In the next two hours, Fatty gave us a detailed account of the whole process of their entry into the Zhang Jia ancient building. Fatty"s narration was extremely vivid and if I wrote it down completely, it would be a very good-looking short story. But obviously I didn"t have so much time, and could only choose the most critical part to write down.
The entrance in the mountains was more than ten miles away from the magic lake, and although it"s more than ten miles away, in fact, it"s just a mountain away. Fatty pointed to the cliff opposite the lake, and said it was the other side of that cliff.
The entrance was a stone tunnel hidden behind a big tree, and it was cut into the mountain diagonally downward. This big tree grew almost horizontal on the mountain and its trunk was full of vines. In fact, there was only enough s.p.a.ce for a person between the trunk and the mountain, so people had to squeeze into the gap to find the entrance.
Fatty estimated that this strange-looking tree was specially planted to cover the entrance, but Granny Huo said no, trees like that were more conspicuous on the mountain. It was probably due to changes in the rock layer caused by the project here. That tree should not have been like that in the first place.
The greatest possibility was that the nearby project loosened the rock soil layer here. After the craftsman left, part of the tree roots broke and fell on the rocks, but didn"t die. Then this scene slowly took shape.
But they didn"t think about it too much because it didn"t make much sense. They cut down some vines on the tree and finally found the entrance.
After they entered the tunnel, most of the mechanisms they ended up blocked by were very, very thick stone walls. These mechanisms opened very strangely and they used the pa.s.swords Xiao Hua and I provided to crack them. But after opening one, the journey between each blocking mechanism was very calm…incredibly calm actually.
As they walked further in, the pa.s.sage was so narrow that they almost had to crawl, which was the norm with grave robbers" tunnels. The basic shape of the whole pa.s.sage was square, and there were a lot of abandoned, decayed, and cracked logs on the ground. Fatty thought they were the traces left by the local people when dragging the coffin.
Everything suddenly changed at the third mechanism, that is, the one where we provided the wrong pa.s.sword from Sichuan Siguniang Mountain. It was really very strange when you thought about it carefully, because Fatty said that even when they pressed the wrong b.u.t.tons, they could still open the stone door and nothing fatal happened.
What was even stranger was that they walked through the whole pa.s.sage and found that there were almost no signs of any mechanisms. Poker-face was the first to discover this since he had a deep understanding of all tombs and mechanisms, so his judgment was credible. In other words, the secret carvings for opening the door seemed to be decoration, and the only function was to remove the stone doors.
This was very strange, after all, because it took so much energy to set up such a complicated pa.s.sword on Siguniang Mountain thousands of kilometers away, but when the pa.s.sword was actually used, it was just a decoration. It seemed too unreasonable. In the face of this situation, they were even more uneasy because it meant two possibilities. The first was that there really was no mechanism here and they were too cautious. The other was that the mechanism here was beyond Poker-Face"s scope of experience.
They soon found that the situation they encountered wasn"t the first one, but they were not entirely sure whether it was the second one either.
They pa.s.sed through the stone door with the wrong pa.s.sword and continued their journey for one or two kilometers in the low pa.s.sage, only to find that something was wrong.
When the incident happened, Fatty was the first to see a very strange light in front of him. He thought that he had finally arrived at Zhang Jia ancient building and was extremely excited, but he still had to approach carefully. It took them almost three hours to grope their way through the 100-meter section. It was not until they came to the light that they realized that everything was not what they imagined—it was sunlight.
Fatty poked through the vines in that place and walked out, only to find that they had actually walked outside to a hidden valley. It turned out that the end of the pa.s.sage was also an exit on the mountainside.
I could almost empathize with that feeling, just like when you went to a very grueling talent show and won first place, only to find that the prize was just a merit certificate.
Even if the prize was a lump of s.h.i.t, it would be better than this. By the same token, it would be better for them to go to the end of the tunnel and find it completely sealed, than to go out to this strange sight.
They climbed out of the mouth of the cave and up the mountainside to the top of the mountain, only to find themselves still near the mountain where the entrance was located. They had seen many sights before but this made them feel very incredulous. After such a long journey, they had actually come out of the mountain directly. They thought that the stone road leading to Zhang Jialou would be underground like the subway, but it was above ground like the light rail, so they decided to continue moving forward.
They searched the mountain for a long time but found no other entrance. But according to their deductions, the tunnel to Zhang Jialou marked on the Yangshi Lei drawing was an almost straight stone road, but it didn"t lead to any ancient building.
Granny Huo didn"t think it was a fake at all, and figured something must have gone wrong. They climbed over the mountains, returned to the entrance behind the big tree again, and began to pa.s.s by one by one according to the instructions I wrote to them at that time. The result this time was even more incredible. They came out, but the exit was on another mountain.
It was the foot of a mountain, and there was a very beautiful waterfall beside it.
There must be something wrong, they told themselves, and soon they realized that this was the result of the wrong pa.s.sword we gave them.
At that time, Fatty also thought of the same question we had in Sichuan. For example, could it be a wrong protective mechanism? The people who opened this ancient tomb, after all, could have possibly remembered the pa.s.sword wrong. If some mistake occurred with the Zhang family"s descendants, or if the information relating to the pa.s.sword was missing due to war or other social factors, at least their descendants wouldn"t be killed by their ancestors" traps because they started the mechanism wrongly.
In light of the fact that moving graves and holding ma.s.s burials in Zhang Jialou required a lot of work to relocate the bodies, such mistakes were likely to occur. In such a case, the builders of the ancient building would certainly take this into consideration. Would they use some weak traps as a wrong protective mechanism to avoid killing future generations by mistake?
On the other hand, because we provided the wrong pa.s.sword, they touched the trap in the tunnel, making the original tunnel to Zhang Jialou turn into another one that led them out instead. This was indeed very possible. However, this suspicion was later rejected because it was still a question of probability. Granny Huo said that if this was the case, then the mechanism had no meaning. Everyone could keep trying, and even if it was wrong, there would be no danger.
It was the same as the mechanism problem that I encountered in Siguniang Mountain, a problem that required logic. When I heard this, I almost immediately guessed what would happen next: “It"s the number of times, the key is the number of mistakes.”
“Yes!” Fatty nodded, “d.a.m.n it, I told them at that time, but there was nothing we could do. Granny Huo said that we were all alive and the stone door could be opened, which proved that there must be nothing wrong with the pa.s.sword. We must have overlooked something when we pa.s.sed through the tunnel. So we turned back again. “
It was this decision that changed things beyond comprehension.
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