Daomu Biji: The Mystic Nine
Chapter 33: To Turn Over

The man looked like a thin old man, but he moved very quickly. After standing there dumbstruck for a second, Old Man Zhang jumped up and ran after him: "Fo Ye! The thief is here!"

When the group of soldiers also gave chase, they found that the mine shaft had been dug straight down into the riverbed. The thin man could barely squeeze through the seemingly bottomless hole himself. It appeared the whole mountain here was riddled with holes. As everyone approached the hole in the floor, a stench assaulted their noses. Old Man Zhang covered his nose and unhesitatingly jumped in before Qi Tiezui had the chance to stop him.

"So reckless! What if there’s a cesspit below?” Just as Qi Tiezui was scolding, he heard the sound of whistles coming from all around. Zhang Qishan led a group of people down from the cliffs where they were planning to ambush and arrived at the entrance to the mine shaft.

"Sure enough, this guy didn’t move aboveground. I just didn't expect him to dig a mine shaft here. As long as he pretended to be a corpse, we really wouldn’t have found him. If not for Ba Ye, we really wouldn’t have anything to show for our troubles.” One of the soldiers said.

Zhang Qishan slapped him on the back of his head and scolded, "What kind of brown-nosing is this? Go down and help!"

Several of the soldiers hurriedly nodded and jumped down. Zhang Qishan also wanted to go down to help, but Qi Tiezui grabbed him and said, "Don't, Fo Ye. I won't stop you if you want to jump into that cesspit, but there’s something even weirder here. You need to stay and check it out first. It won’t be too late to jump down once you’re done."

With that said, he dragged Zhang Qishan over to the corner of the shack and turned the corpse on the bed over again.

The body's face was distorted and highly decomposed, and its muscles had atrophied, revealing a string of sticky threads.

After turning it over, the two of them watched it for a few minutes, but the body didn't respond.

Zhang Qishan gave Qi Tiezui an exasperated look, "What are you trying to do?"

"Fo Ye, wait patiently." Qi Tiezui said confidently.

After another five or six minutes had passed, there was still no movement from the corpse. Zhang Qishan became impatient and took a deep breath before tilting his head and looking at Qi Tiezui. Qi Tiezui frowned and thought it over before pulling Zhang Qishan a few steps away. When he looked back at the body and found that there still wasn’t any response, he said, "Wait a minute, maybe he’s a little shy around you. Fo Ye, let's pretend to walk farther away. Don't look at it, it will turn over by itself in a moment."

Zhang Qishan gave the soldiers a look, silently telling them to keep an eye on the mine shaft. He then turned and walked towards the cliff, completely ignoring Qi Tiezui. After a few steps, however, various exclamations came from behind them.

The two of them looked back and saw that the body Qi Tiezui was talking about had really turned over.

"Look, look, Fo Ye." Qi Tiezui said as he jumped up and rushed over to the body. He pointed at it and started scolding, "You naughty boy, are you messing with me?"

When Zhang Qishan came over, Qi Tiezui said, "Fo Ye, there’s something wrong with the bodies here. They all died very strangely and they’re all lying face down. There must be something inside them."

Zhang Qishan stepped forward, turned over the body that had just turned itself over, waved his hand, and then pointed all around. The soldiers began turning all the bodies face up one by one and then waited. After about ten minutes, the bodies began turning back over one right after the other, until they had all returned to their original states. It was like that moment when the pai gow (1) dominoes were flipped over.

Zhang Qishan said coldly, "Where’s Lieutenant?"

"He’s still checking the situation down below."

"Wait for him to come up and then dissect the body." Zhang Qishan said. "Find a clean one to carry out and leave someone to wait for Old Man Zhang to come back up. I want to talk to him. Everyone else, turn this place upside down. Old Ba." Zhang Qishan kicked a nearby bed over and revealed another mine shaft. "What do you think is going on? Why are there holes under their beds?"

"To steal from the mine." After other veins had been dug up, some miners would dig under those mines and steal scraps of loose ore. Qi Tiezui also kicked over a bed near the shaft entrance, pulled out a few sifting pans from underneath, and touched the remnants, "This is a snake-eye stone mine. There are particularly good snake-eye stones in Xiangxi, so some people try to steal them."

"Why dig into the riverbed? Is digging down to the vein not enough? Digging to the surface takes a lot of effort, after all.” Zhang Qishan said.

"Fo Ye, you might not know, but good snake-eye stones are very precious.” Qi Tiezui said. “They dug this hole because they have a tacit understanding with the miners above. They’ll pick out the good ones when sifting the ore and drop it down the hole, where a bag has been placed. Then, someone will pick it up from below. If they get caught, they’re likely to be skinned and lynched. The snake-eye stones are an important trade good for the chief, so this kind of behavior goes against his interests."

Zhang Qishan nodded and grabbed a handful of the stones from the sifting pan. Fluorite was a luminous stone found in the mountains and seas. It was called fish-eye stone or snake-eye stone because it would shine at night and attract many small fish and insects, which would in turn attract snakes. It was quite interesting that Xiangxi produced this kind of ore. It was said that there were many strange tombs in China, so if there really was a tomb under the fluorite mine, he wondered what it would look like.

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TN Notes:

(1) Pai gow is a gambling game played with dominoes. The dominoes are shuffled on the table and are arranged into 8 face-down stacks of 4 tiles each in an assembly known as the woodpile. Individual stacks or tiles may then be moved in specific ways to rearrange the woodpile, after which the players place their bets. More info here

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Happy Halloween!!!!! Hope everyone gets lots of candy!!!! Looks like we have 3 more chapters left of this book and then it's Chen Pi Ah Si's extra~~~. A staff member on novel updates enlightened my dumb ass that I don't have to put everything under the DMBJ page and can make new ones. So if they get approved, there will be the normal "Daomu Biji" one, "Daomu Biji: The Southern Archives", "Daomu Biji: Extra Collections", and "Daomu Biji: The Mystic Nine". Not sure when they'll be able to shift the chapters over (they have lives too) but I just wanted to give you a heads up in case you notice you're not getting alerts or whatever.