“Dead?” My mind buzzed with disbelief. How could that be possible?

After Ah Gui said this, he completely broke down, almost collapsing into the lake. I had no choice but to help him up and take him back to the rain shelter. I went to the mule and got him a few jars of rice wine to drink, which helped him calm down a bit. However, his emotions were still extremely low, and he was speaking incoherently.

As I listened and organized my thoughts, I finally understood what had happened here.

It turned out that after I left, when Ah Gui returned, he had found a few people to help transport food and supplies to the lakeside. Seeing that everything seemed fine, Yun Cai went back home with those people to do other things, leaving him alone to keep watch.

At that time, the Mute and the Fatty had already salvaged a lot of items, and they had discovered a possible hiding place for the bodies. However, it had started to rain incessantly, and the water level began to rise, causing their salvage efforts to reach a standstill.

During the process of sorting through the salvaged items, they discovered a complete set of salvage equipment, including diving suits and towing ropes. They were using heavy-duty diving equipment connected to the surface by an air tube and pulled with hemp ropes. The Fatty said they must have used this set of equipment to salvage those iron pieces from the ancient village at the bottom of the lake.

The entire set of equipment had been submerged for a long time, and most of the components were no longer usable. However, the diving helmet was made of highly corrosion-resistant material, and surprisingly, it had not leaked water while packed in the equipment bag; the inside was still dry, with only a layer of rubber on the outside peeling away.

The Fatty suddenly had a brilliant idea: he wanted to use the helmet and some of the rubber to create a makeshift diving device. The air inside the helmet could allow him to breathe seven to eight times. Since the exhaled air still contained a significant amount of oxygen, this amount of air was quite considerable. If used well, it could extend the Fatty’s underwater time to five minutes.

In diving, those calm five minutes made a world of difference compared to just one minute. They used this set of equipment to find the underwater skeletons. The process involved using two ropes: one tied around the Fatty’s waist because the helmet was very heavy, and relying solely on his strength could pose a danger during the ascent, so they needed to pull him up. The other rope was lined with hooks made of iron wire—taken from the keel of a suitcase. After the Fatty dove down, he hung all the salvaged items on the hooks, allowing him to bring up a considerable amount in one trip.

The skeletons were all scattered, distributed at the eastern end of the fence. They salvaged them and, based on their positions, pieced them together with branches to determine the number of individuals, which was a straightforward and smooth operation.

After they had salvaged all the visible bones, they encountered a problem while assembling them.

All the bones formed a rough human shape, and to their astonishment, they found that none of the skeletons had a right hand.

According to the method of counting skeletons, the skull and pelvis are the most important indicators for determining the number of individuals because other bones are too fragmented, and it is not unusual for some to be missing. However, the complete absence of a right hand was truly strange. This couldn’t be a coincidence.

The Fatty and the Muffled Oil Bottle began to ponder the reasons behind this situation. Was there something unusual about the body disposal that caused the right palms to be missing, or were they deliberately chopped off? During the conversation with Pan Ma, he never mentioned anything about them cutting off the palms of these corpses, and they had no reason to do so. As a result, they were left perplexed; Fatty even wondered if those people were bears, with their paws chopped off for some secret stew.

In the end, it was A Gui who came to a conclusion. He suggested that perhaps these individuals never had right hands to begin with, and that all their right hands were fake, made of wood. After being thrown into the lake, the wooden prosthetics rotted away. Upon hearing this, I completely disagreed because the premise that everyone lacked a right hand was too bizarre. I simply couldn’t think of a scenario that would lead to such a situation. Instead, I felt that perhaps there was something distinctive about these people’s right hands, and someone had chopped them off to conceal their identities. Or, as if they were trophies, the right hands had been collected by someone. However, Pan Ma had not mentioned this matter. Did they retrieve the bodies after disposing of them and process them again? But this idea was soon deemed impossible, as in A Gui’s account, Fatty also considered this point, but the wrist bones of those individuals showed no signs of having been cut. It seemed as if their right palms had naturally fallen off, with the wrist joints intact.

In Pan Ma’s narrative, the archaeological team all had right hands, indicating that the loss of right hands occurred after their deaths. They couldn’t think of a reason for it, so they decided to dive again in search of clues.

They found nothing near the fence, and Fatty suspected that the bones had sunk into the ancient village within the fence. When they first started diving, they had an unspoken agreement to absolutely avoid entering the ancient village at the bottom of the lake, only operating in the simpler surrounding area. The village was several meters deeper than the periphery, and exploring the lake bottom was very dangerous; no one had tested the underwater environment. Some ancient villages might be extremely fragile, collapsing at the slightest touch, requiring more advanced diving equipment.

Fatty, unable to wait, thought it was no big deal to just take a look, leading to some conflict. However, I wasn’t there, and the Muffled Oil Bottle wouldn’t say anything, and A Gui could not contradict the boss, so Fatty dove down.

This time, however, an unexpected change occurred. The rope was a nylon one that A Gui had brought back from the county, very sturdy and three hundred meters long, so Fatty was not worried at all; he could dive deeper. After Fatty went down, he gradually descended. As before, A Gui was not too worried; he watched the time, preparing to pull Fatty back up after the agreed time.

They had set the time at four and a half minutes, as it took about thirty seconds to a minute to surface, and surfacing too quickly could cause decompression sickness. Underwater, four minutes felt very long, while above water, it passed in the blink of an eye. Soon, A Gui began to tug on the rope, but unexpectedly, after a few tugs, the rope suddenly went taut and wouldn’t budge, as if something below had bitten onto it.

At that moment, the first thought that crossed my mind was that it might be caught on the fence. I had encountered similar situations before; those fences had been soaked for who knows how many years, all soft and crumbly like Wangzai steamed buns. With a strong pull, it would come loose. Agu pulled a few times with all his might, and sure enough, the rope moved.

Agu quickly pulled it up, but as he did, he realized something felt off. The resistance from the rope had decreased significantly, and it was very light to pull.

This feeling was somewhat terrifying, reminiscent of fishing when a fish bites the hook, and after a few seconds of tugging, the line goes slack, indicating that the bait has been taken, and the fish has come loose. In this case, the bait was the fat guy.

Agu broke out in a cold sweat. The more he pulled, the more something felt wrong. He was getting closer to the water’s surface, and the sensation in his hands grew lighter. As he gradually caught sight of a dark shadow underwater, he felt as if he were suffocating. When that shadow emerged from the water, he discovered that the fat guy had vanished, and what he had pulled up was just a helmet.

He speculated that the rope had likely snagged on something, and when the fat guy realized the situation was dire, he quickly removed the helmet and floated up. After taking it off, somehow the thing that had snagged the rope had come loose. If that were the case, the fat guy should float up soon.

However, after waiting for more than a minute, nothing surfaced.

He began to feel uneasy; this was different from other situations. A normal person would surely drown after being underwater for a minute.

At that moment, the dull oil bottle was on the shore, and Agu gradually panicked. What had started as a good business opportunity, where he could easily handle the boss as long as he could swim, had suddenly turned into a crisis, and he would have to take responsibility. In a small place like this in the mountains, such incidents could be talked about for a lifetime.

He took off his clothes while shouting toward the shore. When he saw the dull oil bottle running toward the lake, he jumped in and dove down holding onto a rock. Unfortunately, he had no experience; after sinking a few meters, he lost his grip on the rock and struggled to surface. Just in time, the dull oil bottle arrived, and Agu explained the situation. The dull oil bottle immediately put on the helmet he had pulled up and jumped in as well.

Agu held onto the rope, praying for divine help. What he didn’t expect was that after waiting for five minutes, not only had the fat guy not surfaced, but even the dull oil bottle showed no signs of movement. The rope just hung there in the water.

He pulled on the rope, and the familiar sensation returned. When he pulled it out of the water, he found the same situation had occurred again: on the other end of the rope, the dull oil bottle was also missing, leaving only the diving helmet behind.

After hearing this, I was stunned, my mind a chaotic mess. I couldn’t accept what had happened; it felt absurd. How could such a thing occur? But at the same time, I knew Agu couldn’t be lying, and that made this situation all the more terrifying for me.

I asked Agu when this had happened, and he said it had been almost two weeks. After the incident, he had waited on the lake for a day, but nothing had surfaced.

Two weeks? That’s like a whale; it would surely be dead after being submerged for two weeks. No wonder Agu said they were dead. Regardless of the reason that led them to remove their diving helmets underwater, death was certain.

After that day, A Gui went to the lake every day to take a look, hoping to see if any bodies had floated to the surface, but there were none. He once thought that some strange fish at the bottom of the lake had eaten them, but it was clear that there were no bloodstains or signs of attack left on the diving helmet.

I took a look at the helmet and found that the fat guy had made some interesting modifications, which made it very difficult to take off the helmet underwater. This turned into a “problematic” situation. I had dived to the bottom before and knew what the conditions were like down there. Although entering the ancient village had potential dangers, it wouldn’t require such great effort to remove the helmet.

I suspected it might be decompression sickness because when diving to greater depths, the proportion of oxygen inhaled seems to need to be adjusted; otherwise, it could lead to oxygen toxicity. However, oxygen toxicity is not the same as drunkenness; it wouldn’t make someone strip off their clothes.

Something must have happened underwater that forced them to remove their helmets, and the fact that the “Dumb Oil Bottle” also took off his helmet indicated that it was certainly an unavoidable process. The “Dumb Oil Bottle” wouldn’t have had a sudden whim like the fat guy.

So why did they not reappear after removing their helmets? Did the incident they encountered ultimately lead to some kind of accident?

After a long journey, I was physically and mentally exhausted, and suddenly facing such a tricky situation left me feeling somewhat at a loss. But I absolutely would not accept that they were dead. We had gone through so much together; we could have died anywhere, but we had always found a way to survive. How could we possibly die on this half-tour, half-investigation trip?

Even though I said that, the more I thought about it, the more my heart sank, forcing me to abandon any hope. I knew that accidents don’t adhere to reason; no matter how many dangers you’ve faced before, when it’s your time to die, you can’t escape. Many great heroes in history have met their end at the hands of small figures. Was God playing tricks on me? Were they really gone?

After some thought, I still couldn’t accept it, and I became restless. I thought that it had been raining at the time, and visibility on the lake must have been poor. Perhaps they had surfaced but were far from A Gui’s position, so he didn’t see them. For some reason, they might have made it to shore on their own afterward.

Regardless of the circumstances, there was one thing I had to do: whether or not they had met with an accident, I had to dive down to see for myself. If they were alive, I wanted to see them; if they were dead, I wanted to see their bodies.