Daomu Biji: Tibetan Sea Flower Novel – Book 2 Summary

Table of Contents | Daomu Biji Universe

藏海花 2
Tibetan Sea Flower (Book 2)

Pangzi put a dynamite to the bronze gate and successfully blew up a part of the gate. Right after that, Wu Xie and Pangzi were attacked by some dark shadows, but the two couldn’t quite make out what they were.

It turned out that those were lumps of muds that shot out from the ground after the bronze gate was destroyed. The mud was extremely thick, feeling almost like chewing gum. 

A hole the size of more than ten men was formed on the bronze gate. Behind the gate was absolute blackness. Shining a torch light onto it, Wu Xie estimated the inside to be a cave the size of a football field, where lots of bronze pillars were supporting the ceiling. The entire cave was made of bronze, its surface carved with many intricate patterns. Wu Xie remarked that this was an impossible feast for humans, because in order to empty the core of a giant piece of bronze into this cave, they would have to burn it from inside and have people carve out the core. At least 10,000 people would have to die if such a process actually happened. The only other possibility for this to be done was that this bronze cave was carved in space — where no gravity existed.

Taking a few steps forward, they found a painting on the ground that looked like a circle of upside-down bowls. As the two came closer, these bowls looked very similar to the “turquoise shells” that were seen in the notebook of the dead German that Men You Ping found on the snow mountains many years prior.

Looking around, in the middle of the circle was a tiny meteorite that seemed to be made of the same material as the one found inside the tomb of Queen Mother of The West1You can refer back to Main Story Book 5: Ghost Kingdom of The Snakes to know who Queen Mother of The West is.. Understanding that all the different paintings would form a story, Wu Xie looked around and located the second painting. This was exactly the same as the one found in the notebook of the dead German. Wu Xie deduced that the “upside-down bowls” weren’t turquoise shells, rather, they were tiny meteorites.

Together, Pangzi and Wu Xie concluded that this whole cave was in fact part of a bronze meteorite that fell into this mountain from space. After discovering the meteorite, people dug out a hole and made the carvings onto its inner surface.

Wu Xie started to wonder what the connection between this bronze gate of the snow mountains, the Bronze Gate of Changbai mountains and the Bronze Tree of Qinling2You can refer to Main Story Book 3: Qinling’s Sacred Tree was. Also, how could there be a bronze meteorite in space?

Wu Xie made an estimation that the original meteorite must have descended onto Earth from the east of China, travelling through the troposphere and breaking into many smaller pieces. Some pieces must have fallen deep below the Earth surface, while some remained above the Earth surface, such as this one in the snow mountains and the one in the tomb of Queen Mother of The West. Many of them probably had sunken into the ocean. It was most likely that there was another big piece in Changbai mountains, where the Bronze Gate stood.

Perhaps this meteorite descended onto Earth millions of years ago. How did the people back then locate the projectile of the broken pieces and came to them here in the middle of the snow mountains? 

Moving on to the next painting, they saw a depiction of many people carving the inside of the cave. These people had a lot of arms, looking almost like spiders. Wu Xie concluded that they must be King Wan Nu3You can refer to Main Story Book 4: Heavenly Palace on The Clouds.. 

While they were talking, Zhang Haixing disappeared. The two turned back to find her standing beside what looked like a man’s corpse covered in mud. They wiped off the mud to find that this was an old man covered in an opaque-white layer that looked like gemstone. His clothes and his corpse were almost perfectly preserved under the opaque-white layer.

Zhang Haixing explained that she had seen such a corpse before in another tomb. This kind of corpse was called a “jade mummy”, in which the corpse started to harden and turn into jade after a long time of being covered in mud. Usually, there would be something hidden in the chest of such a mummy. 

This mummy’s chest was completely empty, showing that the thing inside its chest might have broken out. Thinking so, they shined the torch light around and seemed to see a black figure standing in the corner. As they directed the torch light to that corner, a bronze pillar with extraordinarily intricate carvings came into sight, which roughly had the diameter of a rice bowl. There would be one such pillar every 4 or 5 meters around the “jade mummy”, as though they were placed here to ‘guard’ this mummy.

Looking one more time at the patterns on the ground, Wu Xie deduced that they might be carved as such to control the flow of a certain liquid, which would reveal a complete picture or whatever secret hidden in these patterns. They tried to pour water on it, but nothing was found. Wu Xie decided to try using his own blood, which had a different density from water and would flow at a different speed.

After losing too much blood, Wu Xie lost consciousness. He had a strange dream, where he recalled a rather mystic conversation he once had with his grandfather Wu Lao Gou. In the dream, Wu Lao Gou taught the young Wu Xie that someone who held the most secrets would also possess the most power, but at the same time, secrets were the beginning of all sufferings. 

Later, he had a dream of having a conversation with Pangzi, in which Wu Xie told Pangzi that if someone wanted to rule the world, he must be able to debunk all the secrets that this world had. In Wu Xie’s theory, the Zhang family must have debunked lots of secrets through their hundreds of years of raiding tombs, and that they knew that at the end of all secrets lay the end of time. 

Wu Xie then woke up to realise that someone had stitched the wound on his palm. Meanwhile, Pangzi was researching on his laptop while Zhang Haixing had gone to further inspect this place. Pangzi told Wu Xie that after Wu Xie fainted, he also tried to pour his own blood on the patterns but it was fruitless. Unlike Wu Xie’s blood which smoothly spread out across the patterns, Pangzi’s blood got stuck at one place. This had Pangzi deduce that due to the Kylin Scale that Wu Xie absorbed many years back, his blood had grown to be similar to that of Xiao Ge. Discussing over and over, they came to a probable conclusion that only people with similar blood to Xiao Ge were meant to enter this place. So what was the purpose this cave after all?

It came to their mind that this place might be a tomb, and the coffin of this tomb was none other than the strange “jade mummy” that they found earlier. In addition, this so-called mummy was actually a living person whose brain was dead due to absorption of mud, but the cells and tissues in his body were still alive till this day. Something was buried inside this mummy’s belly, but by the time Wu Xie and Pangzi found him, that “thing” had crawled out. 

At this point, Zhang Haixing came back and told them that she had found that “thing”. She asked Wu Xie to look at his own wrist. Numerous black wool-like threads were accumulating around his wrist. While Wu Xie was taken aback, Zhang Haixing revealed that she wasn’t actually a Zhang family member. Back at the monastery, the test that they carried out was to see whether Wu Xie’s blood was the right blood that would help them decode the secret of this tomb. She tied up Wu Xie and made a deep cut on his leg to pour more blood onto the pattern. Wu Xie struggled to roll to a far corner, then he suddenly saw Zhang Haixing stunned. 

Wu Xie fearfully looked behind to find a huge figure the height of three grown men. It had a big head and many, many hands, like a monstrous spider. Meanwhile, Wu Xie’s blood had splattered on both the floor and the walls and was moving with very strange movements, but regardless of where it was, it seemed to want to avoid that creature. 

At the critical moment, Pangzi appeared and dragged Wu Xie to one corner. They only managed to breathe for a second before that creature started attacking them both, which prompted Pangzi to detonate a grenade, but it didn’t seem to have any impact on the creature at all. All of a sudden, Zhang Haixing popped out and tried to attack them again, but the two managed to run towards the entrance of the tomb. Pangzi, believing that the mud here was inflammable, set it on fire and a large space was lit up. 

The three found places to hide themselves. Meanwhile, Wu Xie poked his head out to peek at the creature to discover that it was wearing a sort of Tibetan armour. At this point, Wu Xie realised that this creature was exactly the Yama that he saw on the wool painting of “Yama Rides The Corpse”.

A stone was sent flying from somewhere, hitting Pangzi right in the head. Zhang Haixing jumped out again and started kicking Pangzi brutally. A fight ensued between the two of them, then suddenly, Zhang Haixing fell into a crack on the floor. Feng walked out from behind a rock, his whole body covered in blood. He told Wu Xie and Pangzi that this woman Zhang Haixing wanted to kill them all.

After a while, Pangzi went down to pull Zhang Haixing up. She was completely unconscious with wounds scattering all over her body. Wu Xie examined her and found that she was unlikely to wear any mask like Zhang Haike. Her fingers weren’t as long as an average Zhang family member, which had Wu Xie and Pangzi wonder if the entire group was really from the Zhang family like they claimed. 

Feng went on to tell them his discoveries about Qiu Dekao’s company. There were hundreds of Chinese personnel working in the company. Even though they didn’t hold any major chairs in the board, their existence ensured that resources would always be poured into the departments that they worked for. After the passing of Qiu Dekao, the company was bought over by Feng’s current company. Feng’s boss apparently favoured the group of Chinese personnel tremendously, which triggered Feng’s curiosity.

Being in the position of a secretary, Feng went to research on these Chinese personnel to find out that many of them, since the time they worked for Qiu Dekao till now, hadn’t changed in appearance at all. This had Feng come to the conclusion that the board of directors must be attracted by this secret of ‘never getting old’. Feng then initiated a collaboration between his company and this group of Chinese, which resulted in him being sent to Tibet to find out more about this secret. Feng also mentioned that he never trusted these Chinese men, therefore, before this trip, he quietly set up an auto-send parcel that contained all the confidential information about these men. If he was killed during the trip to Tibet, the contents of this parcel would be exposed to many intelligence companies in China. 

Feng went on to say that he had seen this “Yama” creature on a cargo ship his company once received from Qiu Dekao’s company. That cargo ship transported 24 cargos, each of which contained a stone coffin that had never been opened before. They had no issue opening up the first 15 coffins, but upon reaching the 16th, there was nothing but a sort of bronze wrapper inside. A creature crawled out from the bronze wrapper and caused lots of damage to the team.

From that experience, Feng deduced that to deal with the creature, they needed to lure it out away from anywhere that had bronze. Remembering Xiao Ge’s story where he met the amputated lady in the temple, Wu Xie believed that the lady was meant to act as the bait to lure this “Yama” out.

The three decided to use Zhang Haixing as the bait, and to make their trap even more convincing, they put their own body waste, teeth, skin and hair around her. After everything was fully prepared, suddenly, they felt water drop down from an opening above, just like rain. Wu Xie was reminded of the sound of water falling that he once heard from Chen Wenjin’s video when she entered the Bronze Gate. The same thing must have happened there. 

All of the sudden, right in front of them, the rain spread out to form a giant human shape, and the water stream was twinkling in various shades of colours, which induced Pang Zi to believe that some sort of microorganisms lived in the water. The “giant human shape” moved nearer and lowered its head at Zhang Haixing. This time, Wu Xie finally had a chance to take a close look at this “Yama” creature. It was wearing a mask, an armour and behind its back were thousands of hands. A mummy of a thousand hands could only mean one thing — it was King Wan Nu.

The Thousand Hands Mummy started making a series of strange noise. It captured Wu Xie, dislocated his fingers and almost broke him in half, but luckily, Feng appeared and threw a grenade at it, but he forgot to take out the safety pin. Scared, Feng left Wu Xie and Pangzi behind to flee first. Pangzi picked up the grenade again and tried to stuff it into the Thousand Hands Mummy’s face, but as he pulled out its mask, its face was just a structure made of various round stones that carried many holes.

The Thousand Hands Mummy broke one of Wu Xie’s arms and kicked Pangzi far away, but before that, Pangzi managed to stuff the grenade back into Wu Xie’s hand. Wu Xie threw it onto the creature’s back and successfully detonated it. However, the grenade didn’t kill the Thousand Hands Mummy, only almost cutting off its waist. The creature now struggled to stand up. As its armour had been blown away, Wu Xie could look closely into the insides of its body to find a dried human corpse, and from the corpse, sand was leaking out. Pangzi then warned Wu Xie that they mustn’t get caught by this creature, else it might take their bodies to ride on (aka, it would ride on their corpse, just like “Yama Rides The Corpse”).

To escape from the creature, Wu Xie and Pangzi ran deep into the valley inside the cave. There, they found Feng hiding behind one of the boulders. The Thousand Hands Mummy was still chasing behind, but due to the path being blocked by many rocks and boulders, it couldn’t reach them. Finding a safe spot to take shelter, Pangzi tried putting Wu Xie’s dislocated bone back to its original place. To distract Wu Xie so that he wouldn’t focus too much on the pain, Pangzi revealed to Wu Xie a big secret: Five or six years ago, before Xiao Ge left to guard the Bronze Gate, he actually came to meet Pangzi.

Xiao Ge told Pangzi that one day, Wu Xie might go to Tibet. If Wu Xie encountered the following three things in Tibet, Pangzi had to bring a certain item to him. 

Having his curiosity totally aroused, Wu Xie questioned what the three things were. The first was that: Wu Xie would locate a statue of Xiao Ge, which would prove that Wu Xie finally found the place where Xiao Ge’s connection to this world ended. In Xiao Ge’s words, the statue was “the only contrasting image between him and this world”.

Wu Xie moved on to ask what the second thing was, but Pangzi refused to tell him, since by this point in time, Wu Xie still hadn’t encountered it yet. Pangzi insisted that if he told Wu Xie about that thing’s identity, Wu Xie might spend his whole life trying to find it, which was something that neither Pangzi nor Xiao Ge would want to happen. 

Giving up on asking further, Wu Xie then asked if Pangzi brought “that certain item”, to which Pangzi replied that he didn’t have it with him. It lay at an important place that Wu Xie wanted to go to. There would be a lot of items there, and Pangzi would be the one to help Wu Xie spot “that certain item”.

As they were talking, Feng called them over, saying that he found an iron chain amidst the rocks. They tried to pull on it and a big rock above them seemed to go lower. In a blink, the ground below their feet crash down. Luckily, they just fell into a space among many rocks, while above them, the Thousand Hands Mummy seemed to have been crushed flat. Surrounding them were many skeletons clad in Kam Ba Luo clothes. Wu Xie followed a short tunnel to reach a rather large room of about 6 or 7 meters in height. Finding coal furnaces lying on the ground, Wu Xie realised that those people were casting bronze in this place. There were also many pieces of stones that looked like the ones he saw on the Thousand Hands Mummy’s face. 

Looking at the scene, Pangzi started wondering whether this was a place that ‘produced’ “Yama Rides The Corpse” and whether there might be more than one of such creatures lurking around. He suspected that it was a type of “combat mummy” that was intentionally raised by humans. In Pangzi’s knowledge, a “combat mummy” was often made by cutting off its head then pouring sand into its body. Wu Xie then asked him what was so special about that sand, but Pangzi affirmed that it was just normal sand found in the desert, however, it had an interesting origin related to a mysterious, nameless civilisation that existed during the pre-Qin period. Walking deep into the room, they found a short staircase leading to a small pond of rainwater, and there were also signs that the Kam Ba Luo people lived here for a prolonged duration. 

Moving further, they reached yet another short staircase and the water level became higher. There, they found a decaying bronze gate submerged in water that was purple in colour. This proved that the Kam Ba Luo people must be making a copy of the real Bronze Gate here. Why were they making this copy? Was it too swap it with the real one inside Heavenly Palace On The Clouds?

Wu Xie figured that in order to carve out this giant copy, the Kam Ba Luo people must spend a long time in this cave. Was it also the same reason why every 10 years, a Zhang family member must get behind the real Bronze Gate in Changbai mountains? Did Xiao Ge’s 10-year duty behind the Bronze Gate also have something to do with carving these things? 

Regardless of what the truth behind the real Bronze Gate was, right here in the snow mountains of Tibet, the Zhang family had set up a fake gate inside a huge cave with many deadly traps. There was even a village of Kam Ba Luo here, likely to continue making these fake copies. What was the purpose of all this?

As Wu Xie was deep in thoughts, Feng claimed that there was a small stone gate in front of them, which might be their way out of here. A pile of more than 40 skeletons was lying in front of the gate. The three tried to push the gate open but something was stuck in its path, which turned out to be a lump of bronze. They continued pushing and pushing, and when the door finally opened, before their eyes were lots of tools made of bronze and a gas mask. Wu Xie picked up the gas mask to find a skull still wearing a Tibetan-style helmet made of bronze. 

The three turned on the flashlights to look around. This seemed to be a huge storeroom with many wooden structures that looked like bookshelves, each of them carrying lots of items as well as books. In the middle of the room was a structure of the same shape, but this one was made of stone and had various Kam Ba Luo carvings on it. 

Wu Xie believed that this must be a sort of cemetery. The people were buried below the structures and the items were their burial offerings. There was a even a bunch of grenades on one of the wooden structures.

Staring at those grenades, Feng suddenly exclaimed that these items were not burial offerings. 

[End of Tibetan Sea Flower – Book 2]

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Michelle’s note: That’s it, guys. This is the infamous non-ending of Tibetan Sea Flower. The last chapter of this sequel was released in 2015, and until now, no other word has ever been heard about it. Don’t ask me if Nan Pai San Shu is ever going to finish writing it — for all we know, he owes us readers about 9000 endings 😀 Well, to look at things on the bright side, we might still be able to know its ending once Tibetan Sea Flower is adapted into drama. So, stay tuned or stay stuck in this abyss with me forever. 

Thank you for reading until here and I’ll see you in Sea of Sands next! ଘ(੭*ˊᵕˋ)੭* ̀ˋ