Chapter 32: Ancient Capital Part 2

He left the floating lamp on the bank, but underwater, the music swelled crystal clear. He’d heard the crashing cymbals and booming drums of Lower District god parades—this melody carried an ancient timbre. The water started murky, but at a certain depth, Zhao Meiyou spied something like a copper mirror cradled in the arms of a heavenly maiden. He reached out and wiped it clean.

Moonlight bloomed from nowhere, plunging into the lake and bouncing off the mirror to illuminate the depths.

Zhao Meiyou glimpsed lotuses first. The melody flowed like water, petals and ripples washing over him.

He stood on the lakebed now, surrounded by crumbling walls and moss-encrusted sculptures.

It was a temple complex, long buried beneath the waters.

The music emanated from here. Zhao Meiyou gazed at the statues: celestial musicians offering tunes to the Buddha, boundless joy. The carvings stretched onward through the water, leading toward the blaze of moonlight—

Where a golden Buddha statue loomed.

For some reason, the figure had shattered. Only its head remained, half-buried in the silt, with a single exquisite, solemn face gazing at Zhao Meiyou—slender brows and refined features.

The lotus had fled the realm a millennium past; after the rain, the fishy reek still bore a tang of iron.

After dawn broke, Zhao Meiyou trudged back down the mountain, looking as if he had rolled through the mud. Diao Chan stood outside the shower with a cup of coffee and knocked on the door. “You look worse than after pulling an all-week bender in the lab. Where the hell have you been?”

No response came. Zhao Meiyou took a quick cold shower and emerged while towel-drying his hair. “Meeting in three minutes.”

“I’m just doomed to be your nanny,” Diao Chan said with a shake of his head. He sent out the notification on the terminal. “Meeting summary?”

“There’s something on the mountain,” Zhao Meiyou replied. “Have the Expedition Team set up a permanent camp. Notify the Metropolis Government—S-level file.”

Diao Chan’s hand paused. Every file submitted to the government had a classification code, and S-level was the highest. For Zhao Meiyou to say that meant a major discovery.

Zhao Meiyou took a sip of his coffee. “We might be stuck here for a long time.”

Diao Chan sighed into his own cup. “How long is ‘long’?”

“Hard to say.” Zhao Meiyou thought for a moment. “Could be long enough for that Liu guy and his little boyfriend to celebrate their golden wedding here.”

Only then did his hand freeze as he realized he had left Liu Qijue up on the mountaintop.

He, Diao Chan, and Liu Qijue were old classmates. After graduation, they had all joined the government and ended up in the same Expedition Team—their bond was ironclad. They were also three towering bachelors. By all rights, none of them lacked for prospects. Diao Chan came from high society, with the polished air of a young master; half the team seemed to have slept with him, yet he somehow came off as utterly pure. Zhao Meiyou was erratic on a good day and reliable on a great one. Liu Qijue was the only normal one among them.

There was a kid on their team who hadn’t even graduated yet—utterly besotted with Liu Qijue, as if the man had dosed him with some ancient love potion. The Expedition Team was nominally there to explore, but really they were just digging dirt, slaving away back-toiling in the face of barren earth. After two years trekking through the deserts, a flower blooming from a rock was a rare treat. Zhao Meiyou and Diao Chan were delighted to see it.

After the meeting, Zhao Meiyou did the kid a solid and sent him up the mountain to fetch Liu Qijue. Sure enough, the moment Liu Qijue got back to camp, he grabbed Zhao Meiyou and laid into him. “Zhao Meiyou, you bastard! I’ve been freezing my ass off up on that mountain all night!”

“Wake up—this time of year, it’s not northwest winds,” Zhao Meiyou dodged while retorting. “Still so fired up after a night in the cold air? Liu Qijue, you really need to find someone to cool you down.”

“You two rejects,” Diao Chan said, sipping his coffee as he pulled the kid away from the attempted peacemaking. “Leave ’em be. They won’t stop till dinner.”

The government’s approval came quickly, greenlighting a permanent camp at the base of the mountain, coordinates 29753. Zhao Meiyou had burned the midnight oil for a full year and finally pieced together what the Temple Site at the lake bottom really was.

The mountain roads had been repaved, the lake water completely drained, and sculptures were being hoisted down by floating cranes one after another. Diao Chan and Zhao Meiyou flew overhead in a hovercar, gazing down at the burgeoning townsite below. “The government’s building a new Research Institute here?”

“Right—and it’ll be huge,” Zhao Meiyou said, puffing on a cigarette as he unrolled the blueprints. “Bigger than a whole town, projected.”

Diao Chan studied the plans. “They’re investing big time.”

“High stakes mean high bets.” Zhao Meiyou glanced into the distance, where a crane’s massive claw lifted the final sculpture from the drained lakebed.

The moment the Buddha Head broke the surface, it gleamed with radiant light.

After a year of calculations and deductions, Zhao Meiyou had reached a preliminary conclusion: this Giant Buddha Statue was likely a supercomputer from the 22nd century. If they could successfully decode the residual data inside, the payoff would be beyond measure.

Diao Chan brewed a fresh cup of coffee, only for Zhao Meiyou to snatch it. “Cut the caffeine—you’re gonna drop dead from this diet. We’re stuck here for years; get it together.”

“You quit smoking first, then lecture me.” Diao Chan squinted at the golden Buddha Head hovering in midair. “They name the new Research Institute yet?”

“Yeah.” Zhao Meiyou stubbed his cigarette out in the coffee cup, earning a smack to the back of his head from Diao Chan.

“It’s called ‘Ancient Capital.'”

Winter yielded to spring, dawn’s pale light shrouding the mountains in a fishbelly glow. The Metropolis knew no seasons—or rather, they weren’t precious there. The Upper District’s climate control could buy any weather with money, cycling through spring, summer, fall, and winter in an hour. The Expedition Team had roamed from the Arctic to the equator to the southern continents—mostly wastelands, few oases of life. After years in the Ancient Capital, Zhao Meiyou finally understood the poet’s words about spring tides in the rain.

The Ancient Capital’s buildings were all vermilion towers cloaked in ivy, a riot of red brick and green in summer. They radiated from the mountain’s foot, starting as a few miles but now threatening to encompass the entire peak within the Research Institute’s bounds. Work had gone smoothly these past years. The data stored in the Buddha was devilishly hard to crack, but the Temple Complex had left plenty of scraps behind. Piecing together the surface details was enough to satisfy the government.

“Knew I’d find you here.”

A hovercar descended from the sky, and Diao Chan stepped out, paper umbrella in hand. “Lab 2’s been looking for you all night—no comms device? You addicted to climbing now?”

“A bit hooked, yeah.” Zhao Meiyou stood at the summit amid a thicket of what might have been bamboo. “What do they want?”

“Government reps are here, specifically asking for Lab 2’s progress report.” Diao Chan handed him the umbrella. “Also, the Antarctic Faction’s research station sent specialties—want to trade for some booze and Mandala Seeds.”

“Booze is easy. Seeds for what?” Zhao Meiyou asked. “Grow ’em on ice?”

“Word is, one of their expeditioners went nuts while Scanning the ice sheet,” Diao Chan said. “Kept babbling about Mandala patterns before he died.”

“What’s the Antarctic Faction even doing over there? How many have snapped this year?” Zhao Meiyou tsked. “What specialties’d they send?”

“A ton of ancient ice, dug up from four kilometers underground. Perfect for infusing liquor.”

“Fine.” Zhao Meiyou rolled up his sleeves, digging an urn of liquor from beneath the bamboo. Diao Chan watched. “What’re you up to?”

“They even sent the tools for the crime over from Antarctica—can’t turn that down.” Zhao Meiyou hoisted the urn. “C’mon, let’s treat those government bigwigs to some prime hooch. The sooner they drink, the sooner they flip out.”

Sure enough, the government envoys who partook went mad later. The Ancient Capital and Antarctic Faction passed the buck until it all blew over. In his exhaustion one day, Zhao Meiyou dumped the delivered ice blocks into the bathtub for a soak—and came out fine.

His so-called friends had their takes: Liu Qijue called it a scourge lasting a millennium, while Diao Chan deemed it fighting poison with poison.

In the Ancient Capital’s seventh year, the workshops fired a batch of azure tiles for the new vermilion towers. The firing method came from the Site, and some tiles even bore a glaze clear as glass.

The Research Institute’s staff had ballooned far beyond the original hundred-person Expedition Team—government appointees, Upper District nepotism hires. Zhao Meiyou parked the useless ones in offices, piping out monthly batches of new “discoveries”: hobbies from centuries past, how to brew liquor, blend incense, roast tea, carve lutes. Some rich kid even footed the bill for a greenhouse far from the core labs, a haven for the connected deadweight.

The original mountaintop lake had long been drained. Zhao Meiyou carved out a pond, refilled it, and planted lotus seeds. Then he sought out Diao Chan and Liu Qijue. “I’m sealing off Lab 2 for a while. Won’t be coming out.”

Lab 2 was the highest-security facility in the Ancient Capital, staffed entirely by Zhao Meiyou’s direct subordinates—including Diao Chan and Liu Qijue.

At its core sat a single item: the Giant Buddha Statue salvaged from the lake years ago.

“You’re finally kicking off that program of yours?” Liu Qijue knew Zhao Meiyou had spent years designing something tied closely to decoding the Buddha Head.

Zhao Meiyou nodded.

“Any guess when you’ll emerge?” Diao Chan asked.

Zhao Meiyou paused, then said, “When the lotuses bloom.”