Volume 5 Chapter 25 Monkey Head Roast

Pan Zi saw that my face was not right, so he let me rest for a while. I really couldn’t take it anymore, so I sat on the wine jar and panted. The others re-packed their equipment. Shunzi had never been in such a place before. He picked up a cold firework and looked around curiously. He said, “I really didn’t know that such a place was buried in Changbai Mountain. This time I’ve really seen something.”

“There’s more you haven’t seen yet,” said Pan Zi. “I think that the things that the Jin Dynasty plundered from the Northern and Southern Song Dynasties, and the treasures that the Southern Song Dynasty offered every year, either fell into the hands of Genghis Khan, or they must be in this place.”

“Don’t think too much.” The fat man said, “Most of the tribute from the Southern Song Dynasty was silk and satin. This kind of thing doesn’t age well and is not easy to sell. I think even if there is some, it’s probably rotten. Let’s not always think about the things in the underground palace. It’s better to think about the immediate benefits.” He then went to study the wine jars and wanted to move one to see what was written on the bottom.

I said to him, “This kind of jar is too rough, don’t bother, give it to someone else to sell mutton and pickles, no one will want it.”

The fat man said, “Who says I’m thinking about this jar? Don’t think that your fat grandfather is just a relic.” He used a dagger to break open the seal of a jar of wine, and suddenly a strange smell came out. It was neither fragrant nor smelly, and it was quite enjoyable to smell it for a long time. I don’t know what kind of wine it is.

I have seen wine in ancient tombs in a lot of books, but this was the first time I had seen it in person. I was curious, so I went over to take a look.

The wine was black and very pure. The water in it had basically disappeared, leaving only half a jar. People who know wine know that this is the characteristic of aged wine. This half jar is the essence of the wine, which is really tempting. However, no matter what you say, this thing has been stored for too long. I don’t know how long the shelf life was back then.

I remember that the oldest wine in China was unearthed in a tomb in Henan in 1980 during the late Shang Dynasty. It is now in the Palace Museum and is about 3,000 years old. I heard that after it was opened, the aroma of the wine immediately made several people faint. I don’t know if these people had drunk it at the time, otherwise they could have used it as a reference.

The fat guy dipped a knife in it and wanted to taste it. I stopped him: “Don’t you want to live? Expired food, be careful of food poisoning.”

The fat guy said, “You don’t understand. Cellar wine will not spoil for thousands of years. It is said that the wine in the wine cellar below the thousand-year-old wine can make you immortal. Our ancestors dug up the wine cellar, and some of them went there just for the wine. It will be fine to taste it, and at most you will get a stomachache.”

Before he finished talking, Pan Zi came over and kicked the wine cellar over with a “thud,” spilling the black wine and the wine in the bottom of the jar all over the ground. A strong, strange fragrance suddenly filled the air. The fat man was about to fly into a rage, but Pan Zi said to him, “Don’t get angry yet. Look at what’s in the wine vat.”

The fat man and I turned around and saw that inside the black, muddy wine vat, there were many dark red flocculent substances, like fragments of a poor-quality quilt.

The fat man used a dagger to poke at it, and his face changed. I went over to take a look, and suddenly my scalp went numb, and I felt a wave of intense nausea, almost vomiting.

Those red flocculent substances were the body of a baby that had not completely rotted. The flesh had completely dissolved in the wine, but the skin and bones were still there, so it formed a lump of broken cotton wool.

Pan Zi looked at us in a daze and squatted down and said, “This wine is called ‘Monkey Head Wine’. It’s not a human, it’s a premature monkey. It’s a wine from Guangxi. It may have been a wine from the Southern Song Dynasty that was offered as tribute when the Jurchen Jin dynasty was still in its heyday.” He patted the fat man and used the dagger to pick up the “cotton ball” and made a gesture to invite him to use it: “I don’t know if it can make you immortal, but I heard that it has a good effect on virility. Don’t be polite.”

The fat man angrily slapped the knife away, cursed, and asked Pan Zi, “How do you know so much? Have you drunk this wine?”

“I saw this kind of jar in Nangong, Shanxi. At the time, Dakuai and another of our employees took a jar out. I always thought it was inappropriate, so I didn’t touch it, but they didn’t care. As a result, they drank until they saw the bottom and discovered what was underneath. Later, Dakuai was in the hospital for two months because of this.” Speaking of Da Kui, Pan Zi was a bit emotional: “I’ve been really good to you guys. If I wanted to harm you, I would have waited for you to take a sip before I kicked over the jar.

The fat guy’s face twitched, and he wanted to attack but didn’t have an excuse.

At this time, the cold fireworks went out one after another, and darkness fell. We turned on the flashlights again, and the atmosphere around us suddenly became oppressive.

After a short break, we continued on our way. The fat guy wanted to go back to his precious rifle, so he cocked it again. This is actually a habit for people with guns to give themselves courage. He looked at the two tombs on both sides and asked in a low voice, “Which way should we go?”

We all stopped and looked around. At this time, Shunzi pointed to the left and said, “This side is safer.”

Usually, Pan Zi and I would answer, but now Shunzi suddenly said something, and the fat guy was confused. “Why?”

Shunzi shone a flashlight at the ground at the entrance to the tunnel on the left. We saw that in a very hidden place on one side of the tunnel, there was another symbol engraved in a foreign language. “I just saw it by chance. I think someone is guiding you,” he said to us.

Proofread by Feng Yichun.