The body in this black wooden coffin should be a member of the Zhang family"s 34th generation, and judging from some of the information on the epitaph, he should"ve been born in the middle of the Qing Dynasty. His name was Zhang Shengqing.
I won"t go into details about his life, just that the core information is his life span. According to the epitaph, he lived more than 170 years.
Longevity seemed to be another feature of the family.
This man died in a firefight when the border conflict was said to be at its fiercest. He died in North Korea and was brought back by his clansmen to Zhang Jialou for burial.
His contribution to the whole family was written after his life and apart from all kinds of strange words, two points were mentioned frequently: first, his parents seemed to be quite meritorious so he had innate advantages; second, “he raided numerous burial sites and had lots of gains, so as to continue the family business and make a lot of profits”.
With these two achievements, he was buried in the tomb of the building.
It can be inferred from this that the Zhang family had relations with the royal family at that time and even did a lot of things for them. This could also explain why the Zhang family could survive in troubled times and continue their family for such a long time.
This was a bit like the mysterious families you read about in many novels. They live in seclusion in the mountains all year round and closely guard their secrets, whether they"re martial arts, military, or even magic secrets. Then, when those people who watch the night sky every day find that the world is falling into chaos, they send a few people to join the WTO and make some gains.
Fortunately, there were a lot of people surnamed Zhang and each dynasty had some very powerful people with that surname; otherwise, I would definitely find more a.s.sociations.
“What of Zhang Tianshi, is he also a member of this Zhang family?” Fatty asked.
“I can"t say for sure, they"re all prominent people.” I said. In fact, I cared more about obtaining a lot of information from the numerous details of their lives.
First off, I was sure that the Zhang family had always been active in northern China. Almost all of their birthplaces and activities were there, mainly near North Korea and the Changbai Mountain.
In ancient China, that place didn"t belong to the Central Plains, but was more controlled by ethnic minorities. The Zhang family was obviously a large Han family mixed with other nationalities and if they wanted to live in a place like that, it was clear how powerful they were.
Second, I was sure that there were many branches of the Zhang family. Take for example the branch where this person belonged, it was called “Qipan Zhang” (TN note: qipan=chessboard). Although all these families belonged to the Zhang family, they formed branches because of their large number, just like the Manchu Eight Banners. In this case, the Zhang family had five branches.
This person was probably buried after the completion of the ancient building. At this time, I thought of the ma.s.s grave downstairs and realized that the hands might not be what I originally thought. Could it be that during the relocation of the ancient building, there were too many coffins to transport from the old one, so some of the unimportant people"s hands were buried instead of their bodies?
Moreover, I could see from the text that “Qipan Zhang” was a very important branch of the Zhang family, because they carried the Qilin. I still didn"t know what the metaphor meant, but I could vaguely guess the key.
After reading the epitaph, Fatty turned his eyes on me and pointed to the big black coffin on the side, meaning, do you want to open it?
I looked at the coffin sitting off to the side. It was made of the same wood as that of the ancient building, covered with three layers of black paint and looking solemn. Fatty wiped the dust with his hand, and due to the pa.s.sage of time, the black paint had cracked in many places revealing the old wood color.
This architecture student had made a mistake—I realized another function of the quicksand in the lower level.
The underground water system here was very rich, and the interior of the mountain was very humid, which had a considerable corrosive effect on the wooden building. The quicksand layer we pa.s.sed before was a moisture barrier to prevent water vapor from rising. I estimated that there was more than one layer of quicksand underground, and though our feet reached the layer of slate under the quicksand, there may be more quicksand underneath.
I looked at the coffin and felt that it had to be opened. No matter how many times I had experienced it, however, I was still afraid of opening them. But could I still turn a blind eye to it now?
The Zhang family came from the northern faction of grave robbers so Fatty said he would use their rituals to deal with it. My heart said that he was actually using their rituals against them.
The northern faction of grave robbers had been declining for a long time. On one hand, grave robbers were becoming more and more utilitarian and equipped with more advanced equipment so they had no intention of abiding by this kind of red tape. On the other hand, the northern faction"s rules resulted in fewer skills being pa.s.sed down, unlike the southern school, which had no family distinction. The southern faction"s motto was: I"ll teach you as long as you and I are together since it"s all for the sake of money. As a result, the southern faction"s skills hadn"t been dated, but were continuously developing.
I asked Fatty what to do, and he started by using his clothes as a broom to gather up the dust in the room, stirring it up and making it dusty. As he coughed, he reached the southeast corner of the room with a handful of dust and inserted some cigarettes there. After thinking about it, he found something was off and asked me, “Mr. Naive, what brand are your cigarettes?”
“Yellow Crane Tower.” I said.
“Come, come, exchange it.” Fatty asked me to hand over my cigarettes, “I can"t let Little Brother"s ancestors smoke my eight yuan a pack. This is our first visit, we can"t lose face.”
Fatty lit a cigarette and bowed respectfully to the corner of the wall: “this…… we"re friends with your family member, Zhang Qilin. We really didn"t come here to rob this time, we"re…… we"re…… we came here to visit. After greeting all the elders, umm… by the way, you should supplement Little Zhang"s lessons. As you know, your children have poor memory. Well, we don"t know where Little Zhang has gone, so we"ll ask for directions. If you know, don"t do anything or say anything. If you don"t know, just stay the same. Respectfully yours, Amitabha Buddha, bald donkey has the cheek to rob the great teacher poor.”
What a mess. I slapped him and pulled him up, and the two of us brought out the iron picks. We stuck them into the gaps on both sides of the coffin lid, pried up the coffin nails first, then took a deep breath and carefully pushed the heavy lid aside.
When it fell to the ground, the whole floor shook. As we covered our noses and mouths and fanned the dust away, we saw a layer of cotton wool in the coffin. I poked it with iron pick and found it was a strange mold, like a spider"s web covered with white crushed cotton.
Fatty poked through this layer of stuff with an iron pick to reveal the body inside. It had completely decomposed, leaving only white bones, and there were some sacrificial objects around it in small quant.i.ties, all wrapped in that strange “cotton wool”. Fatty picked one up with an iron pick and found it was a small dagger.
The dagger"s sh.e.l.l had completely rotted like the 8 pieces of an osmanthus flower cake, and the stones on it were like red cherries and green raisins. When I pulled out the dagger, I found it was a short black and gold knife, slightly shorter than Poker-Face"s and different in shape. It glowed black under the flashlight and looked extremely sharp.
The handle had also badly decayed so I grabbed the sharp edge of the blade, knocked the handle against the coffin plate, and broke off the rotten pieces. There wasn"t much left and just as I was about to throw it back into the coffin, Fatty immediately stopped me and said, “Don"t be like that, you went to a lot of trouble to get something and now you"re so picky. Take it, take it out, and make a new handle as a birthday present for Little Brother.”
“Do you even f.u.c.king know when his birthday is?” I asked.
Fatty took the knife, wrapped it up, and put it in his backpack. “I guess even he doesn"t know when his birthday is,” he said. "Just pick a sunny day and tell him that his birthday is coming. With his character, he won"t ask what a birthday is.”
Yes, it"s a good move, I told myself. I didn"t know if there were any festivals for deaf-mutes in the world, but a person who"s so stuffy should celebrate his birthday at that time.
I felt a chill when I thought of Poker-Face blowing out birthday candles, like seeing a ghost blowing out a lamp, and tried not to think too much about it.
Fatty searched some more and found that everything else had rotted into lumps. He scolded, “The Zhang family isn"t rich either. This welcome gift is a disgrace to Little Brother.”
“Zhang family advocates strength, not money.” I said, “As can be seen from the epitaph, the Zhang family was a large family that used its advantage to gain power and protection. In the long history of China, money alone is useless.”
Fatty took back all three cigarettes, pinched off the dusty b.u.t.ts, and pulled the last few puffs. When I asked him what he was doing, he said they were already rotted like this and would have no way of knowing, so we could take small advantage of this poor ghost.
I said, “Why are you so unscrupulous?” Fatty smiled.
After inhaling the smoke, he poked the bones with the iron picks and we found the left hand"s two finger bones were very long. This was the first time I had seen the complete skeleton of an extraordinarily long finger. There were many scars on the joints which obviously showed that the process of training such a finger was quite painful. At the same time, I also found that many of this person"s large joints, such as the shoulder and wrist, had very strange hyperosteogeny (TN note: excessive growth of bone tissue).
Fatty said that this should be the effects of bone contraction. In order to overcome the habitual dislocation caused by contraction, many special muscles at the joints had to be exercised separately. These muscles were very difficult to train and may not make much progress even after a few years. Some muscles are the size of the crescent moon on Bao Gong"s head and must be trained completely while one is still growing, which is naturally very painful.
Fatty said he had a chance to practice that style of kung fu before. A master he knew said his bones were suitable for bone contraction. Fatty went to practice for a day, beat the master, and then escaped.
On this corpse"s skull, I saw two bullet holes which were very irregular and looked like iron sand bullets. The bullet went in one place but didn"t exit, so it should have been shot at close range (if it was farther away, there would be many holes the size of sesame seeds), and the iron sand remained in the skull. This ancestor must have suffered quite a lot when he died.
No matter how powerful the Zhang family was, there was nothing they could do about guns.
Thinking there were no more clues, we went to cover the coffin. When I got up to carry the lid over, I saw many characters engraved on the inside.
When we turned it over, we found that it was a simple family tree with both parents" names and their children listed on it. What made me feel strange was that this person"s parents were both surnamed Zhang. He had two sons, one of whom was already married, while the daughter-in-law was also surnamed Zhang. The two daughters were married and the husband"s family was surnamed Zhang.
“Do you think this is odd?” I asked Fatty.
“How long ago did you say this guy died?” He said, “He had four kids, that"s really f.u.c.king awesome.”
“The main purpose of the feudal hierarchy in ancient China was to increase the number of people and expand the family"s power. He may have given birth very early.” I said. “And the Zhang family has a very long life span so if they want to have kids, they"ll be alive and well after giving birth to a football team. This isn"t the odd thing I"m talking about." I showed him all the surnames.
“Could it be a change of surname?”
I shook my head: “I"m almost certain that it"s intermarriage. The Zhang family was a closed family and they didn"t have marriage with the outside world. “
We re-covered the coffin and embedded the nails. I said, “I"m going to the next room. These epitaphs are very important. I want to have a good look at them, and I can certainly get more information.”
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