Daomu Biji: Wu Xie’s Private Notes - Chapter 29: The Book of the Ruler of Dead Soldiers

About the text written in “The Book of the Ruler of Dead Soldiers” (1), I transcribed the parts that I could understand. Some of the writing was unclear, and some of the characters were too warped for the computer to display them, but I converted what I could to modern Chinese.

When King Shang was twenty-five years old, his father passed away and he inherited the position of Grand Sima (2). He led the army and robbed graves. The treasures obtained were used to pay the army and help fund conquests.

One day, King Shang and his men found an ancient tomb, but they couldn’t determine what dynasty it was from. When they opened the coffin, there was a giant snake inside, which sprang up and tried to kill the king.

But King Shang was courageous and strong, and he lifted his sword and cut the snake. He thought that there must be something evil afoot since the giant snake was lying inside the coffin, so he cut the snake’s stomach open. There he found a purple-enameled box, but he couldn’t open it no matter how hard he tried.

That night, a white-bearded man appeared in the King Shang’s dream, and asked him angrily, “Why did you kill me?”

The king was a violent man by nature and had killed lots of people, so he said in a reproachful tone, “I killed you because I wanted to! There’s no other reason!”

The white-bearded man got even angrier and turned into the giant snake the king had seen earlier that day. It opened its mouth and tried to eat the king, but he wielded his sword and wounded the snake. He then stepped on its head and said, “You didn’t die when I cut your stomach open earlier, so now I’m going to cut off your head. Can you survive that?”

The snake spoke in the human tongue and begged, “I’m willing to give you two treasures in exchange for my life.” The king agreed, so the snake told him how to open the purple-enameled box and taught him how to use the treasures that were inside.

After the king memorized it by heart, he had the thought that no one should know about this secret except for himself, so he beheaded the snake.

The king woke up in a pool of blood and realized that it hadn’t just been a dream. He did as the snake had told him and opened the purple-enameled box successfully, finding that the treasures inside were just as the snake had described. The king didn’t want his men to know about it, so he not only killed all of them, but their family members too. He spared no one, not even those in their infancy.

With these two treasures, the king got out of every dangerous situation safely and became invincible. The power of the country was gathered in his hands, and the emperor (3) relied heavily on him.

Many years later, however, the king was old and seriously ill, and all the doctors said that there was no hope of recovery. One day, he dreamed of the giant snake again, and it said, “It’s time for you to die.” All those people the king had killed before appeared behind the snake, so numerous he couldn’t tell how many there were.

He woke up terrified.

The king had an advisor known as Mr. Iron Mask, who was a master of numerology and feng shui. There was no one in the world who could compare to him. He said to the king, “I had heard that there were jade burial armors in ancient times, which could help you gain immortality if you wore them. Unfortunately, there aren’t any jade burial armors to be found in the world. They can only be found in ancient tombs.”

The king would rather believe such things existed than not, so he read through a bunch of ancient books and found a giant tomb from the last dynasty. He suspected there was a jade burial armor inside, so he deployed three thousand soldiers. They worked in the mountains for half a year until they found the imperial tomb.

There was a giant tree inside the tomb that he named Nine-Headed Snake Cypress, and a jade bed beneath the tree. There was a skeleton-thin male corpse in black jade armor threaded with gold sitting on the jade bed.

Mr. Iron Mask said happily, “This is jade burial armor. The corpse may look dead, but it’s not. It’s a blood zombie. He must have been a withered old man when he was alive. Ever since the burial, he would shed his skin every hundred years and grow new skin, making the corpse ten years younger each time.”

Mr. Iron Mask used a strange method to subdue the blood zombie before removing it from the jade burial armor. He then put the blood zombie in a stone coffin in another chamber.

Based on Mr. Iron Mask’s plan, the king took a pill that could fake his death and had word sent to the emperor. When the emperor learned of his death and that he had a strange ability to come and go freely between the human world and the underworld, he became fearful and bestowed upon the king the posthumous title of “King Shang” (4). The funeral was much grander than those of any dukes, and was almost on par with that of a prince.

The king’s tomb was built on top of the imperial tomb and many difficult mechanisms were set up. There were seven fake coffins, while the king’s real body was hidden in the thousand-year-old ancient tree in the imperial tomb.

On the day the construction of the tomb was finished, all the craftsmen were killed and buried in the river, and the king’s followers were ordered to take poisonous pills. Only the two followers that the king trusted the most were left: one man and one woman. When the king was buried, the two of them also poisoned themselves and died.

The other parts were either difficult or almost impossible to read because after Qin Shi Huang (5) burned books and killed scholars, many things from the Shang dynasty, Zhou dynasty, and Spring and Autumn Period were lost. There were a lot of especially rare words that were lost as well. Even if we had people from the Chinese Academy of Sciences look into the text, it may take them decades to completely understand the words.

At that time, I couldn’t understand what was weird about it until Uncle Three mentioned that the above paragraphs were different from the other parts of the text. To be honest, this could have been avoided if we had a master of Chinese Studies with us. For people like us, we could only admit that we fell into the trap. (6)

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TN Notes:

(1) Could also be called “The Book of King Shang”. This chapter is basically a summary of Vol 1 Chapter 26 “Cavern of Blood Zombies”.

(2) Even though the text said “King”, his position was probably somewhere between marquess and earl. During the Eastern Han dynasty, the term “Grand Sima” came to mean Minister of War. More information here

(3) The emperor here referred to the emperor mentioned back in Sand Sea Chapter 133. It was established that he was really just a “duke” at that time.

(4) Shang here can mean someone who has died young, or someone who has died at war. (Also pulled from Sand Sea Chapter 133)

(5) Qin Shi Huang became China’s first emperor when he was 38 after the Qin had conquered all of the other Warring States and unified all of China in 221 BC. Wiki link

(6) Since the ancient text was supposed to be difficult to read, there was no way Wu Xie could have understood even parts of the text. Someone deliberately made this part of the text easy to read. It was a scheme.