Chapter 41 Chen Wen-Jin’s Journal

After reading this passage, I took a deep breath, the surprise in my heart simply indescribable.

It wasn’t the content that surprised me so much—to be honest, I kind of expected to see something like this the moment I saw the notebook—but the signature.

“Chen Wen-Jin!”

God, I really didn’t expect that she would be the one to leave this thing here. So, did that mean she was the one who sent me the videotapes to lure me here?

Things had definitely taken a strange turn, which left me feeling even more confused. Although Uncle Three didn’t say anything about her, in my mind, I was sure that she must have died somewhere long ago. How could she suddenly appear now and lead me here?

Plus, this short passage contained too much information. What three people? Who were they? What was “it”? When she said “we”, who was she referring to? Was it the other members of the missing archeological team? What research? What secrets?

Countless thoughts flashed through my mind, but I didn’t have time to think about any of them. After taking a moment to calm down, I immediately opened the notebook and flipped to the back.

The notebook was very thick, with about two hundred pages full of words, all densely packed together. The handwriting was very neat and there were many drawings included. It looked like a typical work notebook.

I put my lighter down by the drawer, sat down on the ground, and immediately started reading.

I flipped the first page over and was immediately shocked by the strange, detailed drawing I saw on the next page.

There were only seven lines—six curved ones and an irregular circle—but it seemed very familiar to me. After trying to recall where I had seen it before, I suddenly remembered that this was the pattern Uncle Three had sketched for me, the one deciphered from the silk book of the Warring States Period.

I couldn’t help but feel surprised. It seemed that Chen Wen-Jin and the others were quite skilled considering how difficult it was to obtain this pattern. I guess she and the others must have also been interested in it.

But unlike the sketch that Uncle Three had drawn for me, this one had marks on it. As soon as I saw them, I immediately broke out in a cold sweat—there was a black dot on each of the six curved lines. At first, I thought they were the six stars that Uncle Three had told me were found with the help of the astrolabe, but I noticed a few small words had been written next to four of those dots.

From top to bottom, they were:

Changbai Mountain — Heavenly Palace on the Clouds

Temple of Seeds — Seven Star Lu Palace

Reclining Buddha Ridge — Sky View Temple Pagoda

Shatou Reef — Undersea Tomb

Seeing this, I sucked in a sharp breath. There were a few seconds of confusion, but then I seemed to have an epiphany and suddenly understood what I was seeing.

Were the curves actually the trend lines of each mountain range in the big dragon vein Wang Zanghai had located?

Looking closely at the curves, I found that I was right. The reason why I didn’t notice that these six curves were mountain ranges was because I wasn’t looking at a map. They merely looked like the veins on a leaf or the distribution map of a river. But when I looked at them now, I could immediately see that this was actually a “dragon”—the six lines were the dragon’s head, tail, and limbs! Each line was a mountain range, and the black dots on them were the treasure wells.

In that case, this definitely wasn’t the star map Qiu Dekao claimed it to be!

I suddenly felt cold all over as I realized what was going on. Damn it, either Qiu Dekao was misled or the old devil had lied to Uncle Three!

I looked at the other two curved lines that didn’t have any writing next to them and found that they were also marked with black dots, but only question marks had been written beside them. Obviously, they were also part of the dragon vein, which was part of the large feng shui array, but it wasn’t clear where the treasure wells were located.

The sudden shock nearly overwhelmed me, because I honestly hadn’t been expecting this kind of unsettling discovery as soon as I opened the notebook. I immediately closed it and took a deep breath, but my hands started shaking, and I suddenly remembered the words written on the first page: the contents involve some huge secrets. There was no need to shock me from the very first page! I said to myself.

But the shock was quickly replaced by excitement. I clenched my teeth and patted my chest to get rid of the suffocating feeling, and then opened the notebook again.

I looked carefully at the drawing and noticed something even more interesting this time.

Inside the blank space surrounded by those six curved lines was another black dot, all by itself. This one wasn’t on any line, but was located in the approximate center of the drawing.

And next to this black dot was a small line of words: Qaidam Basin — Tamu-Tuo.

I didn’t understand what they meant, but the words were heavily underlined several times, and there were two or three question marks beside them. Obviously, this was the most important dot on the drawing, but Chen Wen-Jin had questions about it, so she drew the question marks beside it.

Based on the other dots, this one likely marked a location as well. Qaidam Basin? Tamu-Tuo? Could this also be the site of an ancient tomb? But why isn’t this dot on a line like the others? I wondered.

At this time, I suddenly realized that Chen Wen-Jin knew much more than we did, and this notebook would likely help answer quite a few of my questions. With that thought in mind, I immediately flipped further ahead and started reading.

The content was a mixture of text and drawings. The handwriting was still very neat and organized, but the characters were so small that I had to strain to read them in the dim light of my lighter.

I calmed myself, gathered my energy, and focused on reading. But as I read, I felt more and more confused and deeply disappointed. By the time I was done, both feelings had reached their peak, and I sat there frozen, the feelings in my heart indescribable.

The notebook contained more than a hundred thousand characters written in journal format. Everything was recorded in too much detail, but the whole thing could roughly be divided into three parts.

The first part covered the events that took place between April 2, 1990 and March 6, 1991. I can’t copy the whole notebook here, so I’ll just select the most critical entries and summarize them to make it easier to understand. The first part is as follows:

April 2, 1990

We numbered most of the porcelain in the undersea tomb, sketched almost all of them, and compared them to the murals, hoping to learn more about Wang Zanghai’s life. Through this comparison, we actually did manage to find some patterns: the murals depicted his life experiences, while the paintings on the porcelain documented his construction projects. This was proven by putting the murals and porcelain in order. For example, Wang Zanghai’s stay in Eastern Xia corresponded to the building of the Heavenly Palace on the Clouds, and receiving the reward from Zhu Yuanzhang⁽¹⁾ corresponded to the design of the Ming Palace. Based on how the tomb chamber was set up, it was easy to figure out the order of events and match the porcelain to the corresponding murals.

Following this method, we concluded that the murals recorded Wang Zanghai’s incredible achievements in feng shui, and all the content only related to his work. There wasn’t a single image of the kinds of events that most people found important, such as marriage or hunting. I’ve decided to call it “Master Wang’s Relativism”.⁽²⁾

September 6, 1990

Today, “Master Wang’s Relativism” has encountered a difficult problem—on the last mural, we found the following:

(There was a sketch below, which seemed to be a rough copy of the mural. As soon as I saw it, I remembered seeing something similar when I was rifling through the papers on the desks just now. It had looked like something drawn by a child, but as it turned out, it was a sketch of the mural.

It’s hard to describe what the sketch looked like because it was drawn so poorly. I could only roughly make out what seemed to be a high-ranking dignitary bidding someone farewell. The background consisted of a big palace gate that was surrounded by animals such as “camels and horses” that were neatly lined up. Of course, these animals really looked like rats and dogs, but I was familiar with ancient landscape paintings and animal paintings, and had received strict training in this field, so I could guess from the pen strokes and shapes that these strangely shaped animals should actually be horses or camels. Groups of attendants could be seen behind the palace gate, along with a detachment of ceremonial guards—clearly, the scene in the mural was meant to be quite grand.

There were two or three pages full of drawings after that, but I wasn’t interested, so I skipped them all and continued reading.)

This mural likely depicted what happened after Wang Zanghai turned sixty-eight. After he finished his latest project, he must have accepted an order from the emperor and set out for some unknown place, likely on a diplomatic mission. The composition of this mural was obviously an imitation of those Tang Dynasty murals depicting Xuanzang going to the Western Regions,⁽³⁾ but it was very strange—we searched all the porcelain paintings but never found one that corresponded to the mural.

Some said that it may have been the last stage of Wang Zanghai’s life, and there was no corresponding construction project to go with it. Others insisted that Wang Zanghai wasn’t the type of person to break from a well-established pattern. The lack of a corresponding porcelain painting may have been done for a reason, or had its own special meaning. There was also a chance that the corresponding construction project was depicted somewhere else.

After further research, we found that Wang Zanghai’s last few years were shrouded in mystery, and there was no mention of him in any historical records after that. It was almost like the last period of his life was completely blank.

Where was he and what did he do during those years? This became a big question for us.

December 6, 1990

Over the past few months, we have been investigating Wang Zanghai’s whereabouts during the last few years of his life, and we finally have a clue. We found that after his last project, Wang Zanghai accompanied the emperor to Changbai Mountain for a worship ceremony, but there were no mentions of him in the written records after that.

Changbai Mountain… Could he have gone into the mountain? We highly doubt it.

December 7, 1990

There was no way to continue pursuing that angle, so we changed direction and focused on the emperor instead. Among the Ming Dynasty records, there were detailed accounts of diplomatic missions and ceremonies, so we decided to try and find a record of the grand ceremony depicted in Wang Zanghai’s mural, or a record of the diplomatic mission he was sent on.

The result was very surprising. We found that two years before the emperor died, there were seven grand ceremonies. Six were normal, but one was very strange, and the record about it was very simple, with no additional notes:

“In the twenty-ninth year of Hongwu’s reign, forty-six guards, twelve scholars, one hundred and twenty-six horses, ten decaliters of pearls, thirty catties of gold, and one envoy sent to Tamu-Tuo.”

A grand ceremony and a diplomatic mission—this was the only record that met both conditions. There was no mention of who the dispatched envoy was, but the strangest thing was their destination—what was Tamu-Tuo?

Was it a country? There was no mention of it in the official historical records, but it was likely one of the countless small kingdoms that existed in Southeast Asia and the Western Regions during the Ming Dynasty. But it was a bit strange for Wang Zanghai to be sent as an envoy to a small country. A man of his age wouldn’t have been suitable for such a long journey.

February 11th, 1991

The investigation continues. During this time, we had two discussions.

(The ten pages that followed were full of discussions and theories, but all of them were marked out after having been disproved at some point.)

Since the “History of the Ming Dynasty” was compiled in disastrous conditions during the Qing Dynasty,⁽⁴⁾ it was very difficult to conduct research, and there were no results for a long time. Later, we managed to solve the problem by changing the angle of our investigation. We compared the things the envoy brought to “Tamu-Tuo”, and found that the types of gifts indicated that this should be a country in the Western Regions. The number of gifts seemed to be very small, but there were so many horses that it looked more like a trade caravan than an envoy on a diplomatic mission.

March 6, 1991

There are no clues at all, no breakthroughs. Our research has stalled and everyone is in a bad mood.

This entry marked the end of the first part of the notebook. Obviously, there should have been other entries before it, but I didn’t see any traces of torn pages. This seemed to indicate that this wasn’t a solitary notebook, but one that was part of a series.

The first part of this notebook described how they conducted research on Wang Zanghai, discovered “Tamu-Tuo”, started researching “Tamu-Tuo”, and then eventually hit a dead end. It seemed simple, but it actually revealed a lot, such as the fact that they had time to study the murals and porcelain in the undersea tomb. Moreover, it seemed like their research was very systematic and orthodox, which was typical for the archaeological process (the process of studying objects seemed very boring, but it was the main method archaeologists used to conduct their everyday research. In fact, archaeology was basically just digging, writing, and researching). But when Uncle Three and the others went down into the undersea tomb, following such a process should have been impossible—Wang Zanghai’s tomb was so big, and they only had a few people. It probably would have taken a long time for them to record everything inside the tomb, so when exactly did they do all this work described in the notebook?

This was a big clue, but I didn’t have time to think about it, so I continued reading. I initially thought that the previous discussion would continue, but after the March 6, 1991 entry, I saw something that left me feeling puzzled.

About six pages of content followed, all of which were descriptions of the information they had collected. After quickly skipping past them, I found that the next entry jumped to January 19, 1993.

The content was quite different from the previous section, and covered the period from January 19, 1993 to February 8, 1995. But even though the time span was longer than the previous section, not a lot had been recorded. The content is as follows:

January 19, 1993

After our last discussion, what happened to Wang Zanghai became clear. It seems that his trip to Tamu-Tuo really did have something to do with the emperor’s visit to Changbai Mountain. He must have returned to the Heavenly Palace on the Clouds, and then set off for Tamu-Tuo. This Tamu-Tuo must somehow be related to Changbai Mountain.

April 18, 1993

After determining three possible routes to the Heavenly Palace on the Clouds from the murals, we decided to go to Changbai Mountain and see for ourselves.

May 30, 1993

We’ve entered the Changbai Mountain Range. The weather is terrible.

(There were about a dozen pages after that describing their travels, which read more like an adventure novel than a travel log. It sounded pretty similar to our trip to the Heavenly Palace, but the entries stopped once they entered the mountain.)

June 15, 1993

We’ve lost contact with the others. The two of us will continue on alone.

June 17, 1993

We’ve reached the area below the Heavenly Palace. The situation is very bad. Something must have happened to the others, but there’s no time to hesitate. We’ve decided to enter the bronze door and see what’s inside.

June 18th, 1993

I’ve seen the Ultimate!

(The entries stopped here, and only resumed after nearly a year and a half with one short entry.)

February 8, 1995

We started planning to find Tamu-Tuo. I must figure out what all this is about.

This was the end of the second part, which took up about thirty pages. There was an obvious gap of several years between the first and second parts, but in this second part, they started their journey to the Heavenly Palace on the Clouds. After reading it, I was finally able to answer a question that had been bugging me for a while—it seemed that the people who died in the treasure room in the Heavenly Palace really were part of their group. And based on the things they had been carrying, the “we” Chen Wen-Jin mentioned in the notebook must have been referring to the other missing archeological team members.

So, they hadn’t encountered any special difficulties, and were actually living quite comfortably after they disappeared? But this wasn’t all that important. What really shocked me the most was that Chen Wen-Jin not only discovered the bronze door, but even went inside it.

“I’ve seen the Ultimate!” I broke out in a cold sweat as soon I read this line. What did she mean? I wondered. What is this “Ultimate”?

Looking at the dates, she didn’t write another entry until almost a year and a half after she entered the bronze door. This was totally out of character for someone like her, which made me think that she must have seen something behind the bronze door that was so shocking, she didn’t have time to even think about writing in the notebook.

Throughout the second part, the biggest impression I had was that there was a huge connection between Tamu-Tuo and the bronze door, because it was only after Chen Wen-Jin entered it that she came up with the idea of looking for this “Tamu-Tuo”.

After that came the third part. It was very long, but it only covered a short time span, from February 8, 1995 to June 8, 1995. Only one entry is worth mentioning:

February 8, 1995

Using the map of the dragon veins, we were able to determine the location of Tamu-Tuo. We plan on going on an expedition in the hopes of finding the answers to those series of puzzles. To be honest, I really didn’t expect that there was so much behind all this. If what I saw behind the bronze door is true, then this whole thing is absolutely horrible.

After that was the story of their journey to the place called “Tamu-Tuo”. Based on the description, it was likely an oasis in the Gobi Desert. In early 1995, Chen Wen-Jin set out from Dunhuang with a team of camels and went deep into the Qaidam Basin.

They were led into the Gobi Desert by a female guide named Dingzhu-Zhuoma. They then separated from her at a rocky mountain, and entered the place called “Tamu-Tuo”. That oasis seemed to be very dangerous—many people died along the way, and I saw many marks on the map indicating danger. Finally, they arrived at Tamu-Tuo, but Chen Wen-Jin had a disagreement with someone in her group, and ended up coming back instead of continuing the journey.

I skimmed through this part quickly without bothering to read it very carefully. There were about thirty pages full of details, with a lot of road maps and descriptions of equipment failure and the weather, but the pages after that were all blank.

But there was no mention anywhere in the notebook of how they obtained the information or how they conducted their research. There was nothing about their disappearance from Xisha or what happened in this sanatorium either. All the information was related to this “Tamu-Tuo” place. While almost half of the pages were devoted to analyzing what Wang Zanghai and Tie Mian Xiansheng left behind, it still ended up being connected to “Tamu-Tuo”. Moreover, what concerned me the most was that there were obvious gaps in between the three parts of the notebook, as if the pages had been removed and then rebound, or copied from another notebook.

I opened the notebook and looked at the spine, but there were no traces of rebinding or torn pages—this was a complete notebook. In other words, this notebook may have been copied by Chen Wen-Jin. She must have selected only those entries related to Tamu-Tuo, copied them down, and then gathered them together in this notebook.

But why would she do that? This was yet another strange thing. Why did these people always act so mysteriously? Was there something in the other notebook that she didn’t want others to know?

Moreover, looking at this notebook, it was obvious that she was trying to tell me that Tamu-Tuo was a very important place. In fact, it almost seemed like she wanted me to go there.

There were so many questions in my mind that I couldn’t sort them out to come up with a logical answer. I rubbed my temples and flipped back to the first page of the notebook, ready to read it carefully from the beginning to see if I could find some clues after some careful deliberation. But at this time, the light in front of me suddenly dimmed as the lighter’s flame flickered and shrank.

I remembered that the lighter had been burning for quite a long time now, and might soon run out of fuel, so I decided to make a small bonfire using the newspapers I found in the other desk drawer. That way, I wouldn’t be stuck in the dark once my lighter went out. With that thought in mind, I stood up, stretched, and grabbed my lighter.

But at that moment, I suddenly felt that something was wrong. Something seemed…different here. I held my lighter up to see if it was real or just a figment of my imagination, but before I could get a good look, I almost died of fright—a “person” had suddenly appeared on the other side of the desk. I didn’t know when they showed up, but they were sitting in the chair I had recently vacated, looking at the mirror and combing their hair.

<Chapter 40><Table of Contents><Chapter 42>

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TN Notes:

(1) Zhu Yuanzhang (October 21, 1328 –June 24, 1398), is the Hongwu Emperor’s personal name. He was the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty, reigning from 1368 to 1398.

(2) Relativism is the belief that there’s no absolute truth, only the truths that a particular individual or culture happen to believe.

(3) Xuanzang (April 6, 602 – February 5,664) was born Chen Hui / Chen Yi, and also known by his Sanskrit Dharma name Mokṣadeva. He was a 7th-century Chinese Buddhist monk, scholar, traveler, and translator. He is known for the epoch-making contributions to Chinese Buddhism, the travelogue of his journey to India in 629–645 CE, his efforts to bring over 657 Indian texts to China, and his translations of some of these texts.

(4) “History of the Ming Dynasty” is one of the official Chinese historical works known as the Twenty-Four Histories. It consists of 332 volumes and covers the history of the Ming dynasty from 1368 to 1644. It was written by a number of officials commissioned by the court of Qing dynasty, with Zhang Tingyu as the lead editor. The compilation started in 1645 and was completed in 1739. Part of the reason why it took so long was because Ming remnants kept fighting back against the Qing and there was a peasant uprising.

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Ahahahahaha I feel like such a troll. Enjoy the cliffy while I disappear for a few days (though I guess it’s not really a cliffhanger cuz you can read the licensed version). Next update will likely be Wednesday. Also, I love how the licensed version fudged up some of the dates in Wen-Jin’s journal just so they could cram the stuff together. Makes it sound like they were wandering around the mountains for 2 months instead of 2 weeks. smh