Volume 3 Chapter 6 Digging

I was not sleeping very well, and I almost sat up in a half-awake state. I was about to scold him, but he covered my mouth and whispered, “Don’t talk. Come with me.”

I was confused. I saw that he was not in a good mood, and I didn’t know what was going on. I put on my coat and sat up, asking, “What are you doing? What’s going on?”

Lao Yan said softly, “Come with me. I’ll show you something.”

I stared at I stared at him for a long time, feeling strange in my heart. But looking at his expression, I didn’t think he was playing with me, so I put on my coat and followed him out of the house.

The shack was outside the forest. Lao Yan took out a compass to determine the direction, took out a folding shovel from our equipment, and told me to follow him.

We walked with flashlights in the downwind for ten minutes before he stopped. He poked the ground with the shovel and said, “Is this it?”

I was was extremely doubtful. Looking at his expression, I couldn’t help but think that he wanted to come here to plant a tree in the middle of the night.

He saw my expression and hurriedly explained, “My cousin and I spent the night here when we came out of the mountains last time. That night I found him sneaking out in the middle of the night, I didn’t know what he was doing, so I followed him, and I found out that he was burying something here? But We were in a bad situation at the time, I didn’t have the energy to care about this nonsense, I just wanted to get out of the mountains as soon as possible, so I didn’t care about this matter. Now that I think about it, the situation at the time was a bit abnormal.“

”Are you sure this is the place?” I asked.

He nodded, ‘My cousin came out of that hole and was very nervous, I don’t know what evil he was under, I’m sure he’s hiding something from us. This time I happened to come back here, I’m going to dig it up and see what he buried? You help me keep watch.’

I nodded nodded, and Lao Yi began to dig.

The soil here seemed not to be hard, but the villagers were still sleeping not far away, so Lao Yi had to stop every three digs to listen for any noise.

He dug for half an hour, and I began to suspect that he had dug in the wrong place. Suddenly, his shovel seemed to have hit something metal, making a crisp sound.

He stopped digging, leaned down, and took out a stick-like object from the hole.

The stick-like was covered in mud, so I couldn’t tell what it was, but I had a hunch it was a bone. Lao Yan wiped it off a bit and his face changed. He said to me, “Fuck, it’s this thing.”

I went over to take a look, and it was a bronze casting with green patina. There was a clear fracture at the bottom, as if it had been sawn off from another bronze object. Then with the light of the flashlight, I could see an abstract pattern on it that looked like a single-headed two-body snake. It should be the “Shezu” thing that the old man was talking about.

Lao Yan said to me, “This is the bronze branch I told you about. I never thought my cousin would secretly saw this thing off.”

I frowned. These people can be said to be the most unqualified group in the entire tomb-robber class, and they are also the largest group. It is not uncommon for them to destroy a priceless treasure for a few thousand dollars.

Lao Yan He continued digging to see what else he could find, but after a long time nothing appeared, so he began to fill the hole back in.

We wrapped the branch in a cloth and tiptoed back, while the others were still sleeping after a day of hard work.

I saw I saw Lao Yi’s face was solemn and worried, and I couldn’t help but ask, “You’ve been so happy and sad these days. Do you have something you can’t talk about? Do you have hemorrhoids?”

Lao Yi lit a cigarette and said, “If only it were that simple. I feel something is wrong, and I can’t figure it out.”

I didn’t say anything, and listened to him continue.

Lao Yi said, “It’s mainly about my cousin. When I went into the mountains with him, he was still normal, but since he saw this bronze branch, I felt that he had begun to change. At first, my cousin just suddenly became a little bit neurotic. Gradually, I noticed that he seemed to be getting more and more out of control…”

I asked, “What you mean is that your cousin went crazy and this thing has something to do with it?”

Lao Yang nodding, “You see, he secretly sawed this thing down and brought it out, and then buried it. What was the point of that?”

I looked I looked at Lao Yi as he played with the bronze branch, and suddenly I felt that I had seen this thing somewhere before. I quickly took out the information that Professor Wang had given me, turned to a picture, and compared it. Sure enough, it was a copy of a British missionary, Thomas, who copied it from a rock painting in a cave in Xiangxi in 1845. It was a totem that resembled a tree. Thomas wrote in the margin of the painting that this was the “sacred tree” of the local natives. Later This note fell into the hands of Professor Wang, who, based on the description, believed that this sacred tree was one of the totems of the Snake Kingdom culture, representing the divinity of the earth and fertility.

I compared the bronze branch and found that this section was only the end of the branch. If this is the scale, then the entire bronze tree should be 70 to 80 meters high. If it is excavated as a whole, it will be enough to shock the world.

I took I patted Lao Yang on the back and told him not to think too much about it. If it really was the problem with this branch, then he would have been like his cousin long ago.