"The National Library's collection stacks are not all housed within the main building. They are spread across seven separate sites throughout Beijing. The fifth stack—which is now the seventh and eighth Unnamed Stacks—was built on the ruins of an ancient Ming-dynasty temple. While digging the foundation, the construction team discovered that although all surface structures had been completely destroyed, the underground complex remained perfectly intact. From its layout, it was clearly a massive subterranean chamber.
After receiving the report, archaeologists and ancient-architecture experts immediately rushed to the site. They found that the underground structure's style was entirely different from the Ming ruins above. Based on the materials and layout, it dated to the late Qin or early Han period. How could an underground building from the late Qin have survived intact for over two thousand years? And why had a completely unrelated Ming temple been built directly on top of it?
Using the scarce late-Qin records available, the archaeologists managed to open the great stone door. Inside lay a square underground palace: colorful murals covered all four walls, eight pillars carved with coiling dragons, and the floor littered with all kinds of priceless treasures. By then it was already dark, and everyone was exhausted from the effort of prying open the door. They only picked up a few items from the ground for identification before withdrawing, planning to return the next day for a thorough investigation."
"And then?" Fei Ri asked.
"Something terrifying happened. Of the seven archaeologists who entered the chamber, one had to leave for a conference in Shanghai the next morning and took nothing with him. The other six, who had each taken a treasure, all died suddenly without any prior illness. Hospital reports listed the cause of death as myocardial infarction in every case."
Fei Ri's eyes began to sparkle with genuine interest. "You're kidding, right? Are you telling me China has its own version of the Egyptian pyramid curse? 'Death shall spread its wings and strike down all who disturb the king's slumber'? Besides, didn't one archaeologist survive? What did he say?"
Qin Ling continued his mysterious tale. "That archaeologist never returned to Beijing. He settled down in Shanghai. You can probably guess who he was. Later, two more similar incidents occurred. During the Cultural Revolution, three hot-blooded Red Guards broke into the chamber intending to smash everything in the name of 'Destroy the Four Olds.' They all died of cerebral hemorrhages before they could even start. After that, no one dared set foot inside again."
"Li Qi?" Fei Ri smiled. "So he's just really afraid of dying? Didn't you people investigate him?"
"Of course we did," Qin Ling nodded. "He only said one sentence: 'Take nothing, disturb nothing, and nothing will happen.' So the builders of the library decided to leave the underground palace alone and simply constructed the fifth stack on top of it. For many years, everything remained peaceful."
"And my grandmother?"
"After Teacher Murong entered the chamber, she stayed inside for a full three hours. When she came out, she simply sighed deeply and said nothing."
"Grandma truly had the bearing of a great master," Fei Ri said, blinking. "Alright, spill it. You and those five old foxes put on such a big show and got my hopes so high. What exactly do you want from me?"
Qin Ling was stunned for a moment, then let out a long sigh. "If anyone still says you're just a fifteen-year-old kid, I'll fight them to the death. What kind of fifteen-year-old is this old soul?"
"Don't change the subject!" Fei Ri said with a hint of smugness. "Reading a book thoroughly is like living one life; skimming one is like watching one life go by. For someone who has lived hundreds of lives and observed tens of thousands more, your little act with those five old men was completely transparent."
Qin Ling said, "The truth is, we all want to solve the mystery of this chamber. As far as we know, both Li Qi and your grandmother spent countless hours researching historical records from the Qin to the Ming dynasties about this area, but neither of them ever published their findings. Only on her deathbed did your grandmother tell Old Mr. Chen Dan and Old Ms. Ge Fanglin: 'The secret of the chamber can only be solved by The One.'"
"'Solved by The One'?" Fei Ri gave a faint, knowing smile, his eyes sparkling with amusement. "You've all misunderstood. It doesn't mean that I am 'The One' who can solve it. 'The One' most likely refers to time — meaning it will take one very long period of dedicated research before the mystery can finally be unraveled."
Qin Ling shrugged. "Who knows? But from every record we have, one thing is certain: as long as no treasures are removed and the chamber itself is not directly damaged, everyone who has entered and left has remained perfectly safe. So while we hope you'll investigate, we must remind you — don't make the same mistakes those people did."
Fei Ri waved his hand. "Got it. In that case, I'm going home to sleep. When I feel like it, I'll take a look inside the chamber."
Fei Ri had been in high spirits lately. At the very least, regaining unrestricted access to the six level-1 stacks and thirteen Unnamed Stacks was enough to keep him grinning from ear to ear for ten days or half a month. In the past, borrowing books required advance preparation and formal requests. Now he could wander aimlessly through the stacks, flipping through whatever caught his fancy. This kind of complete freedom was exactly what Fei Ri lived for.
However, the moment when he finally "felt like it" didn't come until six months later. During those six months, Chen Dan, Ge Fanglin, and the others were perfectly content; the five peerless treasures — the Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies, the Weibian Fragmentary Slips, the Nine Tripods Inscriptions, the Loulan Ancient Volume, and the design drafts for the seismograph and celestial globe — were more than enough to keep them happily occupied for years. Only Qin Ling, apart from his meetings, kept pestering Fei Ri about any progress on the secret chamber.
Finally, Fei Ri grew a little annoyed. So on an autumn afternoon, he "very happily" arrived at the chamber carrying a cloth bundle.
Inside the seventh Unnamed Stack, he used the twentieth key to open an ordinary-looking bookcase. Behind it was a hidden door, and behind the door, a descending corridor. Carrying his bundle, Fei Ri walked down while clicking his tongue in admiration at the brickwork on both sides. No plaster, no borders — yet through incredibly complex interlocking patterns alone, the Qin artisans had created a passage that had stood firm for thousands of years without collapsing. He had never imagined Qin-dynasty construction technology had reached such heights.
At the end of the corridor stood two heavy stone doors. Fei Ri slowly turned the coiling-dragon wheel beside the entrance. Sand flowed from the side channel into a square hopper below, powering the mechanism that gradually opened the thousand-jin doors with a deep rumble, revealing the entire underground palace.
The palace was perfectly square, approximately fifty meters on each side. Eight pillars supported the ceiling in what appeared to be a deliberately irregular arrangement. Fei Ri nodded appreciatively. "Not bad, not bad at all. Using the North Star as the central guide and scattering the positions of the Big Dipper among them effectively prevents the instability and deformation that regular shapes would suffer. That's why the palace has endured a thousand years of geological changes without shifting."
The four walls were covered with ancient myths and legends of gods and monsters. In the very center of the palace, a five-meter-square space had been left empty, occupied only by a stone stele. The body of the stele was painted sky-blue and adorned with vermilion dragon patterns. In her Archaeological Notes, Murong Qing had recorded that these dragon patterns were actually an ancient script known as "dragon-script tadpole writing" — a variant of tadpole script used exclusively by royal or imperial ancestral temple shamans to record major events.
"Heavenly script guards the dragon vein,
Souls reside within jade.
A thousand years of sun and moon
Nurture spirit into the Dao.
Do not startle, do not disturb;
Seek nothing, lose nothing.
Take rashly, damage rashly —
Life perishes, soul perishes."
Fei Ri did not rush toward the center. Instead, he carefully examined the countless treasures scattered from the entrance all the way to the stele.
"Zhou ancestral temple's divine Nine-Turn Cauldron, King Wen's Pre-Heaven Eight Trigrams Chart, Chu's Yunmeng Thunder Beast Pearl, Zhao's State-Transmitting Tiger Tally…" Fei Ri muttered to himself. "So many priceless artifacts gathered together, yet no historical record mentions them? And they survived countless wars and upheavals untouched — a true miracle!"
What astonished him even more was that these objects — which would have been considered peerless treasures even in the late Qin period — had been scattered carelessly across the floor. Whatever they were meant to protect must be of unimaginable value.
"There really is something wrong here." Fei Ri crouched and picked up a string of pearls that sparkled brilliantly under his flashlight. Hepu Eight Rare Pearls. Among every hundred thousand ordinary Hepu pearls, only one perfectly round, exceptionally large pearl of pure, unusual color would form — a "Rare Pearl." A single Rare Pearl was worth nearly as much as a hundred thousand ordinary ones. They came in eight colors: red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, purple, and black. The string in Fei Ri's hand contained one of each color. In the Warring States period, this complete set could have bought ten cities.
To Fei Ri, the true wonder of these Eight Rare Pearls lay not in their value, but in how perfectly they had been preserved. Pearls are biological secretions and have a limited lifespan. Over time, even the finest pearls yellow, fade, and eventually turn to powder. No archaeological find had ever yielded pearls older than a few hundred years. So how had this string from the late Qin survived intact?
A passage from Murong Qing's private diary — which Fei Ri had once dismissed as nonsense — suddenly resurfaced in his mind:
"The secret chamber lies north of Beijing. Looking at the surrounding geography, the land to the west rises in stepped plateaus. The Tianshan Mountains and Tibetan Plateau concentrate heavenly yang energy, forcing yin energy eastward across the plains. To the east, the sea tides — especially the Bohai Sea, enclosed on three sides by land — cause yin energy to accumulate. Influenced by this eastward flow of yin, the area beneath Beijing sits precisely where the yin dragon wanders across the sea-eye. Through my research, I have confirmed that the secret chamber was built directly above this sea-eye of the wandering yin dragon. Long exposure to the ultimate yin energy of heaven and earth has created a strange geomagnetic field. Perhaps this is the key to explaining the chamber's anomalies."
If Murong Qing's judgment was correct, these treasures had been transformed by the ultimate yin energy of heaven and earth, changing their properties so they would neither decay nor be destroyed. When outsiders removed them, the accumulated yin energy would cause sudden death. In that case, the best way to test it was with a body of pure yang and tools of pure yang.
Fei Ri seemed completely unconcerned by the warning against "taking rashly." With a devil-may-care attitude, he slipped the string of Eight Rare Pearls into his pocket.
In truth, Murong Qing had begun in-depth research on the chamber immediately after her first visit twenty years earlier and had never stopped until her death. In her final years, she had immersed herself in feng shui, the Five Elements, yin-yang theory, shamanism, and other ancient esoteric studies, finally forming a preliminary understanding of the chamber's secrets. To counteract its harmful effects, she had also collected several legendary treasures. With her connections and keen eye, once she began collecting, the result was inevitable: a gathering of extraordinary artifacts.
Apart from the five items Fei Ri had already given away, the remaining three of Murong Qing's Eight Treasures were all related to the secret chamber.
The seemingly ordinary broken bronze rod in Fei Ri's bundle was something Murong Qing had picked up at a scrap yard in Hangzhou. No one knew how she identified it, but she had declared it to be the famous Warring States sword Gan Jiang.
The ring on Fei Ri's left hand had an equally astonishing origin. Legend said the Moon-Gazing Heaven-Piercing Rhinoceros was entirely yin in nature, except for the tip of its horn, which contained the single spark of true yang capable of piercing through the veil between worlds. This ring was a Tang-dynasty relic, carved from the essence of a thousand-year-old Moon-Gazing Heaven-Piercing Rhinoceros horn. Even the tiny shavings left from its carving, when burned, could illuminate the activities of ghosts and spirits — giving rise to the famous allusion "burning the rhinoceros horn."
The last item seemed slightly less impressive in comparison: a wooden carving of a three-legged toad. Murong Qing had left no note about its origin, yet she had ranked it first among the Eight Treasures and specifically instructed in her will that these three particular items must never be given to anyone else.
Fei Ri steadied himself and continued toward the stone stele at the center of the palace. By now his flashlight was running low; its beam had turned dim and yellowish, barely illuminating the stele ahead. Just as Fei Ri was about to curse the shady battery seller, he felt a cold, sinister pressure surge toward him.
The rhinoceros-horn ring on his left hand suddenly emitted a soft, moon-white glow. The light grew brighter and brighter until it formed a brilliant beam that shone directly onto the stele, replacing the failing flashlight.
Under the rhinoceros light, the stele began to release wisps of gray mist. As the mist flowed and spread, the vermilion dragon-script tadpole characters seemed to come alive, writhing on the stone surface. An eerie atmosphere and a pressure as tangible as ice enveloped Fei Ri. Especially inside his mind — it felt as though someone were repeatedly stabbing him with needles. He wanted to scream, but no sound would come out.