Amid the silence, Ding Panling said: “Let’s look again, think more about it, and not rush to conclusions.”
The Drifting Cave hadn’t closed yet. Ding Panling called Ding Changsheng and Ding Qi to go observe it again. Yi Sa and Zong Hang didn’t join in – after being in the water, their energy was too depleted, especially at this high altitude, so they needed proper rest.
The two walked around the camp and found their relocated tent. Going inside, they saw that due to the overall move, the sleeping bags, clothes, and luggage were all mixed up together.
Yi Sa didn’t care – she just picked up her sleeping bag, shook it out, and crawled right in. Zong Hang was more patient, organizing things and even collecting the scattered small fish from the fishing machine one by one.
Yi Sa noticed and remarked casually: “They’re all spoiled, why bother with them?”
Zong Hang didn’t respond. Even if something meaningful was broken, he didn’t want to throw it away. After collecting them all, he put them in a plastic bag, sealed it tightly with a secure knot, and only then got into his sleeping bag.
It was already dawn, typically when people are most sleepy, but having just done intense exercise in cold water, they were quite alert.
Zong Hang turned his head to look at Yi Sa.
She hadn’t closed her eyes either and was staring at the tent ceiling with furrowed brows.
Zong Hang turned his body toward her, sensing she was about to say something.
Sure enough.
Without looking at him, Yi Sa directed her question to him: “When Ding Panling said not to rush to conclusions, what do you think that means?”
Isn’t that obvious?
Zong Hang said: “He probably feels that current speculations don’t hold up.”
Yi Sa slowly closed her eyes.
Indeed, there was a giant Taisui in the Drifting Cave.
And in the Jintang Cave, there were countless corpses.
Everything that needed to be revealed was out in the open, yet the story behind it all remained shrouded in fog.
Early the next morning, Yi Sa was awakened by the noisy commotion and the rumbling of vehicles – it seemed quite a few people were leaving.
Zong Hang was still in deep sleep. Yi Sa didn’t wake him, just put on some clothes and went out to look. She learned that the Drifting Cave had sealed up – they recorded the whole process with handheld cameras. In the footage, the soil gradually converged in a spiral pattern, and in the end, except for leaving a circular mark, it wasn’t much different from the surrounding ground.
The group that left early had received instructions from Ding Panling to rush to the next possible “ground opening” location, based on the Drifting Cave’s previous movement patterns.
Yi Sa’s heart stirred: if they were still going to track the Drifting Cave, that meant things weren’t over.
She went to find Ding Panling.
It was already light out, but the lamp in Ding Panling’s tent was still on. Yi Sa lifted the curtain and went in to find Ding Panling sitting at the table with a pen in hand. The table was covered with papers filled with dense writing and markings, along with many crumpled paper balls. The bed was exactly as it had been the night before – clearly, he hadn’t slept at all.
Yi Sa hesitated, wondering if she shouldn’t disturb him, but Ding Panling seemed unbothered and invited her to sit at the table.
As she sat down, Yi Sa glanced at the papers on the table – many had the word “Taisui” written on them.
Ding Panling noticed her gaze and asked directly: “Do you think it’s formidable?”
Yi Sa nodded: “Besides humans, having something else that can think and has consciousness – that’s not just formidable, it’s terrifying.”
“Then what do you think its constraints are?”
Are there any?
Yi Sa shook her head.
Ding Panling flipped through the papers and handed one over – it had a familiar diagram showing the Drifting Cave’s trajectory.
“Have you noticed that no matter how it drifts or moves, it never leaves the Three Rivers Source area? If it’s so capable, why doesn’t it drift to Poyang Lake or Hukou?”
A spark flashed in Yi Sa’s mind, and she blurted out: “It can’t leave this place?”
Ding Panling nodded: “I checked the materials last night. Taisui grows underground, survives on water, and is extremely cold-resistant. The Three Rivers Source region has a very special geography, especially its water. As the source of all waters, Li Bai’s poem says ‘Yellow River’s waters come from heaven,’ believing the source waters are all heavenly water, unpolluted and purest – this kind of water likely both enabled and restricted it, making it impossible to leave.”
Yi Sa’s heart pounded.
Indeed, as source water flows downstream, it takes in all sorts of things – mud and rotting grass, blood and corpses, foul and turbid matter – the water quality becomes indescribable. This Taisui probably couldn’t handle it at all.
So it couldn’t leave, no wonder it had to work through others.
Ding Panling pushed over another paper: “I also listed what it has done over these years.”
Yi Sa picked it up to look – there were several lines.
The first line read: Ancestral Master, Ancestral Tablet, Three Families.
“The tablet?”
“Yes,” Ding Panling sighed a bit, “These days, checking this and that, we haven’t paid much attention to the ancestral tablet. But thinking about its functions, it’s not just an ordinary ancestral tablet – it must have come from the Taisui too.”
“When our three families unlock Jintang, every time we use the ancestral tablet, we respectfully say things like ‘please let the Ancestral Master possess’ – ‘possession’ actually means giving up self-control, letting others control your behavior and mind – what do you think the ancestral tablet is like?”
Yi Sa remembered at the bottom of Poyang Lake, when Jiang Jun pressed the ancestral tablet to his forehead, the nearby water ghosts, including Ding Yudie hiding in the silt, couldn’t escape its influence.
She also recalled in the Breathing Nest, when Jiang Jun pressed his forehead against hers, her mind instantly became chaotic, as if interfered with, and many unfamiliar fragmentary scenes appeared.
The ancestral tablet seemed like an entity with extremely strong mental power, able to influence and even control people’s thoughts.
Yi Sa murmured in disbelief: “The brain?”
Ding Panling smiled: “Hearing you say that puts me at ease. Last night I was also thinking, could this ancestral tablet be the Taisui’s brain? Then I thought it was too absurd, but now it seems I’m not the only one thinking this way – when using the tablet, it must be pressed against the forehead, and it must be used in water, showing that under specific conditions, it can indeed control people’s behavior.”
Right, in the Jintang Cave at Hukou, Ding Yudie’s every move was completely controlled, though there was a time limit.
She continued reading.
– Jintang Cave, Breathing Nest, corpses.
– In ’96, luring people to the Drifting Cave, the first batch of Three Families’ mutation.
Ding Panling knew she had finished reading and took the paperback: “For any action, motives can be concealed or misinterpreted, but what has been done is a concrete fact. It indeed arranged the Three Families’ inheritance, built the Breathing Nest underwater, and deliberately used the pot-turning incident to lure people to the Drifting Cave…”
A flash of insight struck Yi Sa: if the ancestral tablet equaled the Taisui’s brain, and the Three Families provided it with eyes, then arranging pot-turning would be too easy – it just needed to deliberately make mistakes when controlling water puppets, or entering Jintang Cave but fail to retrieve items, that would be pot-turning!
This way, the Taisui’s actions seemed to form a rough pattern.
Yi Sa took a blank paper and drew a straight line, then divided it into sections.
The first stage lasted very long, thousands of years. Two things happened in parallel: first, establishing the Three Families with continuous inheritance; second, perfecting the Jintang Cave – its scale suggested it wasn’t built overnight.
The second stage was the last hundred years or so, when it started arranging pot-turning, making the Three Families anxious and beginning to think about finding the Drifting Cave.
The third stage started in ’96 when the first batch entering the Drifting Cave mutated…
Yi Sa’s pen paused here: “The Taisui’s original intention probably wasn’t to create mutations. I guess it wanted to control a batch of people, then assign them to enter the Breathing Nest to do what came next, but unexpectedly, this batch of people had problems and were locked in the kiln factory.”
Ding Panling shared this view: “The ideal situation would be these people unchanged on the outside but different inside, so they could both deceive everyone and carry out plans smoothly. Who knew some would die on the spot and some would mutate – this also exposed another of its weaknesses: it couldn’t control this transformation well, could only let nature take its course, so the results were uneven.”
And almost all subsequent stories unfolded from this – the secret gradually leaked out, and attempts to cover it up only led to its slow revelation.
Yi Sa suddenly thought of something: “What about that prophecy? Wasn’t there a prophecy from the Ancestral Master? During the consecutive pot-turning, it was also the time of ‘flying without feathers, facing without face, knowing all under heaven while sitting still, disaster strikes before weapons clash’ – everyone should have turned to the Drifting Cave for help then.”
Ding Panling said: “This prophecy was passed down orally within the Three Families, all saying it was spoken by the Ancestral Master, but when seriously examining it, it can’t be verified. You know, in the Xia Dynasty era, there were no written records.”
“This time when checking materials at the ancestral hall, I specifically asked them to pay attention to this. They replied that the earliest related record they could find was from the Song Dynasty, with a few mentions in the Ming Dynasty.”
Yi Sa didn’t see a problem with this: “The Song Dynasty was still thousands of years ago.”
Ding Panling shook his head: “You probably don’t pay much attention to ancient prophecy books. In the Tang Dynasty, someone named Yuan Tiangan co-authored a famous book called ‘Pushing Back Chart’.”
“This ‘Pushing Back Chart’ was reportedly written on Tang Taizong’s orders, predicting national fate for over two thousand years after Tang. Its fifty-sixth symbol has a line that says ‘disaster strikes before weapons clash’ – isn’t that identical to what the Ancestral Master spoke? There’s another line saying ‘the flying one is not a bird’ – doesn’t that seem very similar to ‘flying without feathers’?”
Yi Sa hadn’t processed it yet: “The Ancestral Master’s prophecy overlapped with ‘Pushing Back Chart’?”
Ding Panling smiled bitterly: “Sasa, at this crucial moment, your mind is muddled. The actual written record, ‘Pushing Back Chart’ came first. Moreover, the ‘Pushing Back Chart’ that survives today is a simplified version edited by later generations. It’s said that when it first appeared, approximate time nodes were all given, but people at the time, fearing the revelation of heaven’s secrets would cause panic, deleted the times and many details, leaving only ambiguous prophecies and verses.”
Yi Sa was stunned for a long while.
– The ‘Pushing Back Chart’ came first, this prophecy already existed, originating from Yuan Tiangan.
– But later, the Three Families’ internal tradition said: that this was spoken by the Ancestral Master in the Xia Dynasty, and when this prophecy came true would be the time of pot-turning.
She tried to sort it out: “The Taisui knew this prophecy and knew when it would come true, so that means the timing of pot-turning was set long ago?”
Ding Panling nodded: “It had a timetable, seeming to have arranged what to do in which period.”
Yi Sa’s back grew cold: “Then what does it want to do? Those many corpses in Jintang Cave must be meant to be used – control corpses to revive, replace humans, become new rulers?”
Ding Panling laughed: “You young people watch too many movies… What meaning would replace humans have for it? Anyway, everything is still uncertain, don’t rush to conclusions. I’ve already notified Ding Yudie and Yi Yunqiao. When they arrive and we have enough water ghosts, I want to go down to the Drifting Cave myself. Hopefully, then, there will be discoveries.”
As he spoke, he rubbed his temples, showing complete exhaustion, and gathered up the materials on the table.
This indicated the conversation was over. Yi Sa knew better and stood to leave, but her gaze caught something that made her stop.
With the papers gathered up, she saw that soft-covered notebook again.
She couldn’t help but ask directly: “Uncle Panling, what’s recorded in this notebook? I remember seeing it in Uncle Ding’s office too, and you’ve brought it here – it must be important?”
Ding Panling hesitated for a moment, seeming to make some decision: “Since you’ve asked, it’s good timing. I was thinking some things needed to be told to Zong Hang through you.”
Zong Hang?
Yi Sa’s heart jumped, and she sat back down unconsciously, her hand at her side involuntarily curling: “What does this have to do with Zong Hang?”
Ding Panling pushed the notebook over: “These are our observation records of physical symptoms for the survivors from ’96. Regrettably, none of them lived long. The shortest-lived three to five years, the longest was your sister – twenty-one years until now. But according to Changsheng, she already has a putrid smell, which is a precursor to death. This is why Changsheng and others grew lax in their guard, allowing her to escape.”
He watched Yi Sa’s hand as she opened the notebook – she probably hadn’t noticed that several of her fingertips were trembling uncoordinatedly.
“Generally, when delirium symptoms appear, death is already on the schedule. More serious is bleeding – healed wounds suddenly bleeding without reason, with unpredictable intervals but increasing frequency, accompanied by hair withering, teeth, and nails falling out. Finally, when the body develops a putrid smell, even cutting with a knife might not draw blood…”
Yi Sa’s mind went blank, feeling the words on the page twist and spin, completely unclear.
She could only mechanically ask: “Then from when my sister showed delirium to when her body had a putrid smell…”
Ding Panling said: “Three to four years, less than five.”
Yi Sa smiled stiffly, her speech somewhat impaired: “Then… what should I tell Zong Hang?”
“He’s still okay – he only mutated a few months ago, and judging by appearance, his condition is much better than Yi Xiao’s. Maybe he can last longer, twenty years, even thirty years is possible. But he has the right to know what he’ll face and should know that compared to normal people, his life will be much shorter. Telling him in advance lets him prepare mentally, value his future time more, spend more time on worthwhile things, and not pursue things without results, right?”