Ch. 005| Seventy Degrees

Across the line, Shen Zhaoye stopped.

He looked at himself first.

Both hands held out in front, the miner's headlamp on his head, the light coming down at an angle onto the backs of his hands, his hand-shadows thrown on the ground ahead. By the lamp's angle, the shadows should have run straight forward from under his hands.

In fact, the shadows slanted 70 degrees to the rear left.

Shen Zhaoye switched the headlamp off.

With the lamp off, there was still brightness in the air. Light came from some direction in the gully—he looked all around and couldn't find the source.

With the lamp off, a hand-shadow appeared on the ground again. Its direction matched the one under the lamp—70 degrees to the rear left.

Two light sources, the same slant. The 70 degrees wasn't the lamp's fault. Over here, the relation between light and shadow simply didn't run by standard rules.

The color temperature of the light skewed warm, close to sunlight at four or five in the afternoon. But his watch read past ten in the morning.

The color temperature didn't match the time. But color temperature was affected by source, medium, reflection—all this said was that the light over here didn't run by standard rules; it couldn't directly prove the time over here was really afternoon.

Shen Zhaoye noted it down: color temperature anomalous, cause undetermined.

Shen Zhaoye looked back.

On the other side of the line—the direction he'd come from—he could still see He Sanjin standing there. His face, the red glow of his cigarette, the direction of the smoke, all clear.

"He," Shen Zhaoye called.

He Sanjin was looking at him, but didn't react.

Shen Zhaoye called again.

He Sanjin gave no reaction at all. Head didn't lift, mouth didn't move.

Couldn't hear him.

Shen Zhaoye tried waving a hand.

He Sanjin was looking at him; his mouth moved a little, like he was saying something. But Shen Zhaoye couldn't hear the sound. He could see, not hear. Probably the same for He Sanjin.

Shen Zhaoye switched the headlamp back on, walked five steps into the gully, looked back.

He Sanjin was still in place, hadn't moved.

The distance he'd walked back was five steps, but He Sanjin looked farther off than that—about 50 meters. Distance and sight didn't match.

Shen Zhaoye wrote three lines in his notebook:

Light comes from a displaced direction.
Color temperature anomalous, cause undetermined.
Distance, by sight, expanded tenfold.

On the fourth line he paused.

He wrote the three characters of He Sanjin's name, then drew a question mark beside them.

The question mark stood for something he wasn't sure of: on this side of the line, was He Sanjin still the same He Sanjin at all. Physically the same man—but the "event-continuity" between them might already have broken.

Sound couldn't carry across, color temperature didn't match, distance by sight expanded tenfold—those together meant the two sides of this line might not run on the same set of physical rules. Whether the "time-flow differed" couldn't be verified without a synchronized event—to test it, he'd have to arrange with He Sanjin to watch the second hand of a watch, both sides at once, and compare. But he couldn't hear, and He Sanjin probably couldn't either. Arranging that couldn't be done.

No way to verify.

Shen Zhaoye walked back, meaning to test the line—whether he could walk back through from this side.

He reached the spot where he'd crossed and put a hand out, feeling forward. The light-spot was gone; the mirror couldn't bring it out either.

Seen from this side, the line only let you in, not out.

5 minutes was He Sanjin's time, on his side. Shen Zhaoye couldn't go back, and He Sanjin by the agreement should head to the village after 5 minutes—but He Sanjin might try to follow him in.

Shen Zhaoye couldn't stop him. He could only leave as much information as he could on this side, so that if He Sanjin did follow in, he could find it and carry it back.

He closed the notebook and kept walking into the gully.

---

The gully going inward was the same 3 meters wide as the stretch outside the line. The paving was blue-gray flagstone too, joints running northeast to southwest.

On the surface it looked no different. But walking it felt wrong.

With every step, the ground's reaction force against his foot felt lighter than usual. He had no scale, no way to measure precisely—he could only say the footfeel was about seventy or eighty percent of normal. Whether the gravity here was lower, or the ground had some give to it, he couldn't tell apart.

Footfeel anomalous, actual cause to be verified.

He crouched and jabbed the tip of his sapper spade into the blue-gray flagstone.

The stone was softer than he'd expected. The tip didn't sink in, but it left a very shallow scratch. Normal blue-gray flagstone wouldn't take a scratch from a sapper spade.

Stone softer than expected, hardness not quantified.

He tried one more thing—rapped the stone with the spade's handle.

The sound came back very slowly.

Normal blue-gray flagstone gave a single "tok," decaying fast, no tail. The rap on this flagstone sounded like "tok—mmm—," like striking a bronze gong underwater.

The echo dragged out, decayed slow—could be reverberation, could be the stone itself resonating, could be that the damping here was off. He couldn't tell apart, and couldn't directly conclude from it that "sound traveled slowly."

Shen Zhaoye slid the sapper spade back at his waist and kept walking in.

After about 200 meters, Shen Zhaoye began to notice marks on the ground.

The marks were longer than footprints, narrower than footprints—like some large creature had dragged the side of its body across, leaving a long streak.

The streak ran opposite to the direction he was now walking—from inside the gully, out.

Something had crawled out of this gully.

Shen Zhaoye put the miner's headlamp on the streak and looked at the detail. The edge of the streak had very fine ridging, like countless small teeth had raked across together—finer than the drag of a belly-plate, more like the drag of scales.

He took the Dragon-Stirring Fragment out of his pocket and turned to page eleven, where his grandfather had marked in red. His grandfather had written one line:

Molting passage: a passage from deep in the earth-vein toward the surface, cut out with the body.

His grandfather's description was: width about 1.2 times the body-width of the passage-making creature.

Shen Zhaoye measured the gully's width with the spade handle—3 meters. If this gully was a molting passage, then the creature that once passed through it had a body about 2.5 meters wide.

A body-width of 2.5 meters was close to the size of an elephant.

But it wasn't an elephant. An elephant wouldn't drag the side of its body across flagstone—an elephant walks on four legs.

Whatever left a streak like this moved on its belly.

Belly-mover, 2.5 meters wide, scales running along the sides of its body.

Shen Zhaoye wrote these features down line by line in his notebook, then tore that page out, balled it up, and put it in his pocket.

What he'd written down, he didn't want anyone else to see.

---

After about 500 meters, the gully deformed at a bend.

The rock walls on both sides suddenly drew inward, squeezing the gully's width from 3 meters down to 1.5. Then a hole opened in the rock wall.

The hole was about a meter forty high, about a meter wide. Positioned on the right side of the gully, close to the ground.

Shen Zhaoye went up to the cave mouth, crouched, and shone the miner's headlamp inside.

The edge of the cave mouth had regular shaving-marks. Spaced about 4 to 5 centimeters apart. Same tool, same direction as the gouges in the seam behind the stone pillar.

Opened by the same pack of "things."

The cave ran in about 3 meters, then began to slope downward. Shen Zhaoye put the downward angle at about 15 degrees. The paving was blue-gray flagstone too, same type as the stretch outside.

But dead center in the cave mouth, on the ground, was a small thing.

Shen Zhaoye shone the headlamp on it.

It was a very small fragment of bone, grayish-white.

The same shape as the bone fragment inside that embroidered shoe in the Ge family ancestral hall. 1 centimeter long, the surface bearing directional, parallel tooth-scrapes.

Shen Zhaoye picked the fragment up with tweezers and compared it against the piece he'd seen in the ancestral hall.

The two fragments' tooth-marks—direction, spacing, scrape depth—were very similar.

Could be the same mouth. Could be a similar mouth, or the same kind of tool imitating it. A 1-centimeter fragment showed no full bite surface; he couldn't pin down the individual.

Tooth-mark features similar, individual undetermined.

But the two fragments had been found a hundred years apart. The one in the Ge ancestral hall was carried out of the gully in 1923. This one sat outside the cave mouth, the soil over it very shallow, the bone surface looking fresh—it should have been set down recently. Bone didn't oxidize in a measurable way the way metal did; exactly how recent, he couldn't judge precisely.

Could be the same mouth, across a hundred years. Could not be.

Shen Zhaoye ran the conclusion over once in his head.

What was in his head couldn't be searched and taken.

---

Shen Zhaoye opened the cloth bundle and took out the embroidered shoe Old Ge had given him.

The white crane embroidered on the upper—the thread, when he'd looked at it on the far side of the line, had already yellowed.

Now, looking at it on this side, the crane's thread was white.

Normal white. No fading at all.

Shen Zhaoye turned the shoe over and looked at the sole. At the worn spot on the sole, the very fine mark that looked bitten by something—on this side, it didn't look like an old injury. It looked new.

Shen Zhaoye set the shoe carefully at the edge of the cave mouth, side by side with the bone fragment.

Neither the fragment nor the shoe reacted.

Shen Zhaoye waited about 1 minute. Nothing happened.

He took out the bronze mirror from the bundle too—the one he'd picked up at the first cross-mark—and set it face down between the shoe and the fragment.

The lower edge of the mirror just touched the toe of the shoe.

The instant it touched, the embroidery thread at the toe gave a very slight tremor—like a gust of wind had passed over it, but there was no wind in this gully.

Shen Zhaoye put the headlamp directly on the toe and looked closely at the thread.

The thread went still.

He took the mirror away, and the thread quivered faintly again.

Mirror near, the shoe trembled. Mirror far, it trembled harder.

There was some connection between the two he couldn't read yet.

Shen Zhaoye wrapped the mirror up again and put it in his pocket.

But he noticed—the shape of the tooth-mark on the outer sole of the shoe, and the spacing of the shaving-marks at the cave mouth, were the same width. 4 to 5 centimeters.

The tooth-marks on the bone fragment, the tooth-marks on the sole, the shaving-marks at the cave mouth—all three spacings fell at 4 to 5 centimeters.

The features were close. But close wasn't the same as one and the same. Could be the same pack of "things," could be the same kind, could be the same kind of tool imitating. Matching spacing alone couldn't fix the individual.

Whether one chain ran the whole way through, he still couldn't say.

But the closeness itself was enough for him to keep walking into the cave.

---

Shen Zhaoye picked up the shoe, wrapped it again in cloth, and stowed it in an inside coat pocket. He picked up the bone fragment too and put it in his pocket.

He crouched at the cave mouth for about 2 minutes.

In those 2 minutes he did three things.

First, he pried up a small piece of the flagstone on the outer side of the cave mouth with the spade and checked the underside of the stone. The underside had etch-marks. The same kind of directional, parallel tooth-scrapes—so this cave had been bitten out from the inside by some mouth, then the stone spat back out piece by piece from the outside and laid down again.

Not dug and sealed by men. A "thing" opening a door from the inside.

Second, he drew a horizontal line of glutinous rice across the cave mouth. As he drew it, Shen Zhaoye remembered his grandfather's words: glutinous rice locks in the yang; a yin thing crosses the rice line first. He didn't believe in spirits, but the rules of the trade he kept all the same. He poured out about a spoonful, the line about 3 centimeters wide.

Third, he took the embroidered shoe back out of his inside coat pocket and set it on the inner side of the rice line—the side of the cave mouth facing in.

He wanted to test an inference: if this shoe had once been "sent back" out of this cave, then it might itself be a token. Leave it on the inner side of the cave mouth and see whether anything reacted.

The 2 minutes were up. The shoe hadn't moved. The rice line hadn't scattered.

Shen Zhaoye picked the shoe up, wrapped it in cloth again, and put it back in his inside coat pocket. The test was done; the shoe couldn't be left—it was the physical evidence Old Ge had entrusted to him, and leaving it would lose it.

The rice line he didn't touch. He let it stay at the cave mouth as a mark for He Sanjin, who might follow in after 5 minutes—a single line of glutinous rice, lying across the cave mouth, visible to the eye. He Sanjin would see it and know Shen Zhaoye had gone into this cave.

He leaned forward at the cave mouth and began to stoop. The cave was a meter forty high, he was a meter seventy-six—to get in he had to bend his back to nearly 90 degrees.

Before going in, he looked back once.

There was no one else in the gully. He Sanjin, on the far side of the line, was no longer visible—probably because of the expanded sight-distance: a position 500 meters off had already reached the limit of vision.

Shen Zhaoye turned the headlamp to its brightest notch.

He walked into the cave.

Inside it was extremely narrow. His back was bent, but his shoulders still scraped the cave's ceiling. The shaving-marks on the ceiling were clearer under the lamp's direct beam—each mark spaced 4 to 5 centimeters, about 1 centimeter deep, running parallel to the long axis of the cave.

They'd been raked with force, not shaved lightly.

Each rake's force was about equal to a grown man cutting stone with the No. 6 sapper spade at full strength.

Shen Zhaoye did a rough count—to rake out the marks of the whole cave, at the spade's pace, would take about five thousand strokes. If with a single mouth, then that mouth had left over five thousand jaw-motions in this cave.

Five thousand bites.

He kept walking in.

The temperature inside the cave was a little higher than the gully outside, but not hot. There was a very faint smell in the air, like iron that had rusted and then soaked in water.

Shen Zhaoye noted the smell down. A rust smell in a closed space usually meant metal oxidizing heavily—or blood.

He didn't know which.

After 20 meters, the cave's downward angle increased from 15 degrees to 20. The flagstone underfoot began to show a very fine polish, like the wear of a sole on stone that hadn't been walked in a long time—but the direction the stone had been worn wasn't the direction he was now walking. It was the reverse.

From inside, out.

The "thing" that had passed had walked out from the bottom of the cave, not in from the mouth.

After 30 meters, faint reflections began to show at the bottom of the cave.

The quality of the reflection wasn't like metal—softer than metal, brighter than water.

Shen Zhaoye stopped.

The reflection was about 10 meters ahead.

It was two round points.

About a meter sixty off the ground, about 10 centimeters apart.

Facing him.

Shen Zhaoye switched the headlamp off.

With the lamp off, the two round points were still glowing.

【Ch. 005 End · the far side of the Dog-Bark Line → inside the Eyeless Imperial Tomb】