Chapter 336: Fished Out Monster

Probably Fatty's shout gave me a premonition; I suddenly felt a chill in my heart and quickly wiped the water from my face to look.

My first thought was that Poker-face might have found those corpses; I was already prepared to see a ghastly white skeleton.

Unfortunately, I guessed wrong. What I saw thrown onto the raft looked like a dead animal the size of a backpack. Looking closer, I noticed around that "sunken corpse" there was even a mass of rotten black tentacles. The "sunken corpse" had swollen from being soaked in water, like a ball, and seemed to have been rotting in the water for a long time.

Anyone who has seen dead pigs or dogs floating in a flooded lake knows how disgusting such a corpse can be. I immediately felt nauseous and hurriedly turned over and kicked away from the raft, thinking to myself, why did Poker-face fish this thing up? After swimming a meter away, I quickly used lake water to wash the rotting corpse water that had splashed on my face, feeling it was sticky. Fatty was already cursing over there, "Brother, damn it, you really can bring yourself to do it. Whatever's disgusting, you fish it up."

Poker-face, however, was unfazed. He lay down on the raft and pressed his hand directly on the rotting corpse, squeezing out corpse water that flowed along the raft onto the lake surface. Then he began to tear those tentacles off the corpse and throw them into the water.

At first I almost threw up, but then I realized something was off because I didn't smell a strong stench of decay. Then I saw that Fatty seemed to have noticed something, and he was also waving for me to come over.

I swam over again. The "tentacles" Poker-face had thrown off were still floating around the raft. Suppressing my nausea, I fished one out and looked at it, and found that they weren't tentacles at all, but a strange kind of plant resembling waterweed. Looking more closely at that black "sunken corpse," I finally realized I had been mistaken. The bulging belly of that "corpse" had already deflated; from this angle it didn't look like a corpse, but rather like a deflated leather ball, and the surrounding tentacles were all that strange waterweed-like stuff.

I went over and helped Poker-face remove the waterweed from around that "sunken corpse." Finally we could see clearly: the thing was actually a rotted, blackened old cowhide bag. The leather had been soaked in water until it was completely black, the surface layer completely rotted away, leaving only a thin backing.

This was an old-style large travel bag with a wire frame inside, which is why it hadn't fallen apart; otherwise it would have rotted away completely.

"This is...?" Fatty was speechless.

Poker-face said, "Where I dove down, there's a layer of fence. Many bags and miscellaneous items that sank to the lake bottom are caught on the fence, scattered over a large area. I saw rifles, leather bags, and a tent. I only fished up one."

I immediately realized what this was: "This must be what Pan Ma said — the guns and equipment they sank into the lake together with the bodies after killing them. It seems I was right; these were all sucked down by the siphon current and are hanging on the fence at the lake bottom."

Poker-face nodded, obviously agreeing with me.

"A fence? Damn it, there really is a village at the bottom of this lake?" Fatty still didn't believe it.

My mind was in a mess. I thought to myself, why would I lie to you? I wouldn't believe it myself if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.

The underwater ancient village looked quite large in scale. This kind of complete submersion by a lake is very special, usually caused by large water conservancy projects' sacrificial water storage, such as the Three Gorges Dam reservoir, where many low-lying villages and even historical sites were submerged. There are also cases of mountain damage due to earthquakes, where reservoir water flows into mountain hollows and floods villages, or the entire foundation of a village collapses due to an earthquake, causing the village to sink into the ground and then be submerged by water.

But the terrain here didn't look like it had experienced an earthquake. This stone lake was also very strange; the bottom was full of gravel, and I had no idea how that had formed.

Damn it, this village must be connected to the whole affair. The archaeological team back then obviously came to the lakeside to salvage the iron pieces at the bottom, and these iron pieces clearly existed in that ancient village at the bottom. What connection do these factors have? What happened here? It seems the secrets hidden in the water are definitely beyond my imagination.

"Let's not worry about that for now. Let's see what's in the bag first." Fatty was eager to open the bag, but it was large and the raft was small. The three of us holding it made it hard to maneuver. Fatty fiddled for a while but couldn't figure out how to open it, and the raft felt like it was about to tip over. My mind was in turmoil, and I didn't have the heart to dwell on it. I stopped him and said, "Don't rush. If it tips over, we'll have salvaged it for nothing. Let's go back to shore first." "No," Fatty said, "We don't know what's inside. If it's a corpse or something that Agui shouldn't see, are you going to kill him to silence him? We have to check it here first."

I thought about it and realized he was right. It's not good to let them know too much. So I told him to hurry.

The bag's overall shape was still intact. When we tugged at the thin, rotten cowhide, we found it still had considerable toughness. The quality of military products back then was truly admirable. This kind of bag typically used metal clasps. We cautiously turned the bag over on the raft and found the clasps on the back. When we turned it, the contents felt soft, like a wad of cotton batting.

This kind of bag was originally used to store clothes or fabrics. I thought to myself, I hope we don't turn out a quilt; that would be hilarious.

After flipping it open, we saw two clasps that had rusted into lumps of iron and couldn't be opened. Fatty pulled out his sickle and directly cut a slit in the bag, revealing the wire frame inside.

I had seen a very old domestic crime movie that had this kind of bag; it was used to dump a body, and it contained dismembered body parts. I still had a bit of a psychological shadow. Fatty was also very careful, using the sickle to pry open the cowhide. Sure enough, inside was a clump of almost completely rotted cotton batting—the remains of a blanket that had rotted in the water. Fatty stirred inside with the knife. Soon, we found some things at the bottom of the batting. After poking around, Fatty fished everything out like an archaeologist. They were all women's personal effects.

What led me to this conclusion were the three combs among them. A man might also bring a comb, but not three, and one of them had particularly wide teeth, which must have been used for combing long hair.

There were also two hairpins, a Mao badge, a wooden picture frame, a jar of Pechoin cold cream, and a tea canister.

Both the Pechoin cold cream and the tea canister were tinplate and heavily rusted, but because of the stable conditions at the lake bottom, you could see that the rusting had stopped after reaching a certain point.

What I was most interested in was the wooden picture frame. It had a photo, but it had been completely soaked and rotted, leaving only blobs of color. If we unscrewed the back cover of the frame, the contents would definitely have rotted away entirely. Even if they hadn't, you couldn't tell what had been photographed from those color blobs.

The tea canister made a sound when shaken, so it was clearly sealed. Fatty wanted to open it, but it was rusted shut. He didn't give up; he used the sickle as a hammer to strike the bottom of the canister, but the raft couldn't withstand that pounding. So he had to backstroke while placing the canister on his chest and hitting it. A crisp drum-like sound echoed across the lake, making him look like a fat otter.

I found it amusing, but it actually worked. Soon the bottom of the canister was broken open, and he poured out a black object. He immediately let out an exclamation.

My heart sank when I saw it; it was actually a small iron piece, very similar to the one I had found under Poker-face's bed.

Fatty muttered, "This stuff again. Looks like this leather bag really did belong to the archaeological team back then. Pan Ma didn't lie to us. Damn it, what exactly is this thing?"

I took the iron piece and looked at it carefully, shaking my head without speaking, because I noticed that this iron piece was slightly unusual compared to the one Poker-face had.