Chapter 61 The Five Mountain Dragon Gods

In my grandfather’s notes, there were a lot of technical terms and rhetoric that gave it the air of a Chinese folktale. I couldn’t understand them at all and Grandpa wasn’t willing to explain them to me. All he would say was that the Chinese nowadays basically didn’t know about the gods in Chinese folktales. When people back then talked about feng shui, their perceptions were quite different from ours. Our generation always felt that learning feng shui was like learning a superpower but they just saw the true imiage of China’s landforms.

The blood of these cultural systems was in their blood, so even illiterate people could quickly understand something like feng shui. But nowadays, if you didn’t study Taoism for more than three or four years, you wouldn’t even have the chance to get started.

There was nothing to explain if you didn’t even know the gods in Chinese folklore, which was a very sad thing if you thought about it. Most of the time, when you read stories about Chinese folk gods in ancient books, you’d feel like you were reading the “Classics of Mountains and Seas”. I’m not exaggerating. You basically couldn’t understand any of the terms at all.

But in fact, all of these gods were really just the greater gods of China⁽¹⁾. In those days, the old ladies who sold onions on the side of the road knew where these gods came from, what they were, and what their status was.

Among the ancient Chinese gods, these five black patterns on the mural were actually the Five Mountain Dragon Gods, who were in charge of the mountains. China was a feudal society when religious culture was forming, so the land was extremely important. The Five Mountain Dragon Gods were five earth dragons that held a very high status, but after being personified, everyone thought that they were just a single old man with a white beard. Their true appearance, however, was so far from amiable that it was enough to make you pee your pants.

All the ancient Chinese gods were from primitive times, so the Chinese people named them as they saw them. As a result, these gods’ names were basically equated to their image.

My grandpa said that if you entered the depths of a big mountain, you would sometimes see the so-called dragon veins, which were black rock bands that were extremely hard. When he was following a group of Taoist priests to a big, six-story tomb, one of them showed him a dragon vein when they got deeper in the mountain. At that time, he saw the black rock band, which turned out to be a residual vein of the Qinling Mountains. It was said to be in a deep cave in Mount Mang.

At that time, they stopped for three days to do the ritual, but the Taoist priests refused to go any further.

Needless to say, Mount Mang held a high status in Chinese tomb culture. It was everyone’s dream to be born in Suzhou and Hangzhou and be buried in Mount Mang.

As soon as I looked at this mural, I knew that the person who designed this tomb definitely wasn’t a normal person.

Those five black dragons were coming from five different directions on the mural, and that hole in the brick was smack dab in the middle of them. I didn’t know what had been painted there, so I tried to put the bricks back together one by one. I split two more fingernails in the process, but I was so excited that I didn’t even feel the pain.

After I was finished arranging everything, I figured out what it was.

It was the snow-capped mountain we saw outside earlier.

There were a lot of black things on the snow-capped mountain, which ordinary people wouldn’t know what they were. I honestly didn’t know what they were before, but I did now!

The Five Mountain Dragon Gods were moving, and their movements were causing dragon veins to grow and deplete. In ancient China, there were people who could influence the trajectory of the Five Mountain Dragon Gods’ movements. In Taoism, this method was called “moving mountains”.

Many people thought that the term “moving mountains” meant that mountains were being moved around, but that wasn’t the case at all. The thing that was moved was the dragon vein, which was the representative of the Five Mountain Dragon Gods. But the “moving mountains” technique required an extremely special feng shui array called: Five Dragons Dismembering a Corpse.

If what I was seeing wasn’t mere superstition, then this snow-capped mountain wasn’t here before. This had all originally been grassland, and the mountain grew here because of the Five Dragons Dismembering a Corpse array formed by the underground palace’s layout. Numerous geological changes must have taken place here over the past thousand years.

Every corpse in these giant outer coffins probably weren’t ordinary corpses, either. That dog-eater corpse definitely wasn’t a dancer, but I still didn’t know what it was.

Not counting the three corpses here, there was also the one in the snow-capped mountain. It was the fiercest and probably not even human at all.

Of course, this was only a part of the dragon god myths in Chinese folktales, so it wasn’t like I could prove anything. But there was one thing that made me think that I was right.

That dark spot.

Was it possible that the huge dark spot was the body of the “dragon”? It was proof that dragon veins led here, after all.

The dark spot on the mural we saw wasn’t painted on, but looked like something came up from the ground, grew into the outer coffin over there, and then came out from the mural. But there was only one spot, which also showed that the corpse dismemberment array here wasn’t complete.

No, it wasn’t just one place. The whole snow-capped mountain outside was dark. Shit, I knew what was under that heavy snow. A huge black spot had corroded the whole mountain.

I was scratching my head in excitement, because this kind of knowledge was so rare that I really wanted to show off. If I could show off at this time, then there was no way Fatty could surpass me in this year’s show-off competition.

But what was the purpose? Why move a mountain here? Did that demon monk do it? Was he trying to create a dragon vein?

I didn’t believe in using feng shui to build mountains, but I did believe that there were crazy people who believed in this kind of feng shui array.

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Author’s note: The knowledge related to ancient Chinese gods has been changed to avoid any taboos. If there are any similarities, it’s purely coincidental.⁽²⁾

<Chapter 60><Table of Contents><Chapter 62>

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TN Notes:

(1) Examples include: the Jade Emperor, the Queen of the West, the direct ancestors of feudal monarchs, such as the Haotian God and the Eastern Emperor Taiyi.

(2) I’m gonna go out on a limb and say this is probably a censorship thing.