After arriving in the village, since we had been away for quite a long time, we needed to return to our respective places to check in. So we made a plan: the胖子 (Fatty) would be responsible for preparing the equipment, while I would continue my work of gathering information.

Once back in Hangzhou, I began to implement my plan. When I was formulating the plan with Fatty, I hadn’t yet figured out how to collect the information. After some thought, I realized that to understand the background of 闷油瓶 (the character’s name), I might need to start from official channels. Previous investigations indicated that people in the underground world did not know much about him. He might have participated in an archaeological team in the 1980s, and there should be records within the organization. During that time, anyone involved in such projects would need to have a clean background. I might be able to find clues in the old archives in Changsha, at least to uncover his organizational connections, and then find one or two people who knew him, or any small piece of evidence. So I prepared to approach it from this angle.

However, city archives, especially personnel files, are confidential, and old archives are even harder to access without the proper official documents. The archaeological team was established in the early 1980s and had encountered some issues, which likely placed it under confidentiality. Accessing these records wouldn’t be easy.

Moreover, the best way to find the archives would be to start with the research institute that dispatched the archaeological team back then. It has only been over twenty years, which isn’t too long, and they should still exist. I didn’t know which specific research institute in Changsha it was, but at that time, there wouldn’t have been as many names as there are now; there was likely only one related to archaeology. Most of the people involved were students, so it was highly probable that it was a university unit, which should be easy to verify.

After several searches, I found that there indeed was an old research institute that matched my expectations; it had since been merged, and its old site was located on the campus of a well-known university. The university was about to relocate, and when Wang Meng and I went there, the outside was plastered with large signs announcing demolition. The land had probably been sold to a real estate company. If we had come a few months later, we might have only seen a flat piece of land.

This gave me a lead. Since the research institute had merged, the archives might have been transferred to the new institute, but there was also a good chance they remained in the old university’s archive room. I know how government agencies work; I wasn’t too confident that anyone would care about archives from over twenty years ago.

However, this matter was difficult to inquire about. I used connections through my uncle’s old contacts and found someone who worked at the research institute. This person, surnamed Du, had an interesting name: Juan Shan. After gifting him two packs of Zhonghua cigarettes and asking about the situation, he mentioned that the office had moved, but the archives were still at the school. The research institute and the university still had ties; many of the staff were lecturers at the university. If I wanted to see the archives, he could take me inside. Aside from some inconvenience at the entrance, it was relatively relaxed inside, but old archives were hard to search through, and he advised me not to get my hopes up too high.

Without further ado, I went there that evening.

The old building of this university is clearly a former hospital that has been converted. The archives room is located in the basement of the auditorium, covering about a hundred square meters; it’s practically a warehouse. Without much effort, Du Juan Shan and I made our way down the low, narrow hallway. There were no lights below, just darkness. When I shone my flashlight, I saw rows and rows of wooden shelves, all filled with archive bags wrapped in kraft paper—some thick, some thin, some intact, some damaged, some placed horizontally, others vertically. Most of them were covered in a layer of dust, and there was a musty smell of damp paper.

Du Juan Shan told me that all the frequently used archives from after 1995 had been moved out, leaving behind only those that had not been touched for years. He estimated that by the time it was necessary to destroy them, no one would bother to look through them.

Looking at this scene, I felt a chill. However, this was just right; the temperature in Changsha in August is quite high, but it feels cooler at night, and the darkness adds a refreshing chill that is very comfortable. I bit down on my flashlight and fanned myself as I carefully searched through each old wooden shelf.

Speaking of which, I knew that Tsinghua University had a library management department, and I found it strange at the time—what could be so interesting about library management? Seeing the scale of this archives room, I finally understood that managing these materials requires a kind of genius. Looking at these shelves, an ordinary person would certainly feel overwhelmed. This is just the archives room of a research institute; if it were the National Archives, with terabytes of materials, how many people would it take to handle that?

Du Juan Shan was worried I might cause trouble for him, so he stayed close by, helping me search and asking me some detailed questions to assist with filtering.

Due to some special reasons, China’s archival system is very well-developed. As long as one follows certain patterns and the archives still exist, they can definitely be found. Unfortunately, I felt like a headless fly at that moment, only knowing the approximate years and not even the archaeological team’s number, so I could only sift through each document.

After searching for a long time, I found nothing. My plan was to search by year; all the archives here are sorted by year and category. So, if I could find relevant excavation archives from between 1980 and 1985, I could get information about the participants. Changsha is located in the Chu region; although archaeological activities are relatively frequent, the absolute number isn’t high, and one shelf was already full. To my dismay, after going through five years’ worth of archives, I didn’t see any document bags related to the Xisha archaeology.

I thought it was strange and asked Du Juan Shan if there were any other places to check. He shook his head and said that if there were none here, then it was likely there truly were none, unless the archives were in a confidential archives room, in which case they wouldn’t be kept here. Otherwise, they might have been specially destroyed.

I thought that seemed unlikely; even if archaeology were considered confidential, it wouldn’t be to that extent. He comforted me by saying that this kind of situation is common. Perhaps, as you said, the archaeological team went missing afterward, which could be a significant matter, and to keep it secret, they disposed of the archives.

We arranged the archive bags neatly, feeling quite frustrated, although we had anticipated that things wouldn’t be so easy.

Disappointed, we left the archives room, lamenting the two cigarettes I had wasted, while also pondering what to do next. If this route didn’t work, it would indeed be as the “dull oil bottle” said—he was completely a person with no connection to this world.

At that moment, I suddenly noticed the staircase in front of me, which continued downward, suggesting that there was another level beneath the archive. There was an iron door at the foot of the stairs, secured with a thick, rusty iron chain, and an old seal of unknown origin was贴在门边上.

“What’s down there?” I asked.

“This is the archive room from before the 1950s. During the Cultural Revolution, they locked it up to prevent trouble from the rebels, and no one has opened this door for decades.”

“Really?” I shone my flashlight on it and clearly saw that the rusty chain had already been cut, just hanging there for show. If you didn’t look closely, it would be hard to notice.