Translator: Henyee Translations Editor: Henyee Translations
Several burning torches fell through the middle of the hole. The stone door above shut again – it seemed that the mausoleum guardians didn’t want to come down.
The five people evaded the torches by tumbling on the ground. Gu Shenwei, Han Fen and Old Man Mu went to one side, and the two from the Qingcheng Sect went to the other. Covered in bruises, Deng Yuanlei was groaning on the ground. Lu Mian hopped over to pick up the torches. Old Man Mu also picked one up, muttering, “So stupid. They think that they can burn us to death with these?”
“Don’t touch them. They’re poisonous,” Gu Shenwei advised as he stood up.
Hearing his words, the two suddenly noticed that the smoke from the torches was a little unusual – it was slightly blue.
“So vicious.” Old Man Mu clamped his nose shut immediately and backed up by more than ten steps.
The torch fire was not very big, but Lu Mian didn’t stay with the other three. He abandoned his previous viciousness and loathing for the Dragon King’s deeds of abandoning others to protect himself, and he shuffled towards another direction with his injured leg. Upon hearing that the torches were poisonous, Deng Yuanlei crawled to his feet in a hurry and followed his Sect Leader in fleeing.
Gu Shenwei led the way into the darkness, getting far away from those torches.
They arrived in a straight corridor, where the faint light of the fire couldn’t reach its end. Every ten or so steps, there was a lamp-stand. Han Fen walked close to one of them and took a few sniffs. “They’re not poisonous. We can light them.”
Han Fen consecutively lit more than ten oil lamps, and yet they still couldn’t see the end of the corridor, though they did discover that there were plenty of empty rooms on both sides of it. Most of them were narrow and small, and some of them didn’t even have a door.
“Lotus took all the treasures, didn’t she?” Old Man Mu said with a bitter resentment.
“No. This place is unfinished.” Gu Shenwei stood at the door of one of the rooms. “Nothing was ever put in here.”
“These rooms are so small. What could they possibly store in these rooms?” Han Fen craned her neck to peek inside and asked curiously. It seemed that she was not interested in the Dragon King’s recovered power at all as if she had already anticipated all of that.
Gu Shenwei shook his head. As far as he knew, the rulers of the Norland didn’t like overly large mausoleums, but this one’s layout was completely different from its counterparts in the Central Plains and the Western Regions. He couldn’t guess the Khan’s intentions.
They didn’t know how far they walked for before they reached the end of the corridor. They then took a ninety degree turn, turning to face yet another long, dark corridor.
“I get it.” Old Man Mu suddenly understood. “The outside halls are arranged in a circle, while the inside corridors are arranged in a square. A circular outside and a square inside – is this what the Khan was playing at?”
“So if we keep going, we’ll eventually meet the two Qingcheng Sect guys, right?” Han Fen said happily, as if she missed the two very much.
This was indeed a square corridor. After rounding the corner, they found some rooms were furnished with items, most of which were stone sculptures about half a normal man’s height. All of the sculptures were placed on platforms of the same height, which took up half the room, and on which some random knick-knacks were placed.
Old Man Mu picked up a small bow and drew it halfway. “What’s this? It’s just a toy for kids. Did the Khan want to be reincarnated?”
This bow looked very old and it surely had nothing to do with someone’s rebirth. All the other items on those platforms were similar to this bow. They looked more like personal belongings than what common people would regard as treasures, and among them, only a few ornaments seemed to be worth more than a tael or two.
Gu Shenwei studied one of the sculptures and remarked, “This is a minister of the Norland.” Then he strode all the way down the platform, and said, “Down here’s a coffin.”
Old Man Mu curled his lips, yet Han Fen rejoiced. She knelt on the ground to peek into the stone platform. “Are there any bodies in there?” After a short while she found the handle and pulled the stone coffin out of the lower part of the platform.
Old Man Mu was confused. “Han Fen, you’re not afraid of dead people, but you’re terrified of ghosts. What exactly are you thinking?”
“Dead men are obedient. Ghosts are not,” Han Fen answered without even raising her head. She stretched her arm and stroked the inside of the stone coffin. “Nothing’s ever been put in here.”
Old Man Mu curled his lips. “You’re free to try it out.”
If Gu Shenwei didn’t stop her, she might really have crawled into it.
The three sped up and kept going forward. There were more and more rooms furnished with sculptures and other items, and the rooms were also larger than the previous ones. They barely had time to look at the rooms, but one of the sculptures caught Gu Shenwei’s attention.
He recognized this sculpture. Although the facial features were slightly different, it was no doubt a statue of King Rizhu. The most conspicuous item on the platform was a saddle, which was embedded with many gems. But in comparison to the jewelry hall outside, it was nothing.
“King Rizhu’s dead. Let’s take a look at if he’s in the coffin.” Old Man Mu was a little curious too.
Han Fen had already opened the coffin before he finished his suggestion, and it was also empty.
In the next few rooms, they found sculptures of the Ten Lords of the Norland, with a few exceptions. And it seemed that the former king’s sculpture was included. It was right in the lower part of the platform beneath another former king. Han Fen cheered when she found a body in the coffin. She took a skull and an arm bone out, knocked them a few times and excitedly asked, “Does it look like the wooden fish of a Buddhist monk?”
Old Man Mu went outside of the room. He was not afraid, but he didn’t share Han Fen’s predilections either, which was why he once again felt that he had been wise to leave the Waning Moon Hall back then.
Gu Shenwei told Han Fen to put the bones back. Clearly, the bones of this previous king had been transferred here long after his death. It seemed that besides building a special mausoleum, the Khan had also had a large-scale funerary companion plan, and he wanted to put everyone he had ever cared about in his life into the mausoleum with him. It was just that King Rizhu had died too late and couldn’t make it.
“The Court Attendants Army,” Gu Shenwei said to himself in a low voice.
“What about them?” Old Man Mu asked.
“The outside halls were for the Court Attendants Army. The Khan wanted them to protect him even when he was dead.”
“The Khan wanted 100,000 people to be buried alive?” Even Old Man Mu, who was a ruthless man, found it unbelievable.
Gu Shenwei shook his head. “No, the Khan didn’t want them to die with him. He wanted their bodies to be buried here with him after their natural deaths. This is why there are no guarding mechanisms in the mausoleum – they will have to move many bodies in here afterwards.”
This was also why there were so many empty rooms, and it could even be deemed the origin of the Court Attendants Army’s obsession with killing lords and military officers. They might not know about the mausoleum’s existence, but they had been instilled with the idea of “funerary companions” from a very early stage.
With the unexpected assassination of Khan, this grand plan had come to a premature end.
“Ha, it would be difficult for Khan to keep a mausoleum like this a secret.” Old Man Mu believed that this was a stupid idea.
Gu Shenwei didn’t know what the Khan was thinking of either, but he knew that as a royal demigod by birth, he must have seen things in a different way from that of ordinary people.
Near the next corner of the corridor, the rooms were getting larger, and the items in them were becoming more varied, and the sculptures could no longer be seen; most of the items were daily necessities carved out of various materials as well as large numbers of weapons. There was even a plate of cheese carved out of jade that seemed so lifelike that the hungry Old Man Mu even stepped forward and sniffed it.
“Did you notice that treasures are indeed like manure and dirt to us when we’re hungry? It turns out that all the saints in the past only wrote such prayers because they didn’t have enough food.” Old Man Mu thought that he had reached a deep comprehension.
In an arsenal, Gu Shenwei found a narrow saber in the same style as those from Golden Roc Castle. Seeing this, Old Man Mu forgot the “manure and dirt” idea and dug the jewelry out of several luxurious weapons.
Han Fen had been running in front of the other two and craning into every new doorway to give a report to them. This time, the contents of the report were, “Books, full of books.”
This was a huge library, with rows of shelves all filled with books. Seeing that the Dragon King seemed to be interested in the books, Han Fen lit all the oil lamps on the walls.
The books reflected the Khan’s tastes, and there was no classics of saints from the Central Plains. On the first few bookshelves, there was a variety of books on tactics which were written in languages from many different regions – the Central Plains, Norland, the Western Regions, and even some stranger languages. Some of the books appeared rather ancient with pages missing from the spine.
“With such an enormous investment, the Khan should have made some copies of these books, like carving the contents of them into stone, so that later generations may read them.” Old Man Mu had this idea while he was browsing those books in a casual manner.
This library gave Gu Shenwei a confused image of the Khan. The owner of the plains seemed even crazier than the disciples of the Waning Moon Hall sometimes, but he also made people involuntarily awed.
“Kung fu manuals! A lot of them!” Old Man Mu was overjoyed and gave a scream. “The Khan’ wants to be a kung fu expert in the ‘martial arts of the underworld.’”
Even Han Fen became interested and she ran to the old man’s position with the Dragon King. As expected, the innermost shelves were full of illustrated kung fu manuals. And on the partitions, there were words indicating the origin of the manuals – from which sect, which region, or who.
“I’m going to find out how many precious books the Jade Pure Sect handed over.” Old Man Mu immediately started looking for the secret manuals of his own sect.
“I’m going to find the ones from the Waning Moon Hall.” Han Fen took this as a game and became even happier,
Golden Roc Castle involuntarily started searching for a tag mentioning the Gu family of the Central Plains or the Golden Roc Castle.
The three words “Golden Roc Castle” appeared first. There were not many of them, just twnet to thirty – killers’ kung fu skills were always as simple as possible, and most killers improved themselves in real fights, so they indeed didn’t have many written manuals.
The Death Scripture and the Grand Enlightenment Sword Sutra were not on the shelves, and Gu Shenwei felt a slight pride in his accomplishment.
But the Daoless Scroll was here, and there were three volumes.
Gu Shenwei browsed through them quickly and found that the first two volumes were pretty new, and the contents were of the first seven chapters he had learned, but the third volume was well worn and also very thin, which gave it the feel of an original manuscript. Gu Shenwei was very surprised.
The Daoless Scroll had never been written down in words, and its contents were stored in the minds of the masters. Where had this original manuscript come from?
After reading just a few lines, Gu Shenwei was shocked – they were not a part of the contents of the first seven chapters.
Gu Shenwei had once brought back the eighth and ninth chapter of the Daoless Scroll from the Land of Fragrance, and had had them translated by Queen Ju, but he had always been wary of hidden traps in the contents of the two chapters, and that they were a bait to lure the people of Golden Roc Castle. So if this volume’s contents matched that of the eighth and ninth chapter, his previous suspicion would be relieved.
Gu Shenwei read on word by word.
Han Fen found the Waning Moon Hall section. She took a book from the shelve and started reading in a seemingly serious manner. After quite a while, she twitched her head and turned to the Dragon King for help. “Alas, there are too many words that I don’t understand. Dragon King, please take a look and help me out.”
Dragon King’s response was merely an “um,” and he didn’t even spare her a single glance.
So Han Fen had to turn to Old Man Mu, who was giggling happily as he read. Han Fen ditched the book in her hand at once, walked over, and asked, “What’s so funny? Let me have a look.”
Old Man Mu handed the book over to Han Fen. “Go ahead. This is a secret manual of the highest degree from the Jade Pure Sect – the Amber Power. Anyone who practices it will no doubt end up breaking their meridians and vomiting blood until they die, ha-ha.”
Upon hearing his words, Han Fen tossed the book in a hurry. “The Jade Pure Sect’s so weird.”
“Ha-ha, it’s not the Jade Pure Sect that’s weird. It’s the Khan. I don’t know how big a price he had to pay to get all these kung fu manuals, but most of them are counterfeits. Ha-ha, it turns out that everyone’s been so deceitful. I have to be cautious.”
Gu Shenwei was surprised. He raised his head and asked, “All of them are counterfeits?”
“Uh, I haven’t read all of them yet, but there’s definitely something wrong with these ones from the Jade Pure Sect. The crucial parts of them were rewritten casually. Anyone who tries to practice them will end up dead. Ah, that’s it – maybe they were written for dead men.”
All of a sudden, a voice came over from the door. “The books are fake, but the antidote is real.”
Old Man Mu turned in surprise as he asked, “Lu Mian, is that you?”
Deng Yuanlei answered the question, “Dragon King, come out and have a kung fu competition with us. You don’t think that you’re the only one who’s got their internal energy back, do you?”
