I squatted down and saw the fat guy prying open some ice, pulling out a piece of animal fur from inside.
“This is snow leopard fur; there are at least four of them frozen together, along with some fragments of deer carcasses,” the fat guy said.
“How could this happen? Four snow leopards? They are fierce beasts; who could have eaten them?” I asked. “Is there a more ferocious beast than leopards around here?”
“Bears can hunt leopards, but these leopards were all shot dead with rifles. Look at the size of these leopards; they must have been the guardians of this lake. The villagers raised them to roam around the lake and protect it from outsiders. The rifles used to shoot these leopards must be quite powerful; besides the rifles, they might have used grenades too.”
“How can you tell?”
“These wounds have shattered bones, and the flesh is all torn apart,” the fat guy explained. “The bodies aren’t fresh; it’s so cold here that the meat has probably gone bad. They must have been dead for some time.” The fat guy looked around and said, “Damn, someone has been here before us. First, there are quite a few people; second, their equipment is very good. They came in and directly took out the guardians of this place.”
He glanced at the tent and the direction of the canyon and said, “This is bad. Do you think something has happened to Kong Ba Luo?”
Images of the innocent local people being slaughtered by foreign powers due to the disparity in weaponry flashed through my mind, sending a shiver down my spine. I looked at the fat guy and said, “No matter who they are, their way of dealing with obstacles is extremely brutal and violent. We need to hurry.”
We used bones and tents to make a makeshift sled, wrapping Zhang Haixing and Feng in sleeping bags, and dragged them along the edge of the lake.
It wasn’t as difficult as we thought, but it wasn’t easy either. We stopped and started, taking twice the time to reach the canyon on the opposite side of the lake.
The lake’s surface was frozen, but the river leading to the canyon showed signs of flowing water beneath the ice. In some places, the ice had cracked, revealing turbulent water, indicating that the ice surface was unstable.
We carefully stepped on the ice surface, sometimes crawling forward, and it was this action that allowed us to see the wonders beneath the ice.
We saw a row of wooden fences submerged under a section of ice, with human corpses in front of the wooden fences—at least twenty or thirty of them. We smashed through the ice layer and saw that the bodies soaking in the water were all decayed, but not rotting; they were waterlogged.
From their hair, we could tell they were all foreigners, with some equipment soaking in the water, and almost all of them were naked.
The fat guy pulled up a rifle and a tube of grenades, strapped them to himself, and began picking up bullets one by one.
“It looks like our comrade from the big dung party had come in here once but failed, which is why they decided to ally with the Zhang family. This group must be the accomplices of those Germans.”
“They weren’t wearing clothes, so it seems they also took a shortcut across the lake and ended up in trouble,” I said. “This group must have found this place, killed the snow leopards by the lake, but something went wrong while crossing the ice lake, resulting in their deaths, and their bodies were swept into the water and washed up here.”

I estimate that the number may not just be those here; some might have died on the lake surface and are frozen there. The fat guy is happily collecting the fallen items, showing no sign of pity or compassion. I asked him, “How long do you think these people have been dead here?”

“I don’t know, but there might be survivors. We don’t know how many people actually came,” he replied.

“Foreigners wouldn’t abandon the bodies of their companions. Looking at the state of these dead people, I estimate that even if there are survivors, there can’t be many, and they would be struggling to save themselves,” I said.

Continuing forward, we soon passed through the places that the fat guy mentioned and finally arrived at the base of the suspended lama temple.

The two idiots still hadn’t woken up. The fat guy climbed up, carefully pushed open the entrance, and found the whole building quiet to the point of being eerily silent, not a sound to be heard.

After much effort, we managed to carry the two of them up. By this time, the sun was setting, and the white clouds were sticking to the snowy mountains, forming patches of mist.

We stopped in a relatively enclosed room in the lama temple and lit a charcoal stove for warmth. The room was filled with felt, which should prevent heat loss, but when I checked the felt, I found it covered in a thick layer of dust, all crusted over.

“The lamas here aren’t very hygienic,” the fat guy said as he warmed himself by the fire, taking off his shoes, and a strong smell of foot odor wafted over. “The ground is all dusty too. Logically speaking, the dust layer on the snowy mountain should be very thin, and the air should be very clean. With so much dust, how much incense do they burn every day?”

It’s reasonable for there to be dust in the lama temple, but the thickness of the dust and the traces on the surface indicated that it had accumulated for a long time and that no one had cleaned it for an extended period.

Could it be that this temple has been abandoned?

I told the fat guy to rest for a bit while I went up alone. I saw the felt that the fat guy had mentioned, which was used for covering the bodies. The door to the upper level was right behind the felt, and there was a staircase, but the door was tightly sealed.

The wooden door was very dark, as if it had been heavily smoked. I tried to open it; that strange woman had crawled out from here back then. But I found that the door was locked, likely braced by a very large wooden rod.

I inserted my dagger, lifted the wooden rod with force, and pushed the door open, immediately hit by a particularly foul smell of incense.

Behind the door was a particularly spacious passage, with doors lining both sides, somewhat resembling the layout of an inn.

I walked to one of the doors and tried to open it, only to find that the wooden bolts behind these doors were particularly heavy and thick, making it impossible to pry them open with my dagger. I had no choice but to return the way I came.

When I got back to the fat guy, I found that Zhang Haixing had already woken up and seemed to have regained her senses; she was drinking water.

I pondered what kind of expression I should wear when talking to her—should I swagger over and say, “Look, you idiot, you didn’t listen to me, did you?” or should I pretend to be particularly magnanimous and comfort her by saying, “Well, I also have a bad temper; we don’t need to mention this matter again. How are you feeling?”

The latter might make her have a better impression of me, but I didn’t want to flirt with this tigress. After thinking it over, I decided to go with the first option.

“I let out a cold laugh, walked over to her, and said, ‘You’re awake. You said you were being silly, I told you to listen to me, but you didn’t. Look, you’re bare—'”