The Lost Tomb Vol. 8

Chapter 48: The Second Floor of the Ancient Building

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 space. 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 Fuxi's [1] 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 passage 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? Think about it, if even I've given up snatching artifacts in these circumstances, you should forget about those secrets. All the damn 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."