Chapter 25: Opening the Door

Walking out of Li Jing’s house, I felt utterly lost. In the end, I hadn't been able to say it to her; I didn't dare. I wasn't some top-tier student from the First High School; I was a grave robber, a criminal. None of my peers would dare to be friends with me. I couldn't forget the look in Li Jing's eyes as I walked away.

"What's wrong, kid? Did you lose your soul?" Back in the bungalow down the mountain, "One-Mole" was munching on an apple.

I gave a bitter smile. "It's nothing. The wind was too strong, it got in my eyes."

One-Mole propped the apple up with one hand, surveyed me suspiciously, and burst out laughing. "You haven't even grown your hair out yet, and you already know what heartbreak is? Just forget about it." She laughed until she was swaying back and forth.

I felt a surge of anger and glared at her. "Just eat your apple! Don't talk about things you don't understand!" I wasn't angry because she called me a kid; I was angry because she told me to forget Li Jing. How could a person just forget someone they cared about?

But then again, back in those days, "non-mainstream" photos were quite the trend on QQ Spaces—melancholic gazes, messy hairstyles, photos enhanced with cheesy effects, paired with captions about forgetting love.

For the next month or so, things were calm. I didn't dare go look for Li Jing. The calves that Boss and Third Brother were raising in the pit were growing day by day. We fed them the best feed, and they grew remarkably fast.

The thickened iron hooks we needed had long since arrived. Boss had commissioned a master in Luoyang to forge them, and their size and specifications perfectly matched our requirements. While down in the pit, besides feeding the calves, Third Brother would take his hammer and chisel and spend time tapping away at the stone door. It took him nearly two months to finally carve a notch, shaped like a bull's nose, into the stone.

That night, we gathered in the pit, everything prepared. Everyone’s face was grim. This was the real deal—trying to pull aside the "self-locking" stone barrier using this far-fetched method. Whether we succeeded or failed depended on tonight.

Boss Sun patted the small yellow ox—no, it wasn't a "small" ox anymore. These three calves were now nearly as tall as me; they were big. Perhaps because they were used to us, the ox even stretched its head out to nuzzle Third Brother.

"I'm counting on you, pal," he said, stroking the bull's head.

One-Mole had sourced the highest-quality mountaineering rope available on the market. After several attempts, Boss Sun finally managed to hook the iron hook through the gap in the door and catch it on the self-locking stone behind it. We secured the hook to the bull's nose ring and tied the mountaineering rope to it. We looped the rope around the necks of the three oxen and grabbed hold of the remaining length.

We had raised the cattle for a hundred days for this single moment. Boss Sun hoisted the rope over his shoulder and roared, "Pull!"

The rope went taut in an instant!

"Pull!"
"Pull!"

The three oxen bellowed and braced themselves, pushing backward. Like One-Mole, I used every ounce of strength I had, my face turning crimson. Suddenly, a cloud of dust rained down from the stone door.

"Hold on! Give it another push!"
"Give me... damn it..."
"Open!"

With that final roar, a massive sound erupted from the stone door behind us. The self-locking stone that had been wedged against the gate of the tomb had been pulled aside.

We all collapsed to the ground, gasping for air. Third Brother had been living in this dark, sunless tomb for months, and he was too excited to control himself. "We did it! We did it!" he kept repeating. Months of persistence had vanished into thin air along with the shifting of the self-locking stone.

Without the self-locking stone, pushing the door open was simple. Once we recovered, we all placed our hands against the stone door and pushed. It creaked open, leaving a gap. The sound of the stone door grinding was deep and resonant, like the tolling of three-thousand-year-old bronze bells.

When the gap was wide enough for a person to squeeze through, we stopped. Looking inside, it was pitch black. The first thing I smelled was a fragrance—the same scent I had smelled when I first entered the tomb, but this time it was significantly stronger, hitting me head-on. Boss had once said that this scent was not a good sign.

After letting the air circulate for a while, Boss Sun took the lead, and we all crawled inside. It was very dark, but Boss had come prepared; we lit the torches we had ready.

We held the torches high.

"This... Brother, what is this?" I was so shocked by what I saw that I couldn't speak.

Before us lay wood—or to be more precise, a vast quantity of crafted timber. Each piece was about a meter long, and there were thousands of them. They were stacked together in a regular, geometric pattern, over ten meters high and more than twenty meters wide, layer upon layer, looking like a giant hedgehog.

The surface of each piece of wood was coated with a black substance that looked like some kind of preservative lacquer. That cedar-like fragrance was emanating from the wood.

Third Brother stared blankly at the mountain of wood. "Huang... Huangchang Ticou..."

He was right. This mountain of wood, stacked like a giant hedgehog, was the "Huangchang Ticou" (a funeral structure made of stacked logs) that Yao Yumen had once mentioned. The Han Dynasty versions of this were incomparable to what was before me; it was like comparing a tractor to a Ferrari—they weren't even in the same league.

None of us had ever seen a Western Zhou-era Huangchang Ticou. If we followed the standards of the later Han Dynasty, the very center of these logs was likely where the tomb owner's coffin lay. In other words, the place where we were standing was the main burial chamber that had vanished from above.

With these logs stacked together like a giant hedgehog, I frowned and asked, "Third Brother, this mountain of wood is blocking the path. How are we supposed to get in?"

Third Brother, being the most experienced, thought for a moment and said, "Yunfeng, don't worry. This was built by human craftsmen. When they finished their work and left, there must have been a path that wasn't easily discovered."

With that, Boss Sun held his torch high and began to carefully search for a space where a person could squeeze through. We stepped closer to help.

I hadn't noticed it from a distance, but up close, I suddenly saw that some of the logs were covered in black mushrooms. They weren't like the ones we ate at home; these were strangely shaped, with caps that looked remarkably like the faces of old men, covered in wrinkles, with distinct noses and eyes.

One-Mole also spotted the fungal growth and reached out to pick one.

"Don't touch it! Don't move that thing!" Boss snapped.

"Don't touch it. If I’m not mistaken, this fungus is something specifically mentioned in the Book of Burials."

"It's called 'Old Man’s Face Agaric,' a very rare type of cave-dwelling medicinal fungus."

"'Old Man’s Face Agaric'? Medicine?" I had never even heard of such a thing.

One-Mole took two steps back. "Third Brother, didn't you say it was medicine? Why can't we touch medicine? Even if it does look a bit strange."

"No, it's not like that," Third Brother said, his voice deep. "Very few people have ever seen this. I doubt even Yao Yumen has. The Book of Burials says this plant grows in places of extreme Yin, and in folklore, it is used by Miao shamans to summon souls."