COPPER COINS

Chapter 25: Skeletons Beneath the River (II)

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The water was deeper and colder than anything anyone could ever have imagined. In no time, a dense chill had seeped into the very cores of their bodies.
As Xue Xian felt the cold wash over him, his thoughts suddenly became crystal clear.
The niezhang had been boiling in his soup of confusion for so long that he barely knew what was going on, but had the audacity to ask Xuanmin, who still held him in his hand, "Bald donkey, how come I'm in the water?"
Who the fuck knew?
Xuanmin did not reply.
Perplexed, the niezhang asked, "Why are you here too?"
Xuanmin: “...”
No one fucking knew.
   
Being a marble, Xue Xian's faculties were not affected by the water, so he could naturally speak whenever he felt like speaking. But if Xuanmin tried to open his mouth, he would immediately swallow gallons of water –– and the issue wasn't just how cold the water was, but the fact that the origins of the water were unknown, nor did anyone have any idea how long it had been in the cavern. It was definitely disgusting. Make Xuanmin drink that? You might as well drown him right then and there.
   
As Xue Xian spoke, the two of them had reached the very depths of the water. With a massive thump, the golden marble landed at the bottom of the pool.
Although the thick layer of sediment and dirt at the bottom of the pool acted as a buffer, Xuanmin's hand was crushed to a pulp. Anyone else's bones would have been immediately ground to dust.
   
In his half-conscious state, Xue Xian got the feeling that, somehow, something had cushioned his fall. And although he wanted to say a word of thanks, the unbearable crescendo of heat continued to scorch his mind and the relentless dizzying sensation made him want to vomit. He rolled about chaotically in the sediment like a decapitated fly, as though driven by some innate, primitive urge –– he seemed to be looking for something.
As soon as the sediment bed had been perturbed, specks of dirt erupted into the water and covered everything in Xue Xian’s vision. Never mind finding something lost –– it'd be a miracle if he could keep track of himself.
   
"I'm sick of this muddy water!" Xue Xian spat in a flustered tone. He seemed even more irritable than usual, if that was even possible.
Where is it, where is it, where is it...
He wasn't even sure what it was he was looking for, yet that one phrase spun about in his head, repeating itself endlessly.
   
Peng––
That tremor-like knocking sound rang out once again, sending Xue Xian into further panic. The vibration had disturbed the sediment flooring even more, and the water became ever more opaque. Xuanmin, nursing his mangled hand, quickly lost sight of the golden marble.
   
No person in their right mind would be able to bear to stay long in this endlessly deep pool, and Xuanmin was no exception.
Lu Nianqi was the first to succumb. Earlier, while in the throes of a seizure, he had narrowly avoided being struck on the back of the head by Xuanmin, but he was unable to escape the harrowing feeling of breathlessness when underwater. He thrashed around, causing himself to swallow several more gallons of water, and then went still.
Next was Jiang Shining, who had been knocked back into his small paper form. As a ghost himself, he did not need to breathe, but amidst the vicious and unforgiving flow of the water, his paper body was close to being dissolved by the water.
Finally, it was Xuanmin’s turn...
Xuanmin frowned. Just as his vision began to blur and fade into darkness, an earth-shattering roar erupted from the sediment bed.
   
That sound pierced through the body of water and rang back and forth in the dark tomb.
For a brief instant, Xuanmin, who was losing consciousness, was stunned. For some reason, this wailing, faraway noise felt familiar –– as though he'd heard it somewhere before. As the thought lingered, the black water swelled up again and began to twist and churn at great speed. In no time, a large whirlpool had formed, as though someone had drilled a hole at the bottom of the pool. The entire pool of water began to recede into that hole, the current quick and powerful.
Xuanmin, along with everything else in the water, was sucked away.
The whirlpool’s force was overwhelming. Nothing could resist it.
   
As he was sucked into the spiral, Jiang Shining grimly thought, Turns out that dying from having one’s paper body dissolve in the water isn't so bad. The worst way to die is being torn to shreds! [a]
Never mind the paper man –– even living humans like Lu Nianqi and Xuanmin were barely holding on. They felt as though every joint in their bodies was being stretched out –– if the whirlpool got any bigger, their flesh would undoubtedly slide off their bones.
   
The strange but clear-sounding roaring noise accompanied the churning of the whirlpool. Altogether, the effect was awe-inspiring. There was something strange about it all –– as though such a monumental event was never supposed to occur in a cramped, dark space like the tomb, but instead belonged only to the expansive, magnificent horizons of the sea.
Dragon Swallows the Sea… [b]
Although Jiang Shining could not make out anything in the spinning waters of the whirlpool, the phrase surged out of him seemingly from nowhere. The strangest part was that he'd only ever encountered such a saying in the books he'd studied –– he had never been witness to such a phenomenon in real life.
Just as these fragmented thoughts appeared in his mind, he was sucked toward the eye of the whirlpool.
Pa––
With that, Jiang Shining's vision turned black and he lost consciousness.

   
The echoes of the great wave went on and on, hurtling tirelessly back and forth across the hollow tomb.
Only after a long time did it slowly begin to recede. Gradually, it disappeared, and the tomb returned to that previous, uncanny quiet.
   
Those seven night pearls strung in the shape of the Big Dipper on the stone ceiling continued to cast their weak glow onto the crater below. But, of the black water that had previously filled the chamber, there remained not a single drop –– it had been entirely sucked clean by the whirlpool, which had even smashed the structure of stone steps into pieces so that it now lay in a pile of rubble across the ground.
And the loose sediment that had covered the bottom of the pool now lay in a pile in the corner, as though impatiently swept away by some invisible hand.
   
With the soft layer of mud and sand gone, the original stone flooring was now exposed. One part of it seemed to have been punctured and the shattered stone tiles pushed to the side, revealing black soil beneath it.
And in that soil was planted a single, glimmering, trembling golden marble. Strewn around the marble were several unconscious bodies, each of them deathly pale.
These were Xuanmin and the others.
   
Soon, there was a gudu sound as the trembling marble threw up a mouthful of water, breaking that mortifying silence.
Next came the heavy sigh of an ill person.
   
"Ah––" From inside the marble, Xue Xian let out a pained sigh of relief. He felt as though he were full to bursting.
During the chaos earlier, Xue Xian had still been in a daze, had been only dimly aware of breaking open the stone flooring and breaking something that had been laying buried inside the soil, absorbing it into his marble. In that moment, he had felt a strange, indescribable feeling of satisfaction, as though finally able to eat a food item that he had been eyeing for ages.
Even that unbearable heat had been defeated for a brief moment.
But one thing hadn't been ideal –– as the golden marble had hungrily taken in that thing in the soil, in a fit of overexcitement, he'd also gone and swallowed all the water in the pool, too.
And now... he was too full.
   
Xue Xian began to panic. The water hadn't actually entered his stomach since he didn't have one –– it had only been absorbed by the marble –– but how come the marble got to stay intact while he had to have a stomachache? It made no sense!
   
As the zuzong rolled about in a huff, Xuanmin's finger seemed to twitch, and his eyelids suddenly fluttered open.
For some reason, as Xuanmin opened his eyes, a sense of emptiness flashed across his gaze, as though he had momentarily forgotten where he was, who he was with, and what he'd been doing. He stared up at the Big Dipper for a time, then abruptly sat up.
   
Hearing the movement, Xue Xian leapt out of the patch of soil and rolled noisily across the stone flooring to where Xuanmin sat. "Bald donkey, could I please bother you for some kind of digestion talisman? [c] Or if you have pills." [d]

He looked up at Xuanmin, waiting for the bald donkey to respond.
But Xuanmin only stared at him. Then, in a deep voice, he said, "What kind of niezhang are you? Why are you hiding inside a marble?"
Xue Xian: “…”
Xue Xian: “……”
Xue Xian: “………”
   
What the fuck was going on?!
He stopped rolling –– he only sat there, stiff as a stone egg, gaping at Xuanmin. "What are you playing at?"
Xue Xian no longer felt turgid. He was so bowled over by Xuanmin's strange reaction that he felt as though all of the water inside him had suddenly evaporated. After another shocked pause, Xue Xian ran two more circles around Xuanmin’s body, inspecting him and thinking, Did he swallow too much water and get possessed by a water ghost?
   
Quickly, Xue Xian rolled up close to Xuanmin’s side and peered at Xuanmin’s neck. Although the darkness of the cavern meant that ordinary people might easily miss small details, Xue Xian was capable of seeing everything clearly.
"What's that thing on your neck?" Xue Xian asked.
   
A strange mark had grown on the side of Xuanmin's neck. It looked like a poised spider. From what Xue Xian could remember, Xuanmin had only had a small mole in that location –– nothing at all like this.
Frowning, Xuanmin reached up and touched his neck.
   
As his fingers grazed the mole, the spider seemed to react minutely to the finger's warmth and immediately retracted its legs, transforming back into a normal mole.
With that, Xue Xian realised that what he had thought was a spider had in fact been a network of outstretched blood vessels, thin and gnarled like the legs of a spider.
   
As the blood vessels retreated, Xuanmin grimaced and shut his eyes, rubbing his temples –– he seemed to be feeling dizzy again. And just like that, he stopped moving.
This reminded Xue Xian of what had happened back at Guiyun Hall: at the time, he had also seen Xuanmin sway dizzily, then settle into the chair with his eyes closed, immobile for a long time.
   
Xue Xian spun about again and inspected Xuanmin from every angle, but could not find anything else amiss.
"What... the hell is this?" Xue Xian had never seen anyone else behave in this way, and pondered it, confused.
   
Finally, after another long moment, Xuanmin moved again: his fingers began to massage his taiyang pressure point [e] and, frowning, he slowly opened his eyes.
Xue Xian watched Xuanmin’s every move with trepidation. Eventually, the bald donkey looked down at him with a neutral face and said, "Look at how much trouble you can cause even without arms or legs. Niezhang, you deserve to be exorcised." [f]
Xue Xian said nothing. Actually, bald donkey, you can go back to being stupid.

As Xuanmin spoke, he massaged the hand that hung limply by his side, slowly tugging at each knuckle. With each crack of the knuckle, he would steal a glance at Xue Xian.
With that, Xue Xian finally understood what it was that had cushioned his fall earlier. He decided to forgive what Xuanmin had just said to him and instead rolled closer, planning to ask about the spider-shaped mole, when he suddenly spied a horizontal shadow in the corner.
   
It was a stone sculpture as tall as a man, with a spherical, melon-like head on which sinister-looking features had been roughly carved.
This wasn't the issue –– it was common for mausoleums to be populated by statues –– but this statue had fallen to the bottom of the crater during the commotion earlier and split in half, revealing its core. And unless Xue Xian had turned blind in the last few minutes...
Encased inside the stone sculpture was a human. A real human who had been dead for a long, long time.
   
Xuanmin seemed also to have noticed this. He swivelled his head around and saw that there were hundreds of such statues littered across the bottom of the pool.
Xue Xian couldn't guess how long the sculptures had been soaking in the water, but he realised that he had swallowed every last drop of the corpse water. A wave of nausea welled up within him.
   
Still nursing his hand, Xuanmin stood up and moved to inspect the statues when, suddenly, a gurgling sound arose from beneath his feet.   
Mystified, he looked down and saw that the golden marble was spouting great amounts of water onto the ground... Xue Xian was so disgusted that he was vomiting.
Xuanmin: “...”

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[a] Here, Musuli uses the chengyu 五马分尸 (wu3 ma3 fen1 shi1), literally “five horses separate corpse”. This describes the execution technique whereby a body is tied to five horses and each horse is made to run in different directions, causing the person to be literally torn apart by the force.
[b] 龙吸水 (long2 xi1 shui3), literally “dragon sucks/swallows water”, is a colloquial term for the meteorological phenomenon of a twister or hurricane happening over a body of water. (Article in Chinese).
[c] In Chinese, he uses 劳驾 (lao2 jia4), a polite way of saying “please”.
[d] The Chinese word here is 丹 (dan1), which refers to a pellet of traditional Chinese medicine that can be chewed and swallowed. A popular trope in the historical fantasy/jianghu genre is pills (dan) that have magical properties. The Chinese term for “golden core”, 金丹 (jin1 dan1), also uses this character.
[e] The taiyang pressure point is at one’s temples.
[f] The verb Musuli uses here is 收 (shou1), meaning to retrieve/recuperate/put away.