Chapter 82: Human Head

Since we entered the mountains, aside from the few wild game the old guide gave us, we'd been eating dry, tough rations. We barely got a few bites of that game before monkeys messed it up, and my craving hadn't faded yet. When Old Itch mentioned fish, I said I didn't want any, but inside I was already tempted, my mind even conjuring up scenes of eating fish-head hotpot at sea. I'd never eaten such a big fish before and really wanted to try it here.

But that damn slash shattered my dream. As I looked at that bloody human head, sticky with stomach acid, overlapping with the fish-head hotpot scene in my mind, a wave of nausea surged into my throat, almost making me throw up on the spot.

Old Itch was usually pretty brave—when it came to dead people, he'd seen eight hundred if not a thousand—but even he turned pale at the sight, taking a long time to catch his breath.

Suppressing my disgust, I used my dagger to turn the head over. I noticed the skin on its face was slightly ulcerated, but the whole head was still relatively intact, so it must have been swallowed recently. When the fish swallowed the head, it probably chewed a few times, deforming the skull a bit. Its features were beyond description, impossible to tell who it was.

The person hadn't been in the fish's stomach long, meaning he died not long ago, so he must have come from that village this morning. Could he be one of the people we were following?

I walked over to the fish carcass, covering my nose with one hand and using my dagger with the other to push aside the things that had spilled from its stomach, hoping to find the rest of the body. All I found was one hand, with nothing on it to reveal the person's identity.

I kept poking around and found half a backpack it had swallowed. The contents were mixed with the stomach's residue. Aside from the things I absolutely couldn't give up, I pushed everything else aside. The dry rations were all well wrapped in plastic, but I just couldn't convince myself to eat them.

Suddenly, I saw a black object in a clump of goo. Before I could fully dig it out, Old Itch yelled, "Damn, it's a Pai Zi Liao."

I had no idea what a Pai Zi Liao was; I guessed it was some slang he'd picked up in prison. I pulled it out—it was a homemade pistol. This gun was really crude: a sawed-off double-barreled hunting rifle's long barrel, with the stock reshaped into a pistol grip. It had two barrels, could fire twice, but you had to manually eject the empty shells like loading bullets. So it was fine for hunting small, non-aggressive animals, but if you ran into a fierce beast and didn't kill it with the first shot, by the time you reloaded and fired the second, your neck would already be bitten off. Also, while it was devastating at close range, beyond twenty meters it couldn't even kill a dog—its practicality couldn't compare to a real pistol.

I scraped the stuff off it on the ground, then picked it up and checked the barrels—there were two hunting rounds inside. Under the pistol barrel was an iron ammo box with about eight rounds, four blue and four red, unknown type. I figured if this guy wasn't one of the people we were following, he might be a poacher who stumbled into this cave out of curiosity and ended up fish food. That's how unlucky people get—who would expect a huge carnivorous fish to be here?

This gun was a good find; it could save our lives in an emergency, but there were too few bullets. After Old Itch fished out his treasured stick, he poked around in the fish's stomach a bit more, but didn't find anything else. I examined the fish's body and saw, besides the wounds we'd made, some small bullet holes. The fish had been injured before attacking us, but it was hit by iron pellets with too little killing power to be fatal.

If it hadn't been injured, we'd probably have ended up like this guy in its stomach.

Old Itch pushed the head into the water beside us and said, "This guy's kind of our benefactor, but all that's left is his head. There's nothing we can do for him. It's too harsh to look at—better out of sight, out of mind."

I wanted to stop him, but the head rolled smoothly and fell into the water. Annoyed, I said, "Why can't you just keep still? We still have to go back through this water channel later. You mess around like this, and if you step on that head, won't you be disgusted?"

Old Itch wasn't bothered. "So you staring at it isn't disgusting? If it's in the water, we can't see it, and if we step on it, we treat it like a rock. You don't know what else is down there—maybe there's all sorts of guts and organs."

I couldn't do anything about him. I turned to look at where the head had fallen, thinking about avoiding that area when we went in the water later. Suddenly, I saw another dorsal fin cut swiftly across the water's surface, stirred around, then dove down again.

Seeing that, my heart skipped a beat. I thought I was mistaken, but the fin seemed to want to make sure I saw it, surfacing again a short distance away. The fish was clearly smaller than the one we'd just killed, but that wasn't good news—small fish are more agile in the water, and fighting one could be even more dangerous.

What the hell kind of joke was this? In a place this small, there were two Taimen? How could they survive? Did idiots like us come here every other day to feed them? Impossible—if that were the case, why would anyone even study ecology?

Old Itch was also stunned. After a long pause, he said, "No, there must be other passages below the water in this mine tunnel. Otherwise, how could there be fish this big? They must have swum over from somewhere else. Damn, and more than one. How are we going to get out now?"

My mind was slow to process, but what he said made sense. A thought came to me: maybe the water here connects to other underground rivers or rock veins, and through them to the outside world. So it wasn't strange for fish to appear.

Back when I studied architecture, there was a course on natural mechanics about geological structures. It mentioned that rocky mountains often have hollow zones formed during the ancient orogeny, called rock veins. If a rock vein connects to a mountain stream, it could form an internal water system in the mountain. If miners hit one, it could cause a major accident—at least flooding a few tunnels, at worst flooding the entire workface. These waters now might not be rainwater but water surging in from underground rock veins.

I thought about it. The water here was so cold—maybe that was the reason.

Old Itch saw I wasn't talking and grew anxious. "Say something. What do we do now? This campfire won't last long. When it goes out, we'll be hugging each other in the dark for warmth."

I said, "You've got to give me time to think. Panic won't help. Heaven never seals off all exits—there's always a way." At this point, I'd never agree to risk going back through the water channel. I looked back at the several mine tunnels nearby and had a flash of inspiration. "Don't panic. That opening was blown open by someone—it's not even a real exit. One of these mine tunnels must have an exit. If we go this way, we might make it out."

As soon as I said it, I regretted it. Mining, like building foundation piles, can be done in many ways—vertical shafts or inclined ones like winding stairs. If it's an inclined shaft, as long as we find the path, we can climb up. But if it's a vertical shaft, ten meters high, you'd need a lifting device. After a few hundred years, those would have rotted away. Even if we could walk on walls, we couldn't climb it.

Old Itch wasn't confident in me. "Hold on. You're making such bold claims. Do you really know what you're doing? Don't be like when we were kids—all talk in the planning, full of loopholes when it came to execution, and I ended up taking the blame. Back then, we just got a beating. Now it's a life-or-death business. Think it through."

I had my doubts too, but my old habit of saving face kicked in. "Why so much bullshit? We succeeded plenty of times as kids too. Now we just have to grit our teeth and go. Otherwise, let's go back via the water channel and see whose luck holds out."

When I said that, Old Itch had no comeback. But for a split second, I thought I saw a sly, triumphant look flash across his face. My heart jolted, but when I looked again, nothing seemed off.

I hesitated for a moment, then Old Itch told me to pack up. Our clothes were almost dry, so we put them on and stuffed all the necessities into our pockets.

When I came, I'd anticipated we might have to abandon our backpacks while entering the fight, so we wore mountaineering suits with lots of pockets, similar to the "rat suits" from the Republican era. But when we finished preparing, I realized how ridiculous we looked—like two Christmas trees.

Old Itch turned on his flashlight and took point. He asked for the Pai Zi Liao, but I was cautious. "I'm better with a gun than you. You just lead the way ahead. Leave the cover fire to me. If things get hectic and you fumble, shooting me by mistake, wouldn't I die in vain?"

Old Itch wanted to argue, but I was right. He scratched his head and agreed. So we went one after the other, picked the biggest tunnel, and walked straight in.

At first, the tunnel was pitch black. We walked for a long time feeling nervous, but as we kept going, nothing happened. Old Itch got bored and asked, "This mine is really strange. What's with the big stone carving on the cliff? Does it have anything to do with the mine?"

I recalled the huge statue—its head and half its body had been blown off. I couldn't figure out what it was about, mainly because I hadn't seen the statue's head. I didn't know if it was a person or a god. Most of my knowledge is about antiques; questions in this realm really stumped me.

However, looking at the position of the statue, I could think about it from the opposite direction. Perhaps the villagers' original intention was only to carve a statue in this hook-shaped crevice, but while carving, they accidentally discovered a mineral vein, so they drilled mining shafts in other places and slowly turned this place into a mine. There are many such stories in county chronicles and anecdotal novels. As for why they originally wanted to carve a human statue on the cliff, it is not important at all and impossible to infer. For something like the Leshan Giant Buddha, the reason is often just a whim of someone. I don't need to speculate about the thoughts of the ancients.

My level could only deduce this much, but it was more than enough to bluff someone of Old Yang's caliber. He listened in a daze, and after a long time, he said, "If there's no connection, that's for the best. That stone hand, damn, it was carved so lifelike, it really gives me the creeps. No matter how I think about it, it's strange."

I also found it strange. In ancient times, there was no realist school. Whatever they carved had a bit of abstraction. A style like this was too bizarre. Speaking of it, it was a bit sinister. Especially not seeing the face of the statue, I was still troubled by that. I always felt that the face might have some problem...

Thinking this, we walked for a long time. Old Yang's flashlight started flickering; the batteries were almost used up. We stopped to change batteries. This kind of flashlight had only one drawback: it consumed too much power. Ordinary tactical flashlights can be used continuously for over five hours, but this one only lasted about three hours. Fortunately, it could use dry cells.

I turned on my flashlight to illuminate for Old Yang. He took out dry batteries from his pocket, squatted down, and began to unscrew the back cover of the flashlight. Suddenly, his foot kicked something and made a clattering sound. I moved the light over and shone it, revealing a rusty iron ring embedded in the ground.

He and I exchanged a glance, both feeling puzzled. I leaned in and walked over, my heart skipping a beat. That iron ring was clearly attached to a trap door in the ground. Although the ring was very rusty, there were many flakes of rust scattered around, indicating that someone had definitely opened this trap door recently.

Old Yang blew away the dust on the ground, revealing a stone slab with the iron ring embedded in it. He knocked on it, and it was hollow inside. He said, "Strange. It seems there's something underneath. Should we open it and take a look?"

Although he said that, his hand was already reaching for the iron ring, as if he was sure I would agree.

Suddenly I felt a strange sensation, and it dawned on me. I grabbed his shoulder and said to him, "Stop pretending. You've already been to this place. How many more things are you hiding from me?"