Chapter 310: Blank Periods
Shao Ling’s theory gave everyone a new line of thinking, but also made the origin of the “entering the painting” event sound even more confusing.
Gu Qingqing summarized in her notebook:
The first possibility: the ‘Classic of Mountains and Seas’ was a painting and also the origin of the “entering the painting” event. It’s the first painting that people entered. The reason could be that during some shamanic ritual, for some reason, it connected to another world and also brought forth the dark force. From then on, the dark force sought opportunities to break through the barrier to enter the human world by drawing people into the paintings.
The second possibility: the ‘Classic of Mountains and Seas’ were shamanic symbols, or rather shamanic incantations, used along with the nine cauldrons and the Earth Cords to suppress an already existing dark force. The dark force, for some unknown reason, set up a mechanism to attract people into the painting, seeking an opportunity to break through the barrier to enter the human world.
The group couldn’t determine which of these two possibilities was true, so they all fell into deep thought. After a while, Ke Xun said, “Actually, we don’t need to obsess over these two possibilities for now, because no matter which one is true, we still need to find the nine cauldrons. So, we can slightly change the direction of our current investigation: gathering information about the nine cauldrons and investigating whether anything noteworthy happened during the era of Yu the Great.”
Shao Ling looked at him amusingly upon hearing that, “Investigating that era might be extremely difficult because no written records have survived from the Xia Dynasty. Even in the Shang Dynasty that followed closely after, all the unearthed oracle bone inscriptions did not mention the existence of the Xia Dynasty. So, some historians even believe that the Xia Dynasty may never have existed at all.
“Of course, later on, there were some artifacts unearthed in our country that could confirm the existence of the Xia Dynasty, but regarding the entire history of the Xia Dynasty, apart from brief records in historical texts like the Records of the Grand Historian and the Book of Zhou, most of it remains blank.
“However, on Xia Dynasty pottery unearthed from the Erlitou site, there are dozens of symbols resembling characters. Some speculate that these are the predecessors of oracle bone script, but some scholars argue that the people of the Xia Dynasty primarily used wood carvings and knotted cords for record-keeping, opposing the idea of treating these symbols as written characters…”
“—Symbols?!” Ke Xun suddenly raised his eyebrows. “Comrades, maybe the coordinates of all the art galleries connected together aren’t a signature but a—symbol?”