Chapter 13 — Cave Encounter, Part Two
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
Wei Zhao gave it no more thought. Two or three strides carried him up onto the platform, and at its very top he saw a small wooden box of antique charm. His heart surged: could this be some sort of scripture casket?
Wei Zhao picked the box up with great care. The moment he had it in hand, he leaped down from the platform and hid himself, for he had heard that such ancient structures were often riddled with traps. He had touched someone's treasure; if a mechanism sprang, he would be in deep trouble.
Yet he waited a long while and nothing out of the ordinary happened, so he let out a quiet breath of relief. Wei Zhao was in no hurry to open the box — after all, the stone door would close before daybreak, and he could open it at home. For now, he decided to use what little time remained to search the cave further.
Skirting the platform, Wei Zhao was astonished to find another stone door behind it, and beside that door a smaller stone tablet, also carved in seal script with eight lines of four characters each, just like the tablet he had seen at the entrance.
Astonished, Wei Zhao hurried to read it closely:
Five years hence, when the divine art first comes to fruition, strike the door with your palm, and only then may you enter.
If your wish is not fulfilled and the divine skill is not yet mastered, wait another five years and come back to try again.
After reading these eight lines, Wei Zhao was utterly baffled. What did "five years from now, when the divine skill is first mastered" mean? Could it be that the box in his hands really contained some secret martial arts manual? And once he had trained in it, he would be able to strike the door with his palm and it would open?
At this thought, Wei Zhao casually pushed at the door, but alas, the stone door did not budge in the slightest. That being so, the last four lines were easy enough to understand as well: "If your wish is not fulfilled and the divine skill is not yet mastered, wait another five years and come back to try again" meant that if he failed to push the door open, it was because his own skills were not yet up to the mark, and he would have to wait another five years, until the stone door opened again, and then come back in and try once more.
Looking at the stone door before him that would not open, Wei Zhao felt a sudden itch of curiosity. By any reasonable reckoning, if the first great hall already held a secret manual of divine skill, then the great hall behind the stone door must surely conceal something even more precious.
It was just that Wei Zhao also understood that with his present abilities it was impossible for him to open the second door. At best he was merely a man of destiny; being able to open the first stone door and enter this great hall was already quite a coincidence.
That being the case, Wei Zhao stopped demanding anything more. Carrying the box he had taken earlier from the high platform, he walked out through the cave entrance. By now the sky was no longer so dark; in the east a faint fish-belly white was beginning to show, the harbinger of the sun rising and daybreak...
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