Chapter 38 Master Hua

The woman was a Mongolian citizen, but she was born in Inner Mongolia. She was educated in Inner Mongolia before the age of twelve and spoke very good Chinese. She was probably married to someone in Mongolia and became the team’s guide because her Chinese was good.

Based on a photo I saw in the notebook, she must have been a very fit woman before she died and became a dehydrated corpse. I figured she could’ve easily incapacitated me by putting me in a chokehold.

When she applied for the job, Xiao Hua and the others flew directly to Ulaanbaatar to meet her, and Xiao Hua talked with her seriously for several hours.

The pay was very high and she had rich experience in cave exploration since she had taken people to explore several caves in the Tavan Bogd Mountains in the Mongolia-Altai region.

In her notes, she kept marveling at the fact that the pay was so high. Her contract should have ended when she brought them to the Sea of Black Lights, so I didn’t know why she had followed Xiao Hua and the others so far.

After entering the grassland, most of the pages were dedicated to the two bosses, whose physical fitness was quite amazing. It was because of this that I was able to get a general understanding of Xiao Hua’s state.

Xiao Hua was very reticent during the whole journey, which was very abnormal considering how he usually got along with people on the surface and rarely gave people such a gloomy feeling. Moreover, he had been using a kind of Chinese divination tool known as Qimen Dunjia, but the woman didn’t know what he was looking for.

Secondly, there was a subgroup in Xiao Hua’s team that had been carrying an iron cage the whole way. This cage wasn’t very tall and was completely wrapped in black cloth, but this Mongolian woman knew that there had to be a living thing in it. She thought that it was a big dog.

The second boss had constantly been trying to get the big boss to relax a bit, and the Mongolian woman kept hearing the following sentences come up in their conversation: “What was predicted at that time may not have necessarily happened. After all, we haven’t seen it with our own eyes.”

I couldn’t even begin to guess what these sentences meant now, but it didn’t sound particularly good.

When they arrived at that first grove, the other teams hadn’t arrived yet, but their goal was very clear so they moved on without hesitation. But in the few days before and after Past Life Forest, Xiao Hua had been directing his people to use Luoyang shovels to dig holes in the grassland. It seemed like he was persistently looking for something underground.

These were just details in a notebook, so I needed to use them to piece together Xiao Hua’s thought process in the future.

The Mongolian woman once talked with Xiao Hua and asked him what he was looking for when he entered the grassland, but Xiao Hua just gave her a vague answer:

A long time ago, his master predicted the possibility of something happening, but it didn’t occur even after many years had passed. He originally thought that it wouldn’t happen, but just a few weeks ago, he met someone whose appearance meant that the possibility his master had predicted actually did happen.

Since that was the case, he had to handle this matter properly according to his master’s last wishes. That was why he came here.

Xiao Hua’s master was Er Yuehong, one of the core figures of the Nine Gates.

Er Yuehong had predicted the possibility of something happening, but what exactly was it? My grandpa’s records of Er Ye were far less than those of Fo Ye, so I had no way of figuring it out.

Moreover, was the person Xiao Hua met a few weeks ago Xia Wen?

Was Xia Wen also just a sack of skin that Qi Yu was hiding in?

And the iron cage? I found it strange. What was in the iron cage? Was it Qi Yu?

Did Xiao Hua bring Qi Yu here?

But why put him in an iron cage? Did they catch Qi Yu or was the iron cage originally empty and they brought it here in order to catch Qi Yu and bring him back?

It seemed that Jin Wantang really did introduce Xia Wen to Xiao Hua at that time, but what happened afterwards was beyond anything I could imagine.

I flipped a page of notes over and saw a sketch on the back of it. It was Xiao Hua wearing Peking Opera clothes and dancing at the Corpse Country’s underground banquet.

He was all alone and wearing a strange crown on his head, which I had never seen before.

His whole costume looked like it was very heavy, but I just couldn’t seem to figure out which role he was playing. He was probably either playing a new role or a self-created one.

Everyone else was watching from a distance and I could even see the cage that was covered with a black cloth.

This scene surprised me, because based on my previous analysis of Xiao Hua’s footprints, I knew that he had been carrying a heavy load. I just thought that he was dancing with Black Glasses on his back, but as it turned out, he was wearing a large set of equipment.

This was a very unusual thing to bring on an expedition, so I couldn’t help but think that Xiao Hua knew early on that there was such a connection and prepared accordingly.

Bringing such troublesome clothes could only be an orthodox ritual to entertain the gods.

When I turned to the next page, I saw the corridor we had walked down before, which contained tens of thousands of strange corpses that were bestowed the status of gods. The Mongolian woman had sketched many of the bodies, but the focus of the drawing on this page was a particular body in one of the niches.

It was a well-preserved ancient corpse of a young man with earrings. All of his limbs were fixed in a cocoon-like shape with a hemp rope and there was a big, empty hole in his chest. There was also a ring-shaped sun-wheel decoration on his back, which must have been a special decoration signifying his rank.

I was a little shocked when I saw this, because I remembered that some of the niches in that corridor had been empty. Was something like this sitting in those niches before? Were they taken away by Qi Yu?

It was impossible for this corpse to transform since the chest was hollowed out, but did that mean Qi Yu had burrowed into it?

Since this was an ancient corpse, there wouldn’t be any mechanisms inside of it, so if Qi Yu was a monster wearing a human shell, how did he do it? Either he made the mechanisms himself and controlled it all on his own—maybe as long as there was human skin, he could make a skin suit out of it—or we just didn’t know what his real physiological structure was.

In the margins of these sketches, the Mongolian woman wrote: “That subgroup’s iron cage got stuck at the entrance of the corridor, making it difficult to enter.” She didn’t see the cage after that, so it appeared that they had left it outside.

This seemed to indicate that they weren’t here to catch Qi Yu. In fact, it looked like Xiao Hua may have actually brought Qi Yu here, because there was no way he could abandon the cage if he wanted to catch something.

So did this mean that after entering this corridor, Qi Yu was free? Did he escape and find himself a new body?

Was he a hermit crab?

Where is he now? I asked myself. I couldn’t shake the feeling that he wouldn’t be too far away from us.

The records became more and more illegible after that, and when I saw Xiao Hua’s sketch before the big black spot, I suddenly felt like this was a send-off procession.

It was just too similar.

This was a team sending off a sacrifice to marry an ancient god; it was just that the bride in this case was a man. There were still many desperadoes in the team, and I finally saw a lot of weapons in the sketch.

Are you going to kill Yamata no Orochi?⁽¹⁾ I asked in my heart. Then what are we? Dessert?

I checked to make sure that Fatty and Poker-Face had both fallen asleep before I secretly pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and took a few puffs. Then, I lay down and switched positions so that my head was by Poker-Face’s feet before using my peripheral vision to look at the darkness around us.

A splendidly dressed bride acted as a sacrifice, brought along an armed team and a monster, and went deep into the realm of the ancient gods. They must be doing this to kill a god.

What did Er Yuehong predict? What vengeance did he seek against the ancient gods?

As I continued to read the notebook, I saw the following text: “I insisted on coming in. I couldn’t resist my curiosity. After coming in, the boss told us the truth about this expedition.”

<Chapter 37><Table of Contents><Chapter 39>

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TN Notes:

(1) Yamata no Orochi, or simply Orochi, is a legendary eight-headed and eight-tailed Japanese dragon/serpent. Info here.