Chapter 6: A Rip in Time

3RD OCT 2021~ VERALUCTL

There were many unimaginable things in the world; Rome’s buried city of Pompeii, the Lop Desert’s Loulan Kingdom, the invisible and intangible Maya civilization that had almost become a legend… When you spoke of them, they were simply what was, but when under the desert’s quicksand, you found yourself an ancient city wholly intact and true, the shock, as if time and space itself was in chaos, was indescribable.

And what’s more was that An Jie had already experienced this shock once before.

Mo Yannan had been muddled from the quicksand so Li San’er and Shen Jiancheng had gone to take care of him. An Jie stood by Lao Ma silently and simply stared at the city.

There were pavilions and terraces and if not for the lack of water in the river, it would have been almost half the beauty of southern Qinhuai1.

There were carved columns and jade masonry, all of it seeming unbelievably prosperous. Even the withered plants on the sides seemed to promise a second renewal should they be blown by a spring breeze.

“You said this was Tianjin City?” Lao Ma asked softly. The two weren’t far ahead of everyone else and he didn’t seem to care about An Jie’s mysterious identity anymore. “Was the Tianjin City you saw like this?”

An Jie looked around. “The one I saw was alive, with mountains and rivers and men, and flowers from spring and a moon from autumn. What this is, is a dead city- a shell of what it was, like those man-faced monsters outside; no matter how beautiful their faces were, they were only painted skin on top of a painful demise, without a single warm thing to them.”

Lao Ma tilted his head and glanced at him, somehow a little apologetic. “I saw from a distance that you and Professor Mo were surrounded. I was going to go back to help you, but I the quicksand took me here before I could do anything…”

An Jie smiled nonchalantly. “It’s not a problem.”

Lao Ma pursed his lips and swallowed down what he had wanted to say, swapping for a pat to An Jie’s shoulder. “Good man.”

An Jie shook his head and didn’t answer as he looked carefully at this maze-like tomb.

Next to him, Mo Yannan had recovered and was staring, dumbfounded and stunned, at the city they had so easily stumbled into. Li San’er added fuel to the fire. “You’ve gotta admit that the world changes fast; a moment ago we were in The Cave of the Silken Web, and now we’re in Womanland2– it really is great here… Now if only some music would start playing and two beauties would run out…”

“San’er,” Shen Jiancheng glared. Li San’er laughed awkwardly and stopped talking. Shen Jiangcheng looked back at Mo Yannan, still frozen to one place. “Professor, what do you think?”

Mo Yannan’s brows furrowed as he stood up, stumbling. He took off his glasses and wiped them vigorously with a corner of his clothes, his mouth slightly agape and his eyes unblinking, like he was trying to print everything he could see into his mind.

“There’s no way, there’s no way, there’s no way!” He even said it thrice. He shook his head and dreamily murmured, “There’s no way, this is far too… amazing.”

This nerd would lose his brains every time he encountered something from his field of expertise, with not a hint of his cowardly nature left over. He walked carelessly into the mysterious and ancient city, looking closely at everything he came across, muttering both praises and questions, looking so possessed that his brain might as well have been eaten by those sequin bugs.

The rest of the group had to follow him. An Jie and Lao Ma both stayed at the very back, one guarding the rear and the other enjoying the scenery. Being a non-specialist, Lao Ma could see nothing interesting inside the city, only that it was exceedingly beautiful and pretty- though in that beauty, there was something that made him feel uneasy.

The old merchant’s intuition was amazingly accurate and had saved him many times before.

An Jie had been to many places before and could more or less sense something wrong as well, like there was an incongruity within the city that he couldn’t quite place his finger on. It was different from the other ancient cities he had visited, with a hint of… dissonance between the buildings. He didn’t regret pushing the old nerd away earlier anymore, and was even a little expectant for his explanation whenever he snapped out of his stupor.

An ancient city, unrecorded in history… like a traveler who lost their direction in time and space, suddenly appearing, and then maybe one day, suddenly disappearing. 

Thinking like that, it was almost as if just one look made it worth everything.

“Tianjin City: a demonic city that will devour one’s soul,” An Jie softly murmured, as if trying to warn someone of something. Hearing that, Lao Ma responded in a low voice, “I don’t know what this archeology team is trying to dig out, but this place doesn’t feel good. We should leave soon.”

“What’s not good?”

“There’s-” Lao Ma hesitated, then said the words in his heart. “A ghostly aura.”

“It’s eerie- it has everything and all of it looks normal, apart from that it misses people,” An Jie continued. “It’s a perfectly kept city, yet why are there no… living creatures?”

He didn’t say ‘human’, but rather, ‘living creatures’. Lao Ma couldn’t help but shiver, a flash of worry crossing his wrinkled face as he looked at the frenzied Mo Yannan and Shen Jiancheng in front of him, and Li San’er who was constantly writing something in a notebook.

As they ventured deeper into the city, the feeling of unease grew in him, and even An Jie’s expression was no longer as relaxed. He replenished his arms from Li San’er, an RPK-74 light machine gun slung over his shoulders as he quietly loaded a Desert Eagle in his hand.

It might have just been his nerves, but the bracelet that had been so randomly put on him by that old nerd was a little warm, like it was resonating with something within the city. An Jie wanted to take it off but for some reason, the bracelet which hung loosely off of his bone-thin wrist suddenly tightened and even moving it became nigh impossible.

“This is too unbelievable.” Mo Yannan pushed up his glasses and looked back at Shen Jiancheng. “Lao Shen, you see it as well, right?”

Shen Jiancheng sighed. “Yes, this is a city like something from multiple timelines overlapping- it’s only normal for there to be no record of it. A record would only make it stranger.”

“Look at these buildings- they use loess and wood as their main materials and most of them sit on thick, rammed-earth foundations.They use a column base with the frame supported primarily by wooden posts, the walls constructed with rammed earth as well and the roof covered by hay,” Mo Yannan softly explained to Li San’er, pointing at a few buildings. “What does it remind you of?”

“Yinxu3.” Li San’er was excited for some reason. “I remember; the architecture of the Shang Dynasty was like this, but those pavilions over there are definitely not from then!”

“Those things didn’t exist until the Han Dynasty,” Shen Jiancheng said. “Further, Yinxu is in Anyang, so it shouldn’t have the same architectural style as Jiangnan4. To have these things together in one place; you could call it unorthodox, yet for some reason, it’s quite harmonious.”

“Not only that.” Mo Yannan waved his hands. “Have you noticed the structure of the center of this city? During our walk, I had a look at the palace and temple-looking buildings and noticed that they were similar to the Zhou Dynasty’s style of ‘ancestors to the left, alters to the right, a court ahead and a market behind’, and there were a number of ideas from the Yi Jing5 hidden throughout the streets and the stairs.”

Li San’er scratched his head with a pen. “Professor, professor, I’m a little confused. Judging by what you said, why does it feel like this city was built by aliens after going through all of China’s history?”

Mo Yannan mumbled, “Yes, it’s truly too strange, how could such a place exist?”

“I’ve heard…” An Jie suddenly said leisurely, smiling a little as he saw everyone’s eyes turn to him, “I’ve heard of a physics theory of there being many parallel dimensions in our world. Could it be a time rift from one of those parallel dimensions, leaking this city to us?”

Saying that, he smiled and waved his hands. “I’m just saying some amateur nonsense, please treat it like a joke.”

Mo Yannan hesitated, then actually nodded in a serious manner. “It’s not complete nonsense, but we’ll still need to see if there are any surviving texts.”

“Where?” Li San’er asked.

“Obviously that palace-like building in the center.” An Jie patted the back of Li San’er’s head and followed Mo Yannan, moving a little closer to him like a good student humbly asking to be taught, but the hand on his gun still exactly where it was before.

In front of the palace’s main hall were eighty-one stairs that seemed to be made of white jade. It was a number for the supreme, but as for what the material really was, Shen Jiancheng and Mo Yannan were unable to come to a conclusion, despite crouching over it and discussing it furiously. An Jie looked up at the hall’s pillars with nine dragons coiled around them and felt chaos. It was truly chaos!

It was like the imagination of a lousy arts student; a made-up world with a chaotic mish-mash of dynasties, filled with unknown materials and buildings that had no relation to each other.

“Legends say that the son of heaven6 is made of nine dragons; if I’m not wrong, this should be the palace.” Shen Jiancheng sighed and lightly touched the stone pillar through his gloves. The hall was empty. Perhaps there was once a group of people who had knelt here and shouted praises as the one sitting high up on the dragon throne casted down his lonely glance over his rivers and mountains…

“But…” An Jie quietly protested, before he decided that he wasn’t a professional and swallowed his words back down. Mo Yannan looked at him with a smile as if gazing down at a student, asking, ‘Does Xiao An have any questions?’.

“Isn’t this the desert?” An Jie raised his brows. “I thought that I would have seen the culture of a tribal nation… These things definitely came from the middle of China- ‘those who sit on the golden chariot7 sit on the whole world’- so why would they exist in the middle of a desert? And how come this territory only consists of a single city? Where is this emperor’s ‘world’? Or was the owner of this palace just an ambitious dreamer? He dreamt of his lofty power and so built this overblown palace?”

Mo Yannan was quiet for a while before also reaching out to touch the pillar. “That’s impossible. There’s no way that this was some imagined glory of some tribal nation… this craftsmanship, this architecture, this scope is as good as the capital of any ancient dynasty. But…”

An Jie’s question was right on point: it didn’t make any sense.

No, it should have been that moment they stepped into this ancient city, all sense had been lost; it was like another dimension. An Jie was about to ask something else when suddenly, a light laughter burrowed into his ears; a silvery, bell-like, scripted little girl’s laugh. Goosebumps quickly crawled up his skin- in this city, there shouldn’t have been a woman alive that could laugh.

Author’s Notes: Okay, I’ll upload till here for now, see you tomorrow ^^

Vera’s Notes:

Haha… See you tomorrow, author-san. And the day after. And the day after that… Sigh, the work of a translator duo… 

1A famous tourist spot known for the river running through it, the Qinhuai river. The Qinhuai river is a tributary of the Yangtze, the south here referring to it being to the south of it. Qinhuai is a famous tourist spot, and the river once flowed through the capital of China, so it’s sided by a large number of ancient Chinese buildings.

2References to places in Journey to the West, the former known for its spider demons and the latter known for having only women as its citizens. 

3Yinxu is the site of one of the ancient and major historical capitals of China. Here it is saying that the architectural style of those specific buildings are similar to the style of those in Yinxu.

4Anyang is situated to the north of Hebei whilst Jiangnan is a term for everything to the south of the Yangtze river.

5The Yi Jing is an ancient Chinese text on divination. It can be applied to architecture similar to Feng Shui, in that using certain materials will improve luck, etc.

6Son of god/heaven. Chinese emperors believed that they were the sons of god and therefore had a heavenly right to rule. Keep in mind that this is not the Christian God, nor the Christian heaven, hence the use of lowercase.

7金銮 actually refer to the golden birds that decorate the emperor’s carriage.