The Eyeless Imperial Tomb

A nameless imperial tomb in the mountains of Guanzhong. Not in the official histories, not in the local gazetteers either. Aboveground it has left 2 things: a small village shrine that sits east and faces west, pressing down on a breath-vent, and in front of the shrine a stele half buried in the soil, knee-high on a man. Its face was ground deliberately — ground flat, ground clean — but whoever did it was not careful enough, and with light raked across at an angle the remaining strokes of 2 characters can still be made out —

Emperor's Gate

The stele is limestone, its surface 3 degrees colder than the night air, and the cold has a direction: it pulls upward from underground. Press the pad of a finger to it and a small damp patch is left that takes 3 seconds to dry.

The real entrance lies deep in the gully. West-southwest from the village, over the second mountain hollow and down into the dry gully — the gully runs 30 meters wide and 2 meters deep, its bed paved with green stones rounded by water that ring hollow when struck; underneath is a man-made channel roofed with slabs, on an engineering scale matching the Qin or something earlier. At the end of the gully stands the broken stone pillar, a granite column 5 meters tall, its upper section fallen into the ground, its lower section still standing, the base bitten into the green bed-stone with mortise and tenon and no mortar. On the underside of the fallen section, 5 characters are cut in regular script:

Where the Royal House Fled South

Behind the pillar is a cleft 1.5 meters wide that a man has to turn sideways to pass. The cleft runs 80 meters and then opens out into a V-shaped gully, 3 meters wide at the floor, dropping 3 meters for every 100 walked, floored with green flagstones whose joints all run northeast to southwest, the same laying pattern as the stone-slab lane in the village below. Nothing calls in the gully, no birds, no insects; the moss rhizoids against the rock walls have gone white, and the stone beads with no dew, morning or night.

The mouth that leads into the tomb opens on the right side of the gully, flush with the ground, 1.4 meters high and 1 meter wide; a man has to bend his back to nearly 90 degrees to get in. Inside it runs level for 3 meters, then tilts down 15 degrees, and after a stretch turns to 20. The cut marks on the ceiling come one after another, 4 to 5 centimeters apart, running parallel to the long axis of the tunnel, each gouged with roughly the force of a grown man driving a No. 6 sapper spade into rock with everything he has; covering the whole tunnel would take more than 5,000 strokes. The air inside carries a very faint smell, like iron that rusted and then soaked in water.

The proportions of the passageway do not match the dimensions of a human being. This tomb belongs to the class the Fenjin school says must never be touched, and precisely because of that, someone is paying a great deal of money to have a man go in.