Shonan Ghost Cub Shonan Ghost Cub Chapter 14: The Underground Palace
At this moment, the time is 5:13 in the afternoon, and more than two hours have passed from going down to the crack to find the passage, and then to finding the entrance to the underground palace.
There was no sunlight shining through the cracks overhead, and it wasn't long before the entire cave, including the entire outside world, would be covered in darkness. Maybe if you're lucky, you'll encounter a sky full of stars, and if you're unlucky, you'll be covered by dark clouds. However, no matter what kind of weather it is outside, it has nothing to do with me at the moment.
The walls on both sides of the cave tunnel, which is just big enough for one person to pass through, were covered with paintings, and the moment I saw the paintings, I began to be unsure that the owner of the tomb was from the Han Dynasty, because in the form of Han Dynasty tombs, it is rare to leave a painting in the tomb, and it has never been found even in the history of Chinese archaeology. The use of color painting to describe the life of the tomb owner was more popular in the Western Zhou Dynasty.
Even if this tomb belongs to the same era as the beast tomb on the crack cliff, it is at least 2,000 years ago in the Western Han Dynasty. After such a long time, the paint on the wall is still vivid, not the slightest fade, I don't know how it was preserved.
The painting on the wall depicts a burial scene, which is slightly different from the life depicted by the tomb owner in the Western Zhou Dynasty.
A capital shrouded in auspicious clouds, all four gates were opened, and four funeral processions walked in four directions from the four gates. After these four funeral processions left the city, there were many people hidden in the woods outside the city.
This picture is supposed to depict the burial of the owner of the tomb, and the reason why there were four funeral processions was to create a suspicious grave and prevent theft. The mural broke when it reached the corner, and when I turned the corner of the cave, the scene painted on the wall changed to something else.
A three-story hall with a three-story grand hall, in front of the main entrance of the main hall, there is a man dressed as a wizard, holding a bell in his hand, and it is shaking. Under the corridor steps of the main hall, there was a huge coffin, which was covered with rune paper, and at the four corners of the coffin stood a strong man, and each of the four strong men had a rune paper pasted on the left and right of their ears.
In the spacious open space in front of the coffin, three huge mouse-like creatures were depicted, digging holes under the clearing with their fangs, one of which had only two hind legs and a two-meter-long tail, but its body was buried in the hole.
I have never seen this animal in my memory, and this picture is related to the previous four funeral processions, which apparently carried no owner in the coffin, and the real funeral procession was led by three huge creatures that resembled rats.
I looked at the paintings on the wall and moved forward, at this point I had no concept of time, perhaps because there was no sense of day and night in such a claustrophobic space, so I blurred my sensitivity to time.
I was really shocked by the appearance of the third picture.
The scene painted on the way turned out to be the suspension bridge space that we had just passed, and it was at the bottom of the cliff hundreds of meters deep, and the suspension bridge on the cliff and the turbulence at the bottom of the cliff were painted very vividly.
The four strong men who had been labeled with talisman paper stood upright on the cliff wall, perpendicular to the cliff at a ninety degree angle, and followed the wizard who led the way to the cliff with the same vertical cliff mechanics walking towards the cliff edge, and the drawbridge was above them. The three rat-like creatures were filling in the holes they had carved out of the cliff face.
After the three murals, there is a completely different scene from the three, a scene of war, a brave general riding on the body of the unknown creature that looks like a big rat in the hole, is charging the enemy army, the point is that the general in this picture has no head!
The entire cave is about fifty meters long, and there are four turns in between, and after each turn there is a mural, and except for the fourth, the first three are connected and depict the scene of the funeral.
The ancients liked to use exaggerated art forms to depict a certain scene, the first three depictions mean that after the death of the tomb owner, there were five funeral processions, four bright and one dark, and the real funeral procession should be the team led by a sorcerer before the three-story hall, and they may have taken the form of digging tunnels to hide their concealment.
As for the fourth, I couldn't think of a reason for it, even if I had a very rich imagination, and there was no mural after the fourth.
There was an exit in front of me that was shadowed by a golden light, which was supposed to be the light of a candle.
I suppressed the excitement in my heart, and no longer thought about the connection between the murals, after so long foreshadowing, so many incredible senses and feelings, I finally arrived at the entrance of the underground palace!
I didn't know at the time what this seemingly easy step meant to me.
From the moment my legs stepped out of the cave passage into the dungeon, my life changed. That was my first exposure to a complete underground world, but not the only one, just the beginning.
Since then, my life has been so much more incredible, and my experience can even be described as legendary.
I was just attracted by the scene in front of me, and my worldview was completely subverted again, and my knowledge and experience could not support the landscape I saw.
The space of the cliff wall of the suspension bridge outside and the space of the underground palace are completely two worlds, if a village is used to describe the space where the suspension bridge is located, then the space behind this door can be described as a city.
The road is about 200 meters wide and paved with bluestone, and there are nine huge lampposts neatly standing on both sides of the bluestone road.
At the end of the bluestone road, a kilometer away from me, a three-story palace stood peacefully in front of me.
Due to the distance, the outline of the palace cannot be fully seen.
Four buildings are side by side on the right side of the palace and three buildings on the left, which are remarkably imposing under the light of ancient lamps. It was a confined space all around, and there were no cracks at the top like the suspension bridge space.
It is surrounded by steep rocks, a palace, and seven buildings on both sides, the same size as the main burial chamber and the seven transepts in the hand-drawn map, except that the hand-drawn drawings simplify everything here, like the drawbridge outside, with only one bridge written on it.
The three-story hall in front of me is the same as the hall in the second mural in the passage, and I think this hall should be the place where the tomb owner lived before his death.
The second place where Aunt Ming gave me a hand-drawn map to place "Zhenlongsha" is where the main hall is located thousands of kilometers away from me.
I don't know if the nine ancient lamps in front of me were re-lit by tomb robbers who came here before me, or if they were always lit like this.
This is the first time I really entered an imperial tomb, I really feel the sense of oppression and shock of this scale, the idea that the nine ancient lamps here are everlasting lamps actually popped out of my mind, I think such an unimaginable place, there should be such an unimaginable strange thing like the everlasting lantern!
Just as I was shocked by the scene in front of me and gave birth to a series of non-intimate imaginations, a sound was heard in the nearest building that made my hairs stand on end.