Chapter 90: Red and Blue Elixir

The man in the black sunglasses fell silent for a moment. He glanced around, lowered his voice, and said slowly, “Let me start with what is strange about this place. First, the blood corpse at the entrance to the tomb passage. By my reckoning, it was most likely the personal guard of the tomb’s owner in life, or someone like that, who after death willingly transformed into a blood corpse to protect this ancient grave. But that blood corpse had clearly been disturbed before. When I say before, I mean a very long time ago—so long ago it could have been a thousand years or more. Because there is no way the blood-corpse coffin was disturbed by the old ghost and the others. A blood-corpse coffin is usually nailed shut with extraordinary tightness and sealed with secret methods. Only when it is subjected to a powerful shock, or when the coffin itself is moved, does the blood corpse emerge from it.”

Then, seeing that I was still somewhat baffled, he explained further. A blood-corpse coffin is usually set directly at the tomb gate, sealed so completely that it becomes part of the gate itself. Once the gate is touched, the blood corpse is alerted. Yet when we arrived, the tomb gate was already open. It could not possibly have been opened by the old ghost and his men. That could only mean the blood corpse had been awakened long ago, but had later returned on its own to the coffin.

So who had entered this tomb? Could it have been grave robbers? Ancient grave robbers, perhaps. I knew grave robbers had existed since very early times, and as far back as the age of the Three Kingdoms there had even been an entire military force devoted to tomb raiding, called the Tomb-Robbing Captains, established by Cao Cao. They excavated ancient graves by methods of plunder and used the gold, silver, valuables, and treasures they stole to sustain the army and fund military expenses.

But the man in the black sunglasses shook his head and continued, “Haven’t you noticed? There are no shortage of gold and silver treasures in the tomb chambers here, and yet there are no signs that they’ve been touched. To be honest, people in our age don’t value that kind of gold and silver, and neither do grave robbers. Everyone knows the precious-metal content of ancient gold and silver is very low, especially gold. Once taken out, it can’t be priced as ordinary gold, and it’s heavy besides. Most professional grave diggers wouldn’t even look twice at it, let alone take it. But the ancients prized such things. After all, in those days they had no real concept of funerary objects or antiques in old tombs; on the contrary, they often regarded them as ominous. It was only much later that people gradually began to unearth and steal them. The more ancient the grave robber, the more he valued gold and silver, because once taken out, those things could be spent like money right away, and they wouldn’t lose value.”

That was one of his doubts. Another was that this tomb was permeated everywhere by a chilling, sinister aura. By rights, the geomantic layout here should never have formed an underground canyon, yet it had. That was highly unusual. More than that, there were worm-creatures here that should only exist in the ancient Kingdom of Li. Clearly, this place really did have some connection to that kingdom.

The greatest mystery was the headless ancient corpse. Obviously, the people who had come here in the past had disturbed the blood corpse, yet still retreated unharmed, taking only the body’s head. That was very strange. What use could a severed head possibly be?

The man in the black sunglasses said he had formed a theory. It had many flaws, but he felt it was probably the truth—or at least very close to it. I asked him, and at first he refused to say. In the end, however, he told me.

“It is very possible that the tomb’s owner stole a secret art from the Kingdom of Li, rather than having it willingly bestowed upon him. After his death, the person who entered here removed his head, probably in order to cut off his scheme. As for what that scheme was, that is obvious enough. Many stories say the secret art of the Kingdom of Li could bring the dead back to life and even control the human mind. In the end, though, the tomb’s owner never succeeded. And the Li secret art was said to be extremely troublesome: not only did one have to master the art itself, one also needed a burial site with a very unusual geomantic pattern. The feng shui here is indeed highly unusual, even strange, and that all points to this possibility.”

The more he spoke, the more certain his tone became. He stated flatly that people from Li must have entered this tomb chamber and shattered the tomb owner’s plan. If that was really the case, could the secret art of Li truly be that miraculous?

At that, both of us fell silent. Of course, these were only the black-sunglassed man’s conjectures. What actually happened back then, no one knew. Or rather, no one would ever know now.

Then I asked again, “What about that pale blue pill?”

He told me that this too was something he had learned from elsewhere, mixed with his own reasoning, and that it might not be true. According to his theory, the red pill was called the Spirit Blood Elixir. There had been rumors of it since the Republican era. The rumor said the elixir had to be held in the mouth while one was still alive. Of course, “alive” here meant nearing death, but not yet truly dead. This pill was said to freeze a person at that age, rapidly turning the body into a dried corpse, while the internal organs began to regain vitality. Naturally, this process was extremely slow, so slow that it might take thousands of years, gradually restoring life to every part of the body, until the dried corpse was reborn as a living person. But these were only rumors. Whether they were true, no one has ever been able to prove.

As for the pale blue pill, there were no such legends about it. Only brief records had been preserved in many places. The man in the black sunglasses added his own speculation to them, believing that the pale blue pill was also a kind of elixir, and that it should complement the red one. From what they had learned in the underground ancient city beneath the desert, the relationship should be one of yin and yang: red represented yang and was taken by the living, while blue represented yin and was taken by the dead.

The red elixir, taken while alive, would allow one to be reborn after a thousand years following death. The blue elixir, taken by the dead, should have the same effect. But exactly how this rebirth worked, and why there were two different elixirs, he could not explain.

I still had many things I wanted to ask him, but at that moment the man in the black sunglasses said, “Don’t ask any more. I’ve already said enough. If I go on, I’ll be breaking an unwritten rule. You only need to know this: before, I really did mean you harm. But now—or rather, since some time ago—I no longer bear you any ill will. I can’t say what will happen in the future, but kid, what you don’t know is that the moment you entered the desert, you were already drawn into a vast and terrible whirlpool. In that whirlpool, human life is the least valuable thing of all. Put simply, you’re already in deep trouble. Be careful from now on. In this world, having a few skills does not mean you can fear nothing. More often than not, there are many ways to drive you into utter ruin.”