by Xu, Lei
I double-checked the gun and was puzzled. It looked as if that group of grave robbers had been equipped with sophisticated weapons, or at least much more so than we were. Who they could have been, these people who went in but did not come back out? Could they have all died in here? If not, where were they now?
As my thoughts ran on, I leaned back against the sacrificial platform. Who knew that this stone stage that appeared so solid couldn’t bear my weight? Before my entire body had pressed against it, the platform suddenly sank halfway into the ground.
Thinking we had triggered a trap, all of us quickly ducked down. The next thing we knew a series of noises came from below our feet, ending with a loud crash near the end of the platform.
We went to take a look and found a huge hole in the gargantuan tree that stood behind the stone platform. From the hole there appeared a mammoth bronze coffin, fixed in place with chains which had been attached to the largest tree branch and then wrapped several times around the coffin.
Uncle Three was speechless and then with a sigh of relief said, “So here is the real coffin.”
“Holy shit!” Big Kui cried. “A coffin this big must be really valuable. Our trip hasn’t been completely in vain!”
Uncle Three slapped him on his head and said, “Valuable?! Stop thinking about goddamn money all the time. Even if this thing was worth something, you still wouldn’t be able to move it out of here. There’s one inner coffin and one outer coffin involved here—not a simple casket. Damn you, don’t always make me lose face with your greed and stupidity.”
Big Kui scratched his head and dared not speak again. I looked closely, feeling something was wrong, and remarked to Uncle Three, “This is strange. Coffins of common people usually are nailed shut because nobody expects them to be opened again—but look. The traps placed in the platform seemed to have been put there to help us locate this. Could it be that the occupier of this grave wanted someone to open his coffin? Plus, you see here, these tightly wrapped chains don’t seem intended to keep the coffin in place but to keep whatever was inside it from getting out.”
Uncle Three nodded and we looked at each other questioningly. Could another monster be inside this coffin? Should we open it or leave it alone?
Uncle Three spat and decided, “My guess is everything that’s valuable must be here in this coffin. If we leave now, then wouldn’t our trip be pointless? So what if there’s a monster in there? We have guns and explosives. If there’s something in there, we’ll fight the fucking thing!”
I nodded, and Uncle Three continued, “Besides, it’s not likely now that we’ll be able to get out the same way we came in. Nearly all of the cave openings on these cliffs will lead us to the tunnel maze again. To leave from one of them will take us forever. Our best hope is to climb from here.”
We raised our heads and saw the crevice on the cavern’s ceiling where moonbeams streamed through; what they revealed looked bleak and dreary. Uncle Three pointed to the giant tree. “You see, the top of this tree is very close to the ceiling. It has many branches, which should make it easy for us to climb it. Look at all of these vines that have grown as high as the top of this cave—they make a natural ladder.”
“Master Three, what nonsense is this? This is a man-eating tree,” Panzi argued. “Isn’t climbing it the same thing as committing suicide?”
Uncle Three laughed. “This is a hydra-cypress. I’ve already thought this through earlier. Don’t you see how the vines won’t grow on the stones here? That’s because this is Tianxin rock, which repels the hydra-cypress and its vines. If we coat ourselves with the dust from these stones, I guarantee we will climb unharmed and everything will proceed smoothly without a hitch.”
“Will it really work?” Big Kui whimpered.
Uncle Three stared at him and I was sure he was going to slap Big Kui on the head one more time but instead he muttered, “Okay, shit—let’s put some on and find out!”
Without another word, we scurried into action. With Fats on Big Kui’s back and Uncle Three supporting Panzi, I shouldered our equipment and took a look back at the cave, thinking, We’re all safe, but what about Poker-face? Uncle Three knew what was on my mind and assured me, “Menyouping can take care of himself—don’t you worry.”
I nodded, realizing I was the last man on earth to worry about Poker-face. He was much savvier than I was, and he seemed to possess supernatural powers. If there was any need for concern on anyone’s behalf, he should be worrying about me.
Holding a gun, I led the way as we slowly reached the stone platform. A moment ago as we ran down the steps, we didn’t notice that the entire platform was supported by huge boulders of Tianxin rock, so enormous that I couldn’t figure out how they were brought in from outside.
Finally we reached the hole in the tree, and the giant bronze coffin stood before us. It was at least two and a half meters long, with ancient inscriptions engraved all over it.
We were all dead silent as if we were reluctant to disturb the occupant of this coffin. Uncle Three took out a crowbar and knocked on the surface, producing a flat, dull thud from inside, which made us realize it was absolutely crammed with objects. Uncle Three knew I had some knowledge of ancient inscriptions and asked me, “Can you read what’s written on here?”
I shook my head and replied, “I don’t understand the specifics, but I am sure the owner of the tomb is the one we have been looking for. The script on this coffin probably provides an outline of his life. It looks like he died before turning fifty without having fathered any children. The scenario in which he passed away is the same as I had read earlier. He died sitting like a Buddhist monk before the Emperor of the State of Lu. All the other texts are probably about his general life.”
Uninterested in the personages and culture of the State of Lu, I scanned the inscriptions quickly.
“What do those words mean?” Big Kui asked. I took a look and saw the word Open in the middle of the coffin. Then there were other words that were bigger and more eye-catching than the others, which I knew indicated a date. “This should mark the date that the coffin was placed here, but I can’t read the words so don’t know what date it is,” I explained.
While I examined the inscriptions, Uncle Three looked for the best way to open the coffin. He shook the chains and found they were all as thick as his thumb. After so many years of wear and tear, most of them were no longer in good shape and basically served only a decorative purpose.
Motioning to me to step back, my uncle scolded, “Stop wasting time with those inscriptions. Check them out after we open the coffin.”
He had barely finished his sentence when the coffin began to shake, with a muffled noise coming from inside. At first I thought I was imagining things, and was about to ask the others if they heard something as well. Then suddenly there was still more quaking; I heard the noise again and knew it was real this time. My heart stopped for a second and I thought, Shit! Something terrible is trying to get out of there.
Chapter Twenty-Four
RELEASING THE ZOMBIE
Panic-stricken, we all took a few steps backward. The quaking of the coffin meant that its occupant could move—and any sort of motion inside a coffin was not a good sign.
Big Kui turned pale. Trembling, he said, “It looks like there’s something alive in here. Master Three, I think we should leave this coffin alone.”
Uncle Three took a closer look at the seams of the coffin, shook his head, and said, “It’s impossible. This coffin is very well sealed with no air flow. No matter if a living thing was put in there, it would have suffocated long ago. To make it even less possible, there’s an exterior coffin and then an inner one, with probably several more layers inside. Let’s pry into it a little and listen carefully.”
I tried to estimate the approximate weight of the coffin. According to my memory, the heaviest bronze coffin ever found was a set of gigantic drum-roll coffins belonging to a noble named Zeng, which had weighed about nine tons. The shape of th
e coffin before us looked similar, but while the coffins in the Zeng tomb were made of both bronze and wood, our discovery was made completely of bronze. So although I assumed that this coffin weighed far more than nine tons, I could not determine the precise weight.
Big Kui and Uncle Three first used their knives to scratch off the wax that sealed the seams. Then they slid in their crowbars and, with a grunt, pressed downward with all their might. We heard a bang and saw that their efforts had crumpled the bronze coffin lid. I darted over to help open the lid, which felt as though it weighed a ton. It took a long time until half of it had been moved and by then we were all out of breath and near exhaustion. Finally, as we all pushed, the lid opened and the inner part of the coffin was exposed.
It was an exquisite jade covering coated with lacquer, with jade stones around its edges. Nestled inside this jade wrapping was a wooden coffin, its surface covered with paintings.
Panzi’s eyes almost fell out of his head when he saw the jade covering. As he clutched his wounded belly, his face was a mixture of joyful greed and physical pain. “Fuck,” he yelped, “my share of this jade will let me do whatever I want for the rest of my life!”
“Absurd! This is jade from Manasi in Xinjiang,” Uncle Three barked at him. “If you break it up into bits and sell the pieces, you will only get about a few hundred thousand dollars, which when shared with all of us isn’t worth our time. We have to bring this out intact and undamaged for it to be worth anything.”
Since he’d already caused enough trouble for everyone, Panzi calmed down after one look from Uncle Three. Scratching his head, he stepped away from the jade that tempted him so much.
Tapping the wooden coffin, Uncle Three observed, “Normally, the noblemen of the Warring States Period were buried with two outer coffins and three inner ones. If the tree was to be counted as the first outer coffin, then the bronze one is the second. This wooden coffin should be the most precious.” With his knife, he carefully removed a number of gold threads that attached the jade wrapper to the painted coffin, doing this with painstaking caution so as not to ruin the protective cover. After half an hour, he was finally able to remove the outer jade covering to reveal what it had protected.
Uncle Three delicately folded the jade coffin cover and put it in his backpack. I picked it up and found it was deadweight and would be a tough load to carry.
Once the cover was removed, I could see the paintings on the wooden coffin, which were easier to decode than the inscriptions. I turned on my lamp and looked closely.
Painted on the coffin were a few drawings. The drawing on the coffin lid showed the scene when the body was first put in the coffin and placed down in the tomb. I saw a huge tree with a crack in the middle. The bronze coffin, uncovered, was carried by skeletons, with many people respectfully kneeling as it passed them.
Encouraged by our findings, Big Kui’s spirits were high, and he began to tug at the wooden coffin. Uncle Three pulled him back and yelled, “Every time you think you see a ghost you faint. Now that you see money, you’re more than willing to risk your life. There is another layer below this, so don’t screw this up. Move slowly and carefully.” Then he squatted down and pressed his ear against the coffin as he gestured for us to be quiet.
We all held our breath while he listened for a long time. Then he turned around, ashen and trembling. “God damn it,” my uncle said in a low voice, “it sounds like something’s breathing in there.”
By now, if we’d heard a ghost calling from inside the coffin, that would seem almost normal. But that something was living without oxygen inside a sealed box, breathing without air, was too incredible for us to comprehend. Big Kui was so frightened he could barely stammer, “It…it can’t be a living corpse, can it?”
Uncle Three said, “Oh my ass! Don’t give me any of your fucking bullshit now. We’ve come this far—do you want to tell me to put the lid back on the coffin?” Taking his black donkey hoof from where he kept it tucked in his shirt, he motioned toward me. I aimed my gun at the coffin while Big Kui picked up the crowbar, ready to bash the first thing that jumped out at us.
Uncle Three spat into his hands. He rolled his shoulders to relax his muscles and then inserted a crowbar into the coffin. As soon as he did this, a voice behind him cried, “Stop!”
We turned to see Fats, whom we thought was still unconscious. He waved his hand at us. “No, no. Something bad’s going to happen if you open it like that. You guys with your little bit of half-assed experience, you think you can rob this grave? It’s like turning on your flashlight in a latrine to look for shit. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Then how would you open it?” Uncle Three looked ready to kill.
Fats waved his hand and motioned for Uncle Three to step away. Then he reached his hand into the cracks between the bronze coffin and the wooden one, closed his eyes, and fumbled around until his hand moved with a bullet’s force. We heard a loud pop and as the lid of the coffin split lengthwise in half, we heard a cry of anguish coming from somewhere inside. I was so scared my muscles turned numb, and the gun almost fell out of my hand.
Fats jumped toward us and stretched his arms wide. He screamed, “Back!”
Without thinking, I aimed my gun at the coffin as I took several hasty steps backward. The painted wooden coffin rose up from the outer bronze one like a blooming lotus. The split lid that had covered it fell away on either side, revealing a sight within that took our breath away—a man dressed in black armor sitting bolt upright.
I raised my gun, ready to fire, but Fats grabbed my arm, saying, “Don’t shoot—his armor is an incredible treasure. Don’t destroy it!”
At last I could see what the legendary Ruler of Dead Soldiers looked like. He was what we call a moist corpse, a body that had not rotted away, but has retained all of its flesh, which is supple and resilient to the touch. His skin had become so white it almost looked translucent, like a very fine pearl, but his face was contorted as if he had died in agony and his eyes were tightly closed. It was surprising. If he had known how to preserve the female corpse so she still looked beautiful and peaceful in death, why did his own corpse not have that same appearance?
Uncle Three walked to the coffin’s edge and said, “And I thought it was a goddamn zombie. Look here. There’s a piece of wood propping him up from the back. No wonder he can sit up.”
We all went to look and sure enough it was a trick. Once the coffin was opened, the corpse inside was pushed up by the wood that had been braced against his back to serve as a spring.
We all sighed with relief. I thought, this Ruler had prepared for every eventuality that might occur after his death. But he of all people should have known that men who were frightened by ghosts and spirits would not rob graves and that veteran grave robbers clung to no fears of that sort. While those inexperienced at this trade might have been shocked to death by his tricks, that we dared to open his coffin in the dead of night proved our fearlessness. These picayune scare tactics that he had devised were rather demeaning to men like us.
We drew closer to the corpse and decided the armor that he was wearing served as the third inner coffin. I identified it as Gold-thread Jade Armor, but I couldn’t explain why the jade had turned black.
I came closer to the body and gasped. The corpse’s chest was rising up and down as though he was breathing and I could distinctly hear the sounds of respiration. I was almost certain I could see a cloud of moisture coming from his nostrils.
Big Kui’s jaw dropped as he squealed, “This…this… this goddamn thing seems to be alive!”
Chapter Twenty-Five
THE JADE BURIAL ARMOR
“How can this corpse possibly be breathing?” I asked. “Have you ever seen anything like this before?”
“Of course not,” Big Kui mumbled. “If I had to go through this sort of bullshit often, I’d be cleaning toilets instead of robbing graves.”
I glanced over at Panzi, who was still clutching his wounded bell
y and sweating heavily. “Never mind what it is,” he growled, “just fire an ammunition clip at it. If it’s not dead now, it will be then. If you wait any longer, we’ll all be in trouble once he stands up.”
This was a sensible argument, I decided—better to take action without thinking than to think after you’re dead and buried. Do something and do it fast.
As I aimed, Uncle Three and Fats anxiously waved their hands and cried out at the same time, “Wait…wait, wait!”
As he said this, Uncle Three was already beside the corpse. He waved his hands at me again and gaped as he studied the armor. Pointing at it, he gasped, “This…isn’t this jade burial armor? My God—this really exists!”
Not knowing why he was so excited, I looked at my uncle apprehensively. He was so worked up that he was close to tears as he stuttered, “Holy…Holy Mother of God! I have been robbing graves for so long, and finally…finally I found a real honest-to-God treasure. It’s truly jade burial armor.” He grabbed my shoulders. “He will stay alive and rejuvenated and continue to grow young as long as he is completely enveloped by this armor. It’s not just something from a story. This corpse proves it’s real.”
In the era when this corpse walked the earth as a living man, one was considered old if he lived to be forty to fifty. Although the muscles of this corpse were a bit shrunken, the man’s face indeed looked very young. It was amazing and I wondered, could there really be rejuvenation in this world?
Fats couldn’t take his eyes off the armor. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “Not even the first Chinese emperor was able to find this armor. And it was on this guy all along. Master Three—there you are—do you know how to remove this thing from the body?”
Uncle Three shook his head. “I’ve heard that you can’t take it off from the outside. Here’s our problem—can we carry away the corpse while it is still wearing this?”