Chapter 66: Wang Canghai: Little Fanboy +1!
Lin Yan was certain that what Zhang Qiling said next would be nine truths and one lie; he just didn’t know where that “one lie” was false.
According to him, they had seen a peculiar two-handled pot in the room with the blue and white porcelain jar, depicting a full view of the building that Wu Xie hadn’t found. If he wasn’t mistaken, it should be the Cloud Top Heavenly Palace designed by the early Ming Dynasty eccentric Wang Canghai! Legend had it that the Cloud Top Heavenly Palace was just a hoax by Wang Canghai to please the emperor, but what was drawn on this two-handled pot seemed more like a palace that truly existed in reality!
Wang Canghai? Wang Family? Lin Yan became interested upon hearing this. Although he didn’t remember exactly what Wang Canghai did in the original story, given the Zhang family’s situation where only Zhang Qiling and a few others remained, the Wang Family’s thousand-year layout was indeed terrifying. If he remembered correctly, Wang Canghai’s goal was to obtain the secret of longevity behind the bronze gate? Then the question arose: with him gone, what use was obtaining that secret?
When he first read the book, Lin Yan had been pondering this issue because the book spent at least half of it talking about Wang Canghai’s layout, but in the end, neither the entire Wang Family nor Wang Canghai himself appeared directly. This was very puzzling, so he always felt that the original story had a lot left untold. He just hadn’t had time to read the books published later by Third Uncle. Now that he was here himself, he should be able to find some answers, right?
Needless to say, Wu Xie and the others had bulldozed through and destroyed how much of the Wang Family’s layout along the way; would such a massive force as the Wang Family let them off? Maybe in the later plot, they dealt with both the Wu Family and the Nine Gates together! So while the plot had just begun, learning more about the Wang Family and Wang Canghai wouldn’t hurt. He refused to believe that after investigating for so many years, Wu Sansheng and Zhang Qiling had no plans against the Wang Family! If he beat around the bush like this then, wouldn’t his chances of winning against the Wang Family increase a bit? He didn’t ask for much; as long as he could survive in the end, that would be fine!
His eyes flickered as he interrupted Zhang Qiling’s narration: “This Wang Canghai, what kind of person is he exactly? Can that heavenly palace really float in the sky?”
Hearing his words, Zhang Qiling just gave him a flat look and fell silent again, recalling the experience at the time. Wu Xie smiled instead: “I can tell you about this too. Wang Canghai was an eccentric in the early Ming Dynasty, with attainments in feng shui that could be called reaching the peak! The Ming imperial palace was designed by him, as were the layouts of several major cities at the time. Back then, one word from him could even erase a city from the map! If the Cloud Top Heavenly Palace really exists, probably only he could have built it!”
After listening, Lin Yan glanced at Zhang Qiling and continued probing: “He’s so powerful; did he… leave any descendants?”
In his peripheral vision, Zhang Qiling, who had been deep in thought, suddenly lifted his head and gave him a deep look. For some reason, Lin Yan suddenly didn’t dare to speak.
Wu Xie was stunned: “I don’t know about this either. As far as I know, there are no records about his descendants. It could also be that he didn’t want people to know and used his own power to hide his family.”
Right, that’s it—Wang Canghai did hide the Wang Family! He looked at Wu Xie, nodded slightly to him, and when he wanted to ask something, used eye contact to tell him: Don’t speak!
Wu Xie was taken aback. Logically speaking, these were all his own people here; why tell him not to speak? He was just about to ask what Lin Yan’s nod meant—could it be… that the Wang Family was really hidden, and it was related to here?
That thing related to the Wang Family… is Zhang Qiling? So it can’t be said here?
Wu Xie quietly glanced at Zhang Qiling, using eye contact to ask Lin Yan: Because he’s here, that’s why it can’t be said? Is he from the Wang Family?
No, Wu Xie was thinking too far. He only wanted to remind him to watch out for the Wang Family, but didn’t want Zhang Qiling to realize so quickly that he had noticed the Wang Family! Lin Yan discreetly rolled his eyes: No, he has no relation to the Wang Family! Anyway, it’s best to keep this guess in his stomach!
Wu Xie seemed to understand something: So this is the thing you mentioned before that I shouldn’t know? Can you tell me now?
Lin Yan glanced at Zhang Qiling, saw him still staring blankly at the pool wall, then nodded to Wu Xie: Yes! Be careful of the Wang Family!
Just as their eye contact ended, Zhang Qiling, who had been deep in thought, suddenly stood up: “I remembered.”
With that, he headed toward the stone tablet again, and Lin Yan and the other two hurriedly followed behind him. When Zhang Qiling had observed the stone tablet before, they had only noticed the characters; this time, as he almost pressed against it, they discovered that the surface of the stone tablet was smooth as a mirror, bright enough to see one’s reflection.
Zhang Qiling squatted and pressed against the stone tablet, staring in a very awkward position for a while before pointing in a direction: “Here! Quick, the time left for us to pass is less than one minute!” With that, he darted out extremely fast. Fortunately, Fatty reacted quickly and followed first; Wu Xie and Lin Yan followed Fatty’s figure and barely kept up, squeezing in with just the last half body position, nearly getting crushed by that secret door.
As soon as Fatty entered, he exclaimed in admiration: “Good grief, it almost crushed me to death! Zhang Xiaoge, how did you discover this place back then? No one was squatting there looking in the mirror, right?”
This made Lin Yan and the others want to laugh. No way someone was so carefree as to come here to look in the mirror, right? Zhang Qiling glanced at Fatty, then at Wu Xie, hesitated a bit, but still told them: “It was your Third Uncle!”
“This…” Wu Xie, who had just imagined the archaeological team looking in the mirror, was immediately dumbfounded. He never expected it was his own Third Uncle who figured it out by looking in the mirror; he hadn’t seen Third Uncle fond of mirrors normally.
Zhang Qiling exhaled slightly and raised the searchlight in his hand to explain: “It was Qimen Dunjia!”
Qimen Dunjia was said to have originated from the Yellow Emperor, passed down through thousands of years and revised multiple times by later generations. Now, in the hands of Wu Xie’s Second Uncle (yes, Wu Er Bai, not Wu Sansheng), only forty-two bureaus remained. Even that was extremely rare; the versions circulating in the world had only eighteen bureaus, and the rest were found by Wu Sansheng in a Han Dynasty ancient tomb—unclear if from Zhang Liang or the Yellow Stone Elder.
However, though Qimen Dunjia was mystical, its essence was still military strategy and fate theory. Using it to set up formations merely created miraculous effects through the application of various mechanisms, like the constantly moving secret door they had just passed through.
Wu Xie, who had some understanding of Qimen Dunjia, could somewhat follow what Zhang Qiling was saying, while Fatty and Lin Yan were almost listening to heavenly scriptures beside him. They vaguely knew about the Eight Gates, but truly applying them left them clueless.
At this point, Wu Xie suddenly thought of something: “So all the mechanisms in this entire tomb were built by the tomb owner, or rather Wang Canghai helping the tomb owner?” He couldn’t help but feel admiration and longing for this early Ming Dynasty eccentric, who used living water from the sea to lay out the entire ancient tomb as a grand formation, with small formations nested within the grand one and mechanisms within mechanisms—how incredibly ingenious! His mechanism arts could also be called reaching the peak!
“Life Gate for life, Death Gate for death; entering any of the other gates reveals the Eight Gates again. If not for seeing the Life Gate’s location on the stone tablet, we might never have entered the correct door in our lifetime! No wonder the stone tablet says, ‘This tablet to the fated one reveals the Heavenly Palace Gate; enter it, and attain the immortal realm!'”
Lin Yan looked at Wu Xie with an increasingly strange expression: Huh, something’s off. Didn’t he just remind him to be careful of the Wang Family? How did he suddenly turn into Wang Canghai’s little fanboy? This won’t do!
Thinking of this, he dry-coughed and interrupted Wu Xie’s admiration for Wang Canghai: “Cough, so is this tomb ultimately Wang Canghai’s tomb? What else did you see after entering back then?”
They were now walking through a pitch-black corridor of bluestone. Under the searchlight, the glance Zhang Qiling turned back to look at him was exceptionally eerie.
“We saw a smiling dried corpse!”
