Volume3 Chapter11: Human Head

Since we entered the mountains, apart from the few wild game dishes given to us by the guide, we have been eating dry rations. We haven’t had a chance to eat much of the game, and the monkeys have messed it up. Now that the craving hasn’t passed, when Lao Yi talks about fish, I say I don’t want to eat it, but in fact my heart is already a little excited, and my mind is still imagining the scene of eating a fish head hotpot at sea.

But this This damn knife shattered my dream. I looked at the bloody human head covered in stomach acid, and the image of the fish head hotpot overlapped, and a wave of nausea rose up my throat, almost spitting it out.

Lao Yang usually has a lot of courage. He has seen a thousand dead people, but when he saw this scene, he also turned pale and didn’t catch his breath for a long time.

With great difficulty I used the dagger to turn the head over and found that the skin on his face was slightly ulcerated, but the whole head was still relatively intact. It should have been eaten not long ago. When the fish swallowed the head, it probably chewed a few times, causing the shape of the skull and jaw to be a bit deformed.

The person had not been in the fish’s stomach for long, which meant that he had just died.

I covered my nose with one hand and used the other to push aside the contents of the fish’s stomach, trying to see where the rest of the man was. Soon I found his hands and some pieces of flesh, all of which had been corroded to some extent, and there was no way to identify the man.

I continued to turn it over a few times and found our backpack, which it had swallowed. The contents had mixed with the remains of the stomach contents, and I pushed everything aside except for those things I really couldn’t give up. Those The dried food was wrapped in plastic, but I couldn’t bring myself to eat it.

Suddenly, I saw a black object in a mass of goo. Before I could get it all out, Lao Yi was already screaming, “Fuck, it’s a ‘patsi’!”

I didn’t know what a patsi was, but I guessed it was some kind of slang he had picked up in prison. It turned out to be a crude handgun. the long barrel of a small-caliber double-barreled hunting rifle was sawed off, and the butt was modified to look like a pistol. It had two barrels, so it could fire twice, but it couldn’t eject the shells by itself. You had to take out the empty shells like you would load a bullet, so it was good for hunting small, non-aggressive animals, but if you encountered a large animal and didn’t kill it with the first shot, by the time you reloaded and fired the second shot, its neck would already be bitten off. In addition , this gun is surprisingly powerful at close range, but if it is more than 20 meters away, even a dog can’t be killed. In fact, its practicality is not comparable to a formal pistol.

I pulled the gun out and rubbed the top off on the ground before taking it out. I pulled the barrel and saw that there were two shotgun shells inside. Under the pistol barrel was an iron box for loading bullets, which contained about eight bullets, four blue and four red. I don’t know what type they are.

This person may have come to the mountains to poach, stumbled upon the hole, and wanted to take a look, but ended up feeding the fish. The gun may have been swallowed by the fish when it was biting human flesh. This is what bad luck is like. Who would have thought there would be such a large carnivorous fish in this place.

The gun is a good thing, and can be used to save lives in an emergency, but there are too few bullets. Lao Yi After taking out our equipment, we poked around in the fish’s stomach a few more times, but found nothing more. I looked at the fish’s body and saw that in addition to the wounds we had caused, there were also some small bullet holes. The fish had already been injured before it attacked us, but it was hit by an iron sand bullet, which was too weak to be lethal.

Lao Yao looked at the fish and said, “Lao Wu, how could there be a killer fish in this place? Could it be that someone has kept it here?”

I told I said to him, “No, I think there are other waterways under the surface of the stone path, connected to the nearby underground river, and the underground river here is usually connected to the Jialing River. This fish must have swum here from the river.”

Lao Yang said, “No, they haven’t had diving equipment for thousands of years, so how did they dig these underwater waterways?”

I saw that Lao Yang was quite interested, and I explained, “They weren’t dug. I think they were formed by an accident.”

When I was studying architecture, there was a course on natural mechanics that talked about geological structures. It mentioned that there are often hollow areas in the rocks formed during the orogenic movement in the ancient times, called dikes. If the dikes are connected to the mountain streams, it is possible to form a water system inside the mountain. Once the miners hit this area, there may be a huge accident. Smaller ones may destroy a few mine tunnels, and larger ones may flood the entire work surface.

This is a quarry, and there are generally no drainage tunnels, so it was flooded like this. It may be because of an accident like this.

However we can also deduce that the scale of the quarry may be much larger than what we see, but because it is submerged underwater, it is not visible. With so much stone used, the ancient tomb we are going to must not be small.

We pushed the fish carcass and human head back into the water, but the smell was unbearable. We didn’t rest for long, and when our clothes were almost dry, we dressed again, put everything we needed in our pockets, and hurried off.

Lao Yao He took out a flashlight and led the way, the two of us walking one behind the other, straight into the back stone path.

It was just as dark inside, with stone and animal figurines lying on the stone path, and the walls on both sides of the cave were pitted and cracked, and sometimes we could see unfinished relief carvings.

These things were all very large, and I couldn’t help but wonder how the stone quarried here was transported to the tomb.

According to According to the information that Mr. Qi gave me, the territory of the Snake Kingdom was not large, most of it was mountainous, hunting was the main way of life, and productivity was relatively backward. It should not have the strength to transport stone materials over long distances. To facilitate transportation, the tomb should be relatively close.

The hole we just came in was blasted by tomb robbers, which means that the exit of this quarry should be on the other side. Could it be that we can reach the entrance to the underground palace by going all the way?

However there are also many people who deliberately prepare materials far away in order to hide the location of their own tombs, which is beyond our control.

We walked for half an hour, and it was dark in front and behind. Lao Yi’s flashlight battery was exhausted and began to flash. I felt tired, so I called for a stop to change the battery and took a smoke to refresh myself.

We sat on the ground, put the flashlight on the ground, and shone it on the lifelike stone figures. Lao Yi asked me, “These stone statues are carved so realistically that they are really creepy. What dynasty do you think they are from? I have no idea.”

I I was as confused as he was. China has a long history of stone and clay sculpture, and it has a long history of integration with ancient India and Tibetan culture. But the sculpting technique that uses realism as the main means of expression has only appeared once in my memory, and that is the Terracotta Warriors of Qin Shi Huang. But the stone statues here are completely different from the Terracotta Warriors, and they are really a strange breed.

However , the stone figurines all have the distinctive characteristics of a double-body snake pattern, which must definitely belong to the culture of the ancient She people. No matter whether this mine belongs to the ancient tomb we are going to, we have now entered the territory of the ancient snake country, and there is no mistake.

Lao Yang talked a lot, asking questions while smoking. I was tired of asking questions, so I told him not to ask me about everything. I’m not an archaeologist. Let’s just take the things and leave. Let the old professors do the research.

After changing After changing the batteries, we walked a few steps and saw a reflection of the flashlight in front of us. It seemed that we had reached the end. We ran forward and sure enough, there was a stone wall in front of us. At the end of the stone path was a small stone room with many broken stone figurines of headless people inside. There were stone lamps around the room, and in the middle of the stone room was a stone coffin.

The stone coffin It was very large, and a two-headed snake was carved on the lid, with the two snake bodies winding around the sides of the coffin. The carving was very refined, but the tail of the snake was obviously not finished, and only a rough outline was carved.

When the flashlight was shone on it, the stone of the coffin appeared translucent like condensed milk, and the lid was not closed, revealing a seam as thick as an arm. The entire coffin was placed on the coffin bed, and there was nothing else around it.

It seemed it is a burial coffin, probably left over from the burial process, or carved as a spare, and abandoned here.

How come this stone path is so long, but only leads to this place? I wondered, it’s impossible, this is obviously a place for storing rejects, there is no exit, so the stone path is closed at both ends, could it be that the road for transporting stone materials is below the water level of the waterway we just passed through? Or is there a secret passage in this stone chamber?

If If the entrance is underwater, that would be terrible, I thought to myself.

After finding nothing strange in the stone room, I and Lao Yang looked around, and finally surrounded the side of the stone coffin.

It was Lao Yang’s first time seeing a coffin, so he was very curious. He circled around twice and asked me, “Is there a rice dumpling inside?”

Without thinking, I said, “No, I’ve never heard of carving a coffin before burial. This should be an empty coffin.”

Lao Yang peered into the gaps in the lid of the coffin with his flashlight and said, “But it looks like something is inside. Come and take a look.”

I went over to him and looked from a distance. Sure enough, looking down through the gaps in the coffin, there was a black shadow lying inside. But what it was, I really couldn’t see.

Lao Yang He blew the dust off the lid of the coffin, knocked on it, and tried to stick the flashlight into the gap in the coffin to shine it in, but the flashlight we bought had a head that was too big, and after trying for a long time, he couldn’t get it in. He asked, “Do you want to open it and take a look?”

I felt a little strange. In the past, when opening coffins, there were always a few old hands on the side, but this time I was alone, so I wasn’t confident, and I shook my head: “Something’s wrong with this. I don’t feel good. Don’t open it rashly.”

Before he could finish hadn’t finished speaking, the old man suddenly jerked back, took a few steps back, sat down, and dropped the flashlight.

I was startled, and just as I was about to ask him what he was doing, I suddenly felt a chill on my hand. I looked down and saw a dry, pale hand that had somehow reached out from the gap in the coffin lid and was grasping my wrist.