Book 1: Chapter 13: South Sea King’s Tomb

Name：Daomu Biji: Restart Author：
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Book 1: Chapter 13: South Sea King’s Tomb

To put it bluntly, a land deed was something you asked for when you wanted to buy land in the underworld. It was similar to current land deeds, except that the land you bought was land in the underworld where you would live. At that time, writing land deeds was basically trading with the underworld, so most of them were useless and considered a shady affair. Only those who had no descendants would make a living helping others write them.

I once received rubbings of a land deed that was unearthed in Yahong, Sichuan Province. I even remembered some of the contents, which read:

Xu Guo died on the twenty-seventh day of the fifth month of the fourth year of Tiansheng, Bingyin Tai Sui (1), in Zhu Ming Town, Jiguo village, Hongya County, Jia Province. Lord Xu spent ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine coins

Since the land deeds contents focused on where the tomb was and information on the tomb owner, Poker-Faces idea was very accurate.

As we stood at the edge of the sarcophagus and looked down, we saw Poker-Face place his feet on both sides of the well and carefully look at the area beneath the corpse. I handed him my cell phone and he took a picture before handing it back to me. There was a whole slate beneath the body that was full of inscriptions, but they were hard to see because of all the barnacle-like things covering it. Fatty lowered a hammer down and Poker-Face began knocking the barnacles off. As the words were revealed, he slowly read them aloud for us: "Minyue (2) snakes, South Seas King Zhi."Visit no(v)eLb(i)n.com for the best novel reading experience

"What the hell? South Sea? Fatty asked. "Isn't it the West Sea?"

"Fat Master, you just said that even though the West Seas Falling Cloud Country is fictitious, there should be a foundation for it, Jin Wantang said. The South Seas King Zhi and the West Seas Falling Cloud changing a single word to fabricate a whole story is really ingenious. South Sea was it really a country in the South Sea?" His eyes suddenly gleamed and he jumped up.

We all looked at Jin Wantang, who frowned and said, "Minyue snakes it was said that people in the seven ancient Fujian countries worshiped snakes. If its both Fujian and snakes, then that means that the land deeds were bought for land in Fujians underworld and the people were from the Baiyue ethnic group. The Classic of Mountain and Sea said that Fujian was in the sea. In other words, this area was in the sea and separated from the mainland a long time ago. That makes the story of Tianmu chasing a cloud all the way to the seaside more credible. He might not have gone west, but south. So, it wasnt the West Seas Falling Cloud Country, but the South Seas Falling Cloud Country. The West Seas Falling Cloud Country is in the South Sea!"

He looked at the body and continued, "Is this corpse the monarch of a South Sea country? Was it an ancient country bordering Fujian and Jiangxi along the coast of China at that time that disappeared sometime during the Han Dynasty?"

"What's so special about this guy? What does it have to do with listening to thunder? I asked him as I looked at the corpses ears. It really didnt look like a custom of the Central Plains people.

It wouldnt thunder every time Yang Daguang came here, so he would bring a tape recording of thunder whenever he did come. He would play it in the well in order to hear what information was in the thunder.

If he was willing to abandon the tapes here, maybe they didnt have what he wanted. Or maybe he couldnt hear anything like us and he threw them away out of frustration. These bronze pieces seemed to have decayed a long time ago, after all. And that wasnt even mentioning the fact that he died in that secluded room without leaving any useful clues. He clearly didn't learn much.

But it wasnt like it was nothing since he had persisted for so long. He shouldve found somethingright?

As I looked at the bronze piece very carefully, Fatty said to me in a grave voice, "We have to go to the place where these murals came from if we want to know what happened."

"You just want to fucking find something," I said angrily.

Fatty didnt even bother denying it and simply nodded, "Do you remember those strange things we encountered in the Fujian mountains before? Dont you think they have some connection to this South Sea country?"

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TN Notes:

(1) According to Baidu, this is from a real Song Dynasty tomb discovered on 8/21/2009 in Sichuan Province. I think this person died around 1027 AD, since this says the Tiansheng era was 1023-1032. Bingyin is the 3rd year of the 60-year cycle. Tai Sui is the star god/deity presiding over the year, but can also be an ancient way of saying "year". Bingyin Tai Sui is the year of the tiger zodiac-wise (if that helps at all).

(2) An ancient kingdom in what is now the Fujian province in southern China. It was a contemporary of the Han dynasty. Its inhabitants were groups of indigenous non-Chinese tribes called the Baiyue. More info here.