We walked over and, from a distance, saw that there was indeed a person lying in front of the old woman.
“Little brother?” A sinister thought flashed through my mind, but I quickly dismissed it. Wasn’t it said that he wasn’t here? It was impossible for him to appear here.
The person was completely wrapped in black, sticky mud, with several vine-like things around them. The fat guy tore these off, revealing three bronze iron chains.
It was these three chains that kept the person fixed here, preventing them from being washed away by the mud.
The person was curled up, and from the shape, they looked very fat; I couldn’t tell if they were even a real person.
“What is this? Is there really a god of diarrhea?” the fat guy said. “Did he exhaust himself and die here?”
“Are you saying that all that stuff earlier was produced by this person? How long must he have been diligently doing that?”
“Have you never heard a song? I want to keep going for another five hundred years,” the fat guy said. Zhang Haixing sighed and looked at the ceiling, clearly at her wit’s end with us.
The fat guy said, “Old sister, don’t be like that. These jokes won’t harm our professional skills; they can actually lighten the mood.”
“Stop talking nonsense and see what it is,” Zhang Haixing said. “Do you never get tired of talking like you’re performing a comedy skit?”
“The more skilled you are, the bolder you are,” the fat guy said, glancing at me and Zhang Haixing before reaching out to touch the person.
The surface of the person showed no indentation; it was hard. I could feel the fat guy exerting force, but there was no change.
“Turned to stone,” the fat guy said, obviously relieved. “It can’t be alive; even if it is, it can’t move. We could even pee on it.”
“Are you sure? It might be a Diamond Gourd Baby,” my heart was racing, and I forced myself to make a joke.
“If it were a Diamond Gourd Baby, we’d be dreaming. Just look at its face; if it were a dream, I’d hope it would be Iron Arm Astro Boy,” the fat guy said, mimicking the action of tearing something off the face, but despite the action, neither he nor I reached out. Zhang Haixing looked at us: “Are you two serious? Should we go back and have a drink to build up some courage before coming back?” Saying this, she reached for the person’s face.
The fat guy grabbed her hand: “If this is a place of gods, then the honor of unveiling the god’s veil must belong to me, Fat Master. I’ve been hanging out with Little Tianzhen for a long time and often end up losing out; I can’t lose my honor too. Step aside.”
“Stop talking nonsense, you two go aside; I won’t give you any honor,” Zhang Haixing said angrily.
The fat guy made an expression that left no room for negotiation and glared at Zhang Haixing for a long time.
Zhang Haixing couldn’t be bothered to argue with him anymore, retracting her hand. The fat guy spat and muttered, “You’d better be one of the Seven Fairies, or at the very least Chang’e; if not, the Weaving Maiden would do.”
I was calculating in my mind that, according to the fat guy, this could not possibly be a god because a god of diarrhea wouldn’t stay in their own excretory organ; it was at most a roundworm in the rectum. This thought flashed through my mind, and I realized I was too tense, my brain forcing me to lose focus.
After a long while, the fat guy slowly began to tear away the black mud from the person.
The mud on the face was quickly peeled off, and as it was pulled away and illuminated by the flashlight, beneath the torn area was a mass of white bone.

The fat man continued to dig, and soon a strange human face appeared before us. It was not stone or a fossil, but something resembling jade, a translucent white stone with many black veins running through it. Surrounding the face were many web-like structures. When we shone our flashlight on them, we discovered that these things had been petrified, but they were not very solid, as they shattered when we applied force.

The surface of the face was severely cracked and had sharp angles; it looked like an old man. The clothing around the collar was completely rotted away, likely washed off by the mud we encountered earlier, leaving only some fibers and a few Tibetan silver ornaments that were not easily decayed still on the body.

“Spider-Man?”

“No, it’s a cocoon,” Zhang Haixing said. Suddenly, she reached out and began tearing off all the black mud from the person’s body.

Soon, a semi-transparent human figure appeared before us. Miraculously, we found that the clothing on the body was relatively intact. It was a leather jacket hardened by the mud.

“Is this a Tibetan person?”

“No, it’s a Han person.” Zhang Haixing lit a cigarette and pulled a pendant from around the man’s neck—it was a jade pendant. She handed it to me, and I could tell it had a Han style.

“Can you tell what era it’s from?” I asked. The design of the pendant was very simple, without many details for me to judge.

Zhang Haixing shook her head, saying, “Knowing what era it’s from is useless; even knowing who he is wouldn’t help.”

“OK, let me summarize: inside this bronze door, there’s a Han corpse chained to the ground. Is this what your chieftain referred to as the ultimate? This ultimate seems a bit weak.”

“No, this person must be a foreigner. Look, the bronze chains are made of real iron, driven into the ground to secure him. We need to take a closer look.”

He looked entirely human, curled up in a natural position, very overweight, with all the fat spilling onto the ground, but when pressed, it was all hard.

“There’s actually a person’s molting here,” Zhang Haixing said, shining her flashlight on the jade figure’s chest. We noticed that all the black cotton-like fibers converged into a black mass at the chest.

“Do you know what this is?” I asked her in surprise.

“I came prepared. I’m not completely unaware of what we might see. This is corpse jade, a strange type of jade formed when a human body petrifies under specific conditions. We’ve opened many ancient tombs over thirty centuries old and found similar situations. This corpse jade takes a long time to evolve and requires a very stable environment. In other words, a specific environment accelerates the petrification of the body to an incredibly fast rate, even preserving its basic shape. However, most corpse jade encases the entire body; this one is very special. I’ve never seen a whole body transformed like this.”

“I feel like I’ve seen something similar before,” a flicker of memory crossed my mind, but I couldn’t recall when I had seen such a thing. “So why is this here?”

“There’s no way for us to know this for sure. All I know is that in our family records, it seems like something is taking shape inside the chest cavity of every corpse jade. Look at this black cotton-like substance; in all the corpse jades we’ve seen before, this material was scattered throughout the body, but there are signs that it all converges towards the chest cavity. And in this one, almost all of it is concentrated in the chest cavity. This corpse jade must be very ancient. Come on, let’s break open its chest cavity and see what’s inside.” With that, she took out her climbing pick.

The fat man waved his hand at her from the other side of the corpse, “No need to break it open; come over here and take a look. This side is already broken.” He then lifted the corpse with some effort, allowing us to see its back. The web-like material shattered completely, falling apart in a cascade of debris.

The corpse didn’t seem too heavy; he was holding it up by himself. We could see a large hole in the back, filled with black jade fragments. The pieces were still beneath the corpse, and we could see that the chest cavity was empty.

“It’s empty; there’s nothing there. It might just be a natural phenomenon.”

“That’s not what you think.” Zhang Haixing’s expression changed, “Could something have escaped from the corpse?”

“What kind of thing?”

“I don’t know, but it must have been in the mud we just saw; it got washed out.” Zhang Haixing said.

“Not necessarily.” The fat man’s expression suddenly changed as well. He quickly pointed his flashlight towards one side of the cave while lowering his gun.

I recalled his earlier feeling and also raised my weapon.

Just as I turned back, we immediately saw a dark shadow in the place the fat man had been looking at earlier. In the dim light, it appeared to be in a hunched position, nestled in the darkness, seemingly watching us.