adminSince we entered the mountains, apart from a few wild game provided by the guide, we’ve been eating nothing but dry rations. The wild game was hardly enough to satisfy us before the monkeys got into it. Now, with my craving still strong, when Lao Yang mentioned fish and meat, I said I didn’t want any, but deep down I was tempted. My mind even wandered to imagining a scene of eating fish head hot pot at sea.
But that damned knife shattered my beautiful dream. I looked at the bloody, stomach acid-covered human head, and the image of fish head hot pot overlapped with it, causing a wave of nausea to rise in my throat, almost making me vomit.
Lao Yang, who usually has a lot of guts and has seen his fair share of dead bodies, turned pale upon seeing this scene and took a long time to recover.
Suppressing my nausea, I used my dagger to flip the head over and noticed that the skin on the face was slightly decayed, but the head itself was relatively intact. It seemed like the person had just died not long ago. When the fish swallowed the head, it probably chewed on it a bit, causing some deformation in the shape of the lower jaw. The face was beyond description, making it impossible to identify who this person was.
This person hadn’t been in the fish’s stomach for long, meaning he had probably just died.
I covered my nose with one hand while using the dagger to sift through the things oozing out from the fish’s stomach, trying to find the rest of the body. Soon, I found a hand and some chunks of flesh, all showing significant signs of decay, with nothing identifiable left.
I continued to search and found our backpack that had been swallowed. The contents were mixed with the remnants in the stomach. I set aside everything I couldn’t bear to part with, but despite being well-wrapped in plastic, I simply couldn’t convince myself to eat the rations.
Suddenly, I spotted a black object in a mass of goo. Before I could pull it out entirely, Lao Yang shouted, “Damn, it’s a ‘pāi zi liāo’!”
I didn’t know what a “pāi zi liāo” was and guessed it was another slang term he had picked up in prison. When I pulled it out, I saw it was a homemade pistol, and it looked incredibly crude. It was essentially a small-caliber double-barrel shotgun with its long barrels sawed off and the stock reshaped into a handgun. It had two barrels, allowing for two shots, but it couldn’t eject the shells automatically; you had to manually remove the empty shells like loading bullets. It might be okay for shooting small, non-aggressive animals, but if you encountered a large beast and didn’t kill it with the first shot, by the time you loaded the second bullet, your neck would likely be bitten off. Moreover, this gun had tremendous power at close range, but beyond twenty meters, it wouldn’t even be able to kill a dog. Its practicality was nowhere near that of a proper handgun.
I pulled the gun out, wiped off the goo from it on the ground, and opened the barrel to find two shotgun shells inside. Below the handgun barrel was a metal magazine containing about eight rounds, four blue and four red, but I had no idea what type they were.
This person was likely trying to poach in the mountains and stumbled upon this cave, only to end up as fish food. The gun probably got swallowed along with the human flesh when the fish bit into it. That’s just how unlucky people can be; who would have thought there would be such a large carnivorous fish in this place?
Guns are good things; they can be used to save lives in emergencies, but there are just too few bullets. After Lao Yang took out our equipment and fiddled around in the fish’s stomach for a while, he didn’t find anything else. I looked at the fish and saw that besides the wounds we caused, there were also some small bullet holes. The fish had already been injured before it attacked us; it had been hit by birdshot, which lacked the lethality to be fatal.
Lao Yang found it strange and asked me, “Lao Wu, how could there be such a killer fish in this place? Could it be that someone raised it here?”
I replied, “No, I think there are other water channels beneath the surface of the stone path that connect to nearby underground rivers, and these underground rivers are usually connected to the Jialing River. This fish must have swum over from the river.”
Lao Yang said, “That’s not right. Without diving equipment for thousands of years, how could they have excavated these underwater channels?”
Seeing that Lao Yang was quite interested, I explained, “It’s not excavated; I suspect it was formed due to an accident.”
When studying architecture, there was a course on natural mechanics that discussed geological structures. It mentioned that there are often hollow zones formed during the ancient orogeny within rocky mountains, called rock veins. If a rock vein connects with a mountain stream, it can potentially create an internal water system within the mountain. If miners strike here, it could lead to a massive accident. The smaller accidents might destroy a few mining tunnels, while larger ones could flood the entire working face.
This is a quarry cave, where drainage tunnels are generally not set up. The flooding here could likely be due to such an accident. However, from this, we can also infer that the scale of the quarry cave might be much larger than what we see, but since it is submerged underwater, we can’t tell. Given that so much stone material has been used, the ancient tomb we are heading to must also be quite large.
We pushed the fish’s corpse and the human head back into the water, but the smell was really unbearable. We hadn’t rested long, and when we saw our clothes were almost dry, we tidied ourselves up and hurriedly packed all the necessary items into our pockets before setting off.
Lao Yang turned on his flashlight and led the way, with the two of us walking one in front of the other straight into the stone path behind us.
Inside, it was equally dark. Stone figures and animal figurines lay scattered across the stone path, and the walls of the caves on both sides were pockmarked and cracked, occasionally revealing half-finished relief sculptures.
These objects were quite large, and I couldn’t help but wonder how the stone materials extracted here were transported to the ancient tomb.
According to the information given to me by Old Qi, the territory of the Snake Kingdom is not large, mostly mountainous, with hunting as the primary way of life and relatively backward productivity. They shouldn’t have the capability for long-distance transportation of stone materials. To facilitate transportation, the ancient tomb should be relatively close by.
The cave we just entered was blasted open by tomb robbers, meaning the exit of this quarry cave should be on the other side. Could it be that we could reach the entrance to the underground palace by going all the way through?
However, many people intentionally prepare materials far away to hide the location of their tombs, which is beyond our control.
We walked for about half an hour, and it had become pitch black around us. Lao Yang’s flashlight battery had run out and started flickering. I felt tired and suggested we stop to change the battery and smoke a cigarette to refresh ourselves.
We sat down on the ground, placing the flashlight beside us, illuminating the lifelike stone figures. Lao Yang asked me, “These stone statues are carved so realistically; it’s really eerie. What dynasty do you think they are from? I have no clue at all.”
Like him, I was just as confused. China’s history of mud and stone carving is long and profound, having undergone a long process of integration with ancient Indian and Tibetan cultures. However, the realistic carving technique, as far as I remember, only appeared once: the Terracotta Army of Emperor Qin. Yet, the stone figures here are completely different from the Terracotta Army; they are truly an anomaly.
However, the stone statues all have the distinctive feature of a double-bodied snake pattern, which definitely belongs to the ancient She ethnic culture. Regardless of whether this mine is related to the ancient tomb we are heading to, we have certainly entered the realm of the ancient Snake Kingdom.
Lao Yang was quite talkative, asking me this and that while smoking. I got tired of his questions and told him not to ask me everything; I’m not an archaeologist. Let’s just take what we need and leave the research to those old professors.
After changing the battery, we hadn’t walked far when the flashlight beam reflected something ahead, seemingly indicating we had reached the end. We rushed forward, and indeed, in front of us was a stone wall. At the end of the stone path was a small stone chamber, inside which lay several broken, headless stone figures. Surrounding them were stone lamps, and in the middle of the chamber rested a stone coffin.
The coffin was large, with a double-bodied snake carved on its lid. The two snake bodies were intricately entwined around either side of the coffin, but the tail end was clearly unfinished, only roughly sculpted.
When the flashlight shone on it, the stone material appeared a translucent white, like congealed fat. The lid of the coffin was not closed, revealing a gap about the thickness of an arm. The entire coffin rested on a stone bed, with nothing else around.
It seemed to be a burial coffin, perhaps one that was left over during the funeral or carved as a backup and abandoned here.
I wondered why this stone path was so long if it only led to this place. It was strange; this was clearly a place for discarded items, with no exit. Both ends of the stone path were sealed. Could it be that the transportation route for the stone materials was below the water level we had just passed? Or was there a secret passage in this stone chamber?
If the entrance is underwater, that would be a problem, I thought to myself.
After confirming that there was nothing strange in this stone chamber, Lao Yang and I looked around and finally gathered around one side of the coffin.
It was Lao Yang’s first time seeing a coffin, and he was curious. He walked around it twice and asked me, “Do you think there are zongzi inside?”
Without thinking, I replied, “No way. I’ve never heard of a coffin being carved after the body is placed inside; this should be an empty coffin.”
Lao Yang leaned in close to the gap in the coffin lid, shone his flashlight inside, and said, “But it looks like there’s something inside. You should come take a look.”
I walked over to his side, and from a distance, I could indeed see a black shadow lying inside the coffin through the gap. But what it was, I couldn’t quite make out.
Old Yang brushed off the dust on the coffin lid, knocked on it, and tried to insert the flashlight into the gap of the coffin to take a look. However, the head of the flashlight we bought was too big; after trying for a long time, it wouldn’t fit. He asked, “Should we open it and take a look?”
I felt a bit uneasy inside. There were always a few experienced hands around when opening coffins in the past, but this time I was alone, lacking confidence. I shook my head and said, “This doesn’t feel right. I have a bad feeling about this. Let’s not open it recklessly.”
Before I could finish my sentence, Old Yang suddenly shrank back, stepping back several paces before sitting down abruptly, causing the flashlight to slip from his hand and roll away.
I startled him, and just as I was about to ask what was wrong, I suddenly felt a chill on my hand. Looking down, I saw a dry, pale hand that had somehow emerged from the gap in the coffin lid, gripping my wrist.
