NR | Chapter 21

Chapter 21: Breakthrough

Tian Yuqing couldn’t confirm our exact location, but he still used divination again and again to determine the direction of the pit wall. We rested against it. The people from the two teams had already been wandering around the bottom of the pit for a full six hours, and the moment we sat down, exhaustion hit all of us.

There were many dried roots hanging down from the plants on the pit wall. Their tendrils had drilled up out of the soil, and as the temperature slowly dropped, our windbreakers obviously weren’t holding up very well. So He Yu used his knife to cut down those tendril-like roots one by one and use them as firewood.

Because of what we had just discovered, I kept thinking about it and had no appetite at all. I only drank a little water and ate a few compressed biscuits. After He Yu got the fire going, he leaned back beside me with a small stick in his hand, while Lu Ayao sat on the sand drawing talismans with a branch.

The archaeology team was distributing food over there. Tian Yuqing reminded Xiao Xu, “This is only our first night. You’re drinking water too fast. This place is deep, and there may be an underground river below, but even the water in an underground river may not be drinkable. If the supply team can’t get down here and you’ve already used up all your water, in the end you’ll only have piss to drink.”

The warmth from the fire slowly brought feeling back to my frozen feet, and I felt as if I had come back to life. He Yu was full and warm now, already leaning beside me and dozing off.

I couldn’t sleep, so I started staring at those tall clay figurines in the distance and letting my mind wander.

There was no doubt about it, this was a figurine array[[1]]. During the Three Kingdoms period, Zhuge Liang had devised the Eight Trigrams Formation, a battle array of strange and constantly changing shapes that no one could fully decipher. This obviously didn’t look much like the legendary Eight Trigrams Formation. According to the stories, the Eight Trigrams Formation was also derived from the Daoist five elements, and Tian Yuqing had been studying the I Ching and divination arts since he was young, yet even he had no way to begin.

Right in front of me was a clay figurine riding atop a massive horse, sword raised and head held high. At the same time, I also noticed that the figurines nearest the pit wall on the outer edge were all standing soldiers. They should count as the most ferocious-looking batch of clay figures in the entire pit, and only after that did they start changing into soldiers, civil officials, and music figurines.

I sat cross-legged on the sand and pulled a compressed biscuit out of my pocket to gnaw on.

The soldiers on the outer layer were obviously there to intimidate, but the mounted soldiers shown in the midst of battle were completely different. They could only be explained as guards for an emperor, but strangely enough, there wasn’t a single clay figure in the pit that resembled an emperor. Nothing about this burial pit made sense.

I was certain the mounted battle-ready soldiers could not have been meant only to protect the music figurines in the very center. Unless there was something else in the pit that we had not seen.

A thought seemed to flash through my mind. I listened as the tapping of the small wooden stick in He Yu’s hand beside me grew fainter and fainter, and then inspiration struck. I immediately reached out and shook He Yu awake. He jerked in shock, still dazed for a long time afterward.

“What are you doing? It’s the middle of the night, and you’re not sleeping. You’re disturbing the peace,” He Yu cursed at me.

I waved him over. We met each other’s eyes, and silently and in sync we both shut up and leaned closer. He asked, “What is it? Did you find something again?”

I nodded. “But I need proof now. In a bit, we need to go back in once, back to the place we were just at before. I need to do an experiment.”

He Yu almost got too excited at once. I hurriedly held him down. “Keep it quiet!”

He shoved me. “Have you fucking gone crazy? It’s Lu’s turn to keep watch tonight. Do you believe he’d go straight and report you to Tian Yuqing? Then you won’t be going anywhere! This is too risky. Wait, tomorrow. Tomorrow we definitely go, okay? Be good and sleep now, can’t you?”

“No! By tomorrow there’ll be more people, and with so many voices around, who knows if we’ll still be able to find the original path? By then there’s no way we’ll find the place where that clay figurine broke,” I shoved him back. “So are you going or not? Stop dragging it out and give me a straight answer. If you won’t go, I’ll go myself!”

I only dared to use this on He Yu. If it had been Tian Yuqing instead, he might have just waved me off and made me go on my own. Going into that pitch-black figurine array in the middle of the night really did take a lot of courage, and I absolutely didn’t have it by myself.

Sure enough, He Yu immediately grabbed me. After hesitating for a moment, he still lowered his head and packed up his bag. He said, “Fine, fine. I’ll just be accompanying a gentleman at the risk of my life. I really don’t get you. You were terrified when you fell earlier this morning, and now you suddenly act like a completely different person.”

I slung on my backpack too. “Isn’t this for everyone’s sake? If I can figure this out, we can get down there earlier, and getting down earlier means we can get out earlier.”

He Yu said, “Then we’d better keep our voices down. Watch out for Lu…”

Before he even finished, I heard footsteps behind us. Lu Ayao gave a whistle, though there wasn’t much expression on his face. He casually lifted his shirt, and the cold steel at his waist gleamed silver. “Talking about me in the middle of the night? You’re packed up pretty neatly. Where are you trying to go?”

He Yu choked up at once, clearly unwilling to talk much with Lu Ayao.

So I hefted my backpack and stood up, grinning at Lu Ayao. “Bro, just pretend you’re asleep and know nothing, okay? We’ll be back very soon, half an hour. Really, really soon.”

Lu Ayao’s face darkened immediately. “No one is allowed to act on their own. Especially under these circumstances. I know you’ve got plenty of ideas, but we’ll talk tomorrow. What you need to do right now is rest. Is that clear enough?”

I fucking can’t sleep! Which university student goes to bed before ten at night! And besides, the guess I had just made had my brain nerves so worked up that if I couldn’t do this tonight, I knew I wouldn’t be able to rest anyway.

I took a deep breath, lowered my voice, and tried to sound as composed as possible. “You saw it today too. Going in together with those people ended up like that. Even Tian Yuqing couldn’t do anything about them. But I already understand the principle of this figurine array. If I don’t go back in and confirm it again now, I can guarantee that tomorrow we’ll still be in exactly the same predicament as today. This array is enough to trap us here for a lifetime, to wear us down to death here like that corpse.”

He Yu stood to the side watching our standoff. I was actually nervous too. My heartbeat was clearly speeding up, and later I even seemed to hear the second hand on He Yu’s watch ticking away. I knew that if Lu Ayao didn’t want us to go in, we absolutely wouldn’t be able to beat him.

After a moment of silence, Lu Ayao said, “You can go in, but the two of you alone won’t do. I’m going with you. Agreed?”

He Yu and I both froze. So he hadn’t been stopping us. He’d come to discuss joining in.

Without any signal flares for illumination, the figurine array was pitch-black. Only our three flashlights casting beams around could make anything visible. Because we had to control the sound of our footsteps, we couldn’t move quickly. With fewer people around, the atmosphere became especially oppressive.

I held He Yu’s notebook in my left hand and compared it with the route map on it, and before long I found the spot where the clay figurine had shattered earlier. I checked the positions of the figurines recorded in the notebook against the surroundings from all sides, and after confirming there was no mistake, I stood beside the broken figurine.

“This is it,” I said.

Lu Ayao and He Yu stopped on either side of me. He Yu had no sense of posture and had one hand resting on a clay figurine as he asked me, “So this place is right, Master Gan. What do you need us to do for you next?”

Lu Ayao asked, “What do you need to confirm?”

I pulled out the wooden stick He Yu had picked up from my waist and drew many circles in the sand, then squatted down and said, “If we take this big circle as the burial pit we’re in now, and the small circles inside it as the clay figurines spread throughout it, then all the figurines on the outer edge are soldiers, while the very center is music figurines. That’s extremely unreasonable. Could these mounted battle soldiers really be here just to protect the music figurines in the center?”

He Yu picked up the thread. “You mean there’s still an emperor figurine we can’t see?”

I went on. “These clay figures were already in a very chaotic state when we first came in, so chaotic that we couldn’t find any pattern in their arrangement. But we overlooked one fact, which is that these figurines move on their own when they hear sound.

“And the thing I came back in to confirm is whether the movement pattern of these figurines is consistent, or, to put it another way, whether these music figurines have been circling around some point the whole time.”

Lu Ayao said, “Playing music for the emperor. If such a point really exists, then that is the entrance to the tomb.”

I dropped the wooden stick in my hand and stood up with a smile. “What we need to do now is simple. We just need to make enough noise. He Yu, this is your area of expertise.”

He Yu happened to have a very trendy flip phone. I’d heard it was a birthday gift from his family. When I said that, he took the phone out of his pocket. “You little bastard, sneaky and devious, so you were waiting for me here. Come on, let’s find something good to listen to and let these ancestors enjoy some modern music too.”

As he spoke, he played *A Little Girl Under the Streetlamp*. The moment it started, even the strangest atmosphere didn’t feel strange anymore.

Before it even finished halfway, my mouth twitched. “Stop, stop, stop. You’re giving our ancestors this? This might be a bit too cutting-edge for them. Change it, change it.”

He Yu clicked his tongue and switched to the next song, *Sailor*. I told him to turn the volume all the way up. The moment it hit the maximum, the clay figurines all around us began to shake violently, as if they had come alive. Their bases seemed to be linked by something, and they started moving rapidly.

I immediately moved aside and shone my flashlight on each clay figurine to keep from getting hit. Lu Ayao shouted at me, “Gan Ji, watch where they’re moving.”

I came to my senses and quickly swept my gaze over every figurine moving in the flashlight beams. Before long, I discovered that their eyes were all looking at the same spot. When they weren’t moving, these clay figurines’ eyes would never have been in that state.

I went around the moving figurine in front of me and ran quickly in that direction. On the way there, I realized that it wasn’t just their eyes pointed that way, the paths of their feet were also moving around that same point.

“He Yu, that’s enough!” I shouted.

He Yu cursed loudly. “Are you fucking deaf?! I stopped ages ago! Why are these things still moving?!”

Only then did I realize, belatedly, that the music had already stopped playing the moment I discovered that spot. But the clay figures around me were still moving, and faster now, at least 1.5 times faster than when the music had been playing.

At that moment, I suddenly remembered something my grandpa once said: old springs, once put back into use, will snap completely if they’re stretched for too long. It’s just like the human nervous system. If your nerves stay tense for too long, you’ll go crazy. The same was true of the axles in ancient machinery.

Lu Ayao was the closest to me. I immediately started searching for him with my flashlight. Just as I moved the beam, the sand beneath my feet suddenly gave way. The sensation of weightlessness choked me, and at the same time I saw He Yu not far away fall down too.

The flashlight slipped from my hand. I instantly reached out and clawed blindly at the air around me, hoping to catch something to stop my fall. But all around me, there seemed to be nothing but sand. I grabbed nothing at all. In the end, I could only clutch my head and let my shoulder slam against the uneven stone as I slid downward all the way.