Lit by the beam of Lu Gouzi's flashlight, everything appeared with absolute clarity.
The walls of the entire burial chamber were covered entirely in colorful murals.
The colors of the murals were so vibrant that they felt as though they had just been painted, with the pigments still not fully dry. The content was equally rich and varied, featuring scenes of fierce warfare, daily dining and banqueting, alongside some bizarre sacrificial rituals. The volume of information contained within far surpassed Along the River During the Qingming Festival.
"The more murals there are in an Ancient Tomb, the richer their artistic flair and the more detailed the content, the higher the status of the tomb occupant must be—and the more valuable treasures there are inside. This time, we've really struck it rich!" Lu Gouzi shouted, flashing his light with a grin so wide his jaw muscles cramped.
"With colors this vivid and no sign of ventilation or oxidation, we must be the first wave of people to enter. I guarantee there are priceless, peerless treasures inside. Finding just one or two of those would be enough to live off for eight lifetimes." Old Pizi rubbed his hands together, his face glowing with excitement.
I, however, was completely captivated by the subject matter of the murals.
Among all the murals in the burial chamber, the figure that appeared most frequently was a man wearing armor. Unsurprisingly, he was undoubtedly the protagonist of the murals and the very occupant buried here. Strangely enough, while everyone else in the paintings had distinct faces, the tomb owner alone was left faceless. Subconsciously, I felt as though the murals were hiding some deep secret.
Ancient people painted and wrote differently from modern folks. Modern people are accustomed to reading from left to right, whereas the ancients went from right to left. If the mural content formed a continuous narrative, it certainly had to start from the left side.
I walked toward the left wall and came to the very first mural.
I observed it closely.
The first mural featured only the faceless man, but he was not wearing armor; his physique looked remarkably slight and slender as he led a horse by the rein, feeding grass into its mouth. This was likely an introduction to the tomb owner's youth, when he was nothing more than a lowly horse-herd boy.
A lowly horse-herd boy who managed to transform overnight into a general holding absolute authority over tens of thousands. He must have encountered some extraordinary destiny.
Sure enough, in the next scroll, the horse-herd boy was shown kneeling in worship before a winged figure hovering mid-air. This must have been his fateful encounter.
This winged figure did not evoke the holy, pristine feeling of angels in Western mythology. His wings were fleshy bat-wings, blood-red as if stained in gore, and prominent tusks protruded from his mouth. He bore a striking resemblance to a vampire from Western tales.
Most eerie of all were those eyes. The very instant our gazes met, an inexplicable sense of terror washed over me, a subtle intuition that I had been targeted by some unclean entity, and goosebumps broke out all over my skin.
Finding the demon in the painting far too unholy to look at any longer, I shifted my gaze to the next panel.
The next panel depicted a sacrificial scene where the tomb owner knelt at an altar to offer a ritual. Knelt densely upon the altar were crowds of bare-chested people, accompanied by several executioners wielding sharp blades who were slaughtering and dismembering those kneeling on the ground. Bloody, dripping hearts were plucked out, placed onto platters, and arranged upon the offering table. The limbs were tossed into nine Bronze Cauldron, beneath which raging fires burned, and one could faintly discern hair-buns unique to human heads bobbing at the brims of the boiling water.
The scene was excessively bloody and cruel. The artisan who painted these murals possessed an uncanny talent for realism. In a momentary trance, I fancied I could hear the shrill screams of the victims, and a sudden chill ran down my spine.
Terrified, I quickly averted my gaze.
Next came the scenes of battlefield slaughter. The protagonist's side was fiercely unmatched, cutting a brilliant figure across the sands of war, while the enemy dropped their helmets and discarded their armor, utterly incapable of resistance. The most noteworthy detail in this painting was the routed soldiers, every single one bearing a face contorted with terror, as if they had seen a ghost. The rest of the details held nothing particularly special.
The remaining murals were essentially depictions of the tomb owner's daily life. It was worth noting that in almost every painting, the tomb owner's dining table featured those same bloody viscera.
Having weathered the baptism of the previous panels, my dread had subsided somewhat, and I was no longer quite as frightened.
It wasn't until the final two panels that the content took a turn. One of the panels was pitch black; upon closer inspection, one could faintly discern lines of other pigments, as if it had been painted over and smeared away after completion, leaving behind no information whatsoever!
The very last panel depicted the funeral of the tomb owner. A Seven-Absolute Coffin appeared in the painting. The tomb owner lay resting inside the Seven-Absolute Coffin. Numerous Taoist priests sat on the ground performing funeral rites, and with that, the picture ended.
I surmised that the deliberately erased panel beforehand must have recorded the cause of the tomb owner's death—perhaps involving matters so sensitive and secretive that they had to be scrubbed out.
I smiled bitterly and shook my head. I had hoped to glean key information regarding the tomb owner's identity through the murals, but aside from a spine-chilling plot, these paintings offered absolutely nothing.
"If you want to know about the tomb owner's identity, just looking at the murals is useless; at best, it's all guesswork. You have to look at the tombstone and the epitaph! The tombstone is outside and we can't see it, and while the epitaph is buried inside the tomb, finding it is exceedingly difficult. But usually, right beside the murals, there are some textual records that might prove useful!" Old Pizi leaned in close to me and said.
Yet this burial chamber seemed entirely devoid of writing.
The three of us walked outward, exiting the inner chamber. Sure enough, just as Old Pizi had predicted, vast stretches of writing were carved directly into the walls on both sides.
Pity that these inscriptions had all been defaced with scratch marks.
"The dust inside the scratches matches the weathering of the text incisions themselves, which means these texts were scraped away not long after they were carved!" Old Pizi stroked the scratch marks on the wall and told me.
Refusing to give up, I searched meticulously and actually managed to find a few characters that had escaped being scraped away. However, these characters were neither Han Chinese script nor bronze inscriptions or seal script; they were winding and curved like Mongolian script, completely incomprehensible to me. Yet some subconscious intuition told me that these few surviving characters might conceal some vital piece of information, so I deliberately took pictures of them with my phone.
"We didn't come in here to do archaeology! What are you taking pictures of this junk for? Are you trying to make sure the cops have enough evidence to arrest you? We're here to rob tombs, here to hunt for treasure! Stop wasting time on this useless garbage, will you?" Lu Gouzi rolled his eyes and shouted at me in dissatisfaction.
In truth, these things were indeed of no real use to me, but I instinctively felt that these fragments of information surely hid some secret, and missing them might leave me filled with eternal regret.
Urged on by Lu Gouzi, we stepped into the next burial chamber.
The very second we crossed the threshold, all three of us were struck dumb.
Arranged side by side inside this burial chamber were nine massive bronze cauldrons, identical in shape and style to the ones in the mural. I could dare swear that these nine cauldrons were the exact nine used to boil human heads upon the altar in the paintings.