Chapter 28 Indescribable Coffin

This tomb chamber was nearly ten times the size of the other chamber we saw before, with four giant carved pillars standing in each corner and numerous things piled everywhere on the ground. When the cold firework was lit, we found that they were actually mounds of gold and silver dishes, precious stones, glazed ceramics, pearls, and beautiful jade. They sparkled and glimmered so brightly in the light that it was hard to look at them directly.

“My God—” Fatty’s eyes were wider than a cow’s, and his face was twisted in shock.

I was so surprised that I could hardly stand. “What did I say?” Pan Zi suddenly murmured. “This is the Jurchens’ treasury, the annual contributions of the Southern Song Dynasty. I wasn’t fucking wrong, was I?”

I had been involved in this business for a long time, but all I usually saw were rusty copper and iron goods so I thought I wouldn’t escape the same fate this time. But who would have thought that there would be so many treasures in the imperial tomb of a small, weak, border country. Was it really as Pan Zi said, and all the treasures were brought here during the Jin Dynasty’s destruction? If so, then we wouldn’t have any problems getting rich—as long as you took just a few things out of here, you’d be living a lifetime of luxury.

Fatty wanted to roll around in the nearest pile of gold and silver dishes—I did too if we’re being honest—but I still maintained my sense of reason and held him back, telling him not to get carried away. Oftentimes, such gold dishes in tombs were doused in poison. It would be stupid to roll around in them and end up poisoning yourself to death, so it was better not to touch them.

But while I managed to grab Fatty, I wasn’t able to stop Pan Zi in time—he had already rushed to the nearest pile of gold dishes and grabbed a handful of them, staring at them in awed disbelief. His face looked golden in the reflected light and he was trembling all over. Then he lost his grip, and those things fell through his fingers, landing on the ground with a metallic clang.

Seeing how Pan Zi was fine after grabbing a large handful of those gold dishes, I knew right away that they weren’t covered in poison. Suddenly feeling relieved, I couldn’t help but go over and grab a handful myself. That heavy feeling almost made me laugh uncontrollably. I didn’t know who said that humans’ love for gold was written in our genes—almost like an innate, irresistible instinct—but he was so fucking right.

Even I, who appeared calm and dignified on the surface, felt my heart race when I saw all that gold in front of me. I might have tried to lie to myself, but I knew that I couldn’t—I liked these things.

We all immediately forgot everything and ran to the nearest pile, picking up a bunch of things before running to the next pile. I picked up a gem-encrusted headband and examined it carefully—these things were all genuine, high-quality goods. Even just one item would be considered a treasure for any museum. And since there were so many here, we could casually take whatever we wanted and step on the rest without having any regrets.

Fatty had already dumped all of his equipment out of his bag and started shoving some of the treasures inside. But once it was full, he seemed to change his mind and dumped them all out before stuffing other treasures inside, making inarticulate noises the whole time.

But we soon found that no matter how much we filled our bags, we couldn’t take even a fraction of this treasure away. As soon as we collected all the treasures we could carry, we’d immediately find something better and more valuable to replace them. But after doing that, we’d find treasures that we had never seen before. It was impossible to find a good place to start.

Things were crazy for a long time. It wasn’t until we exhausted ourselves and finally calmed down from the extreme excitement that I finally realized that something was wrong—I hadn’t heard Shunzi’s voice since we entered.

I wiped the sweat from my brow, stood up from the pile of jewels, and looked around with my flashlight. Shunzi was standing on a pile of gold dishes close by, looking down at something.

I walked over and asked him what he was doing. Was he not excited to see all that gold?

Instead of responding, he simply pointed downward. I used my flashlight to see where he was pointing and found that in the middle of several piles of gold, surrounded by countless treasures, were several people lying motionless, seemingly already dead.

I was startled. The excitement just now suddenly disappeared and my whole body broke out in goose bumps.

Fatty and Pan Zi, seeing that Shunzi and I were just standing there in a daze, thought that we had found some new treasure and immediately rushed over. But they were surprised to find that it was a bunch of bodies.

We walked down into the depression and took a closer look with our flashlights, finding that they were indeed corpses, and they had been dead for a while. Their skin was frozen and dried to the point that it looked like an orange peel. But the strange thing was, these people were all wearing decayed woolen coats—modern clothes—and around them were several old-fashioned military backpacks that had rotted into shapeless forms.

“What’s going on?” Fatty asked in surprise. “Who are these people? Our colleagues?”

I shook my head, put on my gloves, and rifled through those people’s backpacks and clothes. This kind of outfit was popular in the 1980s and 1990s, so now only people in their forties or fifties in Northeastern rural areas would wear it. We had seen many respectable old men in the mountain villages dressed like this, but judging from the degree of decay, these people should have died somewhere between five and twenty years ago.

“Could they be herb pickers or hunters?” Pan Zi asked. “Maybe they accidentally wandered in here from Changbai Mountain and couldn’t get out and died?”

“Not likely.” I tore the clothes off one of the corpses—it was female—and looked at the old-fashioned earrings hanging from its ears and the rusted watch on its wrist. “You see this? This is a Titoni watch, an older model.⁽¹⁾ At that time, not even local mayors would have been able to buy one. This woman came from an influential background; she doesn’t look like someone from the countryside.”

“Maybe they were tourists who got lost back in the eighties?” Pan Zi suggested. “They might have been the ones who carved those marks we were following.”

I shook my head. They couldn’t have left those marks, because I had seen one of the marks in the undersea tomb. This meant that it must have been carved by someone who was related to this matter—either A Ning, someone in her team, or Poker-Face. While it was possible that these people were simply lost tourists, it was hard to believe that they had gotten lost and ended up in a place like this. Unless they had a considerable amount of courage, ordinary people wouldn’t dare to go down into an underground tomb passage.

But if this woman came from an influential background—for example, she was the daughter of some leader, or had some connections with the local officials—then her disappearance may have caused quite a stir in the local area. Considering how Shunzi wasn’t that young, I figured he may have heard something about it at that time, so I turned to ask him if there had been any sensational disappearances here during the past five to twenty years.

But when I turned around, I found that Shunzi hadn’t come down with us. Instead, he was still standing on the pile of gold with a stiff expression on his face.

I suddenly wondered if the corpse fetus had returned and wrapped its tongue around Shunzi’s neck, just like it did with Fatty. But when I looked, I didn’t see anything around his neck. I did notice that he was trembling a little bit, which suddenly made me realize that something was wrong.

“What’s the matter?” Fatty asked him. “Are you afraid of the dead? But I don’t remember you being scared just now.”

Shunzi ignored Fatty and walked down into the depression, his footsteps heavy. Then he moved towards one of the corpses and squatted down, his body so tense that he almost fell over.

I suddenly realized what was going on.

Fatty was about to go up and smack him on the back, but I waved my hand and stopped him. “What’s wrong with him?” Fatty asked me softly. “Is he possessed?”

I shook my head. If my guess was correct, then these bodies were probably the team Shunzi’s father had led into Changbai Mountain ten years ago, and the body Shunzi was looking at right now was his father. That was why he was so tense.

Who would have thought that he’d actually find his father’s body after following us all the way here…

But was this truly a coincidence or something else? Did that team from ten years ago really wander in here by mistake or was there something else going on that we knew nothing about?

<Chapter 27><Table of Contents><Chapter 29>

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TN Notes:

(1) Titoni is a Swiss watch brand usually in the mid-price range. Titoni Ltd. is a Swiss watchmaker that was founded in 1919 by Fritz Schluep in the Swiss “watch town” of Grenchen. The company is now owned by the third generation of its founding family. Here’s their website.

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Can’t believe I jinxed myself last week. Said work was slow and then the universe came in and was like “Hold my beer. Shit’s about to get real.” :(´ཀ`」 ∠):