Chapter 5 Fetus Cave’s Spirit Palace

We gathered up our equipment, put away the smokeless stoves, and folded all the picks and shovels. Everyone seemed to have a tacit understanding because this was all done very quickly, and soon, we were all packed up and gathered around the hole we had dug.

This was typical behavior when people had a common goal, but in fact, it was really kind of childish—no matter how fast we gathered everything together, it had nothing to do with whether we could go down earlier or not. This was because none of us had ever encountered an imperial tomb before, so we still had to go through the usual process of familiarizing ourselves with it. But at that time, there was a feeling that we couldn’t let any of the others take the lead.

As a result, a ridiculous scene took place: after surrounding the hole, everyone suddenly didn’t know what to do. It reminded me of a scene where a bunch of people had a long discussion on where to go to have fun, but once they decided, they realized that no one knew the way. As we stood around the hole, we all looked at each other in dismay, feeling a little bewildered.

I looked into the hole and analyzed our situation. Almost everything was fine except for one fatal problem: we were positioned directly above the abyss. Not only was there a drop of more than a hundred meters separating us from the fetus cave where the spirit palace was located, but there was also a horizontal gap of more than twenty meters. Although we had enough ropes to go down, we couldn’t cross that twenty-meter gap—even swinging over wouldn’t work.

Chen Pi Ah Si, who was sitting behind us, saw us acting like this and sneered, “Bunch of good-for-nothings.” Then he stood up and told us to get out of the way.

I secretly smiled to myself—it was inevitable that Chen Pi Ah Si’s “old man mentality” would rear its head. We had been following his lead from the start, but after Fatty showed his skills just now, Chen Pi Ah Si must have felt annoyed. Then, he saw us acting like this and couldn’t help but mock us to restore his position. This kind of behavior was normal for many elderly people.

As we made room for him, Monk Hua laughed at himself and said, “Boss, we young guys were so overwhelmed with joy that we were standing here in a daze. We’ve never encountered such a big find before. This tomb… how do you think we should enter it?”

Chen Pi Ah Si squatted down with Ye Cheng’s help, looked inside the hole, and said, “No matter how the circumstances change, the essence is still the same—caution is valued above everything else. Someone needs to climb along these wooden pillars supporting the ice dome, reach a spot above the cave, and then use a rope to descend to the roof of the outer building.”

We looked at the wooden pillars covered in ice. Each pillar was more than a hundred meters long, which meant that they weren’t made from a single tree trunk but must be several logs connected together with wooden wedges. Such a structure wouldn’t have any problems withstanding pressure, but I wasn’t sure if it could bear the additional weight of a person. If it didn’t work, then we were screwed—after the wooden beam collapsed, it would hit the other beams as it fell, and the whole ice dome may collapse. This method was very risky.

But at that time, everyone was too eager to worry about it, and it seemed that there was no better alternative.

Only Pan Zi was suitable for such a dangerous job. Since nobody else met the skill or weight requirements, he had no other choice but to take the lead here.

As we tied a rope around his waist and gave him some lightweight equipment, Pan Zi looked a little excited. Chen Pi Ah Si handed him a flask of wine and let him take a sip to calm down while saying to him, “Don’t get too excited. Our goal isn’t here. Be careful while you’re down there.”

Pan Zi nodded, took a deep breath, and carefully climbed into the ice well. He then threw a flying tiger claw at one of the wooden beams on the side and waited for it to wrap around the beam before climbing onto the rope. His body swayed as he clung to the rope, but like a special forces soldier, he quickly slid down to the lower beams.

As soon as he stepped onto the wooden beam, it made a series of cracking sounds like ice breaking. We all collectively held our breath. Pan Zi turned pale and froze, fearing that the beam would disintegrate and break under his feet.

Fortunately, after waiting for more than ten minutes, the cracking sounds finally stopped, and the surroundings became quiet again—it seemed that equilibrium had been restored even with the additional weight on the beam.

I thought that maybe I was worrying too much. After all, the ice dome above was so heavy that there was a ton of pressure being exerted on the wooden support structure below. We were like ants in comparison, so there shouldn’t be any big problems.

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief, but the scare definitely brought us back to our senses and dampened the inexplicable excitement we felt.

Pan Zi continued moving forward, walking even more carefully than before so that it almost looked like he was dancing to an extremely slow beat. Our hearts beat in time with every step he took. After much difficulty, he finally reached the cliff at the end of the wooden beam. More than a hundred meters below that was where the cave was.

We tried to help illuminate his path with our flashlights, but the light was too diffused because of the distance. Pan Zi took out five or six glow sticks, activated them, and then threw them down one by one.

Several specks of light fell into the darkness, some disappearing into the abyss like meteors, while others fell more than ten meters, hit the building’s roof tiles, and bounced a few times before coming to a stop. At the same time, the chemicals in the glow sticks reacted to the violent vibrations, and the light became brighter and brighter, vaguely illuminating the situation inside the ice dome.

Pan Zi then dropped another rope down to the tiled roof below, and then quickly slid down it.

Seeing him step onto the roof tiles so steadily had us all feeling relieved. At this time, Pan Zi made several gestures at us, which probably meant that it was safe for us to come down.

We all started to get excited again. Monk Hua was the second one to go down, with the rest of us carefully following behind him one at a time, copying the others’ movements. In the end, we all managed to descend to the tiled roof without any danger.

Crossing the hundred-meter wooden beam and then climbing down the hundred-meter rope was no joke. After I made it down to the glazed roof tiles, my legs were so weak that Pan Zi had to help hold me up. As I recalled what it was like walking on this icy roof, my legs involuntarily weakened even more.

As seven flashlights swept the surrounding area, we found that the cliff within this ice dome stood at a steep thirty-degree angle and the cave was very deep. We could also see that the spirit palace had been built straight into the mountain, its top almost flush with the top of the cliff. Unfortunately, we couldn’t see what the situation was like inside. The tile roof we were standing on was the roof of the outermost building, which was also known as the “main hall”. The cornices on the flying eaves all had phoenix and dragon head carvings on them, there were chiwen⁽¹⁾ on both sides of the roof ridge, the tiles were yellow, and the roof beams were red—everything had an imperial air to it. We all stood in scattered positions on the roof, making it feel like we were in a Stephen Chow version of the “Decisive Battle on the Top of the Forbidden City”.⁽²⁾

Fatty wanted to lift a tile to take look at what was inside, but found that the tile and roof beam were so frozen that they couldn’t be broken off at all. In the end, he had no other choice but to give up. One by one, we carefully grabbed the dragon heads on the cornices and then used a rope to descend to the platform outside the main entrance of the spirit palace.

The platform was similar to a sacrificial altar, and the ground was covered in stone slabs. The year-round cold made the stones so brittle that they made a crunching sound whenever we stepped on them, as if they may break at any time. This must have been the end of a plank road that was built into the mountain at that time, but now it had already been destroyed. On one side was a dark abyss, while on the left and right sides were rows of copper ding⁽³⁾ covered in ice shards. They seemed to be full of ancient black ashes from some unknown thing.

The style of the copper ding and the appearance of the palace all had very obvious Han-style characteristics. It seemed that when Wang Zanghai accepted the contract to work on the project here, his design couldn’t go beyond the limits of his own nationality or the restrictions that the era imposed. Or, maybe Eastern Xia’s national strength at that time was so limited that they could only make do by plundering things from the Han border.

On the other side of the platform was the entrance to the spirit hall, in front of which stood a tortoise with a blank stele mounted on it. Behind the stele was the white jade door of the spirit palace. It was almost as tall as three people and wide enough to allow two people to pass through at the same time. There were brass handles on the door that were designed to look like tiger heads, and many strange human-faced birds soaring in the clouds had also been carved on the door, but I didn’t know what they were called. Water must have previously been poured all over the door seams and shaft because now the door panels on both sides were frozen into one solid block of ice.

As I stood there and looked at everything in the faint light shining through the ice dome overhead, I felt as if my eyes were covered in a layer of fog and everything I saw returned to the state it was in back when this place was first built. It was a kind of feeling that was difficult to express in words.

Monk Hua wanted to take some photos first, so the rest of us decided to take a break and look around. Ye Cheng, while walking around, saw the abyss below and said with emotion, “I really don’t understand why King Wannu insisted on building a tomb in this place where birds don’t even shit. Isn’t building it on flat ground good enough? Why did he have to torment people?”

“An emperor’s way of thinking is different from that of ordinary people,” I said. “Maybe it had something to do with their religion. In Tibet, many temples are built in places that are difficult for ordinary people to get to. The purpose of this is to get closer to the spirit of heaven. It’s something which ordinary people like us can’t understand.”

Fatty shook his head in disagreement, “I feel that the reason why this tomb was built here is very simple—he just didn’t want others to climb up here. There must be something good in this imperial tomb. That old guy, King Wannu, must have hidden his greatest treasure here and didn’t want anyone to find it after he died. But we’ll teach him a lesson this time.” With that said, he took out a crowbar and went with Lang Feng to pry open the palace doors.

I found it a little funny—Fatty was such a practical person. If he were an emperor, I didn’t know where he would build his tomb.

There was no stone bar⁽⁴⁾ behind the jade door, so when they applied pressure to the crowbar and cracked the ice on the door shafts on both sides, we were able to use a chisel to smash the ice in the seams and open the door a little bit. A black powder came gushing out, and we all scrambled to dodge it, but Monk Hua said that it was nothing to worry about—it was just some moisture-proof paint that had gotten stuck to the back of the door and turned into powder after it froze.

Although we had managed to crack open the door, we couldn’t open it any further than that—it seemed that the door shaft was completely rusted. I took a look inside with my flashlight, but I couldn’t see anything in the empty hall, as if the darkness inside was absorbing all the light.

Ye Cheng couldn’t wait to go in, but Fatty immediately stopped him and turned to Poker-Face, “Little Brother, please take a look first. Are there any mechanisms inside?”

Poker-Face touched the door, and then looked at the carvings on it for a long time before shaking his head to show that he wasn’t sure. “Follow behind me and don’t talk.”

We had already reached a consensus that we would obey whatever this man said, so Fatty and I nodded vigorously as everyone took out their own self-defense items.

Poker-Face turned and stepped over the knee-high threshold, taking the first step inside. As we all followed closely behind him and nervously crossed the threshold into the waiting darkness, an extremely strange sensation suddenly came over me.

It suddenly occurred to me that we may be the first people in nearly a thousand years to step foot in this place. I started to wonder what kinds of things had happened in this huge palace that no one had seen for the past thousand years.

<Chapter 4><Table of Contents><Chapter 6>

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TN Notes:

(1) Chiwen is a Chinese dragon, 1 of the 9 sons of the Dragon King. He is depicted in imperial roof decorations and other ornamental motifs in traditional Chinese architecture and art. He’s said to be a dragon that likes to swallow things, so his image is placed on both ends of the ridgepoles of roofs (to swallow all evil influences).

(2) Stephen Chow is a Hong Kong filmmaker, former actor, and comedian. He made a lot of parody movies. “Decisive Battle on the Top of the Forbidden City” was a 2000 Hong Kong wuxia comedy film about a duel that’s meant to take place on the night of the full moon at the highest rooftop of the Forbidden Palace. The official English title for it was actually shortened to “The Duel”. The movie was adapted from “Juezhan Qianhou” of Gu Long’s Lu Xiaofeng novel series (it’s the 3^rd one on the wiki page).

(3) Ding are ancient cooking cauldrons with two looped handles and three or four legs.

(4) Can also be called “zilaishi” (自来石) or a “holding-stone” I guess. It’s stuck behind the door to prevent somebody from opening the door from outside. Think of it like a giant wedge.

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Lord have mercy, we’re finally in! Just took over a month. The raws for the next chapter are 6 pages so update will take me a few days (last chapter was 5 if that gives you any idea). I guess I didn’t realize how long this book is compared to the others…