Chapter 9 Traveling Notes

The new head lama was probably in his eighties, and I realized that I had seen him before. He wasn’t the one who came with Chen Xuehan on the motorcycle to bring us the news, but I knew that he was a lama I wasn’t very familiar with at that time.

“Nothing strange has happened.” After we sat down, the head lama gave Poker-Face a status report.

The system here was similar to the Western Archives in that it mainly monitored various events in the western region. But no major events had happened over the years, only the occasional small incident here and there. According to the head lama, the new Deren could handle those himself.

“We’re just traveling,” Poker-Face said to the head lama, who nodded and said, “It seems that the distinguished guest can finally take a break.”

As the three of us exchanged a glance, the head lama continued, “It’s truly a pity that there aren’t many old friends left. When do you plan on leaving for Kangbaluo? Deren can meet you there.”

Poker-Face didn’t answer and just looked at me.

“When we want to go, we’ll head there on our own,” I said to the head lama.

“The road is still not easy to walk.”

“How’s the weather lately?”

“It’s been snowing rather strangely,” the head lama said. “There may be news tomorrow. If the snow stops, you can head out.”

When I nodded, the head lama looked at me and said, “Since you’re here, I have something I need your help with. Can you come with me?”

Seeing the puzzled look on my face, the head lama added, “We’ve discovered something in the mountain behind the temple. The patriarch must decide how to deal with it.”

The three of us looked at each other again, and Fatty winked at me, “Sounds exciting. Let’s go and take a look.”

So, the three of us followed the old lama out. We silently passed through the crowd and walked to the back of the temple.

Before liberation, it was said that there was a sky burial platform at the back of the temple, but it was later abandoned. This happened so long ago that proof of its existence was long gone. I hadn’t been there before, but I also heard that the back mountain was full of several small caves, where practitioners could practice their cultivation.

It wasn’t easy moving through the temple since we had to go up and down a lot of steps, and many of the rooms were dilapidated or in disrepair. In fact, Jila Temple had the funds to repair them, but the lamas didn’t think it was necessary. As a result, many areas were left completely deserted, which gave them a bleak and gloomy atmosphere.

We went out through the back door—in fact, there really wasn’t a back door—and came to a towering cliff, which had very small steps only about half a foot wide carved into the stone. Although I called them steps, they were really no more than small grooves that could fit half of a person’s foot. There was a thirteen-meter-high wooden scaffold that stood against the cliff and could be used to climb up to these small grooves. In fact, if the scaffold was removed, it would be absolutely impossible for people to climb up to the grooves. As I looked, I found that the steps stretched about thirty meters up the cliff

To be clear, the surrounding area was nothing but steep cliffs with overhangs cut at an angle of more than ninety degrees, so the area was completely isolated. The only passable area was that thirty-meter stretch from the temple to the cliff, which meant that it was impossible to reach this place from any other area.

After more than thirty meters, we had basically reached the lower part of the mountain where Jila was located. Of course, there was still a long way to go to get to the top of the mountain, and there weren’t any roads here, but there were many mountain dens—i.e., small caves—in the area.

In fact, no one knew how many mountain dens there were because the snow stayed all year round, and even during the hottest part of the season, the area was covered in snow dens. No one knew whether these were actually cave entrances hidden under the snow, but they did know that at least two or three appeared on a daily basis.

The head lama walked fast and soon led us into a cave. The entrance was low so we had to bend over as we moved forward. We could see that there were a lot of daily necessities inside that had obviously belonged to modern people, but they looked so decayed that it was obvious no one had used them for a long time.

“This doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re still alive,” the head lama said to us. “Some people go up the mountain for a long time but don’t come back down. They might have died more than ten years ago.”

“So you’re saying that when I arrived here for the first time back then, all these people might have already been dead?” I asked.

“It’s possible, but we don’t know for sure. Even if we do an in-depth investigation, we probably won’t know whether they’re still alive or not.”

As we walked further inside, we found a loess wall at the back of the cave. A stove had been built into the loss, but it was broken now, revealing a hole in the wall.

In other words, this had originally been the end of the cave, but someone had broken through the loess wall and discovered that there was still space for another room behind it.

When we bowed our heads and went in, I found that the hole was relatively deep and the walls were surrounded by wooden beams.

These beams were quite large and seemed to be smeared in some kind of oil for preservation.

“This seems to be wood left over from when the temple was built. It’s very old,” the head lama said to Poker-Face.

Fatty touched the wood and suddenly sniffed the air, “No, there’s something else in here.”

With that said, he immediately walked further inside. I touched the big beams, thinking about how such large trees could be used as building materials back in those days. The trees must have grown for several hundreds of years.

“Were these beams processed before liberation?”

“Long before that, probably sometime during the late Qing Dynasty,” the head lama said.

“Mr. Naïve,” Fatty suddenly called from deeper inside the cave. “Come and take a look at this.”

I walked in the direction of his voice, and after about two or three minutes, I finally saw the end of the cave. As I got closer, I suddenly felt the temperature of the whole cave rise rapidly. Then, a hot spring pool appeared in my line of sight. It wasn’t big—probably about fifty square meters—but the most amazing thing was that I could see sunlight streaming down from overhead.

I looked up and saw that instead of a ceiling hanging above this hot spring pool, there was a clear view of the sky.

Fatty squatted down and put his hand in the water, “It’s a little hot, but it’s ok.”

<Chapter 8><Table of Contents><Chapter 10>

****

Pic added 12/3/2022 (fan translation courtesy of me).