I dressed as the meanest prisoner in the Qin Dynasty, with the word "Bingwu" branded on my neck, and built a mausoleum for the First Emperor at the foot of Mount Li.
For eight years, I poured copper walls with my own hands, surveyed and mapped mercury rivers, and laid every brick in the thirty-foot-deep underground palace. The fate of all craftsmen has already been determined - the day when the mausoleum is completed is the time of burial.
But no one knew that "Ayan", the young worker in charge of the drainage project, quietly changed the drawings.
When the censor inspected the "undercover river protecting the mausoleum", I knelt on the ground and respectfully explained the flood control considerations for each bend. He left with satisfaction, but did not realize that three feet below the blue bricks, there was another waterway extending quietly - it did not converge to the Wei River, but led to the free morning light outside the mountains.
According to historical records, in the winter of the Bingwu year, the tomb of the First Emperor was completed, and eight hundred craftsmen died in the tomb.
They didn't say that one of them, as early as the eve of the mercury infusion, took a real secret map of the tomb and disappeared deep into the underground river dug by himself.
And the biggest secret I left behind is still sleeping in the heart of that magnificent mausoleum: a survival path that only I know, leading to the deepest taboos in the empire.
