Volume 3 Chapter 9 Stone Man

We were in a daze the whole way, and when we suddenly saw this thing in front of us, very few of us could react immediately.

I and Lao Yang involuntarily stepped back, trying to keep our distance from it, but for a moment we couldn’t move our legs, and we just felt our hearts pounding and our bodies stiffening.

Lao Yang was a little braver than me, and after taking a deep breath, he shouted at the man, “Who are you?”

The man didn’t react at all, and he didn’t move, as if he were a stone.

Lao Yang asked me in a low voice, “Why doesn’t he pay any attention to us? Lao Wu, don’t tell me we’ve run into the army of the dead, just like that old man Liu said?”

A cold wind blew past, and I became a little more sober. I said, “Don’t panic. If it’s a person, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Let’s take a good look at it first!” I took out my flashlight and shone it at it.

The “person” was wearing strange ancient clothes, and his bare arms were grayish in color. He stood motionlessly in the middle of the ravine. In the dim in the dark mountain crevice shadows, it looked extremely strange. The flashlight shone on its body, and it didn’t react at all.

At this time, I discovered something wrong.

It turned out that this person had green moss growing on his body.

No matter what it is, except for a turtle, how could he allow moss to grow on his body? I looked looked closely and found that this “person” was not “flesh,” but seemed to be carved from stone. It was only that his carving technique was too realistic, and in the case of insufficient light, it would be mistaken for real.

Even so, I couldn’t help laughing. This stone man was simply a work of art, so realistic that even when we looked at it up close, we felt the scene was terrifying and our heads were sweating.

We were still scared. We walked over and found that the lower body of the “stone man” was buried in a pile of broken stones. It had probably fallen down with the collapse of the stones above it. The head was gone, leaving only a neck. I looked up and saw that there was a place on the cliff where the rocks were loose, but the entire mountain was tilted, forming a blind spot.

The stone man The arms were exposed, which was not the style of Han culture. On the clothing carved on him, I found the pattern of a two-body snake. The style of the clothes I had never seen before, and the colors had faded a bit. The head of the stone man was missing, probably smashed when it fell.

Seeing this, I was sure that this thing should be a stone man figurine buried with the dead.

I looked up at the top of my head. The stone man figurine had collapsed from above, and it looked like there was something on it.

Old Itch He was impatient and climbed up without waiting for me to see clearly. I followed him and lay on the cliff, moving along the slope little by little. Soon, we climbed to the place where the collapse occurred.

It seemed to be a shallow pit carved into the mountain wall. Many similar stone figurines were visiting in the cave. The strange thing was that the heads of these stone figures were all gone, and human skeletons were placed on their necks, and the joints were cemented with mud.

I knew that these were human head figurines. In ancient times, when soldiers brought back the entire corpse of their enemy to claim credit, they would cut off the head and place it on a stone body to serve as a living sacrifice.

There were originally murals in the Western Zhou Dynasty, but they have been washed away by rain and are now unrecognizable. At the bottom of the cave is a half-length human figure carved into the mountain. The chest to the head has been blown up several times, leaving only one hand and half a shoulder that can still be distinguished.

In the middle of the collapse middle, a basketball-sized black hole was blasted out. I suppressed my excitement and shone my flashlight inside. I found that the space inside was enormous.

My intuition told me that there might be an ancient tomb behind this huge stone statue, and it was very likely the main tomb that the huge sacrificial pit that Lao Yao had mentioned served.

Generally Generally speaking, if you can think of building a tomb in such a place, the identity of the tomb owner must be very prominent. But if you can overturn the tomb in such a place, you must be a master among masters. An ordinary tomb robber, even if he walks back and forth in this Jiazigou hundreds of times, will never think that there is another world above his head.

After some discussion, Lao Yang and I decided to go in first. After all, the destination was nearby, and if there was nothing inside, it would not be too late to come out again. In our line of work, if you don’t drill a hole, you will suffer to death.

He is thinner than He was thinner than me, so he had to crawl into the hole. The hole was high up inside, so he couldn’t reach the bottom with his feet, so he had to cling to the wall. I handed him my flashlight, and he took a look and said, “Fuck, there’s water inside.”

I stuck I looked inside and saw that it was a large vaulted stone chamber that had been carved out. There were traces of frescoes on the ceiling. The water level was very high, almost reaching the edge of the vault. Looking through the water, I could see that shallow pits had been carved into the stone walls on all four sides, and inside were moss-covered headless stone figurines. I don’t know if the water accumulated when it rained and flowed in through this hole, or if there was another reason.

Lao Yao told me that when he last visited, the stone figures had not yet collapsed. It is impossible that the water in here is rainwater.

I told him to be careful, but Lao Yan, who was confident in his swimming ability, jumped in as soon as he let go of the rope.

I looked I saw his tongue hanging out. The water was too deep. I asked him, “Can you step on the bottom of the water? Is it mud or stone?”

Lao Yao said, “I can’t reach the bottom. Damn, the water is really fucking cold.”

I took out the tarps from both backpacks, wrapped them around the backpacks, threw one to him, and put the other on my back. Then I carefully slipped into the water. Immediately, a chill ran up my soles, and I shivered from the cold.

There was It was empty, and indeed very deep. I thought to myself, because I hadn’t thought of working in the water beforehand, I hadn’t prepared any equipment to deal with it, so we just swam in with our flashlights.

After only a few strokes, I saw a stone door open on the innermost stone wall.

Stone door Because of the water level, it looked very low. Inside the low door was a stone path about two cars wide. It was pitch black, and wherever our flashlights swept, there were grayish-blue stone walls with signs of rough carving. There were also murals in some places, but the murals here were already so corroded that they were basically unrecognizable.

We kept swam a dozen meters further, suddenly the stone path took a sharp turn, forming a 90-degree right angle. I shone my flashlight and found that it was frighteningly deep, so I stopped and didn’t dare to go in.

In fact In fact, it is not wise to go any further in. The water is so deep and I can’t see what’s in it, which is a bit scary. If something comes out of the water, even if it’s just a piece of wood, it can scare me half to death.

Old Itch I looked at the surrounding stone walls and asked, “Have you noticed that although this tomb is quite large, it is very poorly built? Look at these stone fragments, one is uglier than the other, and it hasn’t been repaired at all.

I said, ‘This may just be the outermost part of the entire tomb area. Look at all the unfinished stone statues here. It may be where the tomb craftsmen quarried and carved the stones. If you look further in, you should be able to see more clearly.’

We We continued on, and after a few more minutes, when we passed the corner, we heard a few muffled sounds of water in the darkness ahead, as if something was sneaking through the water.

I grabbed Lao Yi’s hand and forced the flashlight in his hand to turn in the direction of the sound of the water. Immediately, I saw a triangular water mark appear on the surface of the water, which instantly sank into the water.

Before I could react to what it was, Lao Yi had already slapped my hand away and turned around and yelled, “Run!”