Chapter 57 Heavenly Stone

When the ancients saw meteorites falling from the sky, they decided to call them heavenly stones. There were many different types of heavenly stones, which were often used as materials for carvings, but the most famous one was called “The Heart of Heaven”.⁽¹⁾

The thing above us could only be a meteorite; otherwise, there was no reasonable explanation for what we were seeing. After all, it wasn’t humanly possible to embed such a large boulder in the middle of the rock formation here. But this meteorite was too big… it was impossible to imagine just how much of it was embedded in the rock.

The others gradually came back to their senses and turned on their miner’s lamps to illuminate the ceiling, trying to find the edge where the meteorite met the cave rock. After some calculations, we estimated that the part we could see was about five or six hundred meters in diameter. Then we took into account the size of the part embedded in the rock and estimated that the whole thing was probably close to a kilometer in diameter.

The holes covering the meteorite’s surface made it look extremely ugly, just like a giant, rotting honeycomb. I didn’t know why, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that this thing looked similar to the immortality pills we saw earlier. The inside of the holes were pitch black, and even shining our lights towards them revealed nothing about what might be inside or how they were formed. Those countless dark holes reminded me of beady little eyes, and I was suddenly overcome with the uncomfortable feeling that I was being watched.

“This must be our destination,” Chen Wen-Jin said. “This must be the place where the Queen of the West’s ultimate secret lies. This may be exactly what Wang Zanghai was looking for…”

“What would he want this thing for? What use is a meteorite to him?” I didn’t quite understand.

Chen Wen-Jin just shook her head, “I don’t know yet, but it may have something to do with these holes. Why are there so many of them?”

I looked at those holes again and felt a chill run up and down my spine. “Could they be man-made? Like someone dug them out? Shit, is there something inside this meteorite?”

Surprisingly, Black Glasses was the one who answered this time, “No, they should be natural. Many meteorites look like honeycombs, but the holes on this one seem to be a little uglier.”

Suddenly seeing him speak so seriously caught me off guard, but before I could react, one of Uncle Three’s men asked, “Have you guys ever heard of an unconfirmed theory that the Qaidam Basin and the Tarim Basin were both formed by the impact of a split asteroid? Maybe this thing is a fragment of that meteorite and the oasis of Tamu-Tuo was located at the epicenter of the impact site. When the Queen of the West’s people were building the city in this crater and digging deep underground to construct the reservoir system, they must have found this meteorite buried here. I think this thing might be a symbol of the Queen of the West’s divine power.”

This was the second time this guy spoke. I glanced at him, but I had never paid much attention to him before so I couldn’t remember his name. Just as I was about to ask him to elaborate on this theory, Fatty suddenly caught my attention.

Fatty, in all his unorganized and undisciplined glory, had at some point wandered away from us. Now he and Poker-Face were about four or five hundred meters away, looking at something we couldn’t see from this distance. Hearing him call us over, we immediately started wading towards him and saw that he had found the junction where the meteorite met the cave ceiling. Looking at it, I couldn’t help but think that this must be what the underworld looked like—a large number of stalactites hung down from above, gradually growing so close together that they formed a huge, eerie stone waterfall. Its slope appeared gentle enough to hike up, but it was so ridiculously huge that it looked like a small mountain.

Clearly, it wasn’t a natural product of this cave. Its shape was both sinister and extremely ugly, as if the tentacles of countless huge monsters were stuck together. It was hard to fully describe it in words, but I knew it must have been the result of the meteor impact, when the high temperatures melted the surrounding rocks.

At the widest section of this stone waterfall, we saw that a bunch of crude steps had been carved, and bronze lamps had been placed on either side of them. The top of the stone steps, that is, the part where the stone waterfall connected with the ceiling, had a large crack that had been turned into a stone platform. Looking around, I immediately realized that this must be the sacrificial altar—it was as close to the meteorite as you could possibly get and also gave a panoramic view of the sacrificial scene below.

But the most important thing was the huge stone throne sitting on the sacrificial altar. It was hard to see clearly, but it seemed to have something like horns sticking out from it, and there appeared to be a person sitting on it.

I sucked in a sharp breath, wondering who it could be. Was it the Queen of the West? After all this time, was she still here, guarding her sacred place?

<Chapter 56><Table of Contents><Chapter 58>

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TN Notes:

(1) At the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, there are 3 main groups of constructions, all built according to strict philosophical requirements: the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, the Imperial Vault of Heaven, and the Circular Mound Altar. The center of the Circular Mound Altar is a round slate called the Heart of Heaven (天心石) or the Supreme Yang (太阳石), where the Emperor prayed for favorable weather. Thanks to the design of the altar, the sound of the prayer will be reflected by the guardrail, creating significant resonance, which was supposed to help the prayer reach the heavens.