Taihao Mausoleum

After driving to the area, Xu Chen found an open spot to park. He checked the map against his surroundings and finally confirmed this should be the place, though he couldn't remember the precise location.

He looked around and saw that the terrain was flat and thick with trees. It didn't look like a barren, inhospitable place. In fact, it seemed quite suitable for building and developing a city.

Zhoukou Huaiyang had once been where three rivers met, offering tremendous advantages in transportation and water supply. With a vast expanse of land as well, it had the necessary conditions for a city to develop.

Historically, people had even built a city here and made it their capital.

So why was it a wasteland?

This world had a population crisis too. It made no sense to leave such a promising site undeveloped, did it?

But Xu Chen had never studied sociology or urban planning in depth, so he could only set the question aside for now. Finding the Taihao Mausoleum was the priority.

"Is this the place?" Professor Ding asked, puzzled, as he unloaded equipment from the car.

"That's right." Xu Chen glanced at Professor Ding. "But it isn't like the mausoleum you're imagining. There should just be a mound of earth here."

To be honest, the Taihao Mausoleum really wasn't as grand as an imperial mausoleum. Even if Taihao had been buried in ancient times, the productive capacity of that era meant there wouldn't have been anything valuable buried with him. Besides, it was built during the Spring and Autumn period, so its greatest significance was purely symbolic.

Professor Ding wasn't disappointed. He smiled too. "That's all right. As long as we find something, it'll be a discovery."

With that, he called on his students to start surveying the terrain.

Archaeology departments in this world taught detection methods that could roughly determine a mausoleum's location from the terrain, relying entirely on science rather than the "feng shui" and folk customs of his previous life. That was nothing to be proud of. Xu Chen suspected it showed that the practice of feng shui had died out entirely.

Unfortunately, Xu Chen didn't know feng shui. He had read books on it as a child, but had forgotten almost everything.

He looked over at Professor Ding and the others, who had already launched a drone to survey the surrounding area. The drone looked secondhand and especially resembled an agricultural model, but it surely had all the necessary functions. Xu Chen couldn't help scratching his head.

With equipment like this, even a drone, there was no reason they shouldn't be able to find the mausoleum.

Xu Chen watched for a while, then caught sight of a blackened stone at Professor Ding's feet. He went over and picked it up.

The stone was quite dense and felt extremely heavy in his hand. On closer inspection, it was also very compact, a type of granite.

Professor Ding's two students were surveying, but the professor himself had nothing to do. When he saw Xu Chen pick up a stone, he couldn't help leaning over for a look.

"There doesn't seem to be much to see here. Isn't it just an ordinary piece of granite?"

"Look again." Xu Chen turned it over. The other side had been polished.

Professor Ding paused, then hurriedly took it and brushed away the dirt clinging to it with his sleeve. But when he saw that the surface was merely polished, he was a little disappointed.

"This thing is no use. It doesn't look like it came from a tomb. At most, it's an artifact."

"That's right, it didn't come from inside the tomb." Xu Chen agreed with the latter part of Professor Ding's statement. "It was outside the tomb to begin with."

"Outside?" Professor Ding was puzzled. He thought it over more carefully. "That can't be right, can it? Building a mausoleum out of granite would take enormous effort for little reward. Imagine how much work that would be."

"Who said it was used to build the mausoleum? This looks like part of the uninscribed edge of a stone stele."

The Taihao Mausoleum might not have had much else, but it had plenty of inscribed steles. Every emperor who offered sacrifices there left behind an imperial sacrificial stele. Besides those, there were steles bearing inscriptions, steles commemorating meritorious deeds, incense-offering steles, and other inscribed steles erected on the mausoleum grounds.

Those inscriptions alone made for a considerable wealth of historical material, enough to trace the entire history and heritage of the Taihao Mausoleum.

Carving words into stone was one of the easiest ways to preserve them for later generations. After all, no one had so little to do that they'd grind the words off a stele, and natural erosion took a very, very long time.

Professor Ding grew excited at once. He understood the value of stone steles. In an archaeologist's eyes, they were far more valuable than artifacts without writing. He had simply been so focused on the mausoleum that he hadn't thought of them.

Since this was part of a stele, couldn't the other pieces, possibly bearing writing, be nearby too? He hurriedly called his students over to retrieve the drone, then had them spread out to search for steles or fragments.

Before long, Xu Chen saw that Professor Ding was still vigorous in his old age. The professor promptly took down a basket and began a thorough search, as if he were collecting scrap.

They hadn't been searching long when someone cried out excitedly.

It was the senior student named Li Ze who had found a fragment of a stone stele.

Everyone ran over and passed it around for a look. The fragment actually had writing on it.

All three of them were delighted, but Xu Chen frowned as he ran his hand over the grooves of the characters.

The reason was simple: the writing seemed too shallow. Most of the characters were even hard to make out, as though they had been worn down. But a closer look showed no signs of abrasion. The characters themselves seemed to have been carved that way.

Xu Chen considered it. Perhaps only this stele had been carved too shallowly, making it an isolated case.

Checking was simple enough. They just had to find another stele.

Before long, Xu Chen found a stele that had been broken in half. He heaved it over with some effort, exposing the inscribed side, then cleared away the dirt and immediately examined the inscription.

"According to □□ imperial □ capital, the old mausoleum □ was there through..."

Xu Chen's heart sank. He straightened up, stepped back for a look at the stele, and estimated its size and original appearance. He immediately matched it to a stele in his memory.

It was actually the Sleeping Palace Stele erected by Zhu Yuanzhang, yet a stele of such historical significance had suffered extraordinarily severe damage.

Xu Chen examined it again. There was still no way to tell why the writing was so hard to decipher or why its grooves were so shallow.

Who the fuck had so much time on their hands that they damaged this thing?

Professor Ding's search had also brought him close to Xu Chen. His sharp eyes spotted the huge stele fragment in front of Xu Chen, and he wanted to run over, but he couldn't bear to leave the basket of stele fragments on his back behind, so he could only walk over slowly.

After taking a brief look at the stele on the ground, Professor Ding's face visibly flushed with excitement. "This... a sacrificial inscription stele this well preserved! Our archaeology department can finally hold its head high!"

"Wait," Xu Chen said, puzzled. "This inscription?"

He gestured with his eyes at the stele broken in half on the ground. "This counts as intact?"

"Of course." Professor Ding put down his basket, his eyes never leaving the stele for a moment. "An inscription like this is rare. By the time many steles are placed under protection, their writing is barely legible."

Xu Chen was puzzled. Could those steles have been made of some inferior stone? How else could they be so easily eroded and worn down?

Professor Ding crouched and stroked the stele, an entranced look on his face. "It's in great condition. Tianjing University has a machine that can reconstruct an original inscription from the damaged stele without harming it. It's just that restoring an inscription costs a fortune—you have to pay even to turn it on for a few seconds. But for a stele like this, surely it wouldn't be too much to use the machine, would it?"

Xu Chen heard what Professor Ding said and exclaimed at the advanced technology.

It seemed this world hadn't failed to make any progress at all. At least, before transmigrating, Xu Chen had never heard of anything that could restore inscriptions even after they had been worn off stone.

But he didn't know that this world had been driven to develop technology specifically to preserve or make use of cultural relics. That alone showed just how precarious the current state of those relics was.