Chapter 64 Bronze Bridge

At this point in the story, Black Glasses stopped and looked back at me with what appeared to be a meaningful gaze.

We had been crawling for so long that we had lost our sense of time, and I was sweating all over. After stopping, I leaned against the nearby wall and found that there was water dripping down from the rocks so I went up and drank a few drops.

Black Glasses was able to control his body temperature well, so although he was covered in sweat, he wasn’t sweating profusely like I was. After I finished drinking, he used a canteen to collect the water.

“A bronze bridge?” I asked him.

“Uh-huh.”

“You could have just talked about the bronze bridge. Why did you have to give such a long introduction?” I asked him. Although I was very interested in that girl, I didn’t recall hearing anything about her in Chen Pi Ah Si’s legend, which meant that she must not have come to a particularly good end.

Based on Black Glasses’ description, this girl must have been really likable; I didn’t want to hear that such a person came to a bad end.

At the bottom of the Kunlun Mountains, I just wanted peace in the world.

“Didn’t you want a good story?” Black Glasses asked.

I didn’t have the strength to keep chatting with him, so I simply asked, “Is this bronze bridge the kind of bronze I’m thinking of?”

“Of course.”

“That kind of bronze is a meteorite. I speculated before that the meteorite fragments fell at certain locations and were carved into various things, such as the bronze door and this bridge. Is that right?”

“No, this bridge should be made of fragments that were collected from all over, melted down, cast, and then carved,” he said. “Later, they came to an agreement and their group went down to the depths of the tusi’s tomb and saw an amazing sight. There was a cliff with nothing on the opposite side, and on that cliff was a bronze beam bridge that extended all the way into the void beyond the cliff. The other end couldn’t be seen at all. If you looked closely, you could see that it was actually a stone beam bridge, but the structural parts of the whole bridge were all bronze, so that was why the bridge looked like it was made of bronze. In addition, the whole underground part of the tomb was on their side.”

I tried my best to imagine what it would look like, but Black Glasses wasn’t as accurate at describing things as I was, so I only had a rough idea that the deep part of this ancient tomb was built on an underground cliff, which was different from the underground ravine we saw before. Or, it was an underground ravine that was so huge, you couldn’t see the other side. But a bridge had been built from the tomb out into the void.

I was familiar with mechanical engineering so I knew that this bridge couldn’t be very long, because the torque would cause anything protruding from a cliff to break once it reached a certain distance.

To solve this problem, modern cable-stayed technology⁽¹⁾ had to be used. Of course, cable-stayed technology wasn’t really a modern technology, because in the jungles of Indonesia, there was evidence of ancient cable-stayed bridges that used bamboo as cables.

If this bridge was made of stone and bronze, then it could only be held up by steel cables, but in Black Glasses’ narrative, there weren’t any steel cables at all.

That left me with only two possible inferences: either the bridge had only been partially built and was actually a half bridge, or the bridge had piers, but they were hidden in such a way that you couldn’t see them.

Physics could definitely explain metaphysics. This was my belief.

I continued to ask Black Glasses, “Was this ancient tomb’s coffin not at their location? Were they unable to find the main coffin?”

Black Glasses nodded, which made me feel even more certain that this bridge was only a half bridge. Instead of connecting to the opposite side, it probably just stretched out for a distance, and the main coffin was at the end of the unfinished bridge.

This bridge was similar to the steps to ascend to heaven, where the owner of the tomb would be interred at the end of the steps. This was a kind of feng shui array, which was called: the Golden Cicada Exhales on the Three Mothers’ Imaginary Fetus Array.⁽²⁾

This bridge was like a frog’s tongue that would shoot out to eat a flying insect in the air. But the shape of the bridge and its unfinished end had no intention of rolling back, so it was basically equivalent to sending the insect in the mouth out with the tongue and into the void.

And the coffin was at the end of the tongue, which just so happened to be the resting position.

It’s difficult to explain the resting position, but you can think of it like this: generally speaking, according to feng shui, the dragon vein comes from the Himalayan and Kunlun Mountains, and goes all the way to the local area. The dragon’s qi, full of warmth, becomes the Ancestral Mountain, which is followed by the Parents Mountain. The fetal position is just below the Parents Mountain, and below that is the resting position, which is similar to the position of the fetus in the Parents Mountain. If there is a “fetus” in the fetal position, the qi will flow right towards the resting position.⁽³⁾

This resting position is full of vital qi, which makes it the most crucial position in the whole dragon vein. That’s why you will often find the biggest tree in that place.

The Parents Mountain was originally two mountains, but in the so-called “Three Mothers’ Imaginary Fetus”, these two mountains become three, and all of them are mother mountains. The yin qi formed by the Three Mothers Mountain converges, and when it reaches its limit, it gives birth to yang. The self-forming yin and yang together form the fetus, which becomes the fetal position.

This fetus is transformed by the yin qi that was formed from pure yin. The yin qi, which is spit out just above the coffin so the body inside becomes immersed in it, cuts off all vitality and ensures that death is complete.

(A person is not completely dead after death. There are still many stages of life after death, and it’s only when they reach the absolute end that they disappear completely.)

Behind this was a void. In fact, there was no Three Mothers Mountain, so this fetal position was imaginary. It was an “invisible dragon vein” invented by the so-called feng shui masters from other places. That was why I personally believed that the “Three Mothers’ Imaginary Fetus” was a derivative of metaphysics that was mainly used to collect money.

“The main purpose of this kind of feng shui array is to have the ancestors’ good karma pass directly on to their descendants in one go instead of slowly transferring it. It’s basically equivalent to directly transferring all of the inheritance,” I said. “Whose family’s children were so impatient and how big of a business did they want that they directly cashed out all of their blessings at once?”

<Chapter 63><Table of Contents><Chapter 65>

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TN Notes:

(1) A cable-stayed bridge has one or more towers (or pylons), from which cables support the bridge deck. A distinctive feature are the cables or stays, which run directly from the tower to the deck, normally forming a fan-like pattern or a series of parallel lines (it’s different from modern suspension bridges, where the cables supporting the deck are suspended vertically from the main cable, anchored at both ends of the bridge and running between the towers.)

(2) Pretty sure NPSS made this array up because I wasn’t finding anything on it.

(3) Seph found a visual that might help:

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SUPER huge shoutout to Seph for tackling that feng shui crap that never makes any sense.

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