Eight straight steel tracks ran in parallel rows alongside the lift, and resting on them was a line of enormous... ships?
Li Qiuchen narrowed his eyes and looked carefully, confirming that his eyes were not deceiving him.
Ships they were. Vessels ten zhang tall and roughly thirty zhang in length.
Thousands of years ago, this was what their ancestors used to haul ore to the surface?
Remarkable.
"Wow!"
Hu Caiyi's mouth fell open. She produced an incoherent sound of astonishnt.
"They're huge!"
Well. A rural fox spirit who had never even seen a ship before.
"These are called land barges. Each one could carry two million jin of ore in a single load."
Chen Baishan said with a note of reverence beside them, "Old relics from thousands of years ago. Nobody knows how to operate them anymore. Feel free to look around down here, but don't climb on them. The City God Office will take you for a thief."
"There's a directory over there. If you want to see sothing, head toward Tunnel 4. There's sothing in that direction, I've forgotten what exactly, so sort of place that tells you about the history. You'll understand when you get there."
"If you need to rest, head for Tunnel 1. There's lodging there, and food and drink. Whatever you do, don't wander off. Wait for us to co back."
"Which way are you heading?"
"We're going to Tunnel 18. This here is the main lift shaft, which was the original mining zone before it was converted. Everything around it has already been dug out. If we want to find anything worth having, we need to go down from Tunnel 18 and try our luck at a greater depth."
The temperature down here was considerable, sowhere around thirty degrees by feel, and Chen Baishan's forehead was already faintly damp just from those few sentences.
"Don't worry about us. We'll just be wandering around."
Li Qiuchen's expression gave nothing away.
There was no need to argue anything with a group of ordinary people.
Once they were gone, the place was his to explore as he pleased.
Truthfully, he was rather keen to climb up and get a proper look at one of those barges.
He still couldn't quite work out how the ancient generations had developed their technology the way they had. Every form of transport seed to follow a more peculiar design logic than the last. Well, he would get used to it eventually.
He watched the exploration crew disappear into the tunnel, then followed Chen Baishan's directions and walked into Tunnel 4.
The scale of this place was genuinely vast. Just the entrance of the tunnel was nearly ten zhang high, and the interior beyond it gave the impression that an entire world had been hollowed out.
Li Qiuchen followed the directional markers painted on the walls for a considerable distance before finding a side passage. Going in, he found a set of large closed doors with two more tal figure machines standing guard outside.
There was also an enormous stone stele with four large characters carved into it.
Cloud-Middle Archives.
If he understood correctly, this was so kind of library or museum.
The doors were not locked, and the tal figures had not activated. Li Qiuchen gave a gentle push, and the doors opened inward automatically.
A row of lights ca on overhead, and the first thing he saw was a vast hall, with a stone sculpture standing at its very center.
Dragon Emperor. Dragon God. Emperor Lord. Founding Emperor.
Many nas, but everyone knew they referred to the sa man.
Yun County itself had no statue of him, but Li Qiuchen had seen portraits.
Behind the sculpture stood a white jade panel one zhang tall and three zhang and three chi wide, covered in dense carved text.
Around the periter of the hall, four separate exhibition rooms opened off in different directions.
Hu Caiyi walked up to the sculpture and stared up at it with an entranced expression.
"This statue is so much more handso than the portraits of the Emperor Lord they have outside! Do you think this is actually what he looked like?"
"Probably, yes. If this was really carved thousands of years ago, the people who made it would have seen him in person."
Li Qiuchen wasn't prepared to make any absolute claims.
The portraits of the Emperor Lord in circulation had several different versions, and after thousands of years nobody could say with confidence which was the original and which were later reinterpretations. This was a county seat in the backwaters, after all. The Central Continent was probably where the most accurate version could be found.
He walked around to the jade panel behind the sculpture, and let his gaze settle on the carved text.
The panel told the earliest history of Yun County.
That history stretched back eight thousand years, or rather, at least eighteen thousand.
In those ancient tis, this place was not called Yun County at all. It was the Fire Cauldron Mine within the borders of the ancient Yan Kingdom, producing primarily coal along with a range of rare tals.
Later, as the Yan royal house declined, the Fire Cauldron Mine and the territories of three surrounding prefectures fell under the control of the prominent great sect known as the Palace of Longevity.
The Palace of Longevity discovered spirit stone veins deep underground, and began capturing vast numbers of wild people from the border regions, transforming them into slaves called the Ruru, specifically bred for mining. They extracted from the earth without limit or restraint.
This eventually caused the Fire Cauldron Mine to collapse. The earth's fire erupted, and hundreds of thousands of Ruru perished in the disaster.
Later, a Yan prince ascended the throne, led the ancient Yan Kingdom into a period of revival, expelled the Palace of Longevity, and reclaid the three prefectures.
Then the Palace of Longevity returned.
The history of the Spring and Autumn Era was this dark and turbulent throughout, full of passages that the records left vague. Even the historians of that ti had apparently been unable to docunt it accurately or preserve it in complete form.
The struggle between the ancient Yan Kingdom and the Palace of Longevity went on for over a thousand years through cycles of separation and reunion, with the Fire Cauldron Mine being fought over, excavated, and collapsing repeatedly. Until at last soone with great supernatural ability ignited the underground coal seams and turned the entire region into a sea of fire stretching a thousand li.
The burning of the coal seams, the billowing smoke, this was the origin of what later beca the legend of the immortal forging a sword.
After the world entered the Age of Fading Law, the Ruru people were transford again into a faster-growing form suited for warfare, becoming the Rakshasa, who rose rapidly in the north, founded a vast empire, and gathered a million-strong force to push south and expand.
Both the Palace of Longevity and the ancient Yan Kingdom collapsed in this war, their legacy lost and their bloodlines extinguished.
Ancient sects and empires alike beca ghostly ruins in the mortal world.
And with that, the historical record fell silent.
This Rakshasa did sound rather like it could be the ancestor of the present-day Rakshasa Ghost people.
Which ant Tang Xiaoxue's desire to co down and look around wasn't purely curiosity. It might also have been so resonance with the blood of her distant ancestors.
Li Qiuchen read on.
The gap in the historical record lasted until the final years of the New Epoch, when soone claiming descent from the Yan royal house raised an army and attempted to restore the kingdom, though they never managed to reclaim the territory of the ancient Yan Kingdom.
This regional governnt existed for approximately three hundred years. Its final ruler surrendered to the Great Chu Empire, which had by then unified the Central Continent, and offered up the territorial maps of the ancient Yan Kingdom along with the surrender.
In the one hundred and forty-eighth year before the national calendar began, the Chu army pushed north and launched a campaign against the Rakshasa Empire.
They arrived to find there was no Rakshasa Empire left to fight.
The Rakshasa Empire had collapsed an unknown number of years earlier, leaving only scattered regional warlords.
The Chu army reclaid the northern frontier in just eight years and drove their advance to the banks of the Blackwater River.
Then they spent a full century cleaning up the wreckage left behind by the Palace of Longevity, the ancient Yan Kingdom, and the Rakshasa Empire.
During this period, the Dragon Emperor ca in person.
With the full force of his supernatural power he reshaped the mountains and rivers, extinguished the thousand-li sea of fire, and renad Fire Cauldron as Cloud-Middle.
After the Dragon Emperor's departure, Chu people began moving north in large numbers, settling the northern frontier. Wasteland was cleared and farmland cultivated, and the Cloud-Middle mine was brought back into operation.
Until the arrival of the first great cold tide.
In the twenty-fifth year before the national calendar began, the stars shifted, and primordial chaos stirred. Unease spread across all four frontiers. Countless ancient demon gods surged from the Northern Sea, following the great cold tide southward, and launched a massive war of conquest against the newly established, not-yet-stable Great Chu Empire.
In this campaign, the Cyan Wolf Dragon King, one of the six great dragons serving beneath the Emperor Lord, fell at the banks of the Blackwater River.
At great cost, the northern frontier was preserved.
But the natural disaster of the great cold tide remained unavoidable.
In the first years of the national calendar, the northern frontier was sealed in ice. Snow lay perpetually unlted, and the land yielded no harvest.
Over a million displaced people were driven from their hos and forced to migrate south as families, and countless people froze or starved to death on the road. However, a portion of the earlier settlers survived by making use of the geothermal energy in the depths of the great mine pit.
After the first great cold tide receded, the Chu people pushed north again, and twenty-eight survivor settlents, Cloud-Middle among them, were converted into underground shelters. The prosperity and developnt of Yun County had its origins here.
The records from this point onward were considerably simpler.
Construction of the shelter, resumption of mining, expansion of the city.
The second cold tide ca, then the third.
The underground veins were at last exhausted. The rchant associations withdrew their investnt, factories closed, the population declined, and the city gradually contracted in scale. Standing in the Inner City today, you could no longer even see the steel walls that had once been built at the city's edge.
Having read the final line of text, Li Qiuchen found himself moved by a quiet sense of weight.
This was history.
A long and profound history, carved into stone.
It was also the fundantal reason why the county school inner hall's core curriculum placed historical texts on equal standing with rites and governance.
Without rembering history, what basis was there for speaking of the future?
The immortal path was vague and intangible. The cultivators of the past spoke often of discarding the false and retaining the true, yet none of them could clearly define what was true or false.
But the words before him, perated with their ancient and imnse weight, were an existence beyond all doubt.
"My family's ancestor appears here too."
Hu Caiyi said quietly.
"Where?"
Li Qiuchen searched his mory of the text carefully. He hadn't seen the word fox anywhere on the panel.
"Right here!"
Hu Caiyi skipped over and pointed to a section in the middle for Li Qiuchen to read.
"My father told
about it. During the first great cold tide, if it weren't for my family's ancestor showing people the way, those survivors would never have thought of the geothermal energy in the mine pit as a ans of survival. The panel doesn't ntion it by na, but our family has our own records."
It doesn't ntion it by na.
Then what exactly are you telling
for.
"And I should tell you, my family's ancestor actually t the Emperor Lord in person. Supposedly it was love at first sight, and she never married anyone her whole life..."
Li Qiuchen stared.
Your ancestor really did manage to pull that off, did she? This sounds better than a stage opera. Are you sure this wasn't sothing a drunk ancestor made up to sound impressive?
"She never married, and then what?"
"And then there was no then. The Emperor Lord was such a figure, how would he ever look twice at a country fox like us."
Hu Caiyi sighed. "I heard that fox spirits in the south even have a different cry from those in the north. Soft and delicate and sweet-sounding. I have an uncle who went south once, and he ca back saying the foxes in the south even have smoother tail fur than ours. By comparison we apparently look like big fluffy wolves."
"And there are the legendary nine-tailed foxes of Qingqiu, nine tails from birth, sacred bloodlines from the very beginning..."
Li Qiuchen shook his head. "There's no need to compare yourself to them. Foxes in the south may have beautiful coats, but they haven't endured the frost and wind and hardship of our northern frontier. What good is beautiful fur without that?"
"That's a fair point."
Hu Caiyi broke into a silly grin.
[NEXT CHAPTER]
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