We reminded Shen Qianjue to be as clear and brief as possible because we were worried that the satellite phones communication ti wouldnt be enough for her to finish the whole story. She was very cooperative and took a brief mont to organize her thoughts before starting to narrate thodically.
Shen Qianjue and her partner were twenty-five and twenty-six years old, respectively. They accepted Jin Wantang's job purely to experience the atmosphere of working with old grave robbers. Since they didn't want to win at all, they constantly focused on observing everything once they entered the grassland. They chose to observe Liuli Suns team and followed them at a distance of two or three kiloters. At night, the two girls took advantage of the darkness and walked close to the other teams camp so that they could eavesdrop on their conversations.
I used to do this all the ti, so I couldn't help but feel a little emotional after hearing this. I felt that I had to take good care of this younger generation and pass on my cunning way of doing things so that there would be fewer unnecessary fights in the business in the future.
The goal of the two teams in the beginning was very clearuse the coordinates that Jin Wantang had provided to reach the grove. After Liuli Suns team arrived there, they didnt obtain any more useful information, so they began searching the grasslands around the grove. They were full of confidence, determined to win, and their logic was very simple. After Guotang Feng ca out of the worlds second most valuable tomb, he was carrying valuable funerary objects on his body so he must have headed straight back. The border managent at that ti was much simpler than it was now, so it should have been safer to return to China from any location. But why did he go to this grove?
There were two possibilities. One was that the grove just happened to be there as he was heading back to the border. Maybe it was windy when he arrived here, so he went into the woods to take shelter from the wind and ended up dying for so reason. The second possibility was that this grove was a landmark in this area. GPS didnt exist at that ti and it was easy to make errors on cloudy days when you were depending on your eyesight to figure out which direction to go in. A forest on the grassland was the only way for herders to know which direction to go, so Guotang Feng probably had no choice but to return here first and then move on to the next landmark.
The only difference between these two possibilities was whether Guotang Feng had a Mongolian guide at the ti. Every Mongolian herder had about a hundred different ways to figure out directions. Even I knew that there was a type of wild lettuce on the grasslandcalled Guide Grasswhich had leaves that grew in a north-south direction. So, if Guotang Feng hired a Mongolian guide and didnt need to look for any landmarks himself, then it was definitely the first possibility.
If he didnt have a Mongolian guide and entered the grassland solely based on so clue in a legend or map, then it may be the second possibility. But Guotang Feng died in that small forest, which is a detail that gives rise to an obvious thought. After they arrived in the forest, did the Mongolian guide murder him that night, bury his body together with the porcelain that he thought was worthless, and then take the gold, silver, and agate away?
Now it seed very clear that it should be the second possibility. But the first male corpse we had dug up from Liuli Suns teamhe was called Old Bingwas a Henan "ankle" (grave robbers in Henan had different nicknas according to their rank in the gang. There were heads, legs, and ankles. Ankles were the lowest workers with no skills and most of them were desperadoes). For those who were originally at the bottom of the totem pole, it would seem very reasonable for a Mongolian guide to murder soone for treasure. So, there was no need for to guess anymore. Liuli Suns team definitely based their decisions on the first possibility.
There was sothing taphysical here, which had been recorded in my grandpa's notes. As long as there wasnt a huge disparity between the team mbers strength, there was a high probability that they would turn on each other the first night after leaving the tomb. According to my grandpa, such thoughts would start to form when the coffin was opened. Most of them would still need to keep cooperating when in the tomb, but after getting out and starting to relax that first night, there would be an uneven distribution of spoils. At that ti, anything from suspicion, greed, and murder could happen.
When I was a child, I was still very curious, so I asked my grandpa, "Why do that? Why not just divide the spoils better?"
My grandpa said sothing that I still find sad even to this day.
"Thats just how people are. Theyll always divide the spoils unevenly."
So, Old Bing and the others ca up with a plan that seed completely wrong now. They drew a circle on the grassland, keeping the grove at the center and making the radius a distance of a days ride away. In that circle, they conducted their first blanket search of the area.
Of course, they didn't find anything, but they didn't co up completely empty either. They found a lot of "sky iron" in the area.
Sky iron was a very magical item. It was said that when there werent any clouds in the sky, iron objects would occasionally fall from the sky. When people looked up, there was no wind or shadow, so they couldnt figure out where these objects had fallen from.
Many people said that it was just iron from teorites. It was undeniable that so sky iron really did co from teorites, but there were also many examples of sky iron that were clearly unfinished handicrafts. So of them even had obvious patterns on them.
In ancient tis, it was said that craftsn in the sky didnt want these unfinished defective products and discarded them. After they landed on the grassland, the herders eventually found them and strung them together with their agate turquoise to make jewelry.
Sky iron had another very interesting feature; that is, many of them could be dug up from lightning strike pits. If you went to a certain place on the grassland that had been struck by lightning and dug for about one or two ters, you could basically dig up so sky iron. Sotis it would be a piece of iron, sotis it would be an iron rod as thick as a finger, and sotis it would be a strange object that was similar to a horseshoe or a ring. Because of this, there was a ti when those female bosses in the collectors circles who were having marital problems would send their husbands sky iron to buy insurance and then let them go to Inner Mongolia to relax.
Of course, sky iron wasnt necessarily iron. In ancient tis, any kind of tal was called "iron". In the Tibetan language it was called tuojia and in Mongolian it was called la (1). For a ti, sky iron drove up the price of Himalayan art, but it was worthless in Mongolia because the Mongolians believed that they were just the remnants of ancient arrows and soldiers' armor.
Old Bing and the others discovered the sky iron using tal detectors, and the overwhelming amount quickly attracted their attention. The distribution of these tal pieces was very strange, almost like a river flowing right beneath the surface of the grassland. Old Bing followed the distribution of these sky iron pieces for a while and soon realized that they seed to be marking a path through the grassland.
This path went past the circle they had marked and stretched out across the distant grassland. They followed this sky iron road for thirteen days. After leaving the small forest far behind, they ca to an old river valley called Zhuladalai.
Zhuladalai wasnt even a place na but a general na for the few hundred kiloters around this area. Kind of like the Taklamakan Desert, it was just a na people used to describe such a huge region. The aning behind the na Zhuladalai was sothing like Sea of Black Lights, but the etymology was said to have existed since the Turkic era so its specific aning wasnt clear.
Having said that, I could practically feel the details in Shen Qianjue's narration co to life. She was actually very organized as she narrated and she spoke very fast so it wasn't very difficult to listen.
After arriving in Zhuladalai, they still had to follow the sky iron road for three more days. These three days were what Shen Qianjue had been talking about before: they were terrible, especially after night fell.
In Shen Qianjues words, after entering that place, you could imdiately feel that sothing strange. And this was especially true at night.
Because there was no ti to explain in detail what happened during those three days, Shen Qianjue directly started talking about the third night. They continued to follow Old Bings team at that ti. It was at dusk on the third day when they ca to a hill with a relatively lush forest on it. They could see more than one such place on their way to the hill, but the two girls didnt care too much and just followed the other team into the forest. Like usual, they went to eavesdrop on the other team during the middle of the night.
But this ti, before they arrived at Old Bings camp, they found that sothing was wrong. First, they could tell from a distance that Old Bing and the others were looking up at the sky. Second, the night here was so cold that they could see their breath. It almost felt as if they had skipped a season. They looked up through the gap in the tree canopy and saw an incredible sightthere were three Big Dippers in the sky.
When I heard this, my whole body quivered.
First-class experts looked at the stars, second-class experts looked at water, and third-class experts walked all over the mountains. Looking at the stars to find tombs was a very mysterious skill. Although the Big Dipper in the sky wasnt sothing that could be hidden, even underground mountain trends couldnt be hidden from the eyes of the most powerful feng shui master. But I heard Grandpa say that there was a type of feng shui acupoint (2) that would affect astronomical phenona and make starlight refract because of the earths special qi. This kind of refraction would form a phenonon called the "Double Big Dipper". The most exaggerated refraction would even produce three Big Dippers. At that ti, anyone who tried to find a tomb by looking at the stars would fail.
This situation didnt an that it was a great feng shui acupoint, but rather an extrely dangerous one. This was the "Double Tomb Hiding a Fierce Corpse" acupoint that had been written about in feng shui books. Extrely prominent people were often buried in this kind of acupoint in order to shock the earths qi, but they definitely werent emperors.
So whatever was hidden under this hill wasnt the worlds second most valuable tomb, but was there still a tomb under it? And if so, whose tomb was it? What did it have to do with the worlds second most valuable tomb?
That night, Old Bing and his team started digging under the three Big Dippers and soon discovered an ancient tomb. This tomb was a huge lotus-shaped palace hidden underground. They dug a grave robbers' tunnel overnight, but at this ti, Shen Qianjue and her companion started to disagree on whether they should continue to follow Old Bings team into the underground palace.
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TN Notes:
(1) The pinyin of iron in Chinese is ti
(2) The character can an cave, hole, or acupuncture point. Considering how theyre discussing feng shui stuff, I felt that going with acupoint was better than cave/hole (Im kind of going off what Ba Ye said in the Mystic Nine drama about that mountain the mine was in that had like life/death acupoints or whatever if I rembered right lol).
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