Chapter 56

This didn’t make any sense.

My brain couldn’t comprehend what was going on but my hand was still holding the lighter up to the group of children.

Other than drooling, they didn’t move at all, but their faces were all dark and ashen and they were clearly looking at me with ill intent.

I had been so confused ever since I set foot on this grassland. Over the past few decades, I had encountered many strange things, but they had never been as strange as what I was seeing now.

I had also encountered paranormal situations, but most of the monsters didn’t harass us like this. The final outcome was ambiguous and I couldn’t tell what was going on, but at this time, I was definitely certain that these children weren’t in the food box just now. If they weren’t ghosts, then what were they?

I suddenly thought of the Wanshi Meat wrapped in those sackcloth bags. They had all been in the shape of children, so was it possible that these children were made into dishes, their souls were trapped in this box, and now they had manifested?

I stared at the kids as they stared right back at me. Did Poker-Face know what I’d face when he locked me in here? I asked myself. Let’s just focus on figuring out whether it’s more dangerous inside or outside this food box. But when I looked carefully, I found that something was wrong.

The children’s drool turned out to be coffin liquid. It was hard to see clearly with the lighter’s dim light, but I plucked up the courage to look closer and then heaved a sigh of relief.

These children were actually stone statues hanging down from the coffin lid. As it turned out, a group of these statues had been carved on the underside of the coffin lid. The children’s heads were on the coffin lid, so when it was closed, their feet would press down on the Wanshi Meat below.

It almost looked like a bunch of children sitting on a pile of meat. These children might have been carved from stone, but they were wearing clothes and appeared so lifelike that it was really scary.

This whole setup ensured that the meat would be immersed in the spice-infused coffin liquid as much as possible. Sure enough, this was definitely a food box and not a coffin, but I’d probably still call it a coffin because it had become habit by now.

I moved closer and carefully looked to see whether these children were really stone statues. After touching one, I realized that I was right. I was certain that these corpse statues had originally been colored, but there must have been a chemical reaction in the coffin to make them look like corpses.

I sent up a silent thank you for this blessing. It’s good that it’s not a ghost.

At this time, I noticed that the eyes of these sculpted meat-stepping children were all looking in different directions.

When I saw them from a distance, I thought that they were all looking at me, but when I approached, I found that they weren’t. They had eyeballs that must have been painted on, but now these eyeballs could only be faintly seen upon closer inspection. They were all looking around in different directions.

I was very familiar with this vividness because it was a concept the Han and Western craftsmen used at the time. In Mongolian social division of labor, most craftsmen’s artistic styles didn’t have such “small” concepts. At that time, Mongolia was fighting two fronts in Europe, so the army would take away all the best craftsmen in the region.

The whole Corpse Country banquet outside was very bold and unconstrained, and although the work was exquisite, the content was very realistic. It showed that when building this place, the craftsmen weren’t ordered to make quick work of it. But why was so much effort and careful thinking put into this stone box?

Did the stonemason who made this coffin want to further express his artistic skills or something?

Over the years, I had developed an intuition that came out of working in this industry all year round, as well as the so-called principle of antique identification. I followed the direction a boy statue’s eyes were looking in and pointed my flashlight at the coffin wall.

I went over to it but didn’t find anything there, so I returned to look at the boy’s eyes again. I then looked at the stone on the coffin wall and scratched it with my fingernails.

Sure enough, I scraped a layer of lime off with my nails. I flicked my lighter off, pulled out the nail clippers I usually carried with me, and then scraped hard, only to find that something was engraved under the lime.

It was a very simple line with very small Chinese characters engraved on it.

Ignoring the stench, I used my fingers to try and clean the words off.

I won’t talk about ancient Chinese here, but I’ll tell you what the meaning of these words was. It was very clear and simple: I was captured and ordered to build this place. There are terrible secrets here. Anyone who comes here must take the secrets out.

The rest was cut off, so I immediately went to see where the second child’s eyes were looking at. I found another lime-covered coffin wall and scraped it clean, revealing the next paragraph of text.

All the places where this craftsman had recorded information were in the exact same spots where the statues were looking. So, as long as the statues looked different, that meant that this person had designed them. Plus, there was information hidden in their eyes.

I followed them one by one and counted six paragraphs in total, with four paragraphs like this.

The third paragraph said: There is a thing buried here that cannot be disclosed. I don’t know what it is but it doesn’t feel like a human being. Before it was buried, it still lived for a while; it just couldn’t move. After the corpse was buried, it affected the atmosphere of this place and strange things started to happen.

<Chapter 55><Table of Contents><Chapter 57>

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I don’t know about you guys, but this was basically my face watching the first 2 episodes of Heavenly Palace:

The guy playing Poker-Face looks like he’s about to burst into tears any second. I think he’s trying to go for indifferent but he just looks like a kicked puppy (poor guy). And he’s like weirdly chatty? Wu Xie’s being a dick to Fatty for some reason and I just don’t understand what’s going on. Honestly, Fatty’s actor is the only thing motivating me to keep going because the script writing sure as hell isn’t lol. Hope you all enjoy it more than I am so far~~