Chapter 193: Stealing the Sky and Swapping the Sun

He Yu flinched at my shout. He pointed at himself, looking at me with an expression that clearly asked, “Are you joking?” I slapped my forehead to remind myself to snap out of it and not let anger cloud my judgment. Taking a deep breath, I turned back around, intending to try persuading them again. But I knew it would be useless. The fact that Lu Ayao had told us to climb up first meant his mind was already made up. At this point, words were a waste of breath.

I stood there for a moment with my head in my hands. Then, I turned and walked over to another pillar, unslung my backpack, and approached He Yu. I pulled a curved machete used for clearing brush from his belt and gestured for him to get the pry bars out.

“Grab your gear.”

He looked at me with total confusion. “Wh-what are you doing?”

I patted his stomach. “Aren’t we opening the coffin? You expect me to open it with a knife? The outer coffin is massive. How else are we supposed to get it open?”

“Wait, we’re actually doing it?” He Yu’s voice dropped, his cowardice showing.

I clicked my tongue and pulled the sections of the pry bar from his bag. “If you’re too scared, go up by yourself first.”

Lu Ayao saw what I was doing and stepped over to stop me from screwing the pry bar sections together. I didn’t even need to look at his face to know what he was thinking. He wanted us to find a place to climb up so he could open the coffin alone. But I hated his self-sacrificing tendencies more than anything.

I shook off his hand, quickly tightened the threaded steel pipes together, and gave him a fake smile. “I’ve changed my mind. I want to see whose corpse is in there too. I’m nearsighted, so I won’t be able to see a thing if I climb up. I’ll get a much better view from down here.”

Hearing this, He Yu and Lu Ayao exchanged a look.

Ignoring them, I turned and weighted the pry bar in my hand, heading straight down the steps. The moment my feet touched the jade floor tiles below the dais, a sense of unease washed over me. It was a subtle feeling, hard to pin down exactly what was wrong, but I felt these jade stones weren’t simply serving as a floor.

The jade floor only extended about half a meter out. This was the first time I had stepped on it since entering the burial chamber. When I went to get Tian Xiaoqi earlier, I had stayed on the steps to keep a higher vantage point, so I hadn’t stepped down. Stepping down now gave me a completely different sensation.

Seeing me stop on the jade tiles, He Yu ran over, chuckling nervously. “What’s wrong? Scared now? If Old Lu wants to open it, let him. It’s the same whether we wait for him up there or down here.”

I waved my hand to interrupt him, then dropped the pry bar and got down flat on the floor. He Yu was caught off guard by my sudden move and let out a few awkward coughs.

“Uh, it’s not even New Year’s yet. Prostrating like this is going to take years off my life^[1]! Rise, my loyal subject, rise!”

I slapped away the hand he offered to help me up and glared at him, then made a shushing gesture. He flinched back and immediately covered his mouth. Ignoring him, I pressed my ear flat against the floor, tapped lightly on the jade tiles with my knuckles, and closed my eyes to listen intently.

The jade tiles were thick, and the sound of tapping was very muffled, but it was still slightly different from the sound of tapping a solid wall. I could hear the vibrations traveling a long distance downward, though it wasn’t obvious. There had to be an open space beneath the jade tiles.

“It’s hollow underneath,” I said, lifting my head slightly.

He Yu raised an eyebrow and mimicked me, splaying out on the floor like a toad to listen. After frowning and listening for a while, he sat up and rubbed his ear. “How can you tell? It sounds like a normal floor to me.”

“You haven’t studied mechanisms. These jade tiles are thick, at least twice as thick as any standard brick I’ve seen. It took me several minutes of listening just to catch that hint of something being off. If you could hear it that easily, my decades of study would have been for nothing.” I sat back on my heels on the jade tiles, looking at him.

Tian Xiaoqi stood on the steps. “Then you two should come up quickly. Could these jade tiles be trapdoors? It’ll be trouble if you step on a trigger.”

Half-kneeling on the floor, I tapped the ground again. “It doesn’t feel like a trapdoor. If it were a trapdoor, there would be no need to intentionally build this ring of steps.”

He Yu crouched beside me. “But even if there’s a mechanism in the floor, it shouldn’t have anything to do with opening the coffin, right? We’ve stepped on it plenty of times without any issues. Let’s stop obsessing over these tiles and just open the coffin.”

“No, if this had nothing to do with opening the coffin, I wouldn’t be thinking about it.” A possibility occurred to me. I patted He Yu’s shoulder, stood up, and used my flashlight to sweep over the Phoebe zhennan wood coffin again. I tried to push the outer coffin, but it didn’t budge an inch.

I only tried once. Realizing it wouldn’t move, I pulled back, rolled up my sleeves, and dropped to the floor in front of the coffin again. This time I got even lower, my cheek almost touching the base of the coffin’s side. I shone the light at the bottom. Just as I suspected, the base of the coffin was fused with the floor tiles. It couldn’t be moved.

He Yu reached out to help me up. I used his hand for leverage to stand, brushed the dust off my hands, took a deep breath, and told them, “This coffin is a fake. We can’t open it. It’s a trap.”

“Huh?” He Yu’s eyes widened. He raised an eyebrow, searching my face for any sign of a joke. “What do you mean by that?”

I put the flashlight down, turned around, and rested one hand on the coffin lid while stomping twice on the jade tiles. “This trick is called ‘Stealing the Sky and Swapping the Sun^[2].’ The real coffin is beneath the floor. This one on top is a decoy meant to mislead grave robbers. It’s a two-layered setup. I don’t know how thick these floor tiles are, so moving them all isn’t realistic. Even if we found a way to clear them away, there’s no telling if there’s a quicksand layer underneath.”

This type of mechanism has a very long history. Legend has it that King Ping of Chu used it, but Wu Zixu discovered the trick anyway and had men dig up his bones. The principle is relatively simple: a basic lifting device is installed in the center of the burial chamber. Once the real coffin is placed on it, the trapdoors below open, and it descends underground. Once the real coffin is in place, a pre-prepared fake coffin rises up, and the trapdoors beneath it snap shut, locking into the base of the decoy.

Ordinary setups usually involved two layers, but one couldn’t rule out the truly extravagant; stacking three or four layers of nested decoy and real coffins wasn’t unheard of.

The quickest way to identify this kind of mechanism was to check the trapdoor beneath the outer coffin. To prevent people from hauling the decoy away and discovering the real one, the builders usually found ways to bolt the decoy to the floor. If the coffin couldn’t be moved, the chances of the ruse being exposed were slim.

I had always doubted the practical usefulness of such a mechanism, so a long time ago, I followed an ancient manual and tested it using wooden strips. As long as there were heavy enough stones to act as counterweights for the lift, it was fundamentally functional, and the swap between the real and decoy coffins could be done quite rapidly.

I just hadn’t expected to encounter such a sophisticated mechanism here.

He Yu shifted a couple of steps closer and leaned in, whispering in my ear, “You’re not just making this up to stop Old Lu from opening the coffin, are you?”

“You’re full of shit! I’m not joking. If I had a drill right now, I’d bore a hole on the spot just to show you whether it’s hollow underneath!” I barked back.

Having said my piece, I tossed aside the rebar, completely losing interest in the coffin. I walked over to Lu Ayao’s side and said, “Go ahead and open it if you want, but the coffin is a fake. There might be a corpse inside, or it might be filled to the brim with gold and silver treasures, but it’s all a front. The person inside will never be the true master of the tomb. Whether you open it or not is up to you.”

I shot a look at He Yu. “Let me go! Let’s find a place to climb the pillars!”