Chapter 20: The Underground Palace

Page (1/3)
We were burning leaves and branches from the pit; some were still damp, so the fire wasn’t very strong, but there was a lot of smoke. I covered my nose with a cloth and said, “Is that enough, Third Brother? The fire was quite big a moment ago.” After half an hour, most of the clay jar was blackened by smoke. Wen Ce Yao poked down with a stick, but this time we didn’t bring up any corpse beetles.
“It should be effective. Who’s going down first?” the eldest brother asked in a deep voice.
“I will! I’ll go first!” Third Brother Sun gritted his teeth and said, “I’ll go down to scout for you all first. If Second Brother is down there, I can rescue him.”
He grabbed the edge of the jar and tested the depth with his leg.
“Not too deep. It seems to be touching the ground.”
Suddenly, there was a sound of crumbling stones below. Third Brother Sun shouted in alarm,
“Hold on! Don’t swing around! I’ve got you! Yun Feng, come help!”
I hurried over to grab the other arm of Third Brother Sun. When the Yao siblings saw this, they ran over to help. Together, we pulled Third Brother Sun up, whose feet were hanging in midair.
“What happened, Third Brother?”
Still shaken, Third Brother Sun said, “That was close… It must have collapsed.”
Yu Men Yao shone a flashlight down; beneath the clay jar was pitch black, nothing visible in the darkness.
Third Brother Sun was not discouraged; he suggested tying a rope and sliding down.
Not knowing the depth below, we tied a climbing rope around his waist.
The eldest brother and I held the rope tightly.
“Third Brother, be careful. If anything feels wrong, shout out, and we’ll pull you up immediately!”
Third Brother Sun nodded under the headlamp.
He slid down along the jar little by little.
Two meters, three meters, five meters—the rope quickly extended to ten meters.
Yu Men Yao frowned and said, “Could this be an underground palace? How could it be this deep?”
Finally, when the climbing rope reached eighteen meters, it stopped. Third Brother Sun must have reached the bottom.

Page (2/3)
The eldest brother could no longer hold back; after all, the missing person in the pit was his own younger brother.
“Just talking and guessing up here won’t help! If there was an ancient earthquake, sinking eighteen meters wouldn’t be impossible!”
“You all hold the safety rope. I’ll go down to find Third Brother,” the eldest brother said as he reeled in the rope and began wrapping it around his waist.
“I’m fine, big brother! Come down quickly and see. My God! I’ve never seen anything like this!” came Third Brother Sun’s loud shout from below.
One by one, we slid down. I was third from the last, with the Yao siblings at the very end.
My grip wasn’t strong, and the climbing rope bit painfully into my hands.
The cave was very dark. Halfway down, I looked up briefly.
On the inner wall beneath the opening, a few flat beetles crawled—those were the corpse beetles that hadn’t been burned. When I shone the light, they remained motionless.
I warned the Yao siblings above, then held tight to the rope and slid down further.
Next came Yu Men Yao, then Wen Ce Yao, who tied the rope loops around the clay jar when he reached the bottom, saying we would need the rope to climb back up.
The space below was vast, not only to me but also to the Yao siblings and the Sun brothers, all of us stunned.
It was pitch black, so I swept the flashlight around indiscriminately.
The surroundings were spacious with stone walls; this underground space was definitely man-made.
Because of the darkness and the flashlight’s limited range, we couldn’t see clearly. The first to notice was Third Brother Sun, who suddenly stopped us, saying there were human bones on the ground ahead.
Bones in a tomb were not strange, but what puzzled us was that these scattered white bones did not seem very old—they were still quite white. Upon quick inspection, there were leg bones, arm bones, finger bones, but no skulls.
Yu Jie, who was brave, squatted down to look and said, “A few months to half a year, not very long.”
I also found an empty Nongfu Spring water bottle on the ground nearby.
Despite many mysteries—no skulls, no clothes—the group quietly agreed on Third Brother Sun’s theory.
He guessed that on the night we first entered the pit, we discovered a blast hole made by a detonator at the tomb entrance. Initially, we thought this trip was a bust, that a local southern tomb-raiding gang had beaten us to it and looted all the burial goods below.
But it turned out to be the opposite—we found modern towels and signs that others had descended, yet the western chamber still held rich burial items. We filled seven or eight large hemp sacks. At the time, Second Brother joked that southern rats had turned vegetarian and kindly left us all this “fat meat.”
Now, seeing the Nongfu Spring bottle and these bones, we speculated it was related to that gang from a few months ago.
How they died and how they got down here remains unknown; the only reasonable explanation is that they turned on each other.

Page (3/3)
At this moment, Yu Men Yao pulled a compass out of her bag and squatted to examine it.
“Yu Jie, what’s that?” I asked, not understanding.
“Kid, don’t ask too much. Don’t distract my sister now. There are many things you don’t know,” her brother Wen Ce Yao shot me a cold glance.
The compass had two long needles and one short one. Oddly, without anyone touching it, the short needle kept swinging left and right.
“Over there…” Yu Men Yao stood and pointed northwest.
At the time, I didn’t understand. Now, having been in the field for years, I can tell you this kind of compass is special. The short needle is made of a material called “heavenly iron,” an ancient term for meteorite. Such compasses are used exclusively by the Fatuo sect, southern masters of yin burial geomancy who select gravesites by observing mountains and geomantic energy, relying on silver needles. This involves complex feng shui and magnetic field knowledge that I cannot explain briefly.
Following Yu Men Yao’s lead, we headed northwest. Along the way, I saw several stone oil lamp stands. I silently guessed that thousands of years ago, this place must have been brightly illuminated.
After more than ten minutes, we were blocked by a massive stone door.
The surface was covered with elaborate carvings of patterns and inscriptions, dense and mostly incomprehensible, as if the door bore the culture of another world.
At the center of the stone door were four characters, not the nine-layer seal script from earlier but bird script, more conspicuous.
“Do you recognize bird script?” Eldest Brother Sun asked Yu Men Yao, who stared at the door in a daze.
After a long pause, she snapped back to attention, her face pale as she nodded.
“This is as far as we go… We can’t proceed further,” she said with a somber tone.
“What do you mean? Are you planning to give up?” the eldest brother frowned.
Yu Men Yao nodded again, pale-faced.
“This level… it surpasses even the Han tomb at Mawangdui. Those four characters read… ‘Mustard Seed Palace.’”
“Behind this stone door are tons of natural stone blocks. With just us outside, there’s no way to open it.”
“You have accidentally discovered something extraordinary. This is… a nationally significant underground palace.”