NR | Chapter 20

Seeing Tian Yuqing’s reaction, I finally realized that I was far too insensitive to danger. I had even been wondering whether this tomb robber had suffered some severe injury before he died here, but a little common sense was enough to tell me that was impossible. There wasn’t a single fatal wound on his body.

I tightened the strap of my backpack and stood up with Tian Yuqing. He obviously had no more interest in the dried corpse on the ground. “Back when workers built the burial pits, they had to move around inside them, so there has to be a passage at the end of the burial pit connecting to the others. We should try not to stay too long. We need to push through in one go.”

That was easy enough to say, but in reality, whether you were studying archaeology or just an ordinary person like me, once you saw mud figurines carved so vividly that they seemed alive, you couldn’t help stopping to look for a while.

So before the group had even gone very far into the burial pit, only a handful of people were still able to keep following Tian Yuqing at the front.

I was a little curious about these lifelike clay figurines too, but I wasn’t any good at history, so I couldn’t make sense of them. At most I’d look for a moment out of curiosity, nowhere near as fanatical as the professional archaeologists.

Xiao Xu slowly brushed the dust off the clay figurines with the brush he carried. His eyes were practically shining. “From the style, these clay figurines look like they’re from the Warring States period. We’ve never seen a complete set made that early before. Their expressions and postures are just too beautiful.”

I stopped listening to his amazement. I only thought these figurines were absurdly large, some even more than half a head taller than me.

And I noticed that although they came in many different forms, their faces were generally smiling. Some of their poses didn’t even look humanly possible. My imagination was too vivid, and the more I looked, the creepier it felt.

But these figurines were from the Warring States period, so they were extremely valuable. Otherwise Wu Yili wouldn’t have been staring at them one by one for so long. The group moved while stopping every so often. The clay figurines standing on the pit floor varied in size and were arranged very irregularly. Sometimes Tian Yuqing would lead the group far ahead, then turn back when he realized no one had followed and have to come back to wait.

I could tell that ever since we’d entered this burial pit, his nerves had been taut. I also knew that the cause of the dried corpse’s death was crucial, but at the time we couldn’t investigate that much. We could only grit our teeth and get out of here as fast as possible, reach the next burial pit, or find the entrance to the tomb passage.

So this stop-and-go progress was pure torment for Tian Yuqing.

I didn’t know how long we’d been walking. I didn’t have the habit of wearing a watch, so while we were paused I pulled a bottle of mineral water from my bag and asked He Yu, “Feels like we’ve been walking forever. This pit is actually pretty huge.”

He Yu rolled up his sleeve to check the time, then blurted out, “We’ve already been walking for five hours. Is this pit really that big?”

Tian Yuqing heard the noise on our side and brought the group behind him over to join us. Only then did I notice that at some point he’d already been holding a complicated compass in his hands. Every direction was marked with cinnabar symbols, and the needle was spinning wildly.

He glanced at Lu Ayao and said softly, “We’ve been going in circles. The magnetic field here has changed.”

Tian Yuqing remained calm, with no trace of panic, as if he were simply explaining the situation to us. “This isn’t ordinary ghostly misdirection. No matter how powerful it is, ghostly misdirection can’t break the eight directions and five elements. Something that can trap experienced tomb robbers to death can’t possibly be a ghost. We’ve probably run into something even more troublesome.”

Since childhood, I’d seen many side-cut diagrams of tombs, mostly to study the countless traps inside them. Although I wasn’t trained in the proper tradition, I wouldn’t panic too badly when entering a place like this for the first time. In a normal tomb, the burial pits usually contained chariots, horses, attendants, or sacrificial figures. No matter how many burial pits there were, they wouldn’t go beyond that.

Our original goal hadn’t been to tour every burial pit anyway, but to find the passage leading to the lower level. From the way Tian Yuqing put it, the passage in this kind of trapped-dragon layout generally wouldn’t be set up casually. Its direction would have to be checked against the compass, but the magnetic field at the bottom of the pit was extremely unstable, and the compass basically had no fixed direction.

Lu Ayao went off alone to circle the area, then came back and said, “We haven’t been here before. This is a new location.”

His tone was unusually firm, leaving himself no room to back out. Lu Ayao was careful and perceptive, extremely reliable and thorough in his work. Once he said it, none of us really had grounds to doubt him.

Aside from the archaeology team nearby brushing dust off the figurines, our side of the atmosphere suddenly grew very heavy. For a moment, no one could come up with a good idea.

In the end, Tian Yuqing gave the order. “We can’t keep wandering blindly. Until we figure out a workable plan, rest where you are. Try not to waste energy.”

He Yu and I rested under a giant clay figurine. He asked me, “Have you ever heard that in ancient times, some cruel emperors would order artisans to make clay figurines, then have those artisans killed once the figures were finished, stuffing them inside the figurines as burial sacrifices? Do you think there might be dead bodies hidden inside the clay figurines here too?”

I shoved him and threatened, “Stop trying to create a horror atmosphere for me. I’m a good socialist youth, okay? Keep your superstitions to yourself, don’t drag me into it. Even if there were dead bodies, it wouldn’t suddenly come back to life.”

As soon as I finished speaking, there was a loud clang beside me. A clay figurine somehow toppled over by itself, and its head smashed clean off. I jerked in fright and almost grabbed He Yu beside me.

The two of us froze for a full minute. Only after we saw that the figurine still wasn’t moving did we finally relax.

“See? Told you not to run your mouth. Looks like it saw how pretty you are and came back to look for a live-in son-in-law,” He Yu laughed so hard he nearly tipped over backward.

I cursed at him, “Get lost!”

Then I stood up and walked over to inspect the shattered figurine. The head had been completely broken apart, leaving only the body. The cracks had long since spread from the head down to the shoulders. Such an exquisite work of art was ruined.

I was feeling sorry for it when I heard a familiar sound, so I turned around and snapped, “He Yu, what the hell are you doing? You’re already an adult, and you still want to scare me?”

He Yu froze. “Who’s trying to scare you? I’m not that bored, okay?”

I didn’t argue back. Instead, I turned around and started rolling up my sleeves. He Yu noticed something was wrong with me and immediately crawled over and knelt beside me.

He stared in shock as I shoved one hand straight under the clay figurine, bracing the bottom and gesturing at him with my eyes. “Hurry up. It’s heavy as hell. Help me hold it up.”

“What are you doing?” He Yu asked, but his hands never stopped moving. He shifted from kneeling to crouching, moved to the figurine’s feet, and lifted from below with both hands. The figurine rose by at least half its height.

Once he had it supported, I immediately pulled my hand out and looked at He Yu. “Like this, keep holding. Hold it steady, and keep at it for five more minutes.”

He Yu stared at me blankly and asked again, “Why are you suddenly so intense? Did you find something?”

Lu Ayao also walked over from the other side when he heard us, then stood behind us and silently watched the two of us crouched on the ground fiddling with it.

I pulled the small flashlight from my waist, clamped it between my teeth, and started prying at the joint between the head and the neck and shoulders with my hands, widening the broken opening a little more until it was big enough for me to fit inside.

I took the flashlight out and said, “I just heard a very faint sound. I judged that it was probably something like metal reeds striking and vibrating against each other. I only yelled at you to confirm it. There aren’t any dead bodies inside this figurine, but there should still be something else in there.”

Actually, there were too few details that could be fully expressed in words. The fact that I dared reach in so boldly already meant I’d more or less formed a theory. We’d been going in circles on the spot, not because of ghostly misdirection, but because we’d run into an extremely rare mechanism designed to confuse tomb robbers.

I bit down on the flashlight and leaned my upper body into the figurine. Lu Ayao clearly didn’t trust my skill very much. He crouched beside me and grabbed one of my arms. That posture was actually a protective measure, so he could pull me out of the figurine as fast as possible if needed.

I’d barely gone halfway in when I was stunned by the structure inside. The figurine was packed densely with bronze wires used to pull and tension things. Each wire was tied to a metal reed. When one reed touched another, it produced a tremendous resonance, and the stronger the resonance, the more the reeds trembled.

I turned myself around and found that there wasn’t much visible inside the figurine cavity. Half the mechanism had actually been embedded directly into the thick body of the figurine. I roughly understood the principle, but what was the actual purpose of installing all these bronze wires?

Lu Ayao pulled me out. Before I even had time to shake the dust from my hair, I stood up with the flashlight and swept it around. I looked toward a figurine on the left, a musical figurine, and walked over to shine the light down inch by inch.

Very soon, Wu Yili’s voice came from behind us. “What are you people doing? These are priceless ancient works of craftsmanship! I’m not even asking you to protect them, and you’re already treating cultural relics like this? Tian Yuqing, who exactly did you hire?”

He Yu shot back, “It was it that fell over on its own, okay?! We didn’t touch it at all. What are you picking a fight for?”

Both sides’ voices were magnified several times by the burial pit. It was like some ancient music hall. If you shouted once, no matter where you were, everyone could hear you clearly.

I half-crouched and stared at the ground beneath the musical figurine. As the sound grew louder and louder, the figurine itself was slowly moving in one direction.

Lu Ayao clearly noticed it too. He looked at the three clay figurines beside us. Their movement was very slow, and they were all shifting at the same time. If a person were walking, they would never notice it, and would only think they were seeing things.

The sight of the figurines moving was actually extremely eerie. The area we were in was full of musical figurines. These smiling-faced figures came in all shapes and forms, and once they started moving, it was as if they were really performing music in the tomb.

So I went to find Tian Yuqing, and he took a record sheet from his pocket. “Actually, from the moment we entered here, I already marked down the number and positions of every figurine we encountered. It was originally for emergencies, but clearly, this trick doesn’t work anymore.”

I saw that the record sheet had a route drawn in red ink, the quickest path to the opposite side. In fact, if we moved quickly through it, the sound of our footsteps alone shouldn’t have been enough to make the figurines shift to the point that the environment had completely changed like this.

He Yu spread his hands. “Anyway, at least now we know the problem is with these clay figurines. As long as it’s not some supernatural phenomenon, it can’t trap us to death.”

As he spoke, he patted my shoulder. “Don’t rush. Think it through carefully. Grandmaster Gan, you’re the only one here who understands mechanisms. I know you definitely have a way.”