very smooth.” Based on Shen Qianjue’s narrative, there weren’t too many obstacles along the way.

There appeared to be some kind of presence here that wanted us to get so far from the boundary of safety that we couldn’t return. And in order to do that, it wouldn’t place obstacles in front of us.

I remembered that there had been a similar long journey to the Snake Marsh, and that many people were killed along the way. Even to this day, I still remembered it all vividly.

Our journey that night went very smoothly. There were more and more trees, the water was clear, and our five senses gradually became clearer. Fatty used his flashlight to illuminate the bottom of every pool, but we didn’t see any more stone tablets. We did, however, see a lot of agate fragments beneath the water’s surface.

Fatty fished up several pieces, each of which was worth at least tens of thousands of yuan in the outside world. Moreover, the quality was particularly good, so he started bagging them.

Agate was a kind of chalcedony⁽³⁾, so it wasn’t unusual to find it in water. But the agate here was very good. Fatty sifted through the water and said to us, “This river is awesome! I bet we’ll find more when the sun comes out tomorrow.”

Sure enough, when the sun came out the next day and we continued moving forward, we found that the whole riverbed was full of agates. These agates must have been deliberately placed here, for the sheer number of them was astounding. Now that the water flow had been cut off and the river had dried up, there was just one pool after another. The agates on the dry part of the riverbed in the middle had oxidized and were covered in moss and grass, but the agates at the bottom of the pools were reflecting the sunlight like crazy. The mottled array of colors was just like a huge opal.

At first, I was rendered speechless by the sheer beauty of it, but by the time afternoon came, I felt like I was going blind. Even wearing sunglasses didn’t help much. I felt like I was going to have a seizure if it continued, but fortunately, this agate river recovered its mild brilliance when dusk came.

I bet Black Glasses must’ve been in a lot of pain when he was walking through here.

Later that night, Fatty was still determined to stick with his habit of checking every pool of water and eventually found more traces of humans.

It wasn’t a stone tablet at the bottom of a pool this time, but a stone lantern⁽⁴⁾.

This stone lantern was actually just a statue of a strange animal holding a bowl full of lantern oil. It kind of reminded me of those kiln monster lanterns from the north⁽⁵⁾. It was half a person tall—maybe higher because the lower half was buried in the soil—and the exposed part was severely weathered.

When Fatty pointed his flashlight at it, we saw that Mongolian characters had been engraved on it. I was really starting to regret the fact that I didn’t study hard before I came here; I couldn’t even understand these important clues at all.

The stone monster’s mouth was open, the inside seemingly hollow and dark. Fatty looked inside, but couldn’t seem to figure anything out even after a long time had passed.

At this time, I was shocked to see Fatty suddenly put his head inside the monster’s mouth. “Hey! Are you a dick? Why are you sticking yourself into any hole?” I immediately asked him.

“Shit, I know why this place is called the Sea of Black Lights,” Fatty said. “Quick, stick your head inside and see for yourself.”

<Chapter 32><Table of Contents><Chapter 34>

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TN Notes:

(1) The act of setting fire to oneself with a flammable liquid and willingly burning to death.

(2) Can also be called “sun dog” or “moon dog”. It’s an atmospheric optical phenomenon that consists of a bright spot to one or both sides of the sun or moon.

(3) Chalcedony is a generic name given to materials that are composed of microcrystalline quartz. Agate and jasper are both varieties of chalcedony. Agate is any type of chalcedony which is translucent, while jasper is any type of chalcedony which is opaque. Info here.

(4) They’re called tōrō in Japan. More info here but here’s a pic of one

(5) Looks like this: