Chapter 16: Reinforcements

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“Missing? Chief! How can a living man simply disappear?” It took me a long while to grasp what he meant.

Chief Wang and Old Third Sun looked grim, weighed down by worry.

Old Third Sun recounted what had happened in fits and starts.

Compared with the eastern side chamber, the western one had yielded nothing of any real value. Old Second Sun had been brooding over it all along, and when they began work that night, the two brothers split up. Old Second Sun said there might be a hidden underground palace or secret compartment beneath the western chamber, with all the bronze vessels and jade artifacts buried inside.

Old Third Sun was the calmer of the two. He immediately laughed at his brother. “Second Brother, I think you’ve lost your mind.”

Chief Wang offered his own theory about the strange incident. He was firmly convinced that the main burial chamber and coffin could not simply vanish into thin air. He guessed that an earthquake, combined with years of water seepage, might have caused the main chamber to collapse and sink. In that case, the principal chamber of this Western Zhou tomb should still be buried underground.

If so, it had become a tomb within a tomb—making the whole affair even more difficult.

What did “a tomb within a tomb” mean?

Such things were not as rare as one might think, especially in regions frequently struck by earthquakes throughout history. Put simply, they were the result of natural disasters.

When the main burial chamber subsided and collapsed, there was no way to predict the distance or direction of its displacement. Anyone trying to locate it would need sixty percent luck and forty percent skill.

Not long ago, the Sanxingdui ruins suddenly became the talk of the nation. Some people may not know that the site of the Sanxingdui civilization had already been discovered by a national archaeological team in the 1930s. After decades of excavation, they still managed to miss several enormous pits. They simply failed to find them—until, quite recently, they were discovered by chance.

That was a classic example of how an earthquake could cause sacrificial pits and burial sites to shift drastically, turning them into tombs within tombs. It was thanks to that misfortune that people of my generation have had the privilege of witnessing the excavation of the ancient Shu kingdom’s golden masks.

Old Second Sun had disappeared beneath the pit, inside the western side chamber. Heaven knew whether he had fallen into some concealed black shaft. He might even have triggered some kind of hinged-floor trap. His fate was unknown, and as his brothers, Old First Sun and Old Third Sun naturally had to find him.

Alive, they had to see him alive. Dead, they had to find his body.

None of them slept that night. Several times, Old Third Sun grew agitated and said he wanted to descend into the tomb alone to search for his brother, but Chief Wang stopped him every time.

“Third,” Chief Wang said, “as the leader of this team, I’m even more anxious than you are about Second going missing. But that doesn’t mean we can rush in blindly! You’ve always been levelheaded, so answer me this: how many people in our line have died after running into a situation like this?”

“That’s why, Third, we need to call for help.”

“Call for help?” I asked curiously. “Chief, are we going to report it to the police? Have them go search for Second Brother?”

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Chief Wang glared at me. “Yunfeng, did a donkey kick you in the head? Report it? Do you want to spend ten years eating prison cornmeal buns?”

After being scolded, I stammered helplessly, unable to think of a reply.

Chief Wang told us not to worry about it. He would find someone to help. He specifically instructed me to keep an eye on Old Third Sun and not let him sneak away alone to descend into the tomb. The reinforcements he had contacted would arrive soon.

I had barely slept all night. The next morning, while I was brushing my teeth in the courtyard, I noticed that Saucy Mole was nowhere to be seen. I had no idea where that woman had gone.

“Yunfeng, go out and buy Third Brother a steamer of soup dumplings, and bring back a bowl of wonton soup,” Old Third Sun suddenly called from behind me.

I spat out the rinse water and turned around. “I can’t, Third Brother. Chief told me to keep watch over you. He said you’re not allowed to leave until the people he’s called for arrive.”

Old Third Sun’s face flushed from blue to red.

“Damn it!”

He kicked over the garbage bin in the courtyard.

All morning, I was like a temple guardian statue, following him wherever he went and carrying out Chief Wang’s orders to the letter. I could not let him sneak down into the pit to look for his brother.

I had never imagined that a grown man could cry. At one point, I saw Old Third Sun lying face down on the table inside the room, sobbing and muttering, “Second Brother, wherever you are, you have to hold on. Nothing will happen to you, Second Brother. You’ll be fine.”

A little after three in the afternoon, two people arrived at the inn, a man and a woman. The man wore sunglasses and had a crew cut. He was lean to the point of gauntness. The woman looked to be in her thirties and wore an expression of icy frost.

After meeting Chief Wang, he introduced them to me.

“Yunfeng, let me introduce you. These are the Yao siblings, famous figures in our line, born into a family with a long tradition. Their uncle is a legendary master in our trade—the renowned Master Yao.”

At the time, all I could think was that this man and woman were formidable. There was something different about their bearing. I did not yet know who the Master Yao Chief Wang mentioned was. It was only later that I had the chance to meet him several times.

He was a truly extraordinary man. He, too, had risen from the ranks to become a tomb leader, though his story did not end well.

If you are interested, look up Master Yao sometime. His tomb-raiding exploits could fill an entire book. I know more about him than most of you do, and if I were to tell the whole story of that man, I could go on for three days and three nights.

The main reason Chief Wang had summoned these two was the woman.

She had studied international archaeology abroad, and she had conducted extensive research into the mechanisms and traps found in grand tombs—diamond-sealed entrance stones, quicksand pits, fire traps, hinged floors, and the like. Those skills could be of real use to us.

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Don’t think I’m telling some tall tale. Most people simply have never seen such things. The mechanisms and traps in those grand tombs—the hinged stones, the quicksand pits—are all perfectly real, and many of them are still functioning to this day.

Let me give two real-world examples of anti-theft measures in grand tombs.

The First Emperor’s mausoleum has mercury flowing like rivers, while its earthen mound is a wonder rarely seen anywhere in the world, rising a full one hundred and fifty meters high. Even today, two thousand years later, the soil beneath Mount Li contains mercury at more than three hundred times the normal level. That was meant to deter tomb robbers. In ancient times, there were no gas masks. Anyone who dug a tunnel into the tomb would have been poisoned to death within five minutes.

Then there is the Qianling Mausoleum, where Empress Wu and Emperor Gaozong were buried together. To this day, I consider it the best-defended imperial tomb in history—better protected even than the First Emperor’s mausoleum beneath Mount Li.

Who among us in the trade has never dreamed of entering Qianling?

Never mind everything else. As for Wang Xizhi’s famous Preface to the Orchid Pavilion, there is an eighty percent chance it lies inside Li Zhi’s coffin. Whoever managed to get in and lay hands on it would never need to worry about food or drink for the next thirty generations of descendants.

The problem is that no one can get inside.

Qianling stretches across Breast Mountain and Beam Mountain. When I was twenty-four, I once went there secretly one night to take a look.

Standing atop Breast Mountain, if the sky happened to be clear and full of stars, you could observe it carefully: the ridgelines of Breast Mountain and Beam Mountain aligned perfectly with the Big Dipper overhead.

What was that called?

In the study of feng shui and celestial omens, it was known as an eternal domain of longevity.

Legend had it that the plans for Qianling were drawn by Yuan Tiangang and Li Chunfeng. Both were masters of feng shui, and they also served as ritual officials of the Imperial Astronomical Bureau, the highest institution under Empress Wu, responsible for observing the heavens, safeguarding the nation’s fortune, and warding off ominous stars.

Throughout history, more than seventy named individuals and groups had attempted to rob Qianling, with seventeen attempts standing out as the most notorious.

The military governor Wen Tao once led three battalions to excavate the mausoleum. That day, a violent thunderstorm broke out, and more than a dozen men were struck dead by lightning.

During the rebellion of Huang Chao, the insurgents, short of military funds, specially dispatched an army of four hundred thousand men, each carrying a hoe, to dig up Qianling. They split Beam Mountain in two, yet failed to uncover even a scrap of treasure. The trench they left behind is still known as Huang Chao’s Ravine.

That was what it meant for a fortress to be impregnable.