Daomu Biji: Restart

All the murals in the burial pit were bright.

The eyes had turned red and the colors in other places had somehow become incomparably gorgeous. If it weren't for the flaking paint, I would’ve thought the murals were done within the past few decades. I silently raised my phone, took a photo, and sent it to them. After a while, a text file was sent back. I could tell at a glance that Liu Sang had written it: "Idol said to stay still. There’s something hidden in the murals. And put out the cold firework!"

I squinted at the murals on the wall, noticing that there were many more above my head. I lifted the cold firework up, but the eyes on the murals turned from red to black as soon as it approached. I thought they were moths or something, but nothing flew away. On the contrary, I could see more clearly that this was definitely a mural, but there was something seeping out from behind the eyes.

I quickly extinguished the cold firework in the mud, once more plunging my surroundings into darkness.

I turned my phone light to its weakest setting and started to ask them "what's in the mural?", but something suddenly dripped onto my phone screen from above.

I immediately smelled a stench and looked up. I used the light from my phone screen to look at the eyes on the mural above my head and found that they were bulging outward. The surface had cracked and there was a lot of smelly liquid dripping out of it.

When my phone’s light got closer, I was able to see that there was a space behind the cracks in the mural. I took a knife out and knocked on the mural several times until it fell off, revealing a big hole.

The back of the mural is hollow? I wondered to myself.

My phone’s light was very weak, so I couldn’t see too far into the hole. I pointed my knife towards the opening for fear that something would suddenly rush out. I slowly approached it with my phone and pressed the flash. There was nothing in the hole, but I could definitely see a lot of other holes forking off from it. I also noticed something else in the wall.

I carefully stood up, held the mural above with one hand to stabilize my body, and then reached into the hole with my other hand to photograph the inside of the holes that branched off.

I took six or seven pictures, but didn’t see anything. The holes ran too deep, so I couldn’t tell where they led.

I took a deep breath, turned on my phone’s voice command, stuck my phone and knife as far into the closest forked hole as possible, and shouted, "Take a picture!"

As soon as the flash went off, I immediately heard a scream and something grabbed my hand.

I was so scared I almost peed my pants.

I cried out and desperately tried to break free, but suddenly heard someone yell, "Who the fuck is blinding me with a flash?!"

That familiar voice could only belong to Fatty. After listening very carefully, I knew right away that it was him.

"Why the fuck are you in the wall?!" I yelled furiously.  

"Cut the crap,” he shouted. “Pull pull pull pull pull pull pull-me-"

"Are you a small expert selling newspapers (1)?" I interrupted him as I moved to pull him out.

A face emerged from the depths of the hole. Sure enough, it was Fatty. His face was covered in smelly water and he said weakly, "Fuck you, I didn't have this much trouble getting out of my mother's womb!"

I grabbed his hand and tugged hard, pulling him out through the mural. After he fell past my head and landed in the mud, I pulled him to my position. As he hugged the Thunder God statue, he looked at its head and cursed. He then pulled my knife out and smashed the handle against the statue’s head until it was smashed to pieces.

The statue really was made of pottery, and it was empty inside. Fatty used my phone to take a photo of it and then breathed a sigh of relief, "It’s empty."

When I asked him what was wrong, he looked around while panting and cursing, "Shit, this whole underground mountain is hollowed out and the rocks are full of holes. When they opened the passages to build the tomb and paint the murals here, they sealed all these holes with lime and then painted eyes on the walls to mark them. So basically, there are holes behind all the eyes that can be accessed from anywhere. It's a fucking roughshod project. But we can't turn the lights on. There’s something in these holes that gather as soon as they see the light."

"How do you know?" I asked him.

Fatty spit out some of the smelly water that must’ve gotten in his mouth, "It’s one of my character strengths. I don’t like other people staring at me seductively, so when I saw the eyes on the mural, I stabbed them. I didn't expect to poke a hole in it. I thought it was grave robbers’ tunnel, so I climbed in to have a look."

Fatty said that these holes were a unique seaside geological feature. They were eroded by water a long time ago and then buried under the mudflat. When he climbed in, he found that it was full of crabs. He took a picture to see what it was, but something strange appeared in the photo’s flash.

I asked him what it was, but he shook his head and said he couldn’t describe it. Unfortunately, he had also left his phone inside the hole. He paused, and we suddenly heard Poker-Face knocking from somewhere close to us.

I took a picture of Fatty to report that he was safe, but when I looked at the photo, I saw that the flash had caught something in the dark background. In the corner of the photo, something was hanging upside down from another eye-hole in the ceiling.

It was very fuzzy and couldn’t be seen clearly from a distance.

Then, we suddenly heard something falling in the mud from that direction. I took another picture, but there was nothing there.

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TN Notes:

(1) Wu Xie is referencing a 1930s children song called “Selling Newspapers Song”. Lyrics are here. Youtube link here. It’s kind of a pun. The pinyin of the character for pull (拉) is “lā”. So Fatty’s sentence could also be read as “La la la, la la la-I’m-”

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I fucking cackled like a crazy person when Wu Xie took the photo and Fatty screamed lol. These two provide me with so much entertainment