Naturally, Professor Qiu and his team were called in to decipher the secrets of the dragon bone and gold slab. Upon accepting the assignment, Professor Qiu locked himself in his lab and began to work away like a maniac.
He’d seen dragon bones like this so many times before, but he was never able to work out what they meant or stood for. What were these records of?
The so-called celestial language was a gap in the knowledge of Chinese scholars. As soon as they worked out how to read it, many thorny difficulties would be solved right away. The problem was that their total ignorance of the language made this gulf insurmountable.
Some scholars attributed the language to a previous civilization, until carbon-14 dating showed that some clearly legible texts were the same age as the “celestial” ones, so the latter couldn’t possibly predate Chinese civilization. Professor Qiu spent more than a month trying out one theory after another, until he finally cracked the secret. After examining the small gold slab with animal heads, he discovered that the language inscribed onto the dragon bones by the ancients was actually a high-security code.
Back in the Tang dynasty, Li Chunfeng had broken this code and received the gold slab from the emperor as a reward for his efforts. As for what was inscribed on the gold slab, it was a glossary—all the signs and symbols of the celestial language were explained.
This language was very simple, consisting of the four secret tones. By studying this gold slab, Professor Qiu was finally able to understand celestial language, which caused quite a stir in the world of archaeology. All of a sudden, large numbers of ancient texts could be read, revealing vast quantities of new information. Many matters previously considered to be settled fact now had to be revised.
After considering the situation carefully, the authorities issued a ruling that this decoded information should be treated with extreme caution and definitely not announced until it had been verified. Professor Qiu now said to me, “That mark on your back can’t be called celestial writing—it’s not part of the secret language. I’ve only seen it on the turtle shell found in Gulan. It represents a particular thing that people at the time had no word for, so they made one up. Calling it a pictograph is probably more accurate. I couldn’t tell you what it means, though. It showed up amid a celestial writing text that looks like the record of some tragic event. I gave it only a cursory glance before it was shipped away—I didn’t expect the plane to crash. Now nobody will ever know those secrets.”
“Why didn’t you photograph such an important object?” I asked. “You say this mark isn’t a curse, but how can you be sure? I won’t stop worrying until I know the details. Can’t you tell me what was written on the turtle shell? Was it anything to do with the ghost-hole in Xinjiang? I swear, I won’t tell a soul.”
Professor Qiu abruptly jumped to his feet. “I can’t tell you!” he yelled. “If I did, the whole world would fall apart!”
CHAPTER TWENTY
My encounter with Professor Qiu left me frustrated. I couldn’t believe he refused to tell me what the symbols meant, or to elaborate on his cryptic parting words.
Back in Beijing, we had several scorching days in a row, the type that leave you drenched in sweat even when you’re sitting still. Finally, the heavens sent a storm that left the roads steaming and the temperature a few degrees lower.
When the rain stopped, Pan Market filled with people.
As Gold Tooth negotiated with an old customer, Kai tried hard to push the embroidered shoe on a couple of blue-eyed tourists. “It’s very ancient. Worn by a famous courtesan.”
The couple barely spoke any Chinese but seemed interested in the shoe. Kai took advantage of their enthusiasm and named a steep price. It was enough to scare the couple off. Obviously, they didn’t realize that in China, a customer is expected to haggle over the price. Kai had to run after them and offer a discount.
I sat in one corner, enjoying the bustle of the scene. After we’d returned from Shaanxi, Kai and I had gone to the hospital for checkups, but we were told there was nothing wrong with us. The marks on our backs were odd, but they didn’t seem to be symptoms of an illness.
To be honest, we barely remembered they were still there. Business was going really well—the fragrant jade was fetching high prices. Still, every time I remembered Professor Qiu’s words, a mountain seemed to crash down on me.
Although the dragon bones that came out of the soil at Gulan had been destroyed, Professor Qiu had surely made copies. What could I do to get ahold of them? I desperately wanted to be sure this mark on my back had nothing to do with the eye of Jingjue. Yet during our conversation, it took only one mention of the ghost-hole for him to have a complete breakdown.
The more the professor tried to duck my questions, the more certain I was that we weren’t done with Jingjue. And if that was the case, I’d have to find a way to get some answers. I certainly wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life with a giant eye on my back.
I was supposed to keep watch on our stall to make sure thieves didn’t take off with anything, but in the summer heat, my eyes drifted shut as wild thoughts scrambled around my head.
I had a series of weird dreams. To start with, I had a mute girlfriend, who told me through sign language that she wanted to see a movie. We walked straight into a theater without buying a ticket, but the film didn’t make any sense. There was an explosion onscreen, and a mountain fell apart. Without warning, we plummeted into a mist-filled cave. Alarmed, I told my girlfriend this was the bottomless ghost-hole deep in the desert, and we had to run. Her face was blank as she pushed me hard. I tumbled into nothingness, and far below me, a giant eye stared up at my falling body….
Suddenly, I felt a twinge as someone pinched my nose. I jerked awake to see a familiar figure, her fingers still on my face. Half in the dream, I recoiled to find her eyes close to mine, and almost fell out of my chair.
Kai chuckled. “Sweet dreams, Tianyi?” he said as he and Gold Tooth burst out laughing. “Look who’s back from America.”
“Miss Yang came straight here,” said Gold Tooth. “Says it’s urgent.”
Julie waved a handkerchief at me. “You were drooling in your sleep.”
I dabbed my chin on my sleeve instead, stretched, and rubbed my eyes. “Your eyes…,” I said. “Good, you’re back—we need to talk.”
“It’s too crowded here,” said Julie. “Let’s go somewhere quiet.”
Leaving Kai and Gold Tooth to look after the stall, we went to a nearby park. Julie picked a stone bench by the lake and sat down. “Normally, only couples sit here,” I said. “Hope you don’t mind if people think we’re on a date.”
“What?” said Julie. “You mean people are only allowed to sit by the lake if they’re in love?”
I had to remind myself that although she looked Chinese, she’d grown up in America and didn’t always get our jokes. “No, of course not. This bench belongs to everyone. Anyway, we don’t need to care what others think.” I plonked down next to her, then asked, “How’s Professor Chen?”
She sighed. “Still in America. He had too much of a shock to the system, and they’re not sure if they can do anything about his condition.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. What about you? What did you want to tell me?”
“Well, I’m worried about something. Strange red marks have appeared on my back, as well as on Professor Chen’s.”
“Kai and I have those marks too. How about Asat Amat?” I asked her. Five of us had returned from Xinjiang alive. Apart from Julie, Professor Chen, Kai, and me, there’d also been our desert guide, Asat Amat.
“I don’t think Uncle Asat Amat would have one,” Julie said. “He didn’t set eyes on the ghost-hole. I’m pretty sure this mark has something to do with the tribe that lived there.”
There were still many secrets about these mysterious people that we hadn’t managed to uncover, bu
t they were now all buried beneath the golden sands, along with the hole that led to who-knows-where. Nothing they’d left behind would ever see the light of day again.
I told Julie about meeting Professor Qiu, hoping he’d have an idea whether this meant we’d been cursed.
She listened carefully. “Professor Qiu—was his full name Qiu Yaozu? He’s got an impressive reputation as a Western Regions expert and has decoded quite a few messages hidden in ancient scrolls and paintings. I’ve read his books. Back when they dug up Pharaoh Djedhotepre Dedumose’s tomb, one of the artifacts they found was a scepter carved with all kinds of symbols. Many academics tried to decipher them without success, but then a French professor who knew Professor Qiu asked him for help, and he managed to crack the code—they determined that the scepter was the fabled Staff of the Underworld from ancient Egypt. The discovery stunned the whole world and made Professor Qiu famous. If he says this thing isn’t an eye but it stands for something else, then I’m sure he’s right.”
I bit my tongue. Who would have thought this eccentric man who dressed like a farmer had such a reputation? “That’s all well and good,” I said, “but we need to find out if the mark singles us out for harm. And we have to find out if it’s connected to the Jingjue Kingdom.”
“I found some clues while I was home in the States,” Julie said. “Remember the book of predictions we found in the Zaklaman Mountains that said one of us was descended from the seer? It’s true—I’m the seer. My grandfather died last year. It was very sudden, and he didn’t have a chance to say goodbye. I had the opportunity to go through his things recently, and I found a notebook. It was terrifying, what he’d written down. It proved that the seer was correct.”
This was what I’d been most afraid of. The nightmarish ghost-hole was clinging to us like a Band-Aid. But why were we still cursed? Hadn’t it disappeared into the desert, along with the entire Zaklaman Mountain range?
“It’s not a curse,” Julie went on. “It’s worse than that. Let me tell you the whole story from the beginning.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Zaklaman Mountains deep within the Taklimakan Desert hid many secrets beneath their obsidian depths—in fact, in the ancient Uighur language, “Zaklaman” means “mystery.” Long ago, a man known as “the holy one” was born in a nameless village, which housed a tribe from the faraway European continent. They’d lived here peacefully for many years, until one of them stumbled upon the unfathomably deep ghost-hole in the mountains. The village mystic told them that only a golden jade eye could pierce its depths, so they fashioned such an artifact. From that moment, misfortune descended upon the tribe.
The gods abandoned the village, and one disaster after another befell them. The holy one, their leader, knew this was surely connected to the ghost-hole, and that once the door to hell is opened, shutting it becomes near impossible. In order to escape further catastrophe, they had no choice but to abandon the land that had housed them for so many years, traveling toward the east and eventually being absorbed into the civilization of the Central Plains.
What exactly were these “disasters”? From a modern perspective, we’d call it a form of radiation—anyone who’d come into contact with the ghost-hole would, over time, develop indelible red marks in the shape of an eye. All of those so afflicted found themselves losing iron after the age of forty. Iron is what gives human blood its red color. Without it, blood thickens and can’t hold oxygen, making breathing difficult. By the time of death, the blood of these victims had turned pale yellow.
This process took a painful ten years, and while their descendants weren’t born with red marks, they inherited the same iron deficiency and died the same agonizing deaths. After the migration to the Central Plains, they discovered that the farther they were from the ghost-hole, the later the illness manifested itself, though they still got it in the end, generation after generation. No words can describe the torture of having your blood turn yellow and harden in your veins.
After many years of trying to find a cure, they finally got an answer during the Song dynasty, when a bronze urn from the middle Shang period washed up in the mud of the Yellow River delta. It was a deep vessel with four legs and delicate engravings. Artifacts like these had once been important in prayer rituals, and their carvings represented the emperor’s devotion to his ancestors as well as his messages for the gods. They could also be commissioned as records of significant events.
The urn found by the Zaklaman descendants was one of the latter, depicting the discovery of a jade eye shot through with gold that had been found and presented to the Shang monarch Wu Ding, along with a scarlet robe. Emperor Wu Ding reckoned this must have been left behind by the Yellow Emperor after he became a deity and ascended to the heavens.
Quite a few of the Zaklaman descendants were mystics, and they cast the runes to learn that this gold-jade object was the eye of the divine. Offering it as a sacrifice to the ghost-hole was the only way to remedy the disaster that had befallen their tribe. But where was the eye? They knew it had slipped out of Wu Ding’s hands and changed owners many times during the subsequent war, and it was quite probably buried in some aristocrat’s grave as part of their burial goods. But there was no way to know for sure—the mystics’ powers were of limited range, and they weren’t able to pinpoint an exact location.
By that point, only about a thousand people were left of the five thousand who’d initially moved to the interior. They’d long been absorbed by Han culture, and even their names had changed. In a bid to escape the curse, the remaining tribe members fanned out across the country, seeking the eye of the divine in every ancient tomb they came across, becoming one of the four great clans of grave robbers who were active at the time.
Since the olden days, tomb raiders have used a variety of tactics, of which gold hunting was only one. The Zaklaman descendants mostly went the route of mountain moving, usually disguised as Taoist priests. As you can tell from the name, mountain moving is very different—essentially, it uses brute force to gain access, unlike the subtle techniques of gold hunting.
In the years that followed, who knows how many ancient tombs they mountain-moved their way through, following a trail of clues that broke and resumed over and over again. As the centuries trickled by, the eye of the divine’s location continued to be obscure while the legions of mountain movers thinned, until by the twentieth century there was only a single young man with these abilities, the most famous grave robber in the Zhejiang region, known only by his nickname: the Partridge. He was an expert sharpshooter, and unparalleled at getting through the traps and snares of old graves.
Following the training of his ancestors, the Partridge sought out whatever slim threads of information he could, and he finally narrowed the location down to a treasure cave from the Western Xia Kingdom. The story was that this trove had been abandoned not far from the Western Xia city of Black Water and had been intended as a tomb for some important official, but the Mongols invaded before he could be interred. Yet because of this sudden event, the burial site was unlikely to be marked. So how was he to find it?
There were hardly any of his tribe left, and if the Partridge didn’t find the eye soon, the rest of his bloodline would surely die out. As a mountain mover, he didn’t know anything about feng shui, so he turned to someone who did: the gold hunters. This was during the time of civil war, and there were probably fewer than ten gold hunters left in the entire country. Indeed, most of the tomb raiding happening at this time wasn’t conducted by experts, but rather rogue soldiers and desperate civilians.
The Partridge did everything he could to track down the remaining gold hunters. Finally, he found one—a reverse dipper of great renown, who’d since turned his back on the material world and was now a Buddhist monk going by the name of Master World’s End.
The master advised the Partridge, telling him, “The human world is full of strife, and only Buddh
a can shelter you from that, bringing you peace with a single smile. Why must you be so sunk in gloom? Back in the day, the humble monk before you was a reverse dipper, but even though I gave everything I found to my people, my heart was never still, and I couldn’t stop thinking how much unrest I was causing by bringing these precious things to the surface so people could fight over them. Our profession brings great harm, whether you use it for your own profit or that of others.”
The Partridge had no choice but to tell him the full story. When Master World’s End knew this was a matter of life and death, his compassionate nature nudged him to tell the Partridge what he wanted to know. According to the rules of gold hunting, though, the Partridge first had to carry out a mission.
“When I joined this monastery,” said World’s End, “I noticed an old grave nearby that had never been reverse dipped, about ten li to the southwest of here, amid deserted hills. There’s only half a tombstone to mark the spot, with no writing. It’s from the Southern Song dynasty. If you go in there tonight and fetch me a set of burial clothes, I’ll teach you everything I know.”
The monk gave the Partridge a set of gold-hunting tools and instructed him in the rules of their tribe. Gold hunters were the first ones to formalize the profession, and most of the oaths come from their original vows. Even the term “reverse dipper” comes from the fact that many of China’s early graves were earth mounds that happened to be shaped like dippers for scooping rice. What the gold hunters did was said to be as easy as flipping a dipper over and helping themselves to its contents.
As he listened to the rules, a great many mysteries became clearer to the Partridge. He nodded at the instructions: light a candle in a corner of the tomb, and be ready to flee if it goes out; don’t take too many items or you might anger the dead; only enter a grave once, and seal it after you leave.
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