第 010 Ch.| Five Minutes

He Sanjin tapped his watch.

10:42.

Shen Zhaoye had crossed the line at 10:37.

Five minutes, just gone.

He Sanjin looked again at the far side of the line. Shen Zhaoye's body was already out of sight—he'd walked maybe 10 meters past the line before he vanished from view. Ahead was a gully, empty. The light was wrong too. On this side, the light that couldn't cross the line was the kind you'd expect at 11 in the morning, a white light leaning faintly warm. But on the far side, the color temperature was the orange-red of four or five in the afternoon.

Two kinds of light, jammed together along that line.

He Sanjin stood there and thought a moment.

By Shen Zhaoye's instructions, he was supposed to turn around, go back to the village, find Old Ge, and tell him: we sited the third kind of vault, and we got it right.

"Got it right"—those were the second half of the last words Shen Zhaoye's grandfather spoke before he died. He Sanjin didn't know the old tomb-craft sayings, but he'd run with Shen Zhaoye for ten years and heard it no fewer than ten times. Site the first kind wrong, you die. Site the second wrong, you die too. Site the third right, and the living man turns into something else.

When Shen Zhaoye used those words just now, he meant he'd been sited right—drawn in.

Meaning—he might already have turned into something else.

But He Sanjin didn't move.

He crouched and pried open the little mound of earth at his feet. After Shen Zhaoye picked up the bronze mirror earlier, he'd put the flat stone and the mound back over it; the paper scrap had already gone into Shen Zhaoye's notebook, out of the dirt. He Sanjin dug the mound open again to see what was left inside.

Nothing.

Only one torn paper scrap, shredded very small, buried deep beneath the mound.

He Sanjin pinched the fragment up between his fingers.

There were two characters on it, weathered almost past reading. But he recognized them—two seal characters, written differently from ordinary small-seal script, as if someone had deliberately reversed the direction of every stroke.

He Sanjin didn't know seal script. But his uncle-in-law dealt mid-market in relics in Shanghai, and he'd taught him one rule—any time you see reversed seal characters, nine times out of ten it's a lock-curse. A lock-curse isn't meant to be read. It's so that when the wrong person reads it, something happens to them.

He Sanjin put the fragment back in the mound and pressed the stone down over it.

He switched the headlamp off for 5 seconds, then made a motion—waved a hand toward the far side of the line, to see whether the spot of light there reacted.

The spot of light didn't move.

---

He Sanjin stood up.

He slung the duffel onto his shoulder.

50 meters off, on the far side of the line, was a place Shen Zhaoye might never come back from.

He stood there about a minute, turning a few things over.

His cut was 15%, so 750,000 to him; Shen Zhaoye still owed 720,000 in back taxes. As for Old Ge's taboo—"don't turn back"—his situation now was following in after a farewell, which was different from turning back after a farewell, so it might not apply. The reversed small-seal scrap under the mound meant someone had deliberately left a signal: whoever picked up the mirror, once you cross the line, don't come back out.

The signal was a "lock."

Which meant someone had known in advance that Shen Zhaoye would pick up the mirror, would cross the line.

Who that "someone" was, He Sanjin didn't know.

But he was clear on one thing—on the far side of this line there was more than just Shen Zhaoye and the tomb the two of them had come to rob. There were other people, or other things, arranging it from behind.

He Sanjin pulled the brim of his cap down, took the cigarette from behind his ear, and lit it.

"Fuck it," he said. "I don't want the 750,000. I don't want the 50 million either. But he doesn't get to die."

He took three drags and stubbed the butt out on the green flagstone underfoot.

He Sanjin had known Shen Zhaoye ten years—seven jobs over those years, big and small. The first was 2016, some nameless Han tomb in Hunan; Shen Zhaoye was barely past twenty then, just taken over the Shen family compass, hands shaking with nerves going into the passage, and He Sanjin laughed at him for three hours straight. The third was 2019, a small lord's tomb from the Five Dynasties period in Henan; He Sanjin took a wooden spike through the calf from a trap, and Shen Zhaoye picked the splinters out one by one and kept them from amputating it. The seventh was last year in Zhangye, Gansu—a side-chamber of a Western Xia tomb with a whole nest of living things in it, not living creatures, something being kept; Shen Zhaoye pinned it down with glutinous rice and the black donkey's hoof, and only then did the two of them get out.

Seven jobs, and every time Shen Zhaoye had one habit—before going into a tomb he'd always run through his death arrangements once.

"If I don't come back, give this document to my sister."
"If I don't come back, hand the spare key to my place to the lawyer."
"If I don't come back, burn that copy of the Dragon-Stirring Fragment, First Half of mine."

But this time, Shen Zhaoye gave no arrangements.

He just went in, and looking back said only one thing: "Five minutes."

Meaning—Shen Zhaoye himself wasn't sure whether he meant to come back.

He Sanjin factored that in.

He walked up to the spot of light. He shook the duffel, checking what was inside—glutinous rice and fire-spills on the outside, headlamp in the inner pocket, waterproof notebook pressed at the bottom. Nothing missing.

He dug a photograph out of his coat pocket.

The photo was his wife.

He Sanjin looked at the photo for 3 seconds and put it back in his pocket.

He straightened up and walked his body toward the spot of light.

The moment he crossed the line, he felt nothing at all.

Only a faintly warm light, coming suddenly into his eyes.

---

Across the line, He Sanjin stopped.

From outside the line he'd seen the "70-degree shadow swing" the instant Shen Zhaoye crossed—but now that he'd crossed it himself, looking down at his own shadow, he couldn't quite make it out. Maybe because the light wasn't strong enough.

He switched the headlamp on and looked at himself.

Both hands out in front. Shadow direction, normal.

No swing.

He Sanjin froze for 3 seconds.

He tried a second method—switched the headlamp off.

With the lamp off there was still brightness in the air. Light came through from somewhere off in the gully, like sun at four or five in the afternoon—but his watch read 11:52 in the morning.

He Sanjin glanced at the watch and stopped.

Outside the line just now he'd checked it at 10:42. Watching Shen Zhaoye for five minutes, finding the paper scrap, reasoning it through, walking to the spot of light—by the time he'd counted in his head, maybe 8 to 10 minutes had passed, so outside the line it should now be somewhere around 10:52.

Not 11:52.

The instant he crossed the line, the watch had jumped forward about an hour—relative to his own present time outside the line, 10:52, not relative to the 10:42 from the first time he'd checked.

He held the watch up under the headlamp to see whether the hands had stuck, whether the second hand was still moving.

The watch wasn't broken. The time had jumped on its own.

"Hell," he said.

No time to analyze it now—he filed the rule in his head: the instant you cross the line, the watch jumps. The two sides may be out of sync. Shen Zhaoye had probably filed it too.

But the "70 degrees"—that phenomenon hadn't shown on him.

Which meant one thing: when He Sanjin crossed the line, the rule didn't apply to him.

There could be three reasons—he hadn't picked up the mirror, his bloodline was wrong, or the line had some limit on whom it recognized. None of the three could he verify.

He Sanjin was not the one being singled out. That much he could be sure of.

He walked on into the gully.

He walked faster than Shen Zhaoye had—because he didn't stop to measure time or color-temperature differences, knowing Shen Zhaoye would do all that measuring, and that there was no point in him doing it too.

He Sanjin's grave-robbing philosophy was different from the Shen family's fenjin craft. The Shens went into tombs on technique—compass, sand and water, magnetic declination, the firing date of the tomb bricks. He Sanjin went into tombs on experience, on his black-market connections, on the off-feeling he'd grown over thirty-eight years of living.

He walked, sweeping the surroundings with the off-feeling.

The gully was quiet—no wind, the insects and birds gone silent too. Shen Zhaoye had probably filed that. But He Sanjin noticed something Shen Zhaoye might not have—the smell of the air over this stretch of ground.

Normal mountain forest has a "vegetation smell"—pine resin, moss, damp soil, all mixed. In this gully those smells were all very faint, but under them was another smell—very weak, like a poultry yard cleaned out a day or two before, that lingering ground smell of "animal secretions gone dry."

Not chickens.

He Sanjin had spent thirty-eight years in the trade and smelled every animal he could ever smell. This one he'd smelled once—2017, in the side-chamber of some nameless tomb in Hubei; back then he'd thought it was a pangolin or some kind of reptile nesting in the tomb. Later Shen Zhaoye read the tomb's age and said, "That can't be the smell of any modern animal."

They hadn't followed it up then.

Now He Sanjin suspected he should have followed it up back then.

After about 500 meters, he saw the cave mouth.

The cave was about waist-high on him, just wide enough for one person to crawl into. It sat on the right side of the gully, flush with the ground. Outside the cave mouth ran a line of glutinous rice—Shen Zhaoye's mark. Beside the rice line, in the mounded earth, there were footprints.

Shen Zhaoye's footprints.

He Sanjin crouched and touched the dirt with his hand.

The top layer was a little dry—but not "bone dry," the dryness of something left for days; more "lost a touch of moisture since it was just stepped in." He Sanjin wasn't a trained reader of this; he couldn't give a precise time, at most a rough "not from days ago."

He'd meant to work backward from his watch to how long Shen Zhaoye had been in the cave. But the line-crossing time-jump had already broken the baseline—the watch's time didn't line up with the time outside the line, and didn't line up with how dry the footprints were either. Judging from time how long Shen Zhaoye had been inside wasn't reliable.

He Sanjin gave up that calculation.

He filed the fact in his head—not to analyze, to remember. Shen Zhaoye had said it before: "The man who can't keep things in his head is the one who dies first in a tomb. Remember everything you see, even if you don't know what it means."

He Sanjin did no more reckoning—he crouched down and went into the cave.

---

The passage sloped down. He Sanjin wasn't as good as Shen Zhaoye at reading grade—he only felt that "the going down was a little slick," but his feet held.

After about 100 meters, he saw the first figurine.

It was a pottery figurine. A little shorter than He Sanjin, in a painted dragon-robe, feet together and standing straight, head tilted very slightly to one side. The eyes were vertical pupils.

He Sanjin didn't crouch to look at the detail. He just kept walking.

But as he passed the figure, he noticed its eyes.

The figurine's vertical pupils were carved on a flat surface—they should be dead, no "direction" to them.

But the moment he walked past, those vertical pupils seemed to "sweep" a glance at him.

Not physical movement. It was that feeling of "being watched"—anyone who's lived long enough in the trade knows it well. He Sanjin had felt it once in 2013, in a nameless grave in Yunnan; and again later, when his wife was having a cesarean at the hospital and an old nurse out in the corridor looked at him.

The feeling of "being looked at" never lies.

The figurine was looking at him.

The second, the third—on until about the thirtieth. As he walked, he noticed two sets of footprints on the ground.

The first set was Shen Zhaoye's—normal spacing, left and right alternating. The second set was feet-together hopping prints—spacing 1.2 meters, with a drag mark down the middle.

The two sets ran opposite ways. Shen Zhaoye's prints ran toward the bottom of the cave—left on his way in. The hopping prints ran toward the cave mouth—coming the way He Sanjin had come.

He Sanjin didn't startle—thirty-eight years in the trade, he'd seen no fewer than 30 kinds of strange footprints in tombs.

But these hopping prints—the proportions were off. The third toe ran long.

And the direction was toward the cave mouth—meaning the thing had originally been deeper down the passage and was now walking out toward the mouth. When He Sanjin came in through the cave mouth earlier, he hadn't seen it outside—maybe it was still somewhere in the passage, maybe it had already gone around the rice line and out through some other gap. He Sanjin couldn't read it.

He Sanjin deliberately set his own steps off the centerline between the two sets of prints. He didn't want to walk the same path as that "thing" and leave overlapping traces.

This rule He Sanjin had picked up himself a few years back in some tomb in Sichuan—"don't step in the predecessor's footprints." The spot where the predecessor leaves prints has been "locked," and whoever steps on it after gets fastened to the same chain.

He walked on, staying to the two sides of the passage, off the centerline.

He kept walking.

At the thirty-second figurine, he stopped.

---

To the left of the thirty-second figurine—that is, on the reversed half of the descending array—

The thirty-first.

In front of that figurine stood a person.

The person had his back to He Sanjin, hands hanging at his sides, posture upright, head tilted very slightly to one side, 10 degrees.

The same posture as the figurines.

The person was Shen Zhaoye.

He Sanjin opened his mouth to call out "Zhaoye."

But he didn't.

Because—

Across from that figurine, on the other side of the passage's centerline—

there stood a person too.

That person also had his back to He Sanjin, hands hanging at his sides, posture upright, head tilted very slightly to one side, 10 degrees.

Two people. Both Shen Zhaoye.

Even the angle of the headlamps matched.

He Sanjin stood in the passage, one foot just set down beside the thirty-second figurine.

He held still about 10 seconds, not moving.

Neither Shen Zhaoye turned his head.

He Sanjin switched the headlamp off.

With the lamp off, the vertical pupils down both sides of the passage lit up together, starting from the pair nearest him, one after another spreading toward the far end.

But in one place it was different.

The wave of lighting—at the position of the thirty-first figurine and the one facing it across the passage—stuck.

It didn't carry on toward the far end.

As if the positions of the two Shen Zhaoyes had crashed the signal system for the moment.

He Sanjin switched the headlamp back on.

The two Shen Zhaoyes in front of the two figurines—still standing. Not moving.

He was clear on one thing—he had to choose which one to believe.

But he didn't know which one it was.

【Ch. 010 End · the dog-bark line, outer side of the gully → before the thirty-first figurine in the array】