The phone must have been dropped not long ago. When I picked it up and saw it smeared with blood, I felt something was off. “It seems that we’re not the only group here; it looks like someone else has been injured. This phone definitely didn’t just fall from the sky.” I opened the phone book and saw only a few numbers, all of them foreign, with no other information. My uncle said, “Regardless, we can’t go looking for them; we need to keep moving.” I looked around and found no clues, so I had no choice but to continue on our path. However, seeing such a modern object in this desolate wilderness felt unbelievable, so I asked the old man if anyone else had entered this forest recently.

The old man chuckled, “Two weeks ago, a group of about a dozen people came through, and they haven’t come out yet. This place is dangerous, gentlemen; we can still turn back now.”

“It’s just a monster,” Big Kui said. “Let me tell you, our little grandpa here can make even a thousand-year-old zombie bow down to him. With him around, no demons or monsters stand a chance, right?” He asked the silent bottle, but the bottle showed no reaction, as if it didn’t even acknowledge him. Big Kui hit a wall and felt frustrated, but there was nothing he could do.

We trudged on until the sky darkened, and before four in the afternoon, we finally reached our destination. We saw more than a dozen nearly intact military tents. These tents were of very high quality; even though they were covered in decaying leaves, the insides were still quite dry and clean. There were quite a few daily supplies inside, and as we rummaged through, we found a lot of scattered gear but no bodies, so the old man must not have been lying.

We even found a generator and a few barrels of gasoline, with the engine wrapped in an oil cloth, though most of the parts were in terrible condition. Fat Kui tried to start it, but there was no response; at least the gasoline was still fine. I noticed that all the items had their labels torn off, even the tents and the logos on their backpacks were missing. I thought it was strange; it seemed these people didn’t want anyone to know where they came from.

We started a fire at the campsite and had a simple dinner. The old man ate while keeping a vigilant eye on the surroundings, afraid that a monster might suddenly jump out and hang him. The taste of the compressed food was really bad; I barely managed to drink a few sips of water.

While eating, the silent bottle was looking at the map. He pointed to a spot on the map marked with the face of a fox monster. “We must be here now,” he said. We all crowded around, and he continued, “This is a sacrificial site; below should be the altar, and the sacrificial offerings might be buried underneath.”

My uncle squatted down, grabbed a handful of soil, smelled it, shook his head, walked a few steps, grabbed another handful, and said, “It’s buried too deep; we need to dig a few shovels down to check.”

We connected the rebar pipes and attached the shovel head. My uncle stomped a few marks on the ground, indicating where to dig. Big Kui first secured the shovel head and then started digging with a short-handled hammer. My uncle rested one hand on the steel pipe, feeling the situation below. After hitting a total of thirteen times, my uncle suddenly exclaimed, “Found it!”

We pulled the shovel up section by section, and finally, with one last scoop, we brought out a clump of soil. Daqi removed the shovel head and walked over to the fire to show us. When my third uncle and I saw it, our faces turned pale at the same time, and even the “Muffled Oil Bottle” gasped. It turned out that the soil looked as if it had been soaked in blood, dripping with a liquid that resembled fresh blood.

My third uncle brought it close to his nose and frowned. Both of us had read accounts of blood corpses, but we couldn’t accurately infer the specifics from my grandfather’s notes. However, since the soil was blood-stained, the tomb below must be extraordinary.

I looked at my third uncle, wanting to see how he would decide. After thinking for a moment, he lit a cigarette and said, “No matter what, let’s dig it open first.”

Meanwhile, Panzi and Daqi didn’t stop working. Daqi took a few more shovelfuls and then handed the shovel head to my third uncle. My third uncle sniffed each shovel head and began to connect the holes in the ground with a trowel. I watched them busily marking the location, and in a short while, they had outlined the general shape of the ancient tomb on the ground.

Locating the burial site is a fundamental skill of a soil worker. Generally speaking, whatever the surface looks like, the tomb below is bound to be similar; it’s rare for a soil worker to make a mistake. However, looking at this outline, I felt something was off. Most Warring States tombs do not have underground chambers, but this one clearly did, and it had a brick ceiling—this was truly unusual.

My third uncle used his fingers to measure and finally determined the approximate location of the coffin, saying, “The ceiling is made of bricks, and I can’t drive the shovel down. I can only mark a rough position based on experience. This underground chamber is too strange; I don’t know how thin the bricks are down there. I can only rely on the experience of Song Dynasty tombs and try to break through from the back wall to take a look. If that doesn’t work, we’ll have to start over, so we need to be quick.”

My third uncle and the others had been digging tombs for over ten years, so they were very fast. Three whirlwind shovels flew up and down, and in no time, they had gone down seven or eight meters. Since we were in the wilderness, there was no need to worry about the soil; we just flipped it out. Before long, Daqi shouted from below, “Got it!”

Daqi had already dug a large hole below the theft tunnel and cleared a big section of brick wall. We turned on the mining lamps and went down inside. The Muffled Oil Bottle saw Daqi knocking on the brick wall and quickly held him back, saying, “Don’t touch anything.” The Muffled Oil Bottle’s gaze was extremely sharp, startling Daqi.

He extended two fingers and placed them on the wall, feeling along the brick seams. After a long time, he finally stopped and said, “There’s a security layer inside. When we move it, all the bricks must be taken outwards; they cannot be pushed inwards, and definitely not smashed!”

Panzi touched the wall and said, “How is it possible that there isn’t even a gap? How could we pull these bricks out?”

Ignoring Panzi, the Muffled Oil Bottle felt a brick, suddenly exerted force, and surprisingly pulled the brick out of the wall. The adobe bricks were incredibly sturdy; it was hard to imagine how much strength it would take to pull a brick out with just two fingers. Those two fingers were truly remarkable.

He carefully placed the brick on the ground and pointed to the back of it. We saw a dark red wax wall behind it. He said, “This wall is filled with alum used during the alchemy process. If we break it, these organic strong acids will instantly pour over us, burning our skin off in no time.”

I swallowed hard and suddenly thought of the skinless monster that Grandpa had seen. I was very shocked. Could it be that what we saw wasn’t a blood corpse, but rather Great-Grandpa who had been doused in alum? Did that mean that the shots Grandpa fired were actually aimed at Great-Grandpa?

The Muffled Bottle instructed Fat Kui to dig a five-meter vertical well below, then took out a syringe needle and a plastic tube from his bag. He connected the tube to the needle and inserted the other end into the deep pit. Panzi struck a match and heated the needle until it glowed red. Muffled Bottle carefully inserted it into the wax wall, and immediately, red alum began to flow from the tube into the vertical well.

Soon, the dark red wax wall turned white, indicating that everything inside had drained away. Muffled Bottle nodded and said, “Alright!” We immediately began to move bricks. Before long, we had created a hole large enough for a person to pass through. Third Uncle tossed a match into the hole and, using the light, observed the environment inside.

We broke through from the north side of the tomb and saw that the ground was covered with large stone slabs, inscribed with ancient characters. These slabs were arranged in a pattern resembling the Bagua, with larger slabs on the outside and smaller ones toward the center. Surrounding the tomb were eight eternal lamps, which had long since gone out. In the middle of the tomb stood a four-legged square cauldron, with the ceiling above it carved with the sun, moon, and stars. To the south of the tomb chamber, directly in front of us, lay a stone coffin, and behind the coffin was a pathway that seemed to lead downward, though we didn’t know where it went.

Third Uncle leaned in to sniff and then waved us over, signaling for us to crawl in one by one.

Third Uncle looked at the characters on the ground and said to Muffled Bottle, “Little Brother, can you tell who is buried here from these inscriptions?”

Muffled Bottle shook his head and didn’t say anything.

We lit several matches and tossed them into the eternal lamps, illuminating the entire tomb chamber. I recalled the monster mentioned in Grandpa’s notes, along with his repeated references to hearing a strange clattering sound, which sent chills down my spine. At that moment, Panzi unexpectedly climbed onto the cauldron to see what was inside. Suddenly, he shouted, “Third Uncle, there are treasures here!”

We all scrambled up to see that inside the cauldron was a headless corpse, its clothes completely decayed. The corpse still had some jade ornaments on it, and Panzi, not hesitating, directly took them off and put them in his hands.

“This should be the remains of a human sacrifice after the head was cut off for a ritual, and the body was placed here as an offering. These must be war captives; slaves wouldn’t have ornaments on them,” he said.

Panzi jumped into the cauldron to see what else was down there, and Muffled Bottle wanted to stop him but was too late. He looked back at the stone coffin, relieved that it showed no reaction. Third Uncle scolded, “You brat, that cauldron is meant for offerings! Do you want to be treated as a sacrifice?”

Panzi chuckled, “Third Uncle, I’m not Da Kui, so don’t try to scare me.” He pulled out a large jade bottle from inside. “Look, there are quite a few good things here. Let’s turn the cauldron over and see what else is inside!”

“Stop messing around, get out quickly!” Third Uncle urged. He noticed that Muffled Bottle’s face had turned pale, his eyes fixed intently on the stone coffin, realizing that something might go wrong.

At that moment, I heard a “giggling” sound. I turned my head to listen, and a chill ran down my spine; the sound wasn’t coming from the coffin, but from the oil bottle instead.