The City of Sand by Tianxia Bachang

Author:Tianxia Bachang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2017-11-21T05:00:00+00:00

Apart from me, everyone in the room was baffled by Kai’s words. What was wrong with him? you could see them thinking. How could this jade eyeball suddenly belong to him?

I hurried over. “If we let this crowd discover we’re actually gold hunters, they might turn against us. Shush!” I whispered in Kai’s ear. Then I pretended to smack him on the head. “No need to make jokes like that. Why don’t you hurry up and try your medallion? Don’t keep us waiting.”

Realizing he’d said the wrong thing, Kai obediently shut his mouth. Fortunately, he was still wearing his gas mask, so no one could see his facial expression, which at least made the whole situation a little less awkward.

Professor Chen and his bookworm students seemed oblivious, so I was mainly worried about Julie realizing what we actually were. Her brain was sharp. The slightest slip and she’d be on to us. Or maybe she’d suspected all along that we were grave robbers. In any case, the moment had passed, and there was no need to stress out over it. I turned my attention to helping Kai fit his jade amulet into the indentation in the eyeball.

The eyeball was swiveled upward, as if staring at the ceiling, and the gap was right on top of it. The jagged outline of the space did look like Kai’s jade piece would fit into it, and after a little maneuvering, we finally got it slotted into place with a satisfying click. The giant eye twitched, then ponderously rolled away. The floor where it had stood was perfectly smooth, with no indication of what mechanism had kept it so firmly fixed in place.

Scooping up the artifact, I pressed it into the professor’s hands, asking him to examine it closely.

Julie lit another flare to give him some light. Professor Chen got out his magnifying glass and turned the eyeball over and over in his hand, shaking his head the whole time. “I—I have no idea what its function is,” he said. “A jade eye the size of a human head. It looks completely natural, with no trace of human handiwork. In fact, I’m pretty certain that two thousand years ago, no technology on earth could have produced an object like this.”

The Jingjue civilization really was shrouded in mystery. Even after devoting several decades of his life to deciphering it, Professor Chen was barely scratching the surface. At most, he had a beginner’s understanding of their language and history. He’d only just learned that this was a society that worshiped eyes, thanks to the black tower totem. It was impossible to know very much about this jade item we’d just come across.

All we could say for certain was that this great stone hall with its sixteen vast columns must be a temple. And of course, if the Jingjue prized the eye above all things, they’d naturally have placed one at the center of their place of worship.

But why was there an indentation that happened to fit

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