Chapter 53 Alchemy Room

I looked over at her and saw that she was standing in the very center of the cave, next to a huge stone slab that looked like a millstone. We all gathered around to look at it and saw that it was a stone astrolabe.⁽¹⁾ It was covered in small dots representing the stars in the sky, each one made from a dark green ugly stone.

These were the pills of immortality that Uncle Three showed me before,⁽²⁾ but I was surprised to see so many of them here.

“What’s this? The elixir of immortality?” An unfamiliar voice suddenly said from behind, accompanied by a low whistle. When we looked back, we saw that Mop and a few of his men had apparently followed us.

I immediately felt a headache coming on, but I shook my head and said, “This is a poison that will kill you instantly if you eat it. You must not touch these immortality pills. They’re extremely toxic.”

“Of course I won’t eat any of them. Can’t I just take a look?”

“No,” I replied firmly. “You can’t touch anything here.”

They were clearly very interested in the pills, but when they heard me say this, they started whispering angrily amongst themselves. One of them even lit a cigarette and muttered, “Who do you think you are, coming up with so many rules?” The tone was no longer as polite as before, but I pretended not to hear it. At this time, the flares started to go out one by one, so Fatty fired two more off. As he titled his head back to watch them soar into the air, he suddenly let out a surprised shout.

We all looked up as well—the flares reached the highest point of their arc and lit up the top of the cave, revealing an interwoven network of chains like that of a spider’s web. One end of the chains was embedded in the rock wall while the other end was attached to a dark object that looked like a huge ball. It hung over us, right at the center of this network of chains.

The flares immediately began their descent, and the top of the cave fell into darkness once more.

“What the hell is that?” Someone beside me muttered to himself.

“This is a suspended furnace,” Chen Wen-Jin said, tone full of surprise. “My God, this cave must be the vital point of the dragon vein mentioned in large feng shui.⁽³⁾ This is the highest realm of alchemy. When the furnace for making pills doesn’t touch the ground, it collects the essence of the entire dragon vein.”

Fatty grabbed a high-altitude flare from his bag and said, “Let’s take a better look.”

When he fired it this time, the flare actually hit the edge of the black ball and exploded in a shower of sparks, enabling us to see everything clearly. It actually turned out to be a bronze spherical vessel with carved patterns on the side, one that was more than three times bigger than any of the bronze vessels around us. From below, it looked like a giant wolf spider lying in wait in the center of a web.

Chen Wen-Jin immediately told Fatty not to launch any more flares, saying that there might be something flammable inside the pill furnace. If it caught fire, the resulting explosion wouldn’t be much different from being bombed—no one would survive.

Fatty sighed, “It’s a shame we can’t go up and take a look. Maybe there are still some immortality pills up there. We could eat a dozen and fly straight to the moon to see how Chang’e⁽⁴⁾ is doing.”

I patted Fatty on the shoulder and sighed, “You’ve finally given yourself away, Marshal Tianpeng.⁽⁵⁾ No wonder your figure always seemed so familiar.”⁽⁶⁾

Before Fatty could make a rebuttal, we suddenly heard Chen Wen-Jin shout, “What are you doing?!”

We immediately turned to look, only to find that the men who had been following us were now standing close to the astrolabe. One of them was holding Chen Wen-Jin back, preventing her from interfering, while another one was reaching for the immortality pills with gloved hands. “Don’t be nervous, Boss Lady,” he said. “I’m as much of an expert as those friends of yours.”

“You bastards!” I shouted in surprise. “Are you looking for death?”

One of them immediately pulled out a gun and pointed it at us. Poker-Face and Fatty, who had been standing next to me, immediately moved to stand in front of me, while at the same time urging me to calm down. The man holding us at gunpoint gestured to Fatty and said, “Drop your gun.” Fatty cursed, but did as he said and threw his gun to the ground.

The man collecting the immortality pills suddenly laughed and said, “Little Master Three, did you really think you were in charge here? Times have changed; now no one cares about seniority.” As he spoke, he dug one of the pills out, shined his flashlight on it, and carefully examined it. Poker-Face’s expression suddenly changed, and I heard him mutter, “It’s over.”

The words had barely left his mouth before the astrolabe suddenly tilted to one side, as if it had lost its balance. Then, there was absolute silence all around.

Everyone immediately froze, too terrified to move as we waited to see what would happen next.

But after waiting for a while, nothing happened. We all looked at each other before Fatty said, “Damn, maybe they just didn’t secure it properly?”

At this time, I noticed that Poker-Face had turned even paler. But instead of looking at the astrolabe, he was looking at the jade burial armor all around us. Then, we all heard a clattering sound coming from the surrounding armor. When we turned to look for the source of the sound, we found that the armor on the corpses was falling to the ground, as if the gold threads holding them together had suddenly been pulled away. The instant the armor lost its shape and crumbled, the ancient corpses inside were finally revealed, along with their elongated faces that looked quite sinister.

I felt like I had been blindsided. I remembered hearing that if the armor was removed too early, the corpse inside would immediately transform into a zombie, which was a big deal. With that thought in mind, I immediately shouted, “We need to get out of here!”

But before I could finish speaking, there suddenly came a series of mechanical locking sounds by the entrance. When I turned to look, I found that the tunnel we had entered through earlier was now blocked by a stone slab.

<Chapter 52><Table of Contents><Chapter 54>

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TN Notes:

(1) An astrolabe is an astronomical instrument dating to ancient times. It serves as a star chart and physical model of visible heavenly bodies.

(2) It’s the one Uncle Three pulled out of the Dart Summit tomb when he was being chased by the corpse eater king. It was talked about towards the end of Vol 4 Ch. 7.

(3) It was mentioned in Volume 3 Ch. 1 that there are 2 types of feng shui: large feng shui and small feng shui. In super simplistic terms, large feng shui was for stuff on a grand scale like the fate of the country, while small feng shui was on a smaller scale like where to build your house.

(4) Chang’e is the goddess of the Moon and wife of Hou Yi, the great archer. Renowned by her beauty, Chang’e is also known for ascending to the Moon with her pet Yu Tu, the Moon Rabbit, and living in the Moon Palace. She’s one of the major goddesses in Chinese mythology.

(5) This is a running joke throughout the series. Wu Xie calls Fatty “Marshal Tianpeng”, which in this context is another name for “Zhu Bajie”, a major character from “Journey to the West”. He’s a fat man with a pig’s head, who often gets himself and his companions into trouble through his laziness, gluttony, and propensity for lusting after pretty women. In the novel, Zhu Bajie originally held the title of Marshal Tianpeng, commander-in-chief of 80,000 Celestial sailors. However, he was later banished for misbehavior. At a party organized for all the significant figures in Heaven, Bajie saw Chang’e for the first time and was captivated by her beauty. Following a drunken attempt to seduce her, she reported this to the Jade Emperor and thus Zhu Bajie was banished to Earth.

(6) Just a heads up, but there seems to be a continuity error on the dmbj.org site between the end of this paragraph and the start of the paragraph where the guy is talking to Wu Xie about seniority. Not sure if it was just copied to the site wrong or what, but I decided to take the missing paragraphs from the published Chinese raw on Amazon and include them here to make it flow better.