Chapter 51 Great Demon Black Pool

Poker-Face looked at the dark spot and said, “This thing is called the Great Demon Black Pool.”

I had never heard of this thing—the four Chinese characters were all in my knowledge blind spot—but I still paused before asking, “Which four characters are they?”

After Poker-Face explained it to me, I glanced at Fatty and asked why this name sounded a bit like a name from “Journey to the West”.

Poker-Face certainly wouldn’t explain it to me—he was earnestly examining the dark spot on the mural as if there was a pattern on it—so Fatty said, “Why does Mongolian culture make people feel that it’s magnanimous and brave rather than mysterious? It’s because the pronunciation of their names is done in a relatively unrestrained manner. For example, Bateer and Hudeer make you feel that people with these names are tall and strong, but King Wannu sounds very evil. That’s why Mongolian culture’s naming conventions hardly make you think that this place is evil. The Great Demon Black Pool is already a very evil name.”

“What the hell is this, a black pool?” I asked Poker-Face.

He nodded and gave a brief explanation, “In Mongolian culture, this demon is an ancient female python corpse.”

As the name suggested, the Great Demon Black Pool was the pool where the giant ancient female python corpse was located. The Mongolians believed that the ancient python corpse lived in a black pool of water.

The ancient python corpse was the only Mongolian symbol that I was familiar with, and in the earliest days, it was said to be a multi-headed python spirit. The ancient python corpse not only appeared in a large number of Mongolian legends, but also in the stories of the Tu ethnic group and other nationalities.

The biggest feature of the ancient python corpse was that unlike most snake spirits in other cultures, it basically appeared as a male. And the ancient female python corpse was originally called the Demon Mother Corpse.

“Is this a kind of worship of ancient python corpses?” Fatty asked. He was about to keep going, but I quickly stopped him. I actually knew this. Mongolians absolutely did not worship ancient python corpses.

But what did this black pool on the wall mean? Wasn’t this an imperial tomb? Why was there a black pool here?

“It’s said that the black pool can cure diseases and prevent food from rotting,” Poker-Face said. “If you kill the ancient python corpse that dwells in it, you can use the black pool to benefit the people.”

I looked at him and sighed to myself. You and I are both illiterate, Fatty. Now it looks like we’ve forced Zhang Qiling to open a school.

“So, this imperial tomb was either built over a certain black pool or there’s a black pool near this imperial tomb, right?” Fatty asked.

Poker-Face shook his head and touched the dark spot with his hand again, looking very puzzled. The worshipping ceramic figurines all around this mural made it very obvious that they regarded this black pool as a sacred existence.

And judging from the mural on the opposite side, it seemed that the corpses were circling around this black pool.

But I still had no idea what it all meant.

Fatty and I continued to look at Poker-Face like two fools. Once upon a time, I thought everyone in the world would look at me like this.

But now I could actually start to think logically.

In this whole underground palace, the first unreasonable place had already been identified.

The mural we saw when we first came down was that of a crowd walking into the Corpse Country’s banquet venue while the second mural we saw was that of people leaving after death. They had turned into corpses and began circulating the grassland like animals. Logically speaking, these murals were all extended scenes of the venue itself.

So the mural on this side should be an extension of the Corpse Country’s banquet venue.

The worship of this “black pool” should be placed on the wall behind the coffin as the coffin’s background wall so that it would be symmetrical. It also represented the central position between the coffin owner and the gods.

But that wasn’t the case here. Instead, the black pool appeared on the side.

This kind of godly worship should be very important, but it was only placed on the side. So in that case, what was the mural on the wall behind the coffin? Did Shen Qianjue describe it to me?

I couldn’t seem to remember, but my curiosity was piqued. Was it something more important than the black pool?

This asymmetrical setup actually wasn’t very comfortable in terms of aesthetics, so what was the reason for it? Did this happen because this ethnic group wasn’t very particular about art? Or was it because of some profound meaning that I didn’t know about?

Poker-Face was still staring at the dark spot, so I motioned to him to ask if we could go to the coffin. The time had come.

But Poker-Face shook his head and suddenly pulled me and Fatty back a step so that we were further away from the dark spot.

“What’s the matter?” The atmosphere had suddenly turned very bad.

“Use your peripheral vision to take a look,” he ordered me.

I turned my head and looked at the dark spot out of the corner of my eye. At this time, I almost peed my pants.

<Chapter 50><Table of Contents><Chapter 52>

****

My friend is like 4 hours late so I had nothing else to do but leave you on a cliffhanger. You can just blame her lol