Chapter 263: The Prophecy

I pulled my arm free from He Yu’s grip and braced myself against the narrow stone walls of the crevice, inching a few steps toward the opening. I clicked on my flashlight and swept the beam outside. Right then, I saw a figure clad entirely in white robes drifting through the air in plain sight.

The figure passed no more than ten meters away from me, close enough that I could see every detail of the ornaments on his body and head with startling clarity. A cold sweat broke out all over me instantly. What the hell was this? How could a ghost be wandering around scaring people in broad daylight?

Shaken, I took a deep breath, held it, and leaned closer to the edge of the crevice, wanting to get a clear look at the white-clad figure’s face. But for some reason, the person holding the lamp suddenly turned away. Facing the stone wall opposite us, he raised his candle and began examining something on the rock surface with great care.

I clicked my flashlight up to a higher brightness setting, squinting curiously to see what this ghost was looking at. To my surprise, the moment I increased the light, the white-clad ghost vanished. I blinked, rubbed my eyes hard, and looked again. There was definitely nothing there.

My mind raced. I immediately twisted the flashlight’s head to narrow the beam, and the white shadow abruptly reappeared across from me. The white figure moved in perfect synchronization with the movement of my flashlight beam. In an instant, I realized what was happening.

This wasn’t a ghost. I remembered my grandfather telling me about a strange local occurrence. He said there was a peculiar cave on a wild mountain in the western suburbs where people would see ancient soldiers in suits of armor whenever a thunderstorm cleared. There was a stretch of low, ancient city walls nearby, and some air-raid shelters had been built there before the founding of the country. Everyone who witnessed it thought the mountain was haunted.

Later, after learning more as I grew up, I formed my own understanding. It was likely that the area had possessed a unique magnetic field since ancient times, capable of recording scenes from the past. When similar magnetic conditions recurred, those recorded scenes would play back.

Perhaps something had happened between these two stone walls long ago. Now, after all these years, the presence of a light source was triggering a natural flashback of the events that had once unfolded here.

As I sorted through my thoughts, the white shadow cast by my flashlight paused mid-stride. I watched as he slowly turned around. I expected to see someone whose face was blurred and unrecognizable, but to my surprise, his features were crystal clear.

I had seen him in my dreams before. When I was being dragged into a bottomless black hole in a nightmare, his corpse had been the only lifeline I could grab. I had also seen the golden silk phoebe coffin that held his body within an illusion. It seemed that Master Jiyun had a hand in everything I was experiencing today.

The first thought that popped into my head was: So this is what those eyes look like when they’re open.

He held a candle in one hand and a jade vanity case in the other. I knew that jade box all too well. It was the Nine-Ring Jade Casket I had opened, though at this moment, it lacked the nine-ring lock. It was just a very ordinary-looking vanity case.

My flashlight illuminated the figure of Master Jiyun. His silhouette turned toward me, his gaze coming to rest on me. Even knowing it was just a scene generated by a magnetic field, a jolt like an electric current ran through me from head to toe. We were practically old acquaintances in my hallucinations, but this was the first time I had ever seen him “alive.”

Our gazes met across thousands of years. I had always felt he wasn’t appearing in my dreams and illusions for no reason, and I hadn’t abandoned that thought yet. There was something filling his gaze as he looked at me. I frowned; it was too deep for me to fathom.

What are you trying to tell me?

I couldn’t help but inch forward again. Right then, He Yu suddenly popped up behind me and slapped my shoulder hard. My flashlight jerked, and the white shadow across from us instantly dissolved into thin air. I turned to look at He Yu in total exasperation. I tried aiming the flashlight back, but I couldn’t recreate the figure no matter what I did.

I was so angry I felt like steam was rising straight off the top of my head.

“It’s all your fault! I just saw Master Jiyun!”

He Yu didn’t respond to my outburst. He straightened my flashlight, staring straight ahead, and patted my shoulder. “Forget about Master Jiyun for a second. Look at the wall across from us. What is that? Are those four pictures?”

I didn’t know what he was talking about, so I turned back to look. I discovered four images painted on the opposite stone wall in an unknown red pigment. The overall style looked like murals drawn by primitive humans. After years of erosion, the red pigment had turned completely dull and dark.

“What are these? Did Master Jiyun draw them?” He Yu asked, adjusting himself into a more comfortable position to support his weight while looking down at me.

Looking at the four images, I remembered the white shadow’s movements and said, “So Master Jiyun was looking at these things on the wall. You probably can only see these murals when you’re looking at them straight on at eye level. We shined our lights from down below earlier, but couldn’t see a thing.”

“If there’s a trick to seeing these murals, there’s definitely hidden information in them!” He Yu said.

I quickly swapped places with him, moving behind, and handed him our only flashlight. “Hurry, take a look. What do the murals show?”

He Yu edged up to the opening of the crevice and began studying the murals, looking at them one by one. He examined them very slowly, clearly picking up on something. I didn’t rush him, keeping as quiet as possible so he could examine them thoroughly.

About half an hour passed before He Yu finally spoke, staring at the murals. “Xiao Yao, what’s drawn here… it’s a prophecy!”

I leaned closer, feeling completely baffled. “A prophecy? What kind of prophecy?”

He Yu rolled up his sleeves and pointed the flashlight’s beam at the first image. “Look. This first picture shows a large sacrificial altar with someone standing on it. From existing historical records, we know that human sacrifice was very common during the Shang and Zhou dynasties. This mural depicts a sacrificial ritual. The person kneeling over the fire in the middle is the slave chosen to be sacrificed.”

I said, “How is that a prophecy? Where are you seeing a prophecy in any of this?”

“Don’t be in such a rush. Look at the second image,” he said, shifting his flashlight to the next panel. “Do you see those four people standing in front of a temple a hundred feet high?”

I narrowed my eyes to study the depicted temple. My heart sank, and a chill ran down my spine. Although the mural was composed of only a few strokes, I could clearly identify it. This temple was the very divine temple at the Tomb of King Ne we had entered in Inner Mongolia. The structure of the main pillars and the decorations on the temple doors were identical.

“This must be the Tomb of King Ne. Looking at the age of these paintings, they’re definitely older than any of our ancestors, yet it accurately predicted that four people would enter the Tomb of King Ne. Isn’t that us, Old Qian, and Han Zhuo? If you don’t call that a prophecy, then what is it?” He Yu bumped my shoulder.

If these four images really were four prophecies, did it mean the King of Gune back then already knew four people would break into his underground dwelling? Yet he hadn’t set any inhumane traps within the tomb. Why? Was it possible he had let the four of us in on purpose?

At this thought, I felt surrounded by conspiracy like never before. This was completely different from how I had felt in the past. I could handle being lied to by the people around me or by my grandfather, or being trapped by secrets from decades ago that couldn’t be unraveled, but I had never imagined that this conspiracy might have been foretold by someone thousands of years ago.

And I, like an actor on a stage, only had to follow the script laid out for me. As this realization sank in, my face turned pale and my body began to tremble. I asked He Yu, “Is… is it possible this was artificially aged?”

He Yu rolled his eyes at me. “I think you’ve lost your mind. If a mural like this could be artificially aged, you can chop my head off.”

Paying me no further mind, he swept his flashlight toward the third mural. “I don’t quite understand the rest, but I can tell you what’s depicted. It’s a bit strange, though. Do you still want to hear it?”

“Tell me,” I said.

He Yu cleared his throat. “The main figure in the third and fourth murals is the same malevolent spirit. This spirit was born from an abyss. The abyss is drawn to look like two mountains, though that might just be an abstract representation. Let’s just treat it as an abyss. In the third mural, the spirit prays to a deity, hoping the heavens will grant it salvation.”

I listened. “Was it saved?”

He Yu shook his head. “No. The heavens didn’t save it. So in the fourth image, this spirit mingles among a crowd of people. It turns them against one another. Slaughter and bloodshed fill the entire scene. Finally, a fire consumes everyone, including the spirit itself.”

I scratched my head. “So the ending is mutual destruction. But what are these two paintings supposed to foretell?”

He Yu said, “We’ve already entered the Tomb of King Ne, so I’m inclined to believe the events of the first two paintings have already happened. What we should really focus on are the last two. But I don’t quite understand what these last two prophecies are indicating, or…”

“Or what?”

“Or perhaps it is simply foretelling a disaster,” He Yu said.