Chapter 330: Plan

Agui had been waiting for me at the door the whole time, squatting on the ground and gloomily smoking a cigarette, clearly having no idea what Pan Ma and the others were up to. When he saw me, he immediately stood up, and I said to him, "Let's go, we're heading back."

On the way, I asked him if he knew about the lake at Yangjiao Mountain that Pan Ma had mentioned. Agui nodded, saying he'd heard of it before but had never been there himself. I said I'd pay top dollar if he could find me a hunter to take us there as soon as possible.

Agui readily agreed, then tentatively asked me what exactly Pan Ma had told me. But he asked very cautiously, and I thought to myself that telling him would only get him into trouble, so I brushed him off with some vague reply.

I hurried back to Agui's house, eager to tell Poker-face what I'd discovered, but I found only Yun Cai and her sister tending the stove at home—Fatty and Poker-face were both gone.

I thought it was strange and asked Yun Cai where everyone was. She said that the boss who rarely spoke had come back, seen that the fat boss wasn't back yet, and asked her about it. When she told him the fat boss hadn't come home all night, he rushed off to look for him.

I had been really excited, but that excitement immediately deflated. I thought to myself, Fatty hadn't come home all night? In a mountain village, there aren't any entertainment spots like in the city where he could fool around, so it was a bit abnormal for him to be gone all night. I knew Fatty's temperament well, and thinking about how he'd said earlier that he wanted to get some sulfuric acid, I suddenly had a bad feeling.

I believed Poker-face had thought of the same possibility, just like me, and that was why he'd rushed off to look for him.

I immediately asked Agui to take me to the village office. If anything had happened to Fatty, he'd definitely be there. But before we'd taken more than a few steps, we ran into Fatty and Poker-face coming back. Fatty had gauze wrapped around his face, and he was cursing as he walked, looking like he was injured.

When I asked, it turned out that on his way back from buying the sulfuric acid, Fatty had spotted a hornet's nest, gotten excited, and misjudged his own abilities. He got stung—pretty badly too—and ended up getting an IV drip at the village office, where he fell asleep for the night. Fatty said the hornets around here were different from the ones he'd encountered before. The ones he'd dealt with in the past only got riled up after you poked the nest, but this time, no sooner had he gotten close than the hornets swarmed him—vicious as hell.

I told him, "Don't make excuses. You've got to admit you're getting old. An old fatty shouldn't brag about past glories. You'd better lay off stirring up hornet nests from now on, unless you want people to laugh at you."

Back in the room, we changed Fatty's bandages. It was obviously extremely painful. If it hadn't been for the need to put on a show of manliness in front of Yun Cai, he would have been screaming like a stuck pig.

Yun Cai, however, was very composed, dabbing at his face with antiseptic as if skimming over water. I noticed that several patches on his chin, each the size of a fingernail, were completely swollen. Yun Cai used a bamboo stick to first cut open the swellings before applying the medicine—it was practically like slicing off flesh while he was still alive. No wonder it hurt like hell.

After that was done, Fatty could barely manage to eat dinner. We finally finished eating, and as dusk fell, we cooled off on the veranda that extended out from the stilt house. I recounted everything I'd heard at Pan Ma's place.

After listening, both of them furrowed their brows. Fatty asked, "There's something like that? Damn, this is as good as the ghost stories I used to scare girls with when I was a kid. Can this be true? What's your theory, then?"

"I think Pan Ma definitely wasn't lying," I said. "This whole thing is absolutely true, but the truth of it isn't the kind of truth you'd normally think."

"What do you mean?" Fatty asked. "Let's consider the most reasonable possibility, setting aside any talk of magical lakes or monsters. What do you think is the most likely scenario?"

Fatty shook his head. "Don't give me that. All my brain cells got stung to death by those hornets. I'm not going to guess. Just tell me straight."

I gave a wry smile. I'd finally wanted to show off a bit, but Fatty wasn't playing along. "Fine. Let's remove all the impossible factors. No magical lake, no resurrection of the dead, no monsters. But the story has to be plausible, and what Pan Ma said must hold up. In that case, the only possibility is actually pretty obvious—people can't come back to life, so the archaeological team that went into the mountains and the one that came out definitely weren't the same team."

Fatty paused, catching on. "You mean the dead people didn't come back to life—the ones who walked out were a different bunch?"

"The people Pan Ma and the others killed really did die. Pan Ma didn't know that team well. If another team had disguised themselves, I don't think it would have taken very sophisticated makeup to fool Pan Ma."

"But why would they do that? That's just messing with him."

"This is just a hypothesis. Based on the situation of that team and Pan Ma's account, I feel there might have been some deviation. Let's say this was a long-planned conspiracy. Then maybe, on the day Pan Ma killed the archaeological team, that team was already meant to be eliminated. But the plan might have gone wrong. Maybe the killer who was supposed to kill the team ran into some accident in the woods and never showed up, so Pan Ma completed the task instead. Then the replacement team—the impostors—arrived, thinking the killer had done the job, so they started their disguise according to plan. And that's how Pan Ma, who was in the dark, came up with the story of the magical lake," I said. "That's a reasonable hypothesis. The actual facts could be completely different, but it proves that this scenario is possible."

"Hey, that actually sounds kind of plausible, but I feel like I've heard a plot like that somewhere before," Fatty said. "What evidence do you have?"

"Just some details. For example, Pan Ma led the archaeological team in, but when they came out, they didn't wait for him to guide them out—they set off on their own. That means the later team was familiar with the terrain and knew how to get out. Then, what happened next might have been because the archaeological team discovered some clues and got killed to silence them—Pang Ergui and the others," I said. "I don't know yet if this archaeological team is the same one that went to Xisha, but I have a feeling that even if not all of them were, a few certainly were. If that's the case, then could it be that someone pulled off this switcheroo just to get onto that team for the Xisha expedition?" My reasoning was solid.

Fatty said, "Damn, but how do you prove it?"

"The most direct way is to go take a look at that lake on Yangjiao Mountain. The lake has shrunk now, so I think we can dive down and see what's down there—whether there are any bodies that were thrown into the lake back then."

"Damn, that's gonna be tough, isn't it? Nearly forty years have passed. Even if there were bodies, they'd have rotted away by now."

"The bones will still be there," I said. "Pan Ma and his people didn't have a boat, so they would have dumped the bodies at the lake's edge. I think it's worth a shot."