The Mojin Code
The rules for going into a tomb, handed down through the generations, resting on experience several generations paid for with their lives. The core of it is one line: you came to look and to take, not to leave anything behind.
Men who go into tombs have their rules for going into tombs, handed down through the generations. They look like superstition, and what lies under them is experience that several generations paid for with their lives.
The open ones even outsiders have heard of: light a candle to read the breath, the black donkey's hoof to hold down a corpse, glutinous rice to seal off corpse-breath, the fire-spill kept back as a last resort. The quantities actually carried in are all fixed. The glutinous rice goes in 3 bags; a line 3 centimeters wide drawn across the cave mouth will hold a stretch of tunnel. The black donkey's hoof is used as shavings of the skin rather than a whole hoof, wax-sealed in small glass vials, 2 vials carried, 1 of them in reserve. You take 6 fire-spills, and their reddish long-wave light can also be turned on ancient luminous inscriptions to bring the faint cuts up.
The unspoken ones matter more. Don't step in the predecessor's footprints — that position has been 'locked,' and whoever steps into it after is tethered by the same chain. Leave nothing behind for the tomb that belongs to you: cigarette ends, scraps of paper, torn-out notes all go back into the pocket and out with you. Smell counts as yours too. The scent-cutting trick the Mojin pass by mouth is to rub the ash of a fire-spill into your gloves, covering the spread of sweat; it holds for only 10 minutes, and after a long stretch of walking you have to rub it on again.
The Shens added 2 of their own: no explosives into the vault, no blade longer than 6 inches. The reasoning is that a gun makes a man brave, and a brave man sites the vault wrong. And one more, unwritten — before going into a tomb you run through the death contingency out loud: who gets the papers, who gets the keys, which book is to be burned. On the trip where a man does not run through it, the people with him know he is not sure himself that he is coming back.
Remembering is a rule as well. Everything you see, you hold on to, and you hold on to it even when the meaning is beyond you. The men who cannot keep it in their heads are the ones who die.
The core of the code is one line:
You came to look and to take, not to leave anything behind.
Leave a part of yourself in a tomb and the tomb remembers you.
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