Chapter 12 Tit for Tat

My hair immediately stood on end and my whole body broke out in goosebumps. I tried pulling my hand away with everything I had, but the withered hand was gripping me so tightly that I not only couldn’t free myself, but also got pulled straight into the coffin as well.

I was so scared that I almost lost control of my senses, but I managed to pull out my gun in the confusion. I was going to use it to try and break the corpse’s grip on my wrist, but before I could take aim, there was a sudden noise behind me and then my gun-wielding hand was suddenly yanked behind my back.

Not knowing what had just grabbed me, I let out a shout and started struggling. I somehow managed to free myself from the corpse’s hand, but then I tripped over the sarcophagus and went flying, the thing behind me also caught up in the fall.

As I rolled on the ground, I realized that the thing that had attacked me was a person. Suddenly feeling bolder, I rolled one more time, leaped to my feet, raised my gun, and got ready to fire.

But before I could see who was in front of me, I heard a loud bang, felt a strong wind come from somewhere, and then something slammed into the back of my head. Stunned by the hard blow, my vision suddenly went dark and I collapsed on the ground.

After I fell, I felt at least two people come up, grab me by the arms, lift me up, and drag me over to the coffin. When I looked back, I saw that Lao Yang had also been dealt with— he was already tied up and being pressed to the ground.

The person behind me used my belt to tie my hands, pushed me down to the ground, and then put a gun to my head. It was only at this time that I was finally able to see who they were. As it turned out, our attackers were actually the guys we had met at the roadside stall in Xi’an.

I was extremely surprised. Why were these people here? Was it as Lao Yang had said and they had been watching and following us all the way here?

This situation was absolutely terrible. These guys were thugs, so there was no telling what might happen to us now that we had fallen into their hands. After all, this kind of place was simply perfect for killing people since the bodies wouldn’t be found for hundreds of years.

After those people tied us up, they didn’t beat or kill us but merely threw us aside and pushed open the coffin lid we had just been looking at. Lao Yang and I saw that the withered hand was still sticking out of the coffin and immediately turned pale with fright. “What are you guys doing?!” I shouted at them. “There’s a zombie inside! We’re all screwed if it comes out!”

The group was stunned when they heard this, but then they immediately burst into laughter. “What zombie?” A young man asked. “Take a good look at what’s inside!”

Lao Yang and I shouted as we watched him give the coffin lid a hard push. It hit the ground with a loud bang and then an old man who looked like a skinny farmer suddenly sat up from the coffin.

After taking a good look, my first thought was, fuck me, isn’t that Uncle Tai? Why is he sitting in the coffin? Then it all clicked, and I wanted to give myself a hard slap. Shit, we were tricked!

Uncle Tai stood up, put his wrinkled, deathly-white ghost hand into his pocket, climbed out of the coffin, and walked over to us.

I noticed that the nails on his hand were long, yellow, and sharp, and I was suddenly reminded of my grandfather’s friend I had seen when I was a child. The man’s leg had been scratched by a zombie, and it took more than ten days for all the pus to flow out. When it finally stopped, his leg had shriveled to the point that it looked withered, just like Uncle Tai’s hand.

I couldn’t help but wonder if Uncle Tai’s hand looked like this because it had also been scratched by a zombie. It was a shame I didn’t think of such a possibility just now. If I hadn’t been so scared, we wouldn’t have been caught so easily.

Uncle Tai stared at us for a while but didn’t speak. Instead, he just lit a cigarette and said a few words in the local dialect to the others standing nearby. Those people glanced at us and then nodded.

I thought that they were going to finish us off so I couldn’t help but tense up, but to my surprise, they continued to ignore us and gathered around the coffin instead. Then, Uncle Tai switched to Mandarin and said to one of them, “Boss Wang, according to Boss Li’s interpretation of the eight divinatory trigrams,⁽¹⁾ this place is the entrance to the tomb’s underground waterway. But there’s nothing here. What’s going on?”

A somewhat fat middle-aged man squatted down with difficulty, took out a notebook, and looked at it before saying, “There’s no mistake. This is the right place. The entrance must have been hidden when the tomb was sealed. There should be a hidden entrance somewhere in this room.”

Uncle Tai looked around before saying to another man, “Master Liang, you’ve done some research on this. What do you think?”

The man was hiding in the dark so I couldn’t see his face clearly, but his voice sounded rather young as he said, “I’ve seen Boss Li’s map. Although I just looked at it casually, it should be accurate. If there is a hidden entrance here, then the only other place it would be is the coffin bed under the coffin.”

They lowered their heads and looked down at the part of the coffin bed that was sticking out from under the coffin. Old Tai tapped on it with the handle of his gun before saying, “Then how do we open it?”

Master Liang thought for a moment and then shook his head, “I don’t know. Just try pushing the coffin and see what happens.”

Uncle Tai stood up and walked over to the young man. The two of them put their shoulders against the coffin and gave a hard push. With a quiet click, the coffin moved a little bit and then a black gap appeared in the coffin bed below.

The others also went over to help. After giving a few hard pushes, the empty coffin slid halfway off the coffin bed, and a one-meter-wide entrance appeared in front of us.

I craned my neck to get a look and saw that it was very dark inside, and there seemed to be a very steep stone staircase leading down to the bottom. A strange but familiar smell was coming up from below, but I couldn’t recall what it might be.

The young man took a look with his flashlight and moved to stick his head in, but was stopped by Uncle Tai, who pointed at me with his chin and said something in their local dialect. The young man nodded, came over to me, and then pulled me to the hole in the coffin bed. After untying my hands and feet, he pushed me into the hole, pointed a gun at my head, and motioned for me to go down.

I finally realized why they didn’t kill us just now. As it turned out, this was all part of their plan. They hadn’t been inside this secret passage yet and were afraid that there would be traps, so they wanted to use us as guinea pigs. I suddenly remembered how Lao Yang had begged me to come and said that this would be just like a nice little tourist trip. I was really regretting my decision now. Why did I even bother listening to him? Based on the current situation, it was highly likely that there were traps on the stairs below and I would end up dying.

I thought about putting up a fight now that my hands were free, especially since I would die anyway. Even if there weren’t any traps in this secret passage, there would still be many opportunities for them to appear in the future. I knew I wouldn’t be so lucky all the time, and there might still be a chance for us to survive if I put up a fight now. But at this time, Lao Yang winked at me and said softly, “It’s ok, just go.”

I was confused. How would he know that when he had never been here before? But looking at his expression, he seemed full of confidence, so I figured he must’ve come up with some sort of plan. I didn’t know what it was, but I decided to listen to him anyways. I tied my flashlight to my wrist, propped my hands on both sides of the opening, and then carefully lowered my foot down.

I took a deep breath and looked at my surroundings with my flashlight. The staircase was almost perfectly vertical and went so deep that I couldn’t see the bottom. For some reason, the green rock walls around me were very wet and slippery so I couldn’t hold onto them. But there wasn’t any water down here, so I didn’t know where the moisture was coming from.

As I stood there mentally preparing myself to go down, Uncle Tai suddenly tapped me on the head and handed me a whistle. “When you get to the bottom, blow this whistle,” he said to me. “If we don’t hear anything within half an hour, I’ll kill your friend.”

Knowing that he was afraid I would take this opportunity to run away, I secretly sneered, took the whistle, and bowed my head to enter the passage.

Steps like this that were almost perfectly vertical were very difficult to climb, especially considering how the craftsmen weren’t careful when they built them. Some were narrow and some were wide, but most of them were only wide enough to fit less than half of my foot. I had only gone down about a dozen steps when I found that my toes were starting to ache and I was already panting for breath. I looked up and saw that the stone entrance above had become a small square speck of light, and the darkness all around me was like spilled ink. Several faint shadows would occasionally block out the light above, making it obvious that they were checking on my progress.

I walked very carefully at first because I was worried that the stone steps would have traps installed on them, but the further I went, the more I noticed that the stone path became rougher and the stones themselves didn’t look like they had been processed. With this kind of shoddy workmanship, there definitely wouldn’t be any traps here.

As I continued walking, the direction of the passage changed and the steps gradually started to level out a bit more, which made it easier to walk. I could see that the rocks in this section were now a reddish-brown color that sparkled when the light hit them.

The rocks were probably granite with reflective mica mixed in with them. Granite was a very hard mineral, so the craftsmen must have changed the direction of the passage in order to avoid this granite belt. Based on this, I knew I must already be in the innermost part of the mountain.

I didn’t know when it started, but I could now hear the sound of water coming from the bottom of the passage. After a few more turns, the sound of water became louder, as if thousands of horses were galloping past—it seemed that a lot of water was flowing very fast.

I looked at my watch and saw that I had been walking for almost twenty minutes. I thought that the sound of my whistle might not be heard by those up top if I went further down, so I took out the whistle and blew it a few times.

The sound worked its way up the staircase and I soon heard an answering whistle come from above.

I continued down and saw that the passage in front of me began to widen, and then the exit came into view. There was a strong gust of wind that suddenly blew in from the exit and almost knocked me down. I ran down the last few steps and suddenly heard a roaring sound in my ears. After walking out of the passage, I found myself standing on the bank of a swiftly flowing underground river.

This underground river was about as wide as a basketball court, and the ceiling of the cave was about ten meters high. I looked to my left and right and found that the cave seemed to stretch on indefinitely. There was no telling where it led to. I didn’t see any stalactites on the cave ceiling, but the surrounding stones were very smooth after years of being corroded by the water. Based on the size of this cave, I knew that it had not been excavated by humans and must have formed naturally.

The water’s current was so swift that it produced a loud roaring sound, which was amplified because the cave’s structure acted like a sort of loudspeaker. I tried to walk towards the middle of the cave but found that the water’s temperature was quite high so it wasn’t easy to wade through. Plus, the water became deeper the further I went in. It reached my knees after I took a few steps, so I quickly retreated.

This was most likely a dike. Just like the blood vessels in the human body, dikes were like the blood vessels of the mountain. I looked to both sides and found that the banks of the river seemed to move closer together and the river gradually became narrower the further it went. I also noticed that to my left, there were a lot of iron chains on the rock walls on both sides of the river.

Just as I was pondering over them, the young man from before came out of the passage with a strange shout and stepped into the water. “Fuck, it’s so hot!” He shouted.

I looked back and saw another young man following him out of the passage. This man was wearing glasses and looked intelligent—he had to be Master Liang. When he approached, I realized that he was actually much older than how he looked from afar. The third person to come out of the passage was Lao Yang, who was followed by the plump middle-aged man and then Uncle Tai. I thought there was supposed to be another person with them, but I didn’t see anyone else coming out of the passage. Weren’t there five of them when they entered the mountain? I wondered.

They all turned on their flashlights and swept the beams back and forth along the dike. “It’s really uncanny workmanship!” Master Liang exclaimed in a low voice. “To think that the passage leading to the tomb is actually an underground river. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would’ve never believed it.”

The young man took a few steps into the water and retreated with a frown before saying to the others, “It’s pretty fucking deep. Uncle Tai, it’ll be difficult to walk here. Crossing this river won’t be easy.”

Uncle Tai glanced at Boss Wang and asked, “Boss Wang, what should we do now? Is it written on your precious map?”

Boss Wang flipped through his notebook before responding, “The map says that the last time they came to explore the tomb, they set up two iron chains under the water. If you find these chains and hold onto them while crossing, you can reach the entrance of the underground palace!”

As soon as he said that, all the flashlights immediately moved towards the water. Sure enough, a black chain about as thick as a wrist lay across the bottom of the river. Uncle Tai pulled a portion of it out of the water, weighed it in his hand, and said, “Hot damn, it really exists.”

The young man walked over and tugged on it a few times, but he couldn’t pull it to the surface. He cast an uneasy glance at the river in front of him before saying, “Uncle Tai, I’m afraid crossing the river like this isn’t feasible. Boss Li died such a terrible death just now. We’ll all be screwed if we encounter that kind of fish again.”

Master Liang touched the water and said, “There’s nothing to worry about. The water here is so hot that there definitely won’t be any fish here. There must be a hot spring at the mouth of this river so any fish would have already been cooked. Pockmark, you think too much.”

Pockmark grinned but still didn’t seem convinced. “Is that true?” He asked.

Master Liang patted him on the shoulder and was just about to say something when a huge blast of water suddenly shot into the air behind Pockmark. In just a few seconds, we were swept into the water and became soaking wet. I turned around in a panic and pointed my flashlight behind me, only to see that a column of water had burst out from below the water’s surface and hit the ceiling, sending scalding hot water pouring down like rain.

Master Liang turned pale with fright and started to tremble as he sat there frozen in the water. I secretly wondered if he had peed his pants. Uncle Tai, however, was a man who had seen a lot during his lifetime. He immediately stood up, gun already in hand, and shouted at Master Liang, “What the hell is this?!”

<Chapter 11><Table of Contents><Chapter 13>

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TN Notes:

(1) Eight divinatory trigrams is from the “Book of Changes” and is also know as “Bagua”. In feng shui, the eight trigrams mark the auspicious energy zones of a location, typically the different rooms or areas of a house. So you can use it to find a tomb.