The deep, blue lake bottom has given me a lot of imagination, but I never expected to see these things at the bottom of the lake. These wooden structures are completely covered by sediment, resembling parts of a sunken ship. In this light, I can’t observe them closely, but I can still be sure that before me lies an ancient Yao village submerged at the lake’s bottom.

In the deeper slope, there is a patch of darkness, where shadows loom; there must be more down there. I guess they are all similar elevated wooden buildings. What is going on? Why are there these things at the bottom of the lake? Could it be that a massive mountain flood occurred here, causing landslides that submerged what used to be a village?

Staring at the eerie, ancient blue buildings, my mind became utterly chaotic, and I even forgot about my surroundings, just staring blankly at the scene before me. While I was lost in thought, suddenly my whole body shook, and I began to float upward. I pulled on a cord that felt like an umbilical line and realized that the rope I had been holding tightly had finally snapped. At that moment, I felt the suffocating water pressure hit me again, and I could no longer focus on what was happening around me. I struggled with all my might to swim upward.

It was a feeling that was hard to describe; with the help of buoyancy, I ascended rapidly. Surrounding me was darkness, and above was a gradually brightening circle of light. My brain began to suffer from a lack of oxygen, and I felt the circle of light becoming more and more blurred, as if I were swimming toward heaven.

Perhaps the last thing a drowning person sees is something like this, I thought. In the final few seconds, my breath had reached its limit, and my mind went blank. Before me was a bright light, and then I suddenly felt my face relax. The surrounding white light shrank, and at the same time, I heard the sound of water and other indistinguishable noises, seeing the shimmering surface of the lake.

I barely had the strength to take that first breath; it felt like I had to use all my strength to explode out the air. When I finally filled my lungs with air, I almost fainted—oh my god, after living for decades, I had never felt breathing to be such a pleasurable thing.

Then I started gasping for air, almost terrifyingly swallowing it, and gradually everything around me began to calm down. When I was fully awake, I raised my hand to check my watch and found that only a little over a minute had passed since I dived underwater, yet it felt like several hours had gone by. The environment at the bottom of the water and what I had seen shocked me so much that my perception felt distorted.

Normally, I could hold my breath for longer, but it seemed that swimming pools and deep lakes were two completely different things; I had underestimated it.

The fat guy and the raft were about thirty meters away from me. Perhaps I had misused my strength when I finally burst to the surface, causing me to veer off course. I swam towards the fat guy and returned to the side of the raft. He asked me why I had come up so quickly.

Just as I was about to speak, I suddenly felt a burning sensation on my upper lip. When I touched it, I found that I was bleeding from my nose. Then, my ears and entire body began to hurt, and I started to feel dizzy, almost losing my grip on the raft. In a daze, I felt the fat guy grab me and vaguely heard him say, “Damn it, you ascended too quickly; your blood vessels must have burst!”

Fortunately, the dizziness was short-lived, and I quickly recovered. I’m not a professional diver, and it seems my body structure is indeed not suited for free diving. I lay down on the raft again, watching the continuous stream of nosebleed flow down my face to my chin, then drip into the water. I couldn’t help but worry that my internal organs might have been damaged as well.

The fat guy used his handkerchief to temporarily plug my nostrils and asked me what was going on, why I had come up so suddenly. I tilted my head back to stop the nosebleed and told him what I had seen. The fat guy listened in shock and disbelief; he said he needed to go down to take a look himself. I stopped him and told him it was definitely deeper than we had measured, and it was too dangerous for one person to go down alone.

At that moment, there was another splash, and the muffled bottle floated up, gasping for air. He surfaced only a couple of meters away from the raft, clearly much calmer than I was. I glanced at my watch; he had been underwater for about a minute longer than me. He swam to the side of the raft with some effort, pulling himself up with one hand. Just as the fat guy was about to ask him how it went, the muffled bottle suddenly pulled something up from the water with his other hand and tossed it onto the raft, splashing us all over.

Before I could see clearly what it was, the fat guy exclaimed, “What the hell is that?!”