The two of us walked past the shelves full of the iron figures on the second floor of Zhang Jialou. When we met with the collapsed area, we stepped carefully and climbed over it. It took us a long time to get to the center of the floor, and when we did, there was a large empty s.p.a.ce. Looking around from here, we could see that all the racks on which the iron figures were placed were arranged in a radius around this point, presenting a complete set of f.u.xi"s 64 hexagrams.

However, there was nothing on this floor except for the figures that had all been cast from crude iron. And just like what we saw under the remains at the bottom of the lake, they should all be the sealed remains of miluotuo.

“This was a warehouse.” Fatty said, “When they were working on the project here, they may have put all the miluotuo they killed up here.”

“So many? There"s a battalion here.”

“Not really, didn"t the deformed brother say that these things follow human body heat? It must have been during construction that these things kept coming together.”

Fatty said: “There were so many iron figures that they couldn"t be transported out, and were all piled up here. The floor where the Zhang family"s tomb is located may still be up here, so we"ll continue our search to see if we can find a way up.”

This layer, like the bottom layer, had four huge pillars and from the outside, Zhang Jialou was eleven stories high. Apart from the one level buried in quicksand, we should have eight more. This building was constructed with the stone and wood from the surrounding mountain, and the stone was mixed with a large amount of “miluotuo stone”, which was very rare.

There were a large number of messy footprints on the ground, showing that Poker-Face and the others had also apparently searched here. The footprints were too messy to provide us with any reference, though.

Fatty touched his chin as he looked up, pondering over the footprints. After thinking for a long time, he said to himself, “There are too many to judge, but there must be some other traces of them.”

I looked up as he spoke and saw that he was sweeping the ceiling beams with his flashlight.

They were thickly dotted with peculiar characters that seemed to have different systems. Each line came from a different place and the only thing in common was that we couldn"t understand them and didn"t know what they meant. In one line, I unexpectedly saw a pa.s.sage from a heavenly book.

Fatty stopped and said to me, “It seems that my theory is correct. As the most primitive tomb raiding family, the Zhang family may be the only ones in the whole world who know China"s true history. They sealed all the secrets they brought out of their tomb robberies into this Zhang Jialou.”

I said, “What do these words really mean? Do you think the people who built this place understood them?”

Fatty said, “You don"t have to know the hen if your eggs are delicious. I think it was the Zhang family who provided the pattern, which was then incorporated into Yangshi Lei"s design. These strange characters should all come from the fragments of Chinese civilization that have already been destroyed. If my guess is correct, the closer to the top floor we get, the closer we get to modern times. Some of the secrets of Chinese civilization should be buried on that huge bottom floor of Zhang Jialou, which has been completely buried by quicksand.”

“Then, when we go up, are we not getting farther from the biggest secret?” I asked.

Fatty said, “Isn"t our main task to save people? If you think even I wouldn"t give up s.n.a.t.c.hing an artifact in these circ.u.mstances, forget it, all the d.a.m.n things here are heavenly books anyways. But I saw inscriptions in them, which should be from the early Spring and Autumn period. If we go up one level, I think we can see a large number of seal characters.”

So we continued our search and finally found a climbing mechanism on the west side of the building. Fatty rushed up.

After going up, the sight that met our eyes was unexpected. On this level, there were no iron figures, but a huge tortoise with a very long neck and limbs. It was a human face on a tortoise"s body, with human hands at the tip of its forelimbs and a tortoise"s feet on the hind legs. The face was that of a woman and it was sinister and fierce, looking like some horrible Tibetan scroll figure with a smile that wasn"t quite a smile. There was a depression on the tortoise"s back, inside of which was a black ball, which was carved with human faces and seemed to be removable.

Fatty marveled at the stone statue: “Do you know the origin of this thing? This is an image of the Guoren clan, the descendant of the Shennong clan. The "Imperial Readings of the Taiping Era" quoted the “Comprehensive Meaning of Customs” book as saying that primitive people at that time lived in groups, were polygamous, and had chaotic births. In order to clear up the birth problem, Nüwa (TN note: creator of humans in Chinese mythology) asked each cave group to make a clay figure and counted up the total number. Among them was the clay figure used by the Shennong clan, a human-faced tortoise. It later became the national emblem of the Shennong people.”

“This national emblem is really too ugly. But how can you, an uneducated person, go to see the "Imperial Readings of the Taiping Era?" I wondered.

“It"s because Nüwa"s chest on the cover was so big. I thought it was a very exciting book, but I didn"t expect it to be so serious.” He said, “I still remember a pa.s.sage inside—"a sovereign"s t.i.tle is but one insight into the upper eye"s facade, Sheng Xing, f.u.xi"s grandson; The Three Sovereigns, sometimes called the Three August Ones, were followed by the Yellow Emperor Huangdi. He was a native of China, a tortoise with a human face and a descendant of Shennong. Ju Mang, a human-faced bird, is the grandson of f.u.xi." Do you still remember the human-faced bird we saw in the Qaidam Basin?” (TN note: I spent over an hour trying to figure out what the h.e.l.l this pa.s.sage in quotes means and couldn"t for the life of me understand it so you get the imaginative version lol. Here"s the actual pa.s.sage if anybody cares: " 一目国，为一只眼，眼立面上端，盛姓， 伏羲之孙；三首国，斯类，为三个头，后为轩辕臣；氏人国，为人面龟身，神农氏后裔；句芒，为人面鸟身，伏羲之孙.")

I squatted down and looked closely at the details on the tortoise, and found that it was indeed similar to the human-faced bird statue we found in the Qaidam Basin. I said: “Ju Mang"s a wood and spring G.o.d, and f.u.xi and Yellow Emperor Huangdi are all people from the mythical era. I don"t know where this thing was dug up from or why it was carried here but it"s definitely not something we could find now. It must have been brought in by grave robbers from the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. It was only in the tombs they dug up at that time that this kind of thing could be found. Zhang family"s ancestors were really veterans; no one else would know how to take this kind of thing out.”

Fatty said, “What G.o.d of Spring, the one that controls v.i.a.g.r.a?”

“It"s the G.o.d of spring. Let"s look around and see what else is on this floor. Maybe there are things from other tribes around here.”

Just as we were about to explore, Fatty suddenly coughed again. This time he coughed even harder, almost falling to the ground as his lungs strained. I immediately went to help him and saw that the sputum he coughed up this time was all blood.

As soon as I saw it, I knew it wasn"t good. The amount of blood was definitely not a small matter. Did he just breathe in too much dust when he shook that equipment bag a while ago? I thought he"d be fine if he coughed it up, but now it seemed that his condition had deteriorated. He coughed and his whole face turned pale. I immediately gave him a canteen and told him to rinse his mouth. “Are you okay? Don"t force it.”

Looking at the blood he coughed up, he scolded me and said, “Let"s hurry up. If we stay here any longer, sooner or later you"ll do the same.”

I supported his weight for a while before he pushed me away. Then, we looked around the level.

Here it was relatively empty, with only a string of very clear footprints on the ground leading all the way into the darkness.

When walking in the dark, I thought about all kinds of things that I might see immediately, but I didn"t expect that after walking around, there was nothing on this ancient building"s third floor. The footprints extended all the way around the four sides and it was clear their owner had the same idea as us: the upward opening must be near the edge of the pillars.

“Isn"t this place unfinished?” Fatty coughed a few times. “You and I have robbed tombs before. All the murals and reliefs in those tombs were quite complete, even if nothing was inside. I thought it was stolen at first, but all the tomb doors were intact. “

I had some doubts. Looking at the footprints on the ground, I found that they showed a strange image of “walking flower blossoms.” After a few steps, the footprints" owner would stop and turn around in a very small place.

“What kind of sign do you think this is?” I asked Fatty.

He put his hand over his chest and said, “This is a national standard dance. It looks like Little Brother was in a good mood when he came to this level. Who did he waltz with?” When he said that, he began to waltz.

My heart said, "Your f.u.c.king lungs are rotten, and you still have the mind to dance." When I looked down at these footprints again, I realized that this was made as they were wandering around, not dancing. They may have found something strange here and stopped to look at it carefully.

But there was nothing around and it was empty, what were they looking at? There was nothing worth staying here for, unless they met with an unexpected situation.

“Be careful.” I looked at their footprints" tracks and saw the situation after a few steps. “According to my previous experience, something will happen soon.”

“I"m already half a tuberculosis patient now, can you stop looking for trouble for me?”

“Early warnings aren"t always a bad thing,” I said.

Just then, the two of us heard a series of light footsteps in the empty hall.

Fatty looked at me and I looked at him and asked, “Is it Little Brother?”

Fatty shook his head and shot around with a flashlight but I couldn"t see anything. Fatty said to me, “Listen carefully.”

The two of us quieted down, stood back to back, looked around, and tried to track the footsteps. I knew immediately why Fatty shook his head.

They came from the ceiling. When we pointed the flashlight up, we immediately found something strange about this floor.

The ceiling was extremely high, with many beams, forming a huge checkerboard-like structure on top of our heads. In the squares of these boards and in the shadows of the beams, I saw countless things hanging.

“Amazing.” Fatty"s eyes were pointed straight up. In the shadow of the whole ceiling, there were tens of thousands of boxes hanging, all large and small, with different shapes and various patterns on them. It was extremely spectacular when viewed at a glance.

“Immortal fruit.” Fatty said, “It"s the fruit of the G.o.ds. f.u.c.k, there are so, so many!”

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TN Note: Yeahhhh, not really my best work on this chapter but I just couldn"t figure out what the heck that pa.s.sage from the Imperial Readings was supposed to say. My Chinese dictionary, 3 translation sites, and google weren"t helpful, so sorry. If anybody can figure it out (or cares enough to), let me know and I"ll definitely fix it.