Chapter 326: Panma

The conversation was very fragmented — the old man spoke, and Agui translated; sometimes they had to explain concepts to each other, which took a lot of time. Moreover, the old man wasn't very cooperative with my questions, or perhaps Agui's translation had some deviations. So by the end, my mind was filled with nothing but a shattered, disjointed picture.

The old man couldn't pinpoint the exact year when Wenjin and the others went into the mountains.

At that time, the person leading the team should have been Wenjin, but when I showed the old man the group photo from Xisha, he couldn't distinguish the others. Too much time had passed, and there were too many people. Under those conditions back then, everyone had the same hairstyle and the same clothes. It made perfect sense that he only remembered the one leader.

Pan Ma took the team's money. He was still in his prime back then, and when hunting, he would go the farthest and deepest alone. Naturally, he was the most suitable choice as a guide.

They set out at dawn that day. He didn't dare ask too many details about the team's mission; he just led the unit into Yangjiao Mountain and then followed along. He focused on memorizing the route — he hadn't been to Yangjiao Mountain much, so he had to ensure he could return safely.

They walked for quite a long time, spent a night in the mountains, and arrived at a lake deep in the mountains.

Pan Ma had only been to that place once, when he was thirty-one years old. He had needed to hunt a few musk deer to take back for his wedding to treat his uncles. That year, the mountains were restless, and the wild animals had all fled deep into the forest. He traced the game with his dogs and found this lake. He ambushed the lakeside for a day and caught a wild boar. After that, he never went that deep again.

That lake naturally had no name. Perhaps besides Pan Ma, no one in the village even knew there was a lake there. It was a dead lake with no streams feeding it. He didn't know if it connected to anything underground. The unit set up camp and pitched tents by the lake, and then Pan Ma's mission was complete.

After that, he was responsible for delivering supplies to the team every few days. The team's own provisions were ample, so each time he went into the mountains, he only brought some rice or salt. The strange incident that Agui mentioned occurred during one of those trips. During that period, no one knew what the unit was stationed there doing.

Throughout this, Pan Ma was curious, but he also knew that in those days, the price of prying into such things was too high, so he restrained his curiosity. Later, when the team moved out, there were many more boxes — about thirty of them, each the size of a shoebox. The soldiers carried them out very carefully.

Curious, he once tried to take one, but a soldier politely stopped him. That person said the things in the box were very dangerous. He found an opportunity to lift one; it felt very heavy in his hand, and he had no idea what was inside.

Hearing this, I had a rough idea. These shoebox-sized boxes are called storage boxes, nicknamed "antique boxes," used by archaeological teams to store excavated and sorted artifact fragments. Such boxes are usually strictly numbered, with various sizes, but most are shoebox-sized (since unearthed artifacts are generally heavy, the weight accommodated by a shoebox size is most suitable for carrying).

Pan Ma was very puzzled, because by the lake there was nothing special. Where did the things in the boxes come from? At the time, he thought the boxes must be filled with stones, since the lakeshore was a large stone beach with countless rocks.

However, he soon noticed something off. After traveling in the mountains for a while, the boxes began to emit a strange smell — very unpleasant and indescribable.