Chapter 42 Graffitied Warning

We set off about twenty minutes later. The mountain opposite us looked very close, but it actually took us an hour to reach the foot of that huge holey slope.

During that time, there was a thought lingering in my heart that was difficult to get rid of—Poker-Face must have only rested for two hours so would he be able to endure it?

I didn’t see any traces of tiredness on his face, but he definitely had to be tired since he kept taking naps all the time. I just didn’t know if I should ask.

When we were halfway through our journey, he still looked perfectly fine while Fatty and I were panting like dogs. As a result, there really wasn’t a need to ask him if he needed a rest. Moreover, we’d have to rest when we arrived at our destination anyway.

At this time, looking up at the mountain was even more frightening, and I couldn’t help thinking that it wasn’t a lotus flower at all but a huge hornet’s nest. It almost seemed as if countless hornets would come flying out of these holes at any moment.

We went from the foot of the mountain to the huge grave robbers’ tunnel on the mountainside. Fatty looked at the dark hole and said to us, “Comrade Naïve, it’s time to use your talents. The choice is yours now: should we find a hole and go in, or should we dig one ourselves?”

“Go in and take a look.” After saying this, I took the lead.

The grave robbers’ tunnel was so big that Godzilla was the only one who could have dug it. The inside sloped downward, so it became very dim after about six or seven meters. When I turned on my flashlight and continued walking further inside, I found that there was water on the ground. This stagnant water was very clear, so it must have been accumulated rainwater that had filtered down from above. After passing the pool of water, I saw a dirt hole that was very dark inside. When I swept my flashlight over it, all I could make out were hard clods of dirt inside.

This didn’t seem to be a stone mountain but a dirt mountain.

Poker-Face quickly cleaned himself without an ounce of hesitation. Our clothes were waterproof, so he washed off the stains on the outside and then neatly took off his clothes. After setting them aside, he quickly got into the pool of water and wiped himself clean. Fatty only took off his jacket and wiped his body with a towel.

The water was extremely cold, so I wasn’t brave enough to copy them.

I moved to take a few more steps inside the tunnel, but Fatty told me not to move rashly.

As it turned out, I couldn’t actually move because I found that the path ahead was blocked. The hard soil inside had collapsed in such a way that the hole was a dead end.

By this point, Fatty and Poker-Face had already caught up to me. The whole bathing process shouldn’t have taken more than two minutes, but Poker-Face had even washed his hair. I figured that his hands had moved so fast when he was washing up that they left afterimages.

“Sure enough, as I said, the soil here may be quite special and the grave robbers’ tunnels won’t last long,” Fatty said.

I squatted down, touched the collapsed dirt pile, and found that there was a lot of coke⁽¹⁾ in the soil.

When I picked one out and illuminated it with my flashlight, I saw that there were some metal things stuck inside. They were very small—almost like sand—but seemed to have rusted after going through oxidation.

“What’s the matter?”

I shook my head, but at this time, Fatty’s flashlight swept over the tunnel wall on our left. We all saw that some graffiti had been painted there.

I was pretty knowledgeable when it came to murals, but this wasn’t a mural at all. Instead, it was more like a child had graffitied something on the wall. This person had obviously engraved it with a knife, and made sure the cuts were very deep.

Examining graffiti was one of Fatty’s many talents.

Based on how the paint was peeling off of the wall, the graffiti must’ve been very old. And even some of the lines were so faint that they couldn’t be seen at all. But fortunately, the painter had applied toner to these lines so that they could be preserved up until this point.

The graffiti showed an image of a black stick figure, which gave off the impression that it was a mural from the Stone Ages. But part of the mural had been crushed by the hard mud that had collapsed.

“Is this a remnant of the ancient Mongolians?” After Fatty asked this, he suddenly felt that the pronunciation of the words “ancient Mongolians” was very funny and emphasized, “Anncccciiiient Mongolians.”⁽²⁾

“This is the information left by the predecessors who dug these grave robbers’ tunnels,” I said. “Grave robbers generally don’t take the initiative to leave messages for others. Can you decipher it?”

“The illiterate understand the illiterate,” Fatty said. “Let me have a closer look. You should go study something else with Little Brother first.”

It took a long time to examine something like this graffiti, so I followed Poker-Face to the other side.

At the intersection between the collapsed soil block and the tunnel wall on the other side, we found a very thin accessible gap where the soil hadn’t completely collapsed.

Of course, this gap was very long, and when we pointed our flashlights at it, we estimated that it was about seventeen or eighteen meters deep.

Poker-Face started stretching his shoulders and I immediately knew that he was about to do bone contraction. I couldn’t bear to watch him do it, so I turned my head away.

But when I did this, I saw Fatty looking at us with a pale face.

“What’s the matter?” I asked him.

“The information on this is a little scary.”

“Don’t be afraid, Daddy’s here,” I teased him. “Just tell me what it says.”

Fatty turned back towards the graffiti and said, “The meaning of the first few pictures is very clear. These are a few people performing Qimen Dunjia.”

He used his flashlight to illuminate several figures on the cave wall, but I couldn’t make anything of them. Fatty continued, “The guy who drew this picture should be illiterate, but if you look here, this little man is holding a flag up. This is the warning sign of the Mongolian cavalry and I think it means that these pictures are all warnings. And look at the movements of these people. There are seven graffiti figures here all performing Qimen Dunjia, but the seasons of the trees behind them are different. There’s also a figure here, which is a strange thing that’s clearly not human. But this thing is also performing Qimen Dunjia, just like those people.”

I looked at the figure and also agreed that it looked very strange. It wasn’t in the shape of a person at all, but it had eyes and appeared to be in the shape of this underground palace.

“I think what this person is trying to tell us is that all of us come here because this underground palace attracts us. This underground palace uses Qimen Dunjia to seduce groups of people to come here at regular intervals,” Fatty said.

“What the hell?”

“That’s just my interpretation of it.”

I looked at those pictures but still couldn’t understand how they expressed such complicated meanings.

“How is this possible? It’s not like the underground palace is a person.”

“We’ve just been assuming that it’s an underground palace, but maybe the things below aren’t actually underground palaces,” Fatty said.

<Chapter 41><Table of Contents><Chapter 43>

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TN Notes:

(1) FYI, not cocaine. In this context, coke is a grey, hard, and porous fuel with a high carbon content and few impurities, made by heating coal or oil in the absence of air—a destructive distillation process. It is an important industrial product, used mainly in iron ore smelting, but also as a fuel in stoves and forges when air pollution is a concern.

(2) Doesn’t translate well. The pinyin for “ancient Mongolians” is Měng​gǔ gǔ​rén, so when Fatty repeated it, he said “Měng​gǔ gǔ gǔ gǔrén”.