Daomu Biji Volume 8 Chapter 40

What made my hair stand on end was that it was too big.

It was a huge black and white ball of meat, with no facial features and all we could see was that it was covered with black hair. It looked just like a huge wet meatball covered in black hair.

Only half of it poked out of the edge of the entrance, as if a shy person were secretly looking at us.

Before I could look at it any more, Fatty shouted, “Shit… fucking run!” Then he turned the flashlight in the other direction.

We almost rolled and crawled into the depths of the tunnel and a few steps later, the passage made a sharp right turn, and we rushed out—there was a cave in front of us.

Fatty shined the flashlight and found a pool in the cave. He rushed over with a few steps and turned back to me and said, “This is it! Look at the mirror!”

I didn't have time to look, and saw a stone door at the entrance of the cave. I immediately said to Fatty, “Help me block this first!”

He came to help me push it closed and we managed to block the entrance before he asked, “What the hell was that?”

“The ancestors of the miluotuo.” I said, thinking that nothing was surprising in this place.

We waited behind the door for a long time, but nothing happened.

“These ancestors might be more manageable.” Fatty wanted to open the door a crack but I quickly grabbed him and said, “No, maybe the ancestors are old and slow.”

The two of us lay prone against the door and listened closely, but there was no sound behind it.

“What should we do?” Fatty asked.

I only saw a head just now and the passage was very narrow, so I didn't know if it could come in. I figured that maybe it was stuck at the entrance and said, “If it's behind the door, we're not even sure if we can kill it. Don't move yet, wait.”

Fatty thought for a moment, “Fine, then come with me and I'll show you something.”

I looked at the door and followed him down the stone beam near the pool. He used a flashlight to illuminate the water and I immediately saw the scene he mentioned earlier.

It was a big mirror six or seven meters wide, and with the flashlight, I saw the ancient building in it, pale and white. However, it wasn't as clear as Fatty said, and many details couldn't be seen. The Zhang Jialou in the huge underwater mirror was as quiet as a picture, and the whole building was shrouded in a dark blue light source. I didn't see any sign of flashlights flickering.

Fatty pointed to one of the positions and said, “This is it. I saw them resting here before.”

Now there was nothing in that place; not to mention people, there weren't even flashlights.

Was it because the flashlights died? I wondered. But I knew it was unlikely.

Poker-Face and the others carried two kinds of flashlights. In addition to the most basic “Wolf-Eye” flashlight (TN note: apparently it's a brand), there were also some hand-powered ones. Although the range and intensity of these lights couldn't be compared with those of “Wolf-Eyes,” they wouldn't have a battery problem. As long as your hands were strong, you could use them for thousands of hours. The purpose of this configuration was to maximize lighting time, using “Wolf-Eye” during exploration and hand-held flashlights while resting and camping. The hand-held flashlights also had a reserve battery that could be changed out in the time it took to masturbate, and could be used for 40 minutes to an hour.

With this distribution of lighting power, plus spare batteries, glow sticks, and cold fireworks, we could extend the expedition's lighting time to more than 100 times, and staying in a cave for 10 days or even half a month wasn't a problem.

At that time, when the store owner explained the flashlight's reserve battery to Fatty, Fatty joked that if he counted the times he beat the plane, he could charge up the flashlight. (TN note: if you couldn't tell, "beat the plane" is a euphemism for jerking off lol).

“Look at how quiet it is inside. Little Brother and the others couldn't have been fucking melted by strong alkali.” Fatty murmured, “That deformed freak was right. We're too late.”

I shook my head and said, “I won't give up until I see evidence that they're dead. Even if they've melted, I'll find their bones and bring them back. Besides, the real situation may be that they're deep in the building and we can't see them. Or maybe the flashlights were turned off because you can use these blue lights to still do a lot of things.”

“It makes sense. The dead old woman is stingy.” Fatty said, “Maybe their condition isn't good and they're too lazy to take the time to recharge their flashlights, or are simply asleep. Let's not think too much. First, study what's going on with the mirror, comrade. As a college student, you've seen a lot of things and can help me analyze it. I really think it's too weird.”

I waded through the water and took a few steps around the mirror, finding that it was attached to the stone beam with copper nails. The whole shape was like a round fan.

The mirror was entirely made of copper, with the brass shiny like polished gold foil, and the two sides were sloped up. In fact, it was more like a large basin immersed in water. In other words, I think it was more appropriate to think of it like a giant hot pot. The edge of the mirror was carved with animal patterns, and I couldn't judge the dynasty by the style, but I saw that the patterns weren't cast on. They were carved by someone using silk carving.

If the mirror wasn't very smooth, I would think that it was actually more like a “reflection” than a mirror.

I stroked these carvings and soon realized that my first feeling was wrong. This thing wasn't copper, but a gilded mirror. And I didn't know what kind of material was used to stick the extremely smooth gold foil on the surface to maintain such high reflectivity for such a long time.

It happened to be the thing I was most familiar with, though—gold gilding was my old profession.

The workmanship of the mirror was amazing. If you stood on the water's surface, the smooth mirror was almost integrated with the surface. When walking in the water, the waves would quiver and the underwater mirror would also produce ripples. The flashlight reflected along these ripples to the four walls of the cave, as if the whole cave were fluctuating. The scene was very beautiful and dreamy.

I dove under the water and looked at the back of the mirror with my waterproof “Wolf-Eye.” There were more than a dozen huge buttons on the back of the mirror, forming a huge star map. In the middle of the map were many ancient seal characters, many of which I didn't know their meaning. The outer edge had a lot of patterns similar to the eight divinatory trigrams of the Book of Changes, which enclosed the star map inside.

I dove back and forth several times, trying to understand the contents of the ancient seal script, but soon found it was impossible. These script used special brushwork that looked strange and it was very difficult for me to identify. I could only recognize the words “heaven and earth”, “longevity”, and “spring stream”, but it was difficult to link them into segments.

I surfaced and climbed onto the beam, sure that there couldn't be any mechanism in the mirror itself, since it was only thick as a palm and there wasn't much room to set up a mechanism.

If there was something strange inside, the only possibility was that there was a huge LCD display in the mirror, which was connected with the Zhang Jialou's monitor. However, looking at the antiquity of this mirror, it should still be before the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Not only was it impossible for there to be an LCD display, but even glass lenses hadn't appeared at that time.

To a large extent, this was an old thing, just like those bronze mechanisms found in the cliff cave of Siguniang Mountain, which were all brought out from the previous Zhang Jialou. But if it's not the mirror itself, then what was going on? Was the Zhang Jia ancient building really in this mirror?

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Chapter end