Chapter 26 Deadly Dragons

The mummified corpse’s eyes had completely shriveled up, leaving only two empty sockets, and its mouth was hanging wide open, revealing a bunch of missing teeth. Its whole face, which was deformed due to dehydration, was sporting a rather sinister expression that made it difficult to look at head-on. It was clear to see from its teeth that this mummified corpse wasn’t actually a monkey but a person!

Lao Yang froze for a moment and then asked, “What’s going on here, Old Wu? Didn’t you just say that these things were monkeys? But this…this…seems to be a human.”

“I…I don’t know either,” I stammered. “When I cracked that thing’s mask before, I saw that it really was a monkey, a big one with yellow fur. But this…this…really has me stumped.”

As I spoke, I started to move towards it to see if I had made a mistake earlier because of the dim torchlight, but Master Liang suddenly waved his hand and told me not to touch the body. He then stood up very carefully and flipped over the mask he still held in his hand. At the place where the mouth should have been, there was a fist-sized spiral bulge shaped like a snail’s shell, along with a small hole. Master Liang held the mask up to his face and said to us, “It seems like the person wearing this mask has to keep their mouth open.”

“Keep their mouth open?” Lao Yang said in surprise. “It’s not like it’s a respirator. That must be uncomfortable.”

I looked at the mummified corpse with its gaping mouth and asked Master Liang, “Is there something strange inside that snail shell? Let’s break it open and see. It seems that these masks were fused to the monkeys’ flesh, but there aren’t any openings for their mouths and eyes. They must’ve had other ways to eat and see.”

Master Liang inserted his pen into the hole by the spiral bulge and forcefully pried at it. The “snail shell” immediately shattered, revealing something that looked similar to a crab’s leg. When Master Liang pulled the whole thing out, I saw that it was actually a fossilized bug I had never seen before. It looked very fragile, as if the smallest amount of pressure would break it into several pieces.

“It appears this mask wasn’t put on voluntarily,” Master Liang said with a frown. “But this thing is indeed man-made. If you look at the patterns inside the mask, you’ll see that they’re roughly the same as the double-bodied snake patterns on the tree. These masks must have something to do with the people who cast this bronze tree.”

Lao Yang took the mask and looked at it with a great deal of interest for a long time before saying, “This must be an old bug from the Western Zhou Dynasty. It’s probably extinct now, so it’s not surprising that we don’t know what it is. But hey, look at this. It seems like this is only half of the bug’s body.”

After he finished speaking, he glanced at us and asked, “Where did the other half go?”

This bug was curled up in the part of the mask where the mouth was supposed to be. If we followed this line of thought, there was only one place where the other half could be. After thinking this, I subconsciously looked into the mummified corpse’s mouth—sure enough, I could see the other half of the bug attached to the tongue in that dark, gaping mouth. Its shriveled body looked like it went all the way down the corpse’s throat, but I couldn’t tell which organ it had entered. Since the fossilized bug looked very similar to the corpse’s atrophied muscles, it would be very easy to mistake it for the corpse’s shriveled tongue if you weren’t looking very carefully.

As soon as Master Liang saw this situation, his expression changed and he cried out, “Throw it away, throw it away! My God, throw it away quickly! This mask might be alive!” After saying this, he slapped the mask out of Lao Yang’s hand. It fell into the darkness below, hit a branch with a loud clanging sound, and then shattered into pieces.

Lao Yang was so startled by this sudden action that he lost his balance and almost fell off the branch. After regaining his footing, he asked Master Liang what was wrong with him, and why he was screaming about the mask being alive.

Master Liang coughed, suddenly looking very remorseful. He then scratched his head and frowned before saying, “I’m so ashamed. Why am I so stupid? Why didn’t I think of it earlier? This…bronze tree and this sacrificial method clearly aren’t related to our Han people. Ah, I’m so stupid. How could I be such an idiot?!”

“What the hell are you going on about?” Lao Yang asked angrily. “Why are you an idiot and what does that have to do with this mask? If you have something to say, hurry up and say it!”

Master Liang waved his hand and said, “Wait, please listen patiently. I have to start from the beginning, but how should I explain it? Let’s start with the blood sacrifices we were talking about before…”

Originally, blood sacrifices were mainly used in the sacrificial rituals of ethnic minorities in the Western Zhou Dynasty. Of course, the ethnic minorities at that time were completely different from how they were now, and most had disappeared or merged with the Han people. Large-scale blood sacrifices weren’t recorded in the Han people’s official history, but there were a few sporadic traces of it at some of the ethnic minorities’ archaeological sites. Unfortunately, there wasn’t more detailed information because the language and texts had been lost over time.

To the ethnic minorities, their places of worship were very sacred. People not only guarded them, but priests would also perform some kind of magic to protect their gods from outside disturbances. In the ethnic minorities’ legends, the process of casting such spells was very mysterious, but after being passed down to the present, such strange techniques changed and became the all-powerful Gu techniques⁽¹⁾ often seen in novels.

Master Liang also said that only a tenth of the original knowledge and skills regarding Gu techniques existed after the Wei, Jin, and Southern and Northern Dynasties, and only a tenth of that limited knowledge existed by the Song Dynasty.⁽²⁾ The Gu techniques before the Qin Dynasty were so powerful that they could have almost been considered superpowers, but every single method was derived from bugs. That was why Gu techniques at the time were called “Min Chong”.⁽³⁾ These masked monkeys, mummified corpses, and strange and mysterious events we had experienced so far were probably the product of an ancient Gu technique.

Master Liang had once heard of a Gu technique called “Deadly Dragon”,⁽⁴⁾ which could make a person very aggressive. After seeing how the bug hidden in the mouth cavity behind the mask went deep into the corpse’s throat, he theorized that it may have been an ancient prototype of the Deadly Dragon. This bug probably affected the host’s nervous system and forced them to attack any strangers. That might have been why the monkey returned to its normal habits and started instinctively moving away from us when I smashed its mask.

Deadly Dragons could reproduce in the host’s body, and once the host died, they would attach themselves to a certain place—such as the mouth cavity in the mask—and wait for the next host to approach so that they could parasitize it in some way.

These mummified corpses might have been hunters who happened to stumble across these dormant Deadly Dragons while hunting nearby. As a result, they must have fallen for the trap and were killed by this ancient sorcery.

Of course, there weren’t any records of this kind of thing at all so I didn’t know whether it was true or not, but it was an indisputable fact that there was a bug hidden in this mask that could penetrate deep into a person’s throat. This definitely wasn’t an ordinary situation, so we had to be careful.

When I heard Master Liang say this, my whole body broke out in goosebumps. In fact, before I came here, the materials Grandpa Qi had given me mentioned something similar. But at that time, I just skimmed over it while telling myself that it sounded like some plot from an American movie. I never in my wildest dreams thought that it might actually be real. Who would have thought that the old American science fiction films would take the technology of our ancestors and use it as the basis of a plot? I honestly didn’t know whether to be proud or ashamed.

I turned to look at the other mummies—they were still hanging there motionless, wearing those deathly pale masks with half-smiles carved onto them. It almost seemed like they were waiting for us to approach.

Lao Yang grimaced and anxiously said to Master Liang, “What you said is too terrifying. If this Deadly Dragon attaches itself to you, you’ll be fine as long as you tear it off immediately, right? There won’t be any hidden dangers?”

“It’s not like I’ve had any experience with it,” Master Liang said. “Deadly Dragons are far beyond the scope of my comprehension. But I think if one attaches itself to you, it’s practically impossible to pull it off easily. With this kind of thing, it’s better to prioritize prevention. Try not to get too close to these corpses. Uncle Tai fell from here and he was an old expert in this business. I doubt he would make a simple mistake like slipping and falling, so we need to be careful.”

Lao Yang frowned and opened his mouth like he wanted to say something, but he remained silent in the end. I asked him how much longer he thought it would take us to climb. If the upper half of this tree was full of dense branches like this, we’d probably die of exhaustion before we ever reached the top. Lao Yang assured me that the branches would be much sparser the higher we climbed. When he had climbed up this tree before, he only had a small flashlight that cast a dim light. He didn’t notice these mummified corpses, nor did any monkeys attack him, so he wasn’t sure how far he had climbed. But in any case, this tree was just like Mount Hua—you would never get lost as long as you kept climbing up.⁽⁵⁾

I didn’t think it was a good idea to stay here long, so I told them that we should finish climbing through this section first before discussing anything further. That fat middle-aged man who had also been in Master Liang’s group was probably somewhere above us. If he got to the top first, we would definitely be in trouble. In fact, all three of us might die if he was lying in wait, ready to ambush us.

“That makes sense,” Lao Yang said. “Give me a second. I’ll fire off one of those flares to see if he’s waiting to ambush us or not.” He then took out the flare gun, pointed it straight up, and fired.

When the flare flew to the top without hitting the ceiling, I felt my heart drop. This kind of flare could reach a height of more than two hundred meters, which meant that we still had that far to go. I couldn’t help but laugh bitterly in my heart. We really might die of exhaustion at this rate.

As the signal flare burst into flame, I looked up and saw that the branches really did become much sparser a little ways up. I couldn’t figure out why it was designed this way. From our vantage point down below, it was impossible to see everything in those two hundred meters, but I could still see something up there, although I couldn’t tell what it was.

When the flare reached its peak and fell, Lao Yang watched it for a while before saying, “It seems that the fat Guangdong boss isn’t waiting to ambush us. Maybe Uncle Tai was the only one to survive and make it this far. After all, that coffin array outside wasn’t easy to defeat… Hey, what are those things?”

When the signal flare was about sixty meters above us, we suddenly caught sight of many protrusions further up on the bronze trunk. When I took a closer look, I immediately felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up and my whole body broke out in a cold sweat. A little ways above us, there was a ten-meter-long section of the bronze trunk that was covered in faces—wait! Those weren’t faces but more of those weird masks.

<Chapter 25><Table of Contents><Chapter 27>

****

TN Notes:

(1) Gu techniques are basically like curses (you can think along the lines of voodoo). Gu was a venom-based poison associated with cultures of south China, particularly Nanyue. The traditional preparation of gu poison involved sealing several venomous creatures (e.g., centipede, snake, scorpion) inside a closed container, where they devoured one another and allegedly concentrated their toxins into a single survivor, whose body would be fed upon by larvae until consumed. The last surviving larva held the complex poison. Gu was used in black magic practices such as manipulating sexual partners, creating malignant diseases, and causing death. Info here.

(2) The Wei, Jin and North-South dynasties is a generic term used by Chinese historians when referring to the historical period of the six Han-ruled Chinese Dynasties (so around 220-589). Info here. Song Dynasty was from 960-1279. Info here.  

(3) Qin Dynasty was from 221 to 206 BC. I stuck with the pinyin for “Min Chong” (皿虫) because “bugs in a container” doesn’t sound like a cool curse technique in English and “contained bugs” sounded weird lol.  

(4) The Chinese characters for “deadly dragon” are 螭蛊 and the pinyin is “chi gu”. Chi means dragon with horns not yet grown while gu can mean legendary venomous insect or to poison someone. Since poison and venom are 2 different things and it’s hard to tell which ones these bugs use, I’m sticking with the licensed version and using “deadly dragon”.  

(5) Mount Hua in Shaanxi is the western mountain of the Five Sacred Mountains. The route up the mountain is considered one of the most dangerous in the world and the paths are narrow so it’s almost impossible to safely pass by someone (whether ascending or descending). Most of its summits were inaccessible throughout history so there obviously weren’t a lot of routes where you could get lost.

****

The raws for the next chapter are 8 pages so it’ll take me a few extra days. The author sure don’t write like he used to lol