NR | Chapter 35

We kept climbing upward. After another twenty meters, I could already make out the dome of this side chamber faintly from where I was. I bit down on my flashlight and swept the beam upward. What the light caught made me jump.

I saw a corpse hanging and swaying in the wind, and it seemed that the higher we went, the more of these hanging corpses there would be. That was definitely not a good sign, so I stopped climbing. He Yu also saw them, and he stopped with me.

Lu Ayao swept his flashlight upward in a circle and said without looking back, “You two wait here for now. There are all kinds of bodies up there, and the risk of reanimation is very high. I’ll go ahead first. If anything happens, just climb back down right away.”

“Reanimation?” I turned to look at He Yu in shock.

He Yu rolled his eyes at me. “Why are you looking at me? Since we got in here, you’ve already seen centipedes as big as a train engine. Something like this shouldn’t be that surprising, right?”

I thought, fair enough. If it weren’t for He Yu and Lu Ayao protecting me all the way, I’d probably have ended up hanging in some random corner just like these corpses. I looked back at Lu Ayao, and he had already climbed ten meters away.

Being alone in a stifling, dark place made it impossible to control your imagination. I knew better than most how frightening a person could be, so when Lu Ayao suggested he scout ahead alone, I felt a little guilty. I thought that if something happened to him while scouting, with my sense of morality, I might regret it for the rest of my life.

“I’m saying, you’re the type who, well, gets all worked up over other people’s business.” He Yu climbed onto the section of chain beside me and lay there with me, reprimanding me in a very low voice.

“He’s way more professional than you, who knows how many times over. You, y-you just stop overthinking. All you need to think about is how we’re gonna run if something happens!” he said. “Plan B, got it?”

What he said shifted my attention a little. I looked around, but I really couldn’t come up with anything. I had been climbing and feeling my way along this whole time, and discovered that the tomb wall here was solid. That meant once something weird happened here, there was absolutely no way we could get out in the short term.

I looked up at Lu Ayao slowly making his way through the dense hanging corpses. From where I was, I could only barely make out the beam of his flashlight. Not long after, he shone the light toward our position. He should have reached the top.

“There’s something here. I think you two should come up and take a look,” Lu Ayao said.

He Yu gave me a boost and said, “Then you go first. I’ll follow behind you. Hold on tight, and for god’s sake be careful not to kick your big brother me down.”

I had never seen reanimation before, or rather, in my mind, corpses were nowhere near as frightening as insects. I had only accidentally discovered this preference of mine, but normally, people ought to be more afraid of corpses.

I grabbed the chain and started climbing. The last stretch wasn’t long, maybe just over thirty meters, but I climbed it agonizingly slowly. The hanging corpses showed different stages of decay. Some were like the paper-thin corpses I had seen before, and some were wet corpses that had not fully rotted.

Many tombs used poisonous substances on accompanying burial corpses as a defense against grave robbers. Even after so many years, who knew whether those toxins had been fully absorbed by the corpses themselves.

So I still planned to be careful. I angled my body, trying as much as possible not to touch those grotesque corpses. He Yu stayed far from me. He must have deliberately kept the pace slow. Ever since we started climbing the chain, the three of us had kept a considerable distance from one another. That way, if something really did happen, no one would drag a companion down in the ensuing panic.

I lifted my flashlight and, out of the corner of my eye, caught sight of another very fresh corpse. It was only two arm-lengths away from me. The clothing no longer showed its original color, and its eyes had become two black hollows. The expression on its face was horribly twisted. I saw that Japanese brand name again, and the clothes seemed to be the same style as the corpse I had seen before.

The two sets of clothes were eerily identical. Could they have been part of another team that came in here earlier?

Before I could think further, Lu Ayao was already reaching out to me from above through the dougong brackets. I took his hand and climbed onto the final eave of the pillar. The moment I got up there, he gestured for me to look overhead.

I squinted and looked, and saw that about three meters above us hung a female corpse. The moment I saw it, my heart sank. The state of this corpse was completely different from the others. She was hanging upright in midair.

It was already rare enough to see something set right in this tomb, so I supported myself on Lu Ayao and stood up, using my flashlight to examine her carefully.

The woman was wrapped in layer after layer of burial robes. Her face was hidden in the dark, and her crown and neck ornaments were intricate. A red cord hung down from the dome and bound her body tightly. The knotting was crude, as if she were nothing more than an item worth no more than any other throwaway object. That made the whole corpse sit obediently in midair like a silkworm pupa.

I took out the jade bi and asked Lu Ayao, “Do you think this was its owner?”

Lu Ayao barely glanced at the jade bi in my hand and said, “Probably not. From the murals earlier, you can tell the tomb owner’s group highly revered hanging burial. Although this female corpse is covered in gold and silver, the way she’s bound and suspended from the dome is odd. The dome is sealed shut, and the ground below is a quicksand layer, so there’s no way up and no way down. The ancients placed the greatest importance on reincarnation and rebirth. From a feng shui standpoint, this kind of burial is extremely inauspicious. Even someone guilty of monstrous crimes wouldn’t be treated like this. The jade in your hand is carved with a luan bird, and it has a blood-soaked patina that is exceedingly rare, the kind not seen for a thousand years. Something this precious is very out of place with her condition.”

I silently put the jade bi away and secretly studied Lu Ayao’s expression. What he had just told me sounded reasonable enough, but in fact it was all based on his own guesswork. I had previously dealt with people who studied feng shui and the *I Ching*[[1]], and the deeper their skill, the more concise and cautious their wording became. As the only legitimate heir of the Lu family now, Lu Ayao naturally inherited that trait too. But when it came to this piece of jade, he was unusually firm and decisive in his conclusion.

I rolled the jade around in my palm, thinking it was only a burial object. Where it came from and how it came to be here were ultimately just a matter of human words. But Lu Ayao’s tone was too suspicious.

“There sure are a lot of treasures in this world.” I smiled and probed him, “Since that’s the case, I have a question about this piece of jade that I’d like to ask you.”

Lu Ayao crouched on the dougong brackets and turned to look at me.

“How did you know it was a unique piece? Did you only say that because you’d seen one before?” I said with a smile. “Normally, if you go by the old saying, a jade bi should at least come as a pair to be considered proper. If there’s really only one luan bird on the jade bi, then that would be just like the saying about looking into a mirror and feeling sorrow. What do you people call that again, inauspicious?”

Lu Ayao did not show much emotional reaction. He did not answer. Instead, he turned back to look at the beam of He Yu’s flashlight not far away. From that movement alone, I knew I had at least guessed half of it right.

I had guessed correctly, but I was extremely annoyed. It was just a damn burial object, yet this kid was hiding things from me left and right. So what if he had seen it outside before? Did he really have to refuse to tell the truth? Not to mention how close we were, we had at least made it all the way here, fought for our lives in a pile of bugs, and rolled around in a pit of bones. He had lied to me, and he had lied to He Yu too, all over some broken piece of jade?

The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. Since he wouldn’t pay me any mind, I had nowhere to vent.

He Yu still hadn’t come up yet, and I was getting impatient. I shouted downward, “He Yu! Are you fucking planning to build a nest down there? Are you climbing the chain or polishing it? You’ve been climbing for a year and still haven’t gotten up here?”

The moment I finished cursing, I saw He Yu’s flashlight flash rapidly several times. It took me quite a while to realize that was a signal made up of three long and two short flashes. Right after sending it, He Yu switched his flashlight off.

My heart sank. Shit, something had definitely happened!