Daomu Biji: The Mystic Nine

Qi Tiezui told Zhang Qishan that in ancient times, the Qi family’s school divided their practice into Yin and Yang so that they could maintain a balance between heaven and earth. During the day, it was to help people deal with their birthdate characters, choose tomb locations, search for dragon veins, and lock corpses’ coffins. At night, it was to look at the mountains and stars, and conduct the business of grave robbing.

Qi Tiezui’s father was regarded as the least qualified in his generation and only had the most basic skills, while Qi Tiezui was even weaker. He only learned a little from his father, but he was already the eighth master of Changsha's nine families, which showed that the knowledge and ability of his ancestors was unfathomable.

There were many rules in this school, and it was said that they had seen too many mysteries known only to heaven, so they had to seal their mouths and shun the world. Many interesting things had become bedtime stories by the time it was Qi Tiezui’s generation. When Qi Tiezui’s father was dying, he was in a daze and said some obscure words to Qi Tiezui about one particular rule—if the master of the Qi family went into a very dangerous place and found himself unable to survive, then he would hang a bronze mirror over his horse’s head and use a special diagram to let it escape, so that later generations would know where and why he had died.

After listening to this, Zhang Qishan looked at the train behind him and uttered in the Changsha dialect: "Damn it, it’s not a horse now, but a train. I don’t know where this reliable source went to court death, but the movement is a bit big."

There weren’t many stories from the Qi family, but Qi Tiezui was still a little uncomfortable at the thought that someone in his family had died an unnatural death. He was afraid that the family had set several other rules, but later generations would never know what they were. At the same time, however, he also felt some curiosity. The train came from nowhere, so what happened to the man who hung the bronze mirror on the front of the train?

A military vehicle drove directly onto the nearby platform, and many engineers got out. Qi Tiezui counted more and more soldiers. Knowing that he couldn't leave, he decided he might as well offer a little help, so he asked Zhang Qishan about the ins and outs of the matter. Maybe he could give some advice first.

Lieutenant have him a rough summary about what happened last night and then said, "The driver hanged himself in the locomotive. He must have slowed down after entering Changsha’s boundary and hanged himself after calculating the distance. No one added any coal, so when the water cooled down, the train kept moving forward. The nose of train slipped into the station, plowed through more than thirty sandbags, and then stopped."

All the doors in and out of the train had been welded shut with iron sheets, so when the engineers got out of the military vehicle, they began cutting the iron from both the engine car and carriages using a gas cutter.

"This driver was an old hand, otherwise his estimation wouldn’t have been so accurate and the car wouldn’t have stopped in the station so accurately." Zhang Qishan said. "This man was hanged, but the death is somewhat strange." Qi Tiezui climbed onto the engine car, looked into the cleaned window, and saw the body hanging there. The strange thing Zhang Qishan was talking about was the hanged man’s eyes. His pupils were the size of soybeans and looked just like a weasel’s. They definitely weren’t human eyes.

The whole car was welded shut and sealed like an iron drum, so he didn’t know how they had dealt with going to the bathroom. It was really strange.

He and Zhang Qishan were both intuitive people. After waiting for a short period of time, the iron sheet on the carriage was the first to be cut off. It fell off and slammed onto the platform with a loud bang, exposing a big hole. Zhang Qishan waved slightly, and all the nearby guards raised their submachine guns.

The air was filled with smoke from the gas cutting, and the carriage was completely dark since all the windows and gaps had been sealed. Only a sliver of light from outside the hole was able to shine in.

As Qi Tiezui covered his mouth to block the smell from the gas cutting, Lieutenant took three lanterns and handed him one. Then, he jumped up and stretched out his hand to pull Qi Tiezui up.

Qi Tiezui shook his head and went to hand the lantern to a guard standing close to him. When the guard didn't take it, he hung the lantern on the guard's machine gun barrel, and then turned to Lieutenant and made a gesture as if to say: "I support you." That meant he wouldn’t go up. He thought to himself, it's all well and good to say I’m a trusted advisor, Zhang Qishan, but you’ve got to be crazy to think I’m a pioneer.

Lieutenant sighed and turned to go into the carriage. Qi Tiezui had just breathed a sigh of relief when Zhang Qishan took the lantern from the guard’s barrel with one hand and grabbed Qi Tiezui's hand with the other.

"What are you afraid of? When we’re in Changsha, nothing is fiercer than me."

With that said, he pulled Qi Tiezui up. As soon as he entered, the contrast of the bright outside and dark inside made Qi Tiezui go blind, and he rubbed his eyes fiercely until they finally adjusted. When he opened his eyes, he froze.

The carriage was very dark, but it wasn’t completely sealed. Light was penetrating everywhere through tiny gaps in the negligent welding, showing the gas cutting exhaust particles in the air. As Lieutenant walked through the disturbed air, the particles surged violently, reminding Qi Tiezui of the attic in his old house. When he was a child, he used to go up there to find something to play with, and the dust particles floating in the tiny beams of sunlight would fall into the cracks of the attic tiles.

Those tiny spots of light leaking in made the places where the light couldn’t reach even darker and harder to see clearly. Lieutenant looked around with his lantern, and the dim yellow light revealed huge shelves on both sides of the carriage. Qi Tiezui noticed that those shelves held one coffin after another, and they were all fixed by iron hoops.

Many of those coffins were covered in dry mud and had tree roots wrapped around them. Some were made of wood that had become white and swollen and rotted and cracked, while others were made of stone. The shelves were all deformed under the weight, and based on the surface and degree of decay on the coffins, they were all ancient. They had all been dug up and taken from an ancient tomb. For some reason, there were a lot of cobwebs between the coffins and shelves, like a layer of cotton wool sticking the shelves and coffins to the train car's wall. It made the atmosphere seem old and mysterious.

Chinese numbers were written in red paint on all the coffins. The numbers were arranged irregularly and written very casually, as if someone was taking inventory of them. With just a cursory glance, the highest number was forty-seven. In other words, there were at least forty-seven coffins here. When he thought of this train having a total of seven cars, did that mean that all of them held these kinds of things? If so, he was afraid there were more than a hundred coffins in total. He looked beside one of the numbers, and saw that there was another casually written sign saying "Tomb A, Number Four, Eastern Room, Second Section”.

"Mr. Qi, look." Zhang Qishan pointed to the words.

Fellow grave-robbers, Qi Tiezui thought to himself. This is a big-ticket operation, and it’s almost caught up with the Mystic Nine’s whole harvest for the year. At first glance, these coffins had been dug up from the earth, and in order to record the rooms and areas that had already been robbed, they were labeled and annotated. Qi Tiezui had some doubts. Changsha’s southern school of tomb-robbing was disorganized, and he wasn’t even sure if some of them were literate. Even if the big players did participate in such a big job, they wouldn’t record where they stole the items from. For them, the only difference between burial goods was price.

They moved slowly as they looked at each of the coffins, and found that they were all from different ancient tombs. Zhang Qishan showed a puzzled expression on his face, but didn’t speak.

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Tiffany's extras:

• Wu Xie’s Private Notes: Chapter 27 The Warring States Silk Book
• Wu Xie’s Private Notes: Chapter 28 The Jade Coffin Cover