Chapter 29 Expedition From Ten Years Ago

Shunzi didn’t end up crying, but after that brief moment of shock, he calmed down and started to fix his father’s hair. But even though he was very careful, the corpse was so badly dehydrated that its hair fell out as soon as he touched it. After fixing it as best he could, his father ended up looking like Ge You.⁽¹⁾ I knew that this guy must’ve had a heavy heart—he had probably spent the last ten years hoping that his father was still alive somewhere, but now that hope had completely shattered. He must have been feeling a complex mixture of relief and devastation.

Fatty and Pan Zi didn’t understand what was going on and looked at him in confusion. I was confident that my guess was correct, so I quickly told them about it.

Fatty shed a few tears as he listened, “My old man also went early. For the sake of the country, he gave his whole life to the revolution but was labeled a counter-revolutionary in the end. Shunzi, I understand how you’re feeling right now, but you have to look on the bright side—after ten years, you two have finally reunited. The heavens answered your prayers. Cheer up.”

When Fatty started crying, Pan Zi’s eyes also became watery and he said, “Alright, that’s enough. At least you guys had a father. I never even saw mine. Master Three has always been like a father to me, but now I don’t even know if he’s dead or alive.”

“Are you guys sick or something?” I asked. “Shunzi didn’t even cry, so why are you more upset than he is? Let’s see if we can figure out why they died here.”

Since these people were able to enter this place, there was no reason why they couldn’t get out, which meant that something must have happened for them to die here like this. And since we were also in this tomb chamber right now, I didn’t want to follow in their footsteps. But the appearance of these corpses was a little strange—Shunzi’s father was just a guide so there wasn’t anything suspicious about him, but according to Shunzi, the others insisted on entering the mountain even though it wasn’t the right season for it. If they weren’t ordinary tourists, did they have some ulterior motive for entering the mountain at that time? Was it pure coincidence that they ended up here? I was dying to know.

We rummaged through their backpacks, finding everything from a rotten book that was falling apart, notebooks, pencils, rawhide ropes, army tents, old flashlights, an old Swiss army knife that still worked, the 1986 edition of the Korean-Chinese dictionary, bubble gum, old lighters, canteens, lipstick, sanitary napkins, a medical kit (it contained gauze, ethyl alcohol, cotton, and several types of tinctures), military compasses, and so on.   

The book turned out to be “How the Steel Was Tempered”⁽²⁾, but it was in such bad shape that I didn’t dare flip through it. I knew that as soon as I tried, it would definitely fall apart. The notebooks, which contained old work notes, looked just like the ones my father used to use back when I was in elementary school. There were three of them in total, and as I looked through them, I found that they contained some phone numbers and account transactions (at that time, this was exactly what notebooks were used for). Unfortunately, there was nothing to tell us who these people were, but the most interesting thing was that none of them were carrying ID cards on them.

Once we lined everything up, we found that these people had basically been fully equipped. Although the equipment wasn’t as advanced as ours, they shouldn’t have had any problems leaving this place. No matter how dangerous the situation was, they should have been able to handle it with this equipment.

That’s odd, I thought to myself. Assuming these people could leave, then whatever happened to them should have occurred on the way out. But it looks like they sat here, waiting for death. Were they too reluctant to part with the treasure here? No, that’s even more unlikely.

In that case, was there something strange here that caused their deaths? I couldn’t help but shiver as I was suddenly overcome with the feeling that something was in the tomb chamber, watching us.

Fatty, standing off the side, looked at the things we had lined up and suddenly clicked his tongue, “Comrades, did any of you notice that something’s missing here?”

We had all been standing around thinking, but after hearing Fatty’s question, we carefully looked everything over again. In my opinion, they had everything they needed, and nothing seemed to be missing. “What’s missing?” I asked him.

“Food!” Fatty said. “There’s no food! None of them have food in their bags.”

As soon as he said that, we all shuddered and looked at the equipment again. Sure enough, the only things in front of us were equipment; there was nothing that could be used to satisfy our hunger.

“There really is no food,” I said in surprise, “which means that these people didn’t die from an accident. If they did, there would have been some food left over. It can’t be a coincidence that none of them have any food. Did they…eat all the food and starve to death here?”

But that didn’t make any sense either. Once the food ran out, a person with a normal build could last a month as long as there was water (if you’re over 2.27 meters tall and only weigh about forty-five kilograms, don’t come arguing to me). As long as these people wanted to get out, they shouldn’t have starved to death here. But if they did, then there was only one explanation—they couldn’t get out.

As soon as I thought this, I suddenly remembered how the doors disappeared in the undersea tomb. I immediately jumped up and ran up the nearest pile of gold dishes to look at the tomb door we came through—it was still there; it hadn’t disappeared. I breathed a sigh of relief, but that lingering fear that the door would suddenly disappear left me feeling a little unsettled.

Fatty knew what I was worried about and said to me, “If that situation happens again, there’s nothing to worry about—we have explosives this time.” It was only after hearing him say that that I felt a lot more at ease.

“I have a theory,” Panzi said after thinking it over. Then he turned to Shunzi and asked, “Do you know how many people were on the expedition team your father led?”

“My mother said there were only seven people, but that’s just who she saw. There might have been others she didn’t see, so there’s no telling how many people there actually were. But in any case, my father left with seven people.”

“There are… one, two, three, four, five, six—a total of six bodies here. At least two people are missing,” Pan Zi said. “Maybe those two became greedy at the sight of all this treasure and killed the others before running away?”

I shook my head in disagreement. None of these people showed signs of violence. Based on their positions and expressions at their time of death, they simply lay down next to each other. There also didn’t seem to be any signs of poison or anything to indicate that they had been killed by some external force. But the thing that really bothered me the most was the fact that their expressions were all the same—they all showed a deep sense of despair, as if they were trapped in a hopeless situation.

This was the first time I had seen corpses like this, and I couldn’t calm down. I had a hunch that what happened here back then wasn’t so simple, but the more I speculated, the more I felt an indescribable coldness and uneasiness settle around me. That creepy feeling that something was watching us from among the piles of gold suddenly became stronger and stronger.

I pondered over it for a long time, but still couldn’t come up with anything worthwhile. Fatty and the others became impatient and moved to start looking through the piles of treasure again, but I calmly stopped them, refusing to let the matter go. I reminded them that these people had died among the piles here, so it was better not to move anything. Plus, we shouldn’t forget our purpose for coming here.

As soon as I said that, they finally seemed to come to their senses, and Fatty said, “I was so blinded by all this treasure that I forgot why we came here. The marks led us here, and the door was blown open, but the inside is just a treasure room. There’s no sign of a coffin at all. I think I finally know what that last mark means—there are grave goods here. The mark must have been left by A Ning and the others so that their second team can take all the treasure away.”

“The door may have been blasted open by these dead people,” I argued. “But this is just a tomb chamber for grave goods, so the coffin definitely wouldn’t be here. We’ll have to take that other tomb passage.”

Although it wasn’t really logical, I had long thought that this tomb passage was the main one that led to the coffin chamber. This stemmed from my assumption that the entrance to the tomb itself was on one side of the corridor, while the center of the underground palace was on the other. But now it seemed that this wasn’t the case at all. Did that mean that we still hadn’t reached the main tomb passage yet? How big was this underground palace? Surely it wasn’t a labyrinth…When I thought of this, I suddenly recalled those marks we had been following. Were they really left here because the layout of the underground palace was too complicated?

“What about all this treasure?” Fatty said a little reluctantly.

“Just pick something,” I told him. “Anything you take out of here will be enough to set you up for half a lifetime. Don’t be so greedy. We can always come back in the future.”

Fatty looked at the corpses again, obviously feeling a little uneasy, but it was impossible to leave here empty-handed. He eventually settled on a few small gold dishes and put them in his pocket. Shunzi insisted on bringing his father’s body with him and used his backpack to secure the corpse to his back. Since the body was so dehydrated, it didn’t weigh much and should be easy to carry.

We took one last look at the glittering piles of gold, steeled our hearts, and then filed out of the blast hole in the tomb door.

As soon as we climbed through, I heard Fatty give a thoughtful hum. Thinking of that bad premonition I had before, I quickly raised my flashlight and looked around, only to break out in a cold sweat.

The murals in the tomb passage were different from the ones we saw when we first made our way into that room. I didn’t know when it occurred, but all the red murals had somehow turned black and now depicted the shadowy silhouettes of people with huge heads.

<Chapter 28><Table of Contents><Chapter 30>

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TN Notes:

(1) Ge You is a Chinese actor (1957-present). A native of Beijing, often with a bald shaven head, he is considered by many to be one of the most recognizable acting personalities in China.

(2) “How the Steel Was Tempered” (aka “The Making of a Hero”) is a socialist realist novel written by Nikolai Ostrovsky. The story follows the life of Pavel Korchagin, including his fighting in and aftermath of the Russian Civil War. Korchagin fought for the Bolsheviks during the war and was injured. The novel examines how Korchagin heals from his wounds and thus becomes as strong as steel.