Ch. 006| Vertical Pupils

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

Shen Zhaoye switched the miner's headlamp back on, set it to the middle notch, and aimed it not at the points but at the cave ceiling.

The instant the lamp came on, the two round points vanished.

Shen Zhaoye switched the lamp off again.

The two points reappeared.

On, off, on, off—4 switches, and the points went out and lit up each time. But the delay before they lit was half a second slower than ordinary reflection.

Ordinary silver, bronze mirrors, crystal reflect light instantly, in sync with the source. These two points didn't. But "out of sync" didn't directly equal "light-storing"—it could be some delayed photosensitivity, or some reflection mechanism he didn't recognize. Take it as light-storing for now.

Light up with a 0.5-second delay, mechanism undetermined, take as light-storing for now.

Light-storing bodies weren't rare in nature. Fluorite, glow-pearls, the eyes of certain marine creatures all had the property. But the brightness and distance of these two points weren't like fluorite.

More like eyes.

Shen Zhaoye tried another method.

He took a fire-spill from his pocket, struck it, lit it. The fire-spill's light was different from the headlamp's—redder in rendering, longer in wavelength.

Under the fire-spill's red light, the two round points were far brighter than under the headlamp.

Brightness up about double.

If the "light-storing" assumption held, then it might be some fluorescent substance that worked more efficiently on red, long-wavelength light. But this was still an inference downstream of "if the assumption holds"—the mechanism itself, under these conditions, he couldn't confirm on its own.

Under red light, brightness roughly double. If light-storing holds, then long-wave excitation.

The fire-spill's flame jumped faintly. He noticed—there was no wind in the cave, but every so often the flame was blown by something unseen, blown in the direction from the cave bottom toward the mouth.

Like something at the bottom of the cave was breathing.

The frequency of the breathing was about once every 7 seconds.

Shen Zhaoye pinched the fire-spill out, put it back in his pocket, switched the headlamp on again, dimmed it one notch, and slowly walked forward.

---

About 7 meters from the two points, another kind of mark began to show on the ground.

Not a streak. Footprints.

The footprints were shallow, spaced about 40 centimeters. Each was 18 centimeters long, 8 wide. They matched a grown man's foot—probably walked in straw sandals, the sole-wear direction readable.

But there were two rows of prints.

The two rows ran opposite: one toward the cave bottom, one coming from the bottom toward him.

The two rows were close in size, spacing, sole pattern. Could be one person going and coming back, could be two people in similar straw sandals. Shen Zhaoye took it as "one person, round trip" for now—he'd turn back if he'd read it wrong.

The outbound prints had even sole-wear—normal walking.

The returning prints had uneven sole-wear—the left deeper, the right shallower.

Could be carrying something, the left foot bearing more weight. Could be a limp, or a slight lateral tilt to the ground here—he couldn't verify for now. Took it as "carrying something" for now.

If carrying something, then by the left-right depth difference, the thing weighed about fifteen to twenty kilograms—a stone, a small piece of pottery, or the trunk of a person.

Shen Zhaoye took the estimate as a "hypothesis," not a conclusion. Kept it in his head, didn't write it in the notebook.

The returning prints stopped about 10 meters from the two points—the stretch of cave Shen Zhaoye had just walked. Beyond that, toward the mouth, there were no more prints.

Which meant this person—if it really was the same person, and really was carrying something—set out from the figure's side, walked about 10 meters, then stopped, and was gone.

Or more precisely: he reached the middle of the cave passage and vanished.

Shen Zhaoye shone the headlamp back along the flagstone he'd come over. Apart from his own fresh prints and those two rows of old prints running opposite, there were no other marks at all.

That person carrying something—if he was carrying something—"cut off" in the middle of the cave passage. Could be that some mechanism ate him, could be that he never left in any "human sense" at all.

Shen Zhaoye didn't intend to chase the question now.

The two points were still ahead. Not moving.

---

5 meters.

Shen Zhaoye stopped, crouched.

From this height, the two points sat a little higher than he'd estimated—not a meter sixty off the ground, a meter sixty-eight. In other words, the thing the points were on should be over a meter seventy tall overall.

About the height of a grown man.

He took the bronze mirror from his pocket, tilted the face forward 30 degrees, and let it reflect the direction of the two points.

In the mirror, he saw it.

Not two points floating in the air. A human-shaped silhouette.

The silhouette stood, feet together, hands hanging at its sides. The head tilted about 10 degrees, toward the central axis of the cave passage.

Like it was looking at him.

Shen Zhaoye lowered the mirror and looked straight ahead with his own eyes again.

By eye, no silhouette. Only the two bright points.

Mirror-visible, invisible to the eye. The same as the light-spot in front of the Dog-Bark Line earlier, seen through the mirror.

The same kind of physical rule.

Shen Zhaoye carefully stowed the mirror in his inside coat pocket and kept walking forward.

At 3 meters, he saw the human shape directly, by eye.

It was a figurine.

---

The figurine was about 1.72 meters tall, feet together, hands hanging at its sides. It wore a painted dragon-robe that had flaked away over half its surface—black for the ground, gold lines edging it, a dragon pattern that should have sat at the chest, now just a blurred coiling outline.

That coiling outline's shape was familiar to Shen Zhaoye. Head down, tail up, wings folded flat against the body on both sides—the posture of the scale-pattern motif on the broken stone pillar.

The third time he'd seen the same pattern.

The figurine's head was tilted faintly, toward the central axis of the cave passage. The angle of tilt, about 10 degrees. There was no movable structure at the figurine's joints—it was fired as a single piece, fixed forever in this posture.

Not a tilt caused by earthquake or time. It had been fired at this angle.

The figurine had been deliberately fired with its head turned toward the central axis of the passage—and that axis was the path anyone walking in along the cave would take.

In other words: two thousand years ago, or earlier, the one who made this figurine already knew someone would come walking in along this cave.

This figurine was set here to "face" someone arriving by a fixed route.

Shen Zhaoye shone the headlamp straight on the figurine's face.

The figurine had no eyelids.

Never had. The eye sockets were flat—no sculpted layering of lids, no carved line of an eye-edge. Only two pupils—carved straight onto the flat surface, two vertical lines.

Vertical pupils.

Not a decline in craft. Not an aesthetic choice. A deliberate way of carving—the vertical pupils carved to imitate the shape of some eye that had really once existed.

Shen Zhaoye ran the conclusion over once in his head.

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

At the figurine's pupils, those two round points from before were no longer glowing. Under the headlamp's direct beam, the pupils turned back into ordinary ceramic incisions. But he knew—the instant the lamp went off, the points would return.

In those two vertical lines was embedded some substance that lit with a delay—by the few on-off observations, closest to the behavior of a light-storing body. Whether it was really light-storing, under these conditions he couldn't yet confirm on its own.

Shen Zhaoye stepped forward, in front of the figurine.

One meter.

The figurine was 3 centimeters shorter than him. He could see straight onto the top of its head.

There was a round hole in the top of the figurine's head. About 8 centimeters across. Positioned dead center on the crown, the edge bearing regular shaving-marks—spaced 4 to 5 centimeters. The same pack of "things" that opened the cave mouth, and the seam behind the stone pillar, had opened this.

The marks of its being opened were new. Three years at most.

Shen Zhaoye rapped the figurine's right chest lightly with the spade handle.

"Tok—mmm—"

The echo dragged out. It was hollow.

He rapped the figurine's belly, shoulder, thigh, and around the crown in turn. The echo frequency was different at each spot—the belly lowest, the crown shortest.

The figurine was a hollow ceramic shell. From the difference in rap-frequency you could read the rough distribution of the cavity—largest at the belly, tapering toward the limbs. But rapping only gave a rough outline; it couldn't precisely map the inner shape.

This rough distribution matched a human form. But "matched" didn't equal "sculpted precisely to the body dimensions of a grown man"—to verify that he'd have to open the shell, or measure straight down through the crown hole. Take it as a "human-form container" for now.

The surface temperature of the clay was a little above Shen Zhaoye's hand—about 35 degrees. The clay itself had sat in this gully for who knows how many years; by physical law it should be the same as the ambient temperature, not just a few degrees off human body heat.

The shell itself was generating heat.

Low, steady—like something inside was maintaining a near-constant-temperature metabolic process.

Shen Zhaoye drew his hand back.

---

Shen Zhaoye took the miner's headlamp off his head and held it in his hand, shining the light straight in through that 8-centimeter hole in the figurine's crown.

The instant the light went in, he stopped what he was doing.

Inside the figurine, it wasn't empty.

But with an 8-centimeter hole plus a straight beam, the only range he could see clearly was the stretch from the crown down to the shoulders. Below the chest cavity was blocked by the ceramic shell, out of sight.

He took the bronze mirror from his inside coat pocket—15 centimeters across, nearly twice the hole, too big to fit in.

But he could use the mirror to change the lighting angle.

He set the mirror face just above the hole, used it to reflect the headlamp's light, and let the light enter the hole at different angles. Each time he changed the angle, he "peered" once through the 8-centimeter hole to see which parts inside lit up.

But his line of sight itself could still only look down that straight line of the 8-centimeter hole—the mirror could redirect light, not his line of sight.

What he could see directly: crown, neck vertebrae, shoulders, collarbone. A human skeleton.

The skeleton was a grown male. Shen Zhaoye had seen enough human bones in tombs to read the basic features in 3 seconds—this much, of what he could see, was enough.

What he couldn't see: the inside of the chest cavity, the abdomen, the pelvis, the limbs. Blocked by the ceramic shell; the 8-centimeter hole plus a straight line of sight couldn't get around it.

But he noticed one thing.

When he'd cast reflected light with the mirror, there'd been one angle especially steep, the light grazing down the inner wall of the ceramic shell and coming back from some direction—and the brightness of that reflected light was far brighter than the surface of bone should give.

A bone surface was rough; it wouldn't reflect light this bright.

What was bright should be something smoother than bone surface, lying against the inner side of the skeleton, carrying the light back.

Shen Zhaoye noted:

Some smooth reflective matter inside the chest cavity, lying against the inner side of the skeleton.
Not visible by direct line of sight, read indirectly from the brightness of reflected light.

The closest explanation—like scales. Shed scales, thin as a cicada's wing, lying against the inner side of some skeleton's ribs.

But "read indirectly" didn't equal "seen with his own eyes." He couldn't measure the extent, couldn't see the form. Whether it was scales, he'd have to wait until the shell was opened to confirm.

If it was scales—

like some creature had once molted from inside this person's body, from the inside out.

Or, the more precise hypothesis: this person's body had once been used by some creature as the "shell" for molting—like the figurine's ceramic shell Shen Zhaoye was looking at now.

A figurine over the human body.
Inside the human body, maybe scales.

Figurine, human, scales (if the read on the scales held)—three concentric layers. The innermost layer scales, the middle layer human, the outermost ceramic.

Every layer was the shell of some "thing."

In his notebook, Shen Zhaoye sketched a bare-bones concentric-circle diagram of the three-layer structure—then tore that page out the moment he'd finished, balled it up, and shoved it in his pocket.

He thought of the five characters on the underside of the broken stone pillar—"Where the Royal House Fled South." If what was called "fleeing south" back then meant "sending a batch of people in"—and then something passed through their bodies and molted away—

then what really fled south might not have been people.

Shen Zhaoye crouched before the figurine's crown hole for about 30 seconds, looking at the skeleton inside.

He wrote four lines in his notebook—then tore that page out the moment he'd finished, balled it up, and put it in his pocket.

The contents of the four lines he intended to leave no written record of.

But an inference had already formed in his head: the figurine's function was more like a "container"—a ceramic shell of a specific shape, "sealing" something inside.

And the thing sealed inside, by the part Shen Zhaoye could see, should originally have been a living person with a skull.

But this skeleton had no skull.

Shen Zhaoye tilted the mirror's angle even steeper, casting the headlamp's light in to strike where the skull should be—above the shoulders, above the neck vertebrae.

Through the 8-centimeter hole he saw: the cut at the neck vertebrae was very clean. Severed as a whole piece by a sharp tool, below the third cervical vertebra. The edge of the cut formed a precise straight line. Shen Zhaoye had seen this kind of cut a dozen times in tombs, always with the same feeling: done by a person.

The man placed inside this figurine's ceramic shell back then had his head cut off.

The order of the beheading and the sealing into the figurine, Shen Zhaoye couldn't read for now—could be beheaded first then placed, could be placed first then beheaded. But one thing he could confirm directly: the skull, whole, was not inside. Below the chest cavity he couldn't see; whether what was in there was whole, he'd have to open the shell to verify.

Shen Zhaoye switched the headlamp off.

The figurine's two vertical pupils lit faintly again.

The light, same as before, lit with a half-second delay, the same brightness as before—but the "aim" of the light was different.

Before (Shen Zhaoye a meter from the figurine, standing): the brightest beam from the two vertical lines was aimed where Shen Zhaoye had been then.

Now (Shen Zhaoye standing above the figurine's crown, just done with his notes): the brightest beam wasn't aimed where he stood now—it was aimed at the patch of flagstone where he'd crouched to take notes a moment ago.

The two vertical pupils were themselves fixed lines carved on a flat surface; the incisions couldn't turn on their own. But the light from the layer of light-storing matter in the vertical pupils (if it was light-storing matter) had a clear directionality—and that direction aligned with where Shen Zhaoye had been a moment ago.

In other words: the incisions hadn't moved, the "aim" of the light had. The thing giving off the light was "focusing."

The vertical pupils had tracked his movement a moment ago.

【Ch. 006 End · the cave passage entrance of the Eyeless Imperial Tomb → before the first figurine】