The White Lotus

“Gao Zhijian, what are you saying? Are you sure you didn’t misread it?” Chun Xiaoman looked at the brown-covered book in his hand with a puzzled expression.

The words coming out of his mouth were a jumbled mess. She really couldn’t understand what he was talking about. What was this about “no birth, no death”? What was this about something growing out of one’s dantian?

And what was this about a son climbing out of his own mother’s corpse? Was that still a person?

A strange thought popped into Xiaoman’s head. “Could the person who wrote this book be crazy, just like Senior Brother Li?”

Feeling suspected by his companions, Gao Zhijian shoved the book into his pocket and, without a word, kept walking along the wall.

“Hmph.”

Chun Xiaoman was about to pull Bai Lingmiao to follow, but as soon as she touched Bai Lingmiao’s hand, she felt how cold it was.

“What’s wrong, Miaomiao?” Hearing Chun Xiaoman’s inquiry, Bai Lingmiao, whose face was very pale, just shook her head and followed Gao Zhijian’s retreating figure.

As they walked, before long there was another book. This place seemed to be for storing books, but the content of this one was even more obscure and difficult to understand than the last. It would have been better not to have read it.

“Miaomiao, why do you have these strange books in your family’s ancestral hall?” Chun Xiaoman asked the only surviving member of the Bai family.

This place didn’t seem dangerous, but everything—from the White Lotus banners to the contents of the books from before—felt bizarre.

Who in their right mind would build such a huge space under their own ancestral hall to store this kind of random stuff? If it bothered the ancestors buried in the shrine above, weren’t they afraid of getting a scolding in their dreams?

Bai Lingmiao paused for a moment before answering, as if trying hard to recall. “I… I don’t know. I’m a woman. When we used to do ancestor worship, they never let me in here.”

Just then, Gao Zhijian stopped again. His tall, sturdy body stood rigidly still, so that the two women behind him couldn’t tell what was ahead.

“A horse.” Gao Zhijian, rarely, didn’t stutter.

Bai Lingmiao suddenly let go of Chun Xiaoman’s hand, walked in front of Gao Zhijian, and looked up at the ceramic horse’s head, which was larger than her entire body.

The horse’s head was incredibly lifelike, as if it were real. The horse’s two eyes stared straight ahead, putting immense pressure on anyone standing in front of them.

Bai Lingmiao walked under the horse. As she touched its smooth, hard ceramic body, a look of confusion appeared in her eyes. This feeling… it was so familiar.

“This ceramic horse is huge. How big of a kiln would you need to fire it?” Gouwa remarked with awe.

“Huh?!” Startled, Chun Xiaoman turned her head to look at Gouwa, who had suddenly appeared. “When did you get here?”

“Why can’t I come? Seeing you two running over here one after the other, I thought you were splitting the loot without me.” Gouwa circled the giant ceramic horse, examining it.

“Junior Sister Bai, was your Bai family in the ceramic business? Selling a horse this big must be worth at least twenty or thirty taels of silver, right?”

As he spoke, he turned around and bumped straight into a figure in the darkness, giving him a start.

When he saw that the figure was just a headless, armless ceramic mannequin, he cursed under his breath and kicked it.

“I’ve been here before.” Bai Lingmiao’s voice drew the others’ attention.

Bai Lingmiao stared at the towering horse, struggling to recall very faint memories. “My grandfather brought me here. When I was very, very young.”

“That day, I was crying because I wanted to ride a horse. But Grandfather said riding a real horse was too dangerous, so he brought me here to ride this ceramic horse instead. I had a lot of fun that day.”

As she spoke, Bai Lingmiao’s brow furrowed. “I think I remember… the horse flew up. It took me into a painting to play. It was so lively there! Lots of adults and children playing with me! Yes! There’s a painting here!”

Remembering something, Bai Lingmiao spun around and dashed into the darkness. The others were startled and hurried after her.

After just a few steps, they saw Bai Lingmiao stop in front of a wall. There was a painting on the wall, but it only depicted pure white lotuses blooming on a pitch-black water surface. There was no sign of the many people she had mentioned.

“What… what is this place?” At this moment, Bai Lingmiao remembered that Senior Brother Li had once said something to her. It seemed to be about the Bai family doing something bad.

But before, she had been completely overwhelmed by the immense despair of losing her entire family, her emotions nearly broken, and she hadn’t paid any attention to it.

“No, it can’t be. How could it be? My grandfather… my father… and my mother…” Bai Lingmiao thought of the perfect image of her family in her heart, and a look of hesitation appeared on her face.

“Look, that small lotus flower on the wall is actually an oil lamp.” Gouwa took out his flint and went over to light it.

As the white lotuses were lit one by one, everything around them gradually brightened, slowly revealing the full scale of this empty underground grand hall.

What first caught their attention was a mural at the front of the hall. It was massive, and in front of it was a censer for burning incense, proving the mural’s importance to its original owner.

The mural depicted six lifelike black horses galloping. Above the horses floated a blooming white lotus. And on the lotus… there was nothing.

The base color of the mural was a bright yellow, but on that lotus, there was a strangely distorted area that lacked even that base color, exposing the uneven earthen wall directly. It was jarringly out of place.

After looking at the cryptic mural, they began to survey the rest of the hall.

The entire hall was rectangular, with a ceiling a full two zhang high. The hall was open on all sides, with numerous openings that led to unknown places.

It seemed that beneath the entire village of Niuxin Village, there was another underground village.

The walls and ceiling were covered in various intricate patterns. Most were white lotuses, set against an ink-black background at the bottom.

Combined with the three giant ceramic black horses in the center of the hall and the hundreds of unfinished ceramic figures around the edges, Gouwa’s jaw dropped in astonishment. “Tsk, tsk, tsk. Even the emperor’s palace must be as grand as this, right?”

Seeing that there was no danger around, Gao Zhijian put down his wolf-tooth club, scratched his head, and looked at Bai Lingmiao with confusion.

“Miaomiao? What’s wrong? You look terrible. Are you feeling bad? Maybe we should go back up first?” Chun Xiaoman supported Bai Lingmiao and asked softly.

Bai Lingmiao shook her head and gently pushed Xiaoman away. She looked around at everything with a complicated expression, searching for the faint traces of memory that still lingered in her mind.

As she thought, Bai Lingmiao saw the figure of a small child emerge from among the ceramic figures.

She was wearing a tiger-head hat and tiger-head shoes, bundled in a winter coat. Her big, pink eyes were very cute.

“G-Grandpa!”

The little girl stumbled forward, and just as she was about to fall, she lunged forward, landing in the arms of a beaming old man.

“Aiya~ my good little girl. Do you love Grandpa?”