NR | Chapter 1

Actually, the beginnings of many stories are far older than we imagine. That box was never that famous at first, and it appeared without warning.

At the end of the 1970s in New China, several old farmers were bent over, bracing the shovels that had sunk into the ground. Zhu Laosan took a few hard drags on the cigarette between his lips, the ember flashing and fading in an instant in the black mountain hollow.

“Zhu Laosan, you fucking blind or what? We all grew up in this damn hollow, so how come out of hundreds of people, you’re the only one who dug up treasure?” the young man standing outside the pit cursed.

Zhu Laosan hefted his hoe and jabbed it into the dirt. “If you fucking want to dig, dig. If you don’t want to get rich, then scram. Quit spouting shit over there!”

The shovel brought up a scoop of yellow earth, all of it dumped onto the pile behind them. Zhu Laosan drove the shovel in again, and this time there was a clear clang as the blade struck something metal, and the shovel could go no farther. Zhu Pingsan, who had made a living by stealing for years, tightened inside, and the fatigue in his eyes vanished at once.

“It’s on.” Zhu Laosan scraped off the last layer of soil, dropped the shovel, and started clawing at the mud with his bare hands. He called to the young man, “You idiot! What good is just standing there? Hurry up and help. We’re about to get rich!”

The crisp ring of metal on metal vanished from his mind at once. The memory of just having been trading curses with Zhu Laosan was quickly cast aside, and the young man threw down the shovel in his hands and scrambled on hands and knees to Zhu Laosan’s side.

The two of them used four hands to quickly scrape away the mud covering the metal vessel. A gold object the size of a palm soon appeared before them, and the young man could hardly tear his eyes away from it. Zhu Laosan also loved money, but he was not as hopeless as his unlucky nephew.

Years of mixing in the outer eight trades had taught him that there was something even more valuable underneath.

So Zhu Laosan kicked the troublesome nephew onto the nearby pile of dirt and kept scraping the soil away with his own hands. Soon his fingers touched something quite hard. Its size was clearly bigger than the gold object from before.

It was a jade box.

He sped up and cleared the jade box out. With just one glance, Zhu Laosan tucked the box into his chest and wrapped it tightly in his ragged clothes.

That mountain hollow still had to carry on with normal work the next day, so to keep anyone from noticing, Zhu Laosan and his nephew filled all the earth back in, then covered it with a bit of grass before the two finally left in high spirits.

A week later, a barefoot doctor stopped to rest on a bridge somewhere along the Huai River. The sweltering weather instantly turned cold and bleak, with a gusty, sinister wind.

The barefoot doctor sensed something was wrong, so he hurried across the bridge. To his shock, hanging directly beneath the arched bridge was a corpse that had already been dried out by the wind. The body swayed in the breeze, thin as a cicada’s wing, as if some spirit had sucked out its blood and bones, leaving only a sheet of human skin.

The rumor spread fast. Villagers recognized it from the clothes left by the bridge.

That was Zhu Laosan, who had just struck it rich and was planning to run to the county seat to marry a wife.

I lay on the bed, drowsiness creeping up on me, my whole body going limp as I looked at the record book in my hand and kept yawning.

At the end of the 1970s, in the period before the state’s policy of dividing the fields among households had been fully rolled out, many villages still produced according to production brigades, and Zhu Laosan must have noticed the valuable objects buried underground while digging up grass roots in the mountain hollow.

According to the account passed down through my ancestors, Zhu Laosan only dug a jade box out of the ground, and after reselling it he vanished without a trace. Not until his body was discovered did the villagers think he had run off to the county seat.

I rubbed my sore eyes and sorted through everything in my head in detail.

After Zhu Laosan resold the jade box and got a huge sum of money, he came to Nigou Bridge. He stripped off all his clothes, walked alone into the hard-to-walk mud pit, and hanged himself alive beneath the arched bridge with a rope.

It was simply unbelievable.

By normal logic, none of this made sense at all.

There is something that needs to be said here about the ancestors who recorded this strange incident.

My ancestors were a fairly traditional group of Wen Bi Lu, and what is called Wen Bi Lu, in my opinion, is essentially not that different from clerical record-keepers.

The only difference is that the most traditional Wen Bi Lu only served the outer eight trades, namely the eight branches beyond the three hundred and sixty trades[[1]], those of theft, gu, selling, feng, cheating, sorcery, theater, and killing.

After all, these ghost stories were written by one generation after another. It’s inevitable that they’d be cobbled together into stories that don’t quite fit. Just treat them like some no-nonsense bedtime chatter, and at the very least give our ancestors a little credit, right?

I closed the heavy record book, thinking exactly that, when the doorbell suddenly rang. I slowly got out of bed, very much wanting to curse. It was already past ten at night. Which brat was refusing to sleep and coming here to pull a prank? Once I saved up enough money, I had to move immediately to a high-end residential complex.

While thinking that, I got up to open the door. The motion-sensor light outside was blazing, but there was no one there.

I only opened the door and looked outside once, and every hair on my body stood on end as if I had been shocked with electricity.

A complete jade box.

The instant I saw it, my mind went blank. I walked around the doorway three times, and there really wasn’t a single person in sight.

So I made what might be the one decision in my life I would regret to the very end.

The box sat on the tabletop. The silver lock in front of the jade box had already been opened by someone, and when I touched it, it felt wet, cold as ice, as if it had been taken out of some even colder place.

Inside the jade box was a stack of manuscript paper two fingers thick.

That was the first time I saw a story about “Nine Rings.”

As a direct descendant of Wen Bi Lu, I wasn’t surprised by this kind of mailed manuscript. Some people who do shady business don’t want to reveal their identity, and they send things this way after wrapping them up, too.

Driven by curiosity, I put on my glasses and began leafing through the damp manuscript pages that were almost stuck together.

I didn’t sleep all night. I finished reading the manuscript.

This was a story even more magnificent and bizarre than I had imagined. In truth, I didn’t care whether what was written in the manuscript was real. I just kept reading and copying it out, treating it as a precious treasure of my generation of Wen Bi Lu.

By the time I finished copying it out, it was already the afternoon of the third day.

I lay down on the bed and fell asleep at once.

When I woke up and looked at the table again, those manuscripts were gone without a trace.

Even the jade box, still carrying that icy, snowy aura, had disappeared too, but the content I had copied into the record book proved I wasn’t dreaming.

Someone really had sent me an opened jade box.

It was as if someone simply wanted me to record these stories.

Nothing more.

But I can be sure there isn’t only one Wen Bi Lu still living in this world. Why, then, was that person sending it only to me? And also, did the legendary Nine-Ring Jade Box really exist? Or was the one I saw yesterday the very same one as the legendary box?

But no one answered my questions. My life remained calm and peaceful, and I never saw that jade box covered in mystery again. Later I even made a special trip to Henan, but I still didn’t find the protagonist from the manuscript.

The people in that story, those families, seemed to have been completely swallowed by the long river of time.

Only I know that once, perhaps, they really did exist.

In this chapter, the “I” is not the same person as the male lead in the main text, and only serves as a prologue to lead into the main story.

# Falling Dragon Nine-Turn Corridor