Ch. 008| Sixteen Characters

Shen Zhaoye reset the miner's headlamp to its middle notch.

The thirty-first's brightest beam had turned a moment ago and now sat back on the center axis. He wasn't sure that "change of direction" had been real, or a visual afterimage from fatigue.

He went around the thirty-first and on toward the bottom of the cave.

The passage kept sloping down. The figure array in the back half was like the front—a pair every 1.5 meters. But the front half was clockwise scale patterns, the back half counterclockwise—he was now walking the lineage that "belonged" to the counterclockwise.

Passing the twentieth pair—the thirty-ninth and fortieth figures—Shen Zhaoye stopped and did one thing—

He took the ash of the fire-spill from his pocket and rubbed it over his right glove again.

The breath-stopping art was good for only 10 minutes. His grandfather had said so.

As he walked, he watched closely for whether the details changed every few pairs.

The forty-third and forty-fourth—the index finger on the left figure's right hand was about 2 centimeters longer than on the others.
The forty-seventh and forty-eighth—the hem of the right figure's black dragon robe had been patched with clay. The patch was where a piece had later been "knocked off," then filled back in with clay of the same era.
The fifty-first and fifty-second—the scale pattern on the left figure's chest had an extremely fine horizontal mark, as if scratched by a fingernail.

Every figure had its own tiny "individual difference"—all traces of having been "worked on" later.

As if someone patrolled this array on a schedule, making minute adjustments to each figure by some specific rule.

The "person" doing the adjusting—or the "thing"—hadn't shown itself yet.

Passing the twenty-fifth pair, he noticed the paving on the floor begin to change. The front section (pairs one through twenty) was bluish stone slab. The back section (pairs twenty-one through thirty) switched to a stone Shen Zhaoye didn't know—the surface had extremely fine markings, like ripples on water, and the color leaned dark green.

This stone wasn't in any mineral catalogue Shen Zhaoye knew—at least, he'd never seen it within China's borders.

He scraped the dark-green surface lightly with the tip of the sapper spade, leaving a very shallow mark. The hardness was about the same as the bluish slab. But this stone had a curious sound-absorbing quality under a tap of the spade-haft—the "tonk" carried for about thirty percent less time than off the bluish slab.

As if the stone itself were soaking up the sound waves.

Shen Zhaoye noted the phenomenon—but this time he didn't tear out the notebook page. He knew he'd already passed enough figures to work out how far the cave bottom still lay. Tearing out another page, writing it down, shoving it straight in his pocket—he'd done that move 5 times already.

The rest of his observations he meant to keep only in his head.

---

At the thirty-first pair—the sixty-first and sixty-second figures—Shen Zhaoye saw the bottom of the cave.

About 20 meters off.

Another 1.5 meters in was the array's last pair—two gate-guard figures.

The gate-guard figures were nothing like the sixty-two ordinary figures before them—plain dark-brown hempcloth robes, no dragon pattern, no scale-pattern outline. The eyelid line sat normal, gazing straight ahead.

The heads weren't canted either. Straight gaze.

Like something meant to guard a gate.

Each gate-guard figure's right hand gripped a weapon—on the left, a long-hafted bronze dagger-axe; on the right, a straight-bladed bronze sword. Both were genuine. The bronze carried the green patina of age, but the blade edges had no corrosion—as if kept maintained over a long time.

Passing the gate-guards, Shen Zhaoye deliberately rubbed the fire-spill ash over himself once more. One more layer of scent-cover before the gate was one more layer.

The breath-stopping art had only 5 minutes left.

He glanced at the crowns of the gate-guards' heads.

The gate-guard figures had no 8-centimeter hole at the crown.

Meaning the gate-guards weren't the same "build" as the ordinary figures—Shen Zhaoye had earlier checked the first figure and the thirty-first, both with an 8-centimeter crown hole, containers for "holding a person." But he hadn't checked them one by one; whether the other sixty also had holes was inference, not verification.

These two gate-guards had no crown hole—on the surface, a different build from the figures before them. But "no crown hole" didn't equal "holding nothing"; whether there were openings elsewhere—the base, the sides—Shen Zhaoye hadn't gone around tapping, hadn't verified.

By position and posture, they looked like something meant to guard a gate. But "looks like" wasn't "is"; the purpose could only be inferred.

Shen Zhaoye passed the gate-guards, another 20 meters in.

Behind the gate-guards the passage narrowed abruptly, from 3 meters wide down to 1.2. The floor switched from dark-green slab to steps hewn out of raw stone wall.

The steps sloped down at about 30 degrees.

Shen Zhaoye stepped onto the first—each step about 30 centimeters high. The step surfaces weren't worn—probably little used. Going down along them, every step on the left-hand wall was incised with a tiny number, like Han-clerical script. Top to bottom, the numbers descended.

He counted under his breath: twenty, nineteen, eighteen, seventeen…

At the twenty-first step came "zero."

Twenty-one steps down, the passage turned again.

At the turn was a small platform, about 4 meters square. Behind the platform—

was a door.

---

The door was bluestone slab, 2 meters on each side. The surface bore no ornament, the whole block ground very smooth.

Shen Zhaoye looked first at the door's edges. Where the stone met the surrounding cave wall—mortise and tenon. The same joining method as the broken stone pillar in the dry gully.

The mortise-and-tenon seams held no mortar, no plaster, no sealant in any modern sense. Held purely by the bite of the stone itself.

To manage mortise and tenon this fine, the craft required was on the same level as the dry gully's "royal works."

Maybe the same team of engineers.

He tapped the door's face three times lightly with the spade-haft. "Tonk—tonk—tonk—" The sound decayed at a rate like when he'd tapped the dark-green paving earlier—sound-absorbing too.

The whole slab was about 0.4 meters thick.

By Shen Zhaoye's eye, the door's stone alone weighed over two tons. One man couldn't push it—by the designer's intent, opening this door took some "mechanism," not physical force.

What the mechanism was, he'd have to see whether the writing on the door gave a hint—or maybe it gave none.

At the door's center was a round recess.

Diameter 15 centimeters. Depth about 1 centimeter. The inside of the recess was ground very fine, like a seat made for some object of a particular shape.

Shen Zhaoye took the bronze mirror from his pocket and matched it against the recess—diameter and depth both a perfect fit.

The dimensions fit. Could be the seat for this mirror—could be for another mirror of the same size, or some other object of the same size. Dimension alone couldn't verify it.

But he didn't put the mirror in.

He looked at the rest of the door first.

Above the recess were four lines of incised characters. Four characters per line, sixteen in all. The script was seal script, cut very fine—you'd take it for the stone's natural grain if you didn't look closely.

Shen Zhaoye angled the headlamp across it and worked it out slowly.

Whoever enters this door
know the dragon and turn back
hold the mirror and enter
the soul returns at thirty-one

---

Shen Zhaoye stood before the door about 3 minutes.

The four lines, sixteen characters—he read them five times.

"Whoever enters this door, know the dragon and turn back"—literal sense: whoever enters this door, if they recognize the "dragon," should turn back.

"Dragon" in the Fenjin gate's verses carried a plural meaning—it could point to the run of an earth-vein, to the True King bloodline, or to some species no longer in the existing zoology. Shen Zhaoye couldn't read yet which level the "dragon" here belonged to.

If the "dragon" here meant some species that no longer existed—then the "winged, scale-patterned coiling" figure he'd seen on the broken stone pillar in the dry gully might already have been "known." But that was only a "maybe"; he hadn't ruled out either the earth-vein or the bloodline reading.

By the gate-verse's worst-case reading, he ought to turn back.

But he didn't.

The third line, the fourth—

"Hold the mirror and enter; the soul returns at thirty-one."

Literal sense: whoever enters carrying the mirror, their soul returns to the thirty-first.

The mirror in Shen Zhaoye's pocket—he'd picked it up at the first little cross-mark. The Ge family rule: pick up something on the way in. He hadn't known whether it counted.

Maybe it counted—maybe not.

By the worst-case reading: whoever picks up the mirror and enters, the gate-verse says their "soul returns at thirty-one." The slot of the thirty-first figure might be the one "made ready" for whoever brought the mirror in. The face of the late-Ming, early-Qing woman just cut and set inside it might be temporary, a placeholder, waiting for the next one to carry a mirror through the gate and fill the slot.

That was the worst-case reading. Whether it was actually so, you'd only verify by setting the mirror in the door's recess—and Shen Zhaoye didn't intend to verify.

Shen Zhaoye crouched before the door and thought about 2 minutes.

He had two choices:

One, turn back as the gate-verse said. Leave the mirror at the door, retrace his way back to the dog-bark line, cross it, go find He Sanjin. The cost—this job ended here, and of the 5,000,000 dollars he'd take only the 300,000 from signing, none of the rest. Back home he'd still owe the tax bureau 720,000. But he'd be alive.

Two, ignore the gate-verse and keep pushing in. The cost—if the worst-case "soul returns at thirty-one" reading held, he might become the "official contents" of the thirty-first. But that was only the worst case; the actual mechanism wasn't verified.

There was, in fact, a third choice.

Throw the mirror away and pass the gate empty-handed. But this choice carried a risk Shen Zhaoye couldn't read—he didn't know whether "throwing the mirror away" would trigger another rule not written on the door.

The Ge family rule was "whatever you bring up the mountain, drop one thing on the way out." The mirror he'd picked up on the way in; by rights it didn't count. But if this gate-verse's rule was "you must carry a mirror to be allowed in"—then throwing it away was the same as giving up.

Shen Zhaoye thought it over, and decided not to drop it.

But not to put it in the recess either.

He meant to pass by a fourth way—not trigger the mechanism, just look at the inside through the gap at the door's edge. If this door had a gap, if he could see the situation within, he'd look first and decide after.

Shen Zhaoye dialed the headlamp to its dimmest notch, moved to the door's left side, and looked slowly along the vertical of the stone.

Where the door met the cave wall—though the mortise and tenon were tight—the joint held one extremely fine seam, hair's-breadth thin, the tolerance of the joinery.

He switched off the headlamp and put his eye to the seam.

On the seam's far side, he could see an extremely faint light.

The light's color temperature was close to the light in that gully outside—warm-leaning, like sun at four or five in the afternoon.

But he'd already tested this in the outer stretch of the gully: color temperature not matching the time didn't directly mean it was actually afternoon over there. All he could say was "there's a lighting anomaly inside too," maybe from the same source as the gully's, maybe not. Whether time was displaced, there was no synchronized event yet to verify.

Shen Zhaoye kept his eye to the seam and moved slowly left and right, trying to see more of the range inside.

The seam's angle was extremely narrow, the light faint too—he could see out maybe three degrees of view.

In those three degrees, there wasn't much he could make out.

About 20 meters off, at the center of the space, was a shape. Seated, posture upright. Behind it seemed to be a back, armrests—maybe a chair, maybe a throne-type seat. Too far to make out the form.

Couldn't make out whether the shape was a person, a figure, or something else.

At the crown of that shape—there seemed to be a small dark spot. At 20 meters, an 8-centimeter hole and a small black dot couldn't be told apart. He "assumed" it was a crown hole, the same kind as those holed figures up the passage—but that was only an assumption, not something seen for certain.

Shen Zhaoye drew his eye from the seam, stepped back two paces, switched the headlamp back on.

Who sat in that chair, he couldn't make out.

---

Shen Zhaoye raised the bronze mirror under the headlamp and looked closely.

On the mirror's surface was a detail he hadn't noticed back in the passage—a set of very fresh scratches, as if someone had raked them with claws.

The scratches sat in the lower-left corner of the mirror's face. Four in all, parallel, each about 3 centimeters long. Spacing between marks—4 centimeters.

4 centimeters.

The same dimension as the set of scratches on the thirty-first figure's right shoulder, and the gouge marks on the walls along the passage.

The same claw—or the same kind.

Shen Zhaoye took the mirror out from under the headlamp and tucked it back into his coat's inner pocket.

He couldn't tell when this set of scratches had been left—crossing the dog-bark line, entering the cave mouth, looking at the figures, or any moment now standing before the door—any of them was possible.

Shen Zhaoye looked back over his shoulder.

On the steps behind the platform, nothing else.

But he couldn't tell with the naked eye whether there was "anything else"—he'd already known some things in this gully couldn't be seen by the naked eye.

Only the mirror could see them.

【Ch. 008 End · the back half of the Eyeless Imperial Tomb's figurine array → before the stone door of the main chamber】