Volume 7 Chapter 38: The Swamp Demon Realm (Part 2)

I woke up immediately, sat up abruptly, and my head hit someone’s chest.

I reflexively grabbed her, and I suddenly woke up, only to find myself leaning against a tree, my hand holding the belt, which was already half-opened.

Everyone was looking at me in bewilderment. A waterproof cloth had been placed over the snake bones, and the mining lamps were placed on the branches around us. The fat man was sleeping next to me, snoring like a thunderstorm. Ah Ning was holding her chest, obviously in pain from the impact.

I realized that I had just been dreaming, and I let out a sigh of relief. I touched my forehead, which was still wet. I didn’t know if it was cold sweat or rain from yesterday.

I thought about when I fell asleep, and remembered that I had called them down to dig up the snake bones. But the snake bones had been entangled in the vines for at least ten years, and the inside was a mess. We dug for a long time but didn’t find anything, so we took turns resting. I didn’t expect to be so tired from the journey that I fell asleep as soon as I lay down. There was still rain on my face, and that was what Ah Ning’s saliva was.

I smiled awkwardly, got up, wiped my face, and went over to continue helping. Pan Zi was over there, asking me with a sinister smile, “Little Master, what were you dreaming about just now? You were about to take off your pants?”

I slapped him and thought to myself that this time I couldn’t explain it even if I had the reason. I couldn’t help but think of the story of the architect and the train, and I thought that this kind of thing wasn’t just a joke.

I looked at the watch and realized that I hadn’t slept for long. I was wet all over, and I just closed my eyes for a moment. Light sleep is easy to have nightmares, but I finally slept, and my spirits were much better. The dream was a bit strange, but it was also very real. They say that dreams are the subconscious reaction of the human mind. I thought of some of the psychological things that Lao Yi had told me before, and I thought to myself, “Is it possible that in my subconscious mind, I have an overwhelming fear of this woman, Ah Ning? In the dream, it was such a plot.

Looking back at Ning, she had leaned against the tree trunk and taken over my rest. She closed her eyes and rested, looking a little haggard. But this made her aggressive demeanor fade a lot, and she looked more feminine. The twisted face of Ning in the dream overlapped with the current scene, and I suddenly felt a little scared again.

I turned to see how they were doing, but found that there didn’t seem to be much progress. The vines had wound into the bones, and after a lot of tossing and turning, they had all broken off, rotted, and mineralized. The scales that had been smashed were scattered in the pile of vines, looking like ancient paper money.

I laughed at myself, let out a sigh, and asked Pan Zi what they had found. Why hadn’t they dug?

Pan Zi picked up a miner’s lamp on one side and shone it into the skeleton, saying that it was impossible to get the body out. First, the bones were almost rotten and would crumble at the slightest touch, and there would be nothing left if they dug any further. Second, they found this thing.

I looked down along the light of the miner’s lamp and saw a bundle of something similar to chicken legs in the depths of the snake bones, where the vines were tangled. I got down on my stomach to take a closer look and found that it was actually three old-fashioned hand grenades tied together. They had rusted into one whole piece.

Around the body of the grenade was a blackened band of armor, and it was clear that the three things were inserted into the armed bag and carried on the body of the corpse.

I couldn’t help but gasp in horror, and I didn’t dare to move for a moment, backing away carefully. Pan Zi said to me, “This was first discovered by Fatso. If it weren’t for Fatso’s sharp eyes, we might all have been blown to bits.”

I was surprised. “Who is this corpse? How could he be carrying such a thing?” Even if Wen Jin’s team was carrying equipment, they should have brought explosives instead of grenades. This old-fashioned wooden-handled grenade is a weapon for actual combat, designed to kill people, and is basically useless for engineering blasting.

“Do you remember what the old woman Ding Zhuoma told us? In 1993, a group of reactionary separatist forces fled into the Qaidam Desert, and the militia chased them into the depths of the Gobi Desert, but the group disappeared? Pan Zi asked me, “I think this skeleton is one of the people from that group. Maybe it was a female bandit, or maybe it was a family member. They disappeared at that time, and I think they were killed because they got lost in this swamp. It’s been more than ten years, and this group of people hasn’t appeared again. They should all be dead here.”