Ch. 007| The Thirty-First

Shen Zhaoye left the first figure.

Two steps deeper toward the bottom of the cave, he glanced back.

The first figure stood on the left side of the passage, flush against the stone wall. Coming in from the cave mouth, his eyes had stayed locked on the two glowing dots, and he'd paid no attention to the opposite side.

He glanced at the right-hand wall.

On the right wall, directly across from the first figure, stood another.

The second one.

Same type as the first—painted dragon robe, feet together, hands hanging at its sides, head canted 10 degrees. The difference: the first figure's vertical pupils faced the passage's center axis, and from the direction Shen Zhaoye had entered, the beam of light was visible; the second figure's vertical pupils also faced the axis, but the axis was relative to the second figure's own orientation, so its beam shot out toward the opposite side—toward the first figure—and Shen Zhaoye, coming in, hadn't seen the second one's light.

The first and the second, set about 1.8 meters apart laterally, symmetrical left and right. A pair.

Shen Zhaoye noted the rule: both sides of the passage might hold paired figures, and within each pair the vertical-pupil beams pointed at the passage's center axis, not at whoever was walking in along it.

He kept going down. The cave kept sloping, the angle holding at 15 degrees. The joints of the paving stones held their direction too—northeast to southwest.

About 1.5 meters on, he saw the third figure.

Set on the left side of the passage, flush against the wall, about 1.5 meters along the passage from the first. Same painted dragon robe, feet together, hands at its sides, head canted 10 degrees.

Two vertical pupils, same as the first and second.

Shen Zhaoye glanced at the right wall.

On the right wall, 1.8 meters laterally from the third figure, stood the fourth.

Symmetrical on both sides. The second pair.

He kept moving inward. Every 1.5 meters, a pair on each side. Every figure's head was canted 10 degrees toward the center of the cave—meaning the direction every figure "faced" was the passage's center axis.

A ceremonial guard formation.

In ancient China such formations had two uses: one for the living—an emperor's procession, a lord's honor guard. The pottery figures stood in for real people, a kind of rehearsal. The other for the dead—burial honor guards, arranged by rank, so the deceased could "carry an honor guard into the other world."

But the figure array in this passage matched neither.

The passage was narrow—3 meters wide, 2.4 meters high. A living emperor's honor guard wouldn't squeeze into a corridor this tight. A burial honor guard for the dead would be placed near the main chamber, not lined down both walls of a corridor.

The function of this array, Shen Zhaoye couldn't read yet.

But he made one engineering judgment: the spacing between each figure and the next was extremely consistent, the error no more than 2 centimeters. To hit that precision, whoever placed the figures had to have measuring tools in hand, and the kiln that made them had to guarantee standardized dimensions.

Two thousand years ago, to manage that, you needed either a kiln under direct imperial control, or some organization on par with the imperial house, with state-level craft.

At the eleventh pair—the twenty-first and twenty-second figures—Shen Zhaoye stopped and did one thing.

He switched off his headlamp.

With the light off, the vertical pupils along both walls began to glow.

They lit in sequence, starting from the pair nearest him and spreading in both directions at once—like some light-wave passing from figure to figure. Speed, about 5 meters per second.

Within 2 seconds the signal had run roughly 10 meters in each direction—about six or seven pairs lighting up per side. Anything farther, his sightline cut off; he couldn't see.

Whether the signal kept spreading past that, he didn't know—beyond his line of sight, he couldn't verify directly.

Shen Zhaoye switched the headlamp back on.

Every vertical pupil within view went dark.

He switched it off again.

The lighting sequence, the direction it spread, the speed—exactly the same. Reproduced once.

This passage—every figure within view was wired into some kind of "signal system." No figure was its own thing; each was a node in something larger.

Whether the whole row ran like this, he couldn't verify.

Shen Zhaoye switched the headlamp back on.

He kept going inward.

---

At the fifteenth pair—the twenty-ninth and thirtieth figures—he noticed a detail.

From the eleventh pair on, the coiling scale pattern on the chest of the left-hand figures' painted dragon robes had shifted slightly in direction—the first ten pairs coiled clockwise, the eleventh through fifteenth counterclockwise.

Figures of both directions faced symmetrically toward the center of the cave.

Like two different "things" sharing one corridor.

Or two lineages.

Shen Zhaoye raised the headlamp and studied the coiling scale pattern on the eleventh figure, left side. The counterclockwise coil—its lines were slightly less fine than the clockwise ones—as if painted in later, not incised into the clay before firing.

He scraped lightly at the edge of the counterclockwise lines with the tip of his sapper spade.

The base color of the clay showed through, a pale cream. On the clockwise side, scraping turned up the same pale cream—same kiln, same batch of clay.

But the direction of the coil had been changed.

At some point, someone had reversed the chest scale patterns of every figure in the back half of this corridor, from clockwise to counterclockwise.

Meaning the thing these figures "belonged to" had once been "reassigned."

From one lineage to another.

Shen Zhaoye crouched before the fifteenth pair and took notes.

But what he wrote wasn't like before—he didn't record a specific observation. He wrote a simple question:

Am I being treated by something as the next one's "person."

He tore the page out at once, balled it up, shoved it in his pocket.

In his head he was clear on the answer to that question—he didn't know. But he had to assume the answer might be yes.

If this passage's function was to "select the next person to be sealed into a figure," then his current position was the twenty-ninth slot in line. In the direction he'd entered from, twenty-eight figures already stood behind him.

Meaning if something wanted to "seal him in," the most convenient position was—

Keep going inward.

Shen Zhaoye kept going inward.

At the sixteenth pair—the thirty-first and thirty-second figures—

He stopped.

---

The figure on the left was facing wrong.

Unlike the others, the thirty-first's head was not canted toward the center of the cave. Its head pointed the opposite way—toward the cave mouth.

Shen Zhaoye raised the headlamp straight at its face.

Two vertical pupils, same as the other figures. But this figure's eyelid line sat lower than the others. As if someone had pressed it hard from outside, shoving the whole facial structure down by about 2 centimeters.

A deviation like that wouldn't come from firing. Something had been done to this figure later, by someone.

Shen Zhaoye went around behind the figure and looked at the 8-centimeter hole at the top of its head.

The cut marks at the rim were deeper than on the other figures, and newer—three months at most.

The spacing of those marks matched the cut marks on the underside of that freshly laid paving stone out at the cave mouth—the most recent work of the same group of "things."

The timing of that most recent work had nothing to do with whether anyone had come or gone lately through the gully Old Ge called "the one you shouldn't walk into"—three generations of Ges had never gone past the dog-bark line into this passage. Ge's father had walked the seven cross-marks, dropped a bone at the last one, then turned back; he'd never entered this passage. Meaning whoever opened this cave and worked on this figure was not a Ge.

Someone else.

Had come through three months ago at most.

Shen Zhaoye angled the headlamp across the figure's shoulder.

On the figure's right shoulder was a set of extremely fine scratches, like something had raked them with claws. Four in all, parallel, all running top to bottom. Each about 3 centimeters long.

Human fingernails could barely leave marks like that on fired clay.

Either whoever scraped had unusually hard nails, or they weren't nails at all. Shen Zhaoye thought of the gouge marks in that seam behind the stone pillar—cut marks spaced 4 to 5 centimeters, left by some "thing" with claws or teeth.

The spacing between these four parallel scratches was 4 centimeters.

The same dimension as that group of "things'" claw marks.

Meaning the "thing" that opened this figure's crown hole three months ago and left these scratches was the same kind as whatever carved this passage long ago and left those gouges.

Or the very same one.

---

Shen Zhaoye took the miner's headlamp in his hand, set it to its brightest notch, and shone the light down through the hole at the figure's crown.

What was inside the figure wasn't a skeleton.

It was a face. Face up, neck down, looking straight up at the cave ceiling—Shen Zhaoye, peering down through the 8-centimeter hole, had his line of sight square on the front of the face.

The headlamp hit the face directly, the eyes, the forehead, the hair knotted up top. The straight-on angle was enough.

Shen Zhaoye held still at the crown hole for 3 seconds.

The face was fresh. Skin a normal color, eyes shut, lips slightly parted.

A woman, around thirty.

The face was made up—white powder for a base, a faint red on the lips left by cinnabar. At the center of the forehead, a forehead ornament—a half-moon, in cinnabar, set off with tiny flecks of gold leaf.

The style of that ornament matched the white-crane embroidery on the embroidered shoe in the Ge family shrine—the same period. Late Ming, early Qing.

The hair was bound into a high knot, a silver hairpin thrust through it. Shen Zhaoye recognized the head of the pin—it was a "crane-crest silver," a style favored by gentry women of the southern Ming.

This face, from the makeup to the hair ornaments, came from the same era and the same class as the embroidered shoe the Ge family had had "returned" from the gully in 1923.

A southern gentry woman of the late Ming or early Qing.

A person from four hundred years ago.

Shen Zhaoye linked a few threads in his head:

Ge's grandfather had died in the gully in 1923, and all they'd carried back was a woman's embroidered shoe. There was a foot bone in the shoe. The tooth marks on that bone resembled what he'd seen all down this passage—maybe the same group of "things," maybe just the same kind.

The gouge marks from those teeth—at the cave mouth, at the crown hole of every figure, at the opened crown hole of the thirty-first—all came out at 4 to 5 centimeters. Resembling wasn't equal to identical, but it was enough to keep reasoning forward.

And now, inside the thirty-first figure in this passage, sat the face of a late-Ming, early-Qing woman.

If the owner of this face was the owner of that embroidered shoe—

then what Ge's grandfather saw in the gully in 1923 might have been this woman.

But by then she'd already been dead at least three hundred years.

A person dead three hundred years had gone on "existing" in this gully, in some form Shen Zhaoye still couldn't read.

Existing until 1923, when Ge's grandfather saw her.

Existing until three months ago, when that group of "things" opened this figure's crown hole—but at that point the hole was still empty; she hadn't been placed yet.

Existing until not long ago, when some "thing" (the same kind, or the same one) cut her face off and set it inside the figure—how recently, no way to tell.

Existing until today, when Shen Zhaoye saw her.

Shen Zhaoye dialed the headlamp down to its dimmest notch—but left it on.

The light went weak, but it was still there. In the faint light, he noticed the makeup on the face inside the figure had a slight disturbance, as if a current of air had passed over it—the cinnabar powder showed an extremely fine scattering.

But there was no wind in this passage.

He turned the headlamp back to brightest.

The disturbance vanished. The makeup lay smooth.

Only when the lamp was dimmed had the face "moved" a little.

But this face was too fresh to be something placed here three months ago.

The figure held only a head, no body—meaning the head had been cut off whole with some sharp tool and set inside. The cut should be at the base of the skull, along the cervical spine.

But the exact position of the cut—Shen Zhaoye couldn't see it. The skull itself blocked the base; a mirror could change the angle of incoming light, but not his line of sight. To see the cut clearly, he'd have to lift the skull out of the figure.

He didn't intend to touch it.

All he could verify directly was the freshness of the face: skin a normal color, lips moist, the cinnabar of the forehead ornament unsmudged. None of it looked like it had sat here three months.

Put another way: the time the face was cut off and set into the figure was not the same occasion as when the crown hole was first opened—the hole had been opened three months ago, leaving the scratches; the freshness of the face pointed to a recent "placement." Exactly how recent, the available observations couldn't tell.

Crown hole + scratches: three months ago.
Head placed inside: recent, time undetermined.

But the face's own "era," by features, makeup, ornaments, was four hundred years back.

A person from four hundred years ago, beheaded at some recent point.

Shen Zhaoye ran the conclusion through his head once. Didn't write it in the notebook.

What was in his head couldn't be searched out of him.

---

Shen Zhaoye stepped back one pace.

He stood before the thirty-first figure about 1 minute.

In that minute he made a technician's choice: he would not take the face out.

Three reasons:

First, taking it out was irreversible. Once the face was gone from the figure, the state of the scene changed, and every later observation would have to be recalibrated.

Second, taking it out would leave his scent, his sweat, his skin cells—anything with a keen nose could track him.

Third, he wasn't sure whether figure and face were "container and contents" or "device and sensor." If the latter, removing the face was the same as severing the device—and might trigger some reaction.

He took out the ash of a fire-spill and rubbed it on his right glove. The ash of a fire-spill could mask the spread of human sweat-scent—one of the "breath-stopping arts" passed down at the Mojin gate; his grandfather had taught it to him.

Glove done, he tapped the cut-marked rim of the figure's crown hole lightly with the haft of the sapper spade.

"Tonk—"

The sound carried out, and across every figure within view, the brightest beam of each pair of vertical pupils flickered for an instant.

The glint off the coiling scale pattern on each figure's chest flickered too.

Shen Zhaoye felt no physical tremor—he was leaning on the cave wall, the floor didn't shake, the paving didn't quiver, the figures themselves didn't shift. What moved was the light: the beams, the glints.

It was a "reaction in light"—as if this whole passage were a living thing, and Shen Zhaoye's tap of the spade-haft had drawn back an answer in light.

He returned the spade to his hip.

Switched off the headlamp.

With the light off, every figure's vertical pupils lit.

The lighting sequence was the same as before—starting from the pair nearest him, spreading toward the far ends.

But one direction was different.

The other sixty-one figures' vertical pupils all faced the center axis of the cave.

The thirty-first—the one with the woman's face inside—its vertical pupils faced the cave mouth.

Toward the direction Shen Zhaoye had walked in from.

That face, inside the figure, faced the way he was supposed to leave.

Shen Zhaoye switched the headlamp back on.

The thirty-first's brightest beam turned a little, back to the center axis.

Aligned with the other sixty-one again.

【Ch. 007 End · the Eyeless Imperial Tomb's ceremonial array → before the thirty-first figure】