Chapter 9 Videotapes

When I was chatting with Uncle Three, someone suddenly knocked on the door, and then an express courier came in looking for me.

The only ones who knew that I was here were my family and some of the people in A Ning’s team, so I thought it was either a get-well gift from my family or some information from those foreigners. Not attaching too much importance to it, I signed for the package and then took it from the courier. But when I looked at who the sender was, I found that Zhang Qiling’s name was on the package.

I froze in shock, and a chill swept over my body.

During my time here, I had gradually forgotten everything that happened in Changbai Mountain. Except for the fear, all the other memories had basically been buried under a pile of trivial things. But seeing these two words suddenly tugged those faded memories to the forefront, and all the recent events suddenly emerged in my mind like a flood.

How could he even send me anything? Didn’t he enter that huge bronze door? Did he already come out? Or, did he send it before we went to the Heavenly Palace? I immediately looked at the date on the package and felt my eyelid twitch—it had been sent four days ago.

So he really came out! He came out of that giant door!

My hands started shaking as the memory of Poker-Face walking through the giant bronze door flashed through my mind. I looked at the package in my hand, my heart a complete mess. What could it be? I wondered. Did he bring something out of the bronze door?

But if he did, what could it be? A human head? Grave goods? A jade ghost seal?

I didn’t know how many strange thoughts flashed through my mind before I suddenly realized that I should open the package and see for myself. I looked around, frantically searching for a pair of scissors.

Uncle Three, noticing the drastic change in my expression, leaned in curiously to see what I had received. As soon as he saw Zhang Qiling’s name, he sucked in a sharp breath and his expression also became shocked.

The two of us frantically searched for a long time before Uncle Three finally found a fruit knife and handed it to me.

Once I cut open the outer box, I found a smaller one inside. It was square, and the outside was neatly covered in tape, which was very difficult to tear off. After a lot of effort, I finally tore a hole out and saw what was inside—two black objects. My heart suddenly beat faster, but I made myself pause and take a deep breath before yanking the two black objects out.

At that moment, I was prepared to see something horrible, but what I saw still left me feeling blindsided—they were two black old-fashioned videotapes.

I had thought about all kinds of possibilities just now, but I never expected that the contents of the package would be two videotapes. Based on what I knew of Poker-Face, it was easy to associate him with things like coffins, but outdated modern equipment such as videotapes? That was way too hard to imagine.

Shit, why would he send me such a thing? What was on these tapes?

My heart suddenly stuttered, and a thought came to my mind—did they reveal what happened after he entered the bronze door? Did he really film it?

Damn, if that were true, it would be too… But when I thought about it again, I realized that it was impossible. I didn’t see him carrying a camera when he entered the bronze door at that time. I also doubted that anything good lay behind the door, so it probably wouldn’t be easy to film.

What could possibly be on these tapes? The need to watch them right away was so strong that it suddenly felt like countless ants were crawling under my skin.

But the appearance and materials from which these two videotapes were made were so old-fashioned that it became obvious they were quite old. I knew I’d need an old VCR in order to play them, but that kind of thing was hard to find nowadays.

Uncle Three motioned for me to examine them, so I threw the packaging aside and carefully checked to see if there were any markings or labels on the sides.

I was no stranger to videotapes. Ten years ago, when the streets were full of video rental shops, watching foreign feature films was practically my only form of entertainment. At that time, I could get through five tapes a day during the holidays, so I naturally had some understanding of how these things were structured. I knew that they usually had something written on the back; otherwise, there was no way to tell them apart.

At first glance, these videotapes were a bit strange—there was evidence that they used to have a label on the back, but now it had been torn off. The traces looked very new, which meant that the labels had been torn recently. It looked like Poker-Face didn’t want us to see what was on the label.

But why? If he was sending these videotapes to us, why tear off the labels? Was there something on them that he didn’t want me to know about?

“What’s going on?” At this time, Uncle Three picked up the discarded package from the ground and shook it, making sure there was nothing else inside. “Nephew, you’re so mean,” he said to me. “Why didn’t you tell me that you’re still in contact with him?”

I shook my head, vehemently denying it, but Uncle Three tapped on the videotapes and asked, “Then how do you explain this?”

“Even if you ask me, I don’t have an answer,” I replied.

Uncle Three, seeing that I didn’t seem to be lying, frowned and said, “Then this guy has incredible skills. How did he know you were here?”

I was also surprised—after returning from the Heavenly Palace, only A Ning’s team and my family knew where I was. Poker-Face didn’t have any of my contact information, but he was still able to send me a package here. This was actually quite difficult to do, unless someone gave him my information. But that was impossible. It seemed that this taciturn guy had unfathomable depths to him.

Uncle Three thought for a while, and then asked me if there was anything on the shipping label saying where the package was sent from. I picked it up and looked at it before shaking my head—everything was blank except for the sender’s name and date it was sent. Not only had the return address not been written, but even the place where it was originally sent from was blank. There was no telling how this courier service worked.

But according to the date, it was sent four days ago. Any express mail in the province usually arrived within one day, and only took two days if it was going to a neighboring province. This package took four days, which meant that it was either sent from a place that was far away from here, or it came from a place that was quite remote and had inconvenient transportation services. I decided to check online to see if the courier company had a website. If they had online registration, then I could use that to try and figure out where this package came from.

Uncle Three and I looked at each other, both smiling wryly. Not only had this sudden package disrupted his story, but now I didn’t even know what to do with these tapes. “Nephew,” Uncle Three suddenly said, “why don’t we take a little break? You know how secretive Little Brother is. He wouldn’t send something for no reason, which means these two tapes might be very important. Let’s find a VCR first and see what’s on them.”

I shook my head and said no. Although I was also very curious about the contents of these videotapes, Uncle Three hadn’t given me any answers yet. If we paused now, he might change his mind later and never finish the story. Plus, not only had the production of VCRs been discontinued for almost ten years now, but even CDs were starting to be discontinued. It would be difficult to find a VCR even at the flea market, so we wouldn’t be able to play the tapes for a while anyways.

But it was impossible to act like these two videotapes didn’t exist, so I told him to ask his shop assistant to visit the local flea markets and see if he could find one while Uncle Three kept telling his story. If the shop assistant found one, he could buy it, and if not, then I would go online later that night to look for one.

Uncle Three agreed with my suggestion and said, “That’s fine. We can discuss the Little Brother thing later when we look at the tapes.” He then waved his hand and sent his shop assistant off to carry out the task.

That guy had also been intrigued by Uncle Three’s story and seemed reluctant to leave, but he quickly swallowed his argument when he saw how Uncle Three was glaring at him.

After the guy left, Uncle Three rubbed his face and said, “Let’s make this quick. Where was I?”

I repeated what he had told me right before we were interrupted by the courier. Uncle Three nodded and said, “Yes, the contents of the silk book are the key to this whole thing. The foreigner had a deep understanding of the silk book of the Warring States Period, but the matter is actually quite complicated. I should probably start from the beginning. Nephew, you’ve been in the antique business for a long time now. How much do you know about the silk book of the Warring States Period?”

I thought it over for a while. If you do something, then you should at least have a basic understanding of it. Although I didn’t really like selling rubbings—the profits were too small and the people I came into contact with were kind of weird—after doing it for so many years, I still had a relatively deep understanding of them.

Silk books from the Warring States Period weren’t regarded as the main type of rubbings. As you can tell from the name, they are just silk books written during the Warring States Period. But the Warring States Period only covers a relatively narrow timeframe, so all sorts of official records and trade records from the Spring and Autumn Period are also attributed to it.⁽¹⁾ There are very few original copies of the silk books from the Warring States Period on the market, which makes them very valuable. And since they’ve been unearthed from tombs in different places, they’ve been divided into different categories, such as silk books of the Chu Kingdom, silk books of the Wei Kingdom, and so on.⁽²⁾ The contents of these silk books are also different, but the most valuable ones are the silk books of the Lu Kingdom.⁽³⁾ I knew that about ten of them existed, but they were all damaged. There were obviously counterfeits out there, but they were so hard to distinguish from the real ones that the authorities usually denied their existence.

Of course, the silk books of the Lu Kingdom were not all the same, and were divided into several sub-categories based on the style of script and size of the rubbings. The most valuable one among them was a book written on yellow silk. The reason was very simple—nobody could read it.

The grammar used in this silk book was very strange. The meaning of the individual characters could be understood, but when put together, they didn’t make any sense. China had eight other texts just like this: “The Book of Cang Jie”, “The Book of Xia Yu”, “The Sacred Writings of the Red Cliff”, “The Sacred Writings of Yelang”, the Ba-Shu script, the Tadpole script, the Dongba Script, and the Xun Lou Stele.⁽⁴⁾ The reason they couldn’t be deciphered was because they were all unique texts, so scholars couldn’t compare them with other sources to figure out their meaning. However, the text on the silk books of the Lu Kingdom seemed to have been deliberately encrypted. Foreign archaeologists called these silk books “Chinese grimoires”, because reading them aloud sounded like a shaman chanting a spell.

Fortunately, the encryption was finally cracked in 1974. As it turned out, it was an ancient code that replaced text with images, and was later called the “script map of the Warring States Period”. I looked up the information myself after hearing Uncle Three talk about it. This was a big discovery, but it was overshadowed by an even greater event that occurred in 1974.

Now, among the regular silk books of the Warring State Period, the Kingdom of Lu ones were in high demand, and many people were looking for them. Some time ago, I heard that according to archaeological research, there may be as many as a hundred and twenty of them. I didn’t know where they got the information from, but I knew for a fact that only four or five volumes were actually in circulation. They weren’t something you could find on the internet, and the only ones who might have seen them were real professionals. Foreigners especially liked them, so many brokers scoured all over the place, hoping to find a rare copy. But if you wanted to find a rare silk book of the Lu Kingdom, then you needed to go to a shop that sells rubbings and look through everything. This was because such shops bought rubbings in large quantities and didn’t sort them—they’d usually just pile them all together regardless of their origin. If you were tenacious enough, you might be able to find a rare one, but those who did usually didn’t publicize it and instead chose to research it on their own. That was why business in this market was still relatively easy.

The silk book my grandpa stole from the ancient tomb was a silk book of the Lu Kingdom, but we didn’t dare show it off because of his past—Grandpa was very famous in the underworld, so many people would have started asking about it. As a result, it remained a hidden treasure in my shop.

Now, we knew that this kind of silk book was most likely part of the records left behind by Tie Mian Xiansheng, who lived during the Warring States Period. Like Leonardo da Vinci, he created his own written language and used it to record his notes. After I returned from the Seven Star Lu Palace, I also took the time to study these things. It was said that throughout human history, those who used ciphertext to record things did so because they discovered something that subverted the current world view, and they were afraid of being wiped out by those in power (such as the Roman Catholic Church in Leonardo da Vinci’s time).⁽⁵⁾

That was all I knew about silk books. When I told Uncle Three this, he nodded and said, “That’s right. It’s like squatting over a latrine but not being able to shit no matter how long you sit there. All you can do is grunt.” Then he pulled his torn bag out from underneath the bed, took out a wrinkled photograph, and handed it to me. I looked at it and saw that it was a picture of a silk book of the Warring States Period held in a museum display case. Based on the arrangement of the text, it seemed to be the one that American conned from my grandpa.

“This should belong to our family,” Uncle Three said. “When I went to the U.S. three years ago, I took a photo of it in a New York museum. Everything started because of this thing. Thinking about it now, it really feels like destiny—after all, four generations of our family have been involved in this matter. It almost feels like we’re cursed. That’s why I didn’t want you to get involved. I was hoping this matter would end with me.”

Four generations… I suddenly sighed with emotion and asked, “So what’s written on it?”

Uncle Three smiled and said, “I just told you—it’s something you’d never be able to guess. In fact, nothing is written on the silk book. After it was deciphered, they found a mysterious picture instead of a textual record.”

“A picture? “I frowned, suddenly thinking of the silk book of the Warring States Period that led us to the Seven Star Lu Palace. “Is it also a map of an ancient tomb?”

Uncle Three shook his head, “It’s not a map. It’s something much more complicated than that. I won’t be able to explain it in a few words. The foreigner told me everything about it before I went to Xisha, and now I’ll tell you. You’ll understand after you hear it.”

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

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TN Notes:

(1) The Spring and Autumn Period was a period in Chinese history from approximately 770 to 481 BCE. It preceded the Warring States Period, which was from around 475-221 BC (there is some controversy as to the beginning of the era so that’s probably why some of the Spring and Autumn records are attributed to the Warring States Period).

(2) The Chu Kingdom and Wei Kingdom (also referred to as the State of Chu and the State of Wei) were Chinese kingdoms during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States Periods. They were both vassal states of the Zhou dynasty. The Wei Kingdom was one of the seven major states during the Warring States Period.

(3) The Lu Kingdom (c. 1042 BC–249 BC), or State of Lu, was another vassal state during the Zhou dynasty (and Spring and Autumn and Warring States Periods). Lu was the home state of Confucius as well as Mozi, and as such has an outsized cultural influence among the states of the Eastern Zhou and in history.

(4) English results were scarce for all of these so most info came from the Chinese wiki or Baidu. “The Book of Cang Jie”—according to legend, it was written by Cang Jie, a legendary ancient Chinese figure said to have been an official historian of the Yellow Emperor and the inventor of Chinese characters. There are only 28 characters total. “The Book of Xia Yu”—said to be written by Yu the Great, a mythical leader who tamed the floods. There are only 12 characters in total. “The Sacred Writings of the Red Cliff”—a bunch of symbols were carved into the cliff on Shaijia Mountain in Guizhou. Pics here. “The Sacred Writings of Yelang”— a name given by Chinese archaeologists to an ancient text discovered in the Yi minority area of ​​Hezhang, Guizhou Province. Has a total of 4,480 characters. Pic here. Ba-Shu script— 150 pictographs found on bronzeware from the ancient kingdoms of Ba and Shu in the Sichuan Basin of southwestern China in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Tadpole script— a variety of Chinese seal script with strokes that start and end with sharp points, and the head is thick and the tail is thin (like a tadpole). Pic here. Dongba Script— a system of pictographic glyphs used by the Bon priests of the Naxi people in southern China. Goulou Stele—a stone slab containing 77 characters supposedly written by Yu the Great, thanking the people of the Xia Kingdom for fulfilling their duty. Pic here.

(5) Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. Most of his writings are in mirror-image cursive (he wrote from right to left) and he used a lot of shorthand and symbols. Some say he was hiding his scientific ideas from the powerful Roman Catholic Church, whose teachings sometimes disagreed with what he observed.

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Wu Xie in the licensed version: No, I don’t know much about silk books

Wu Xie here: Allow me to give you a two-page-long exposé on everything I know about silk books

His college professors must have hated him hahaha