Could it be Cao Liberation? Had it sobered up and was now doing something useful?
Yi Wansan’s heart pounded. Yan Hongsha had the same thought and whispered, “Shall we go look?”
She glanced down below the tree. Whether it was psychological or not, she felt that even if wolves were around, the safety factor during daytime was higher than at night.
The two climbed down from the tree, each picking up a thick branch. If any wolf dared show itself, they’d strike it head-on.
After determining the direction, they found the tapping sound seemed to be coming from the east.
Yi Wansan was about to head that way when Yan Hongsha held him back: “We’ve been gone all night. Luo Ren and the others must be looking for us by now.”
Just then, as if in response to her words, large rolling clouds of white smoke began to rise in the distant sky.
Light at night, smoke by day—Luo Ren and the others were probably burning smoke cakes as signals.
Yi Wansan hesitated: “If we go back, will we be able to find this place again?”
Yan Hongsha thought for a moment: “I certainly can’t. I’m terrible at finding locations by direction.”
“I can’t either.” Yi Wansan pointed east. “This sound is so faint that we won’t hear it if we move a few steps away. If it stops pecking after a while, we’ll never find it again. Besides, this is the direction into the mountain. Luo Ren and the others will search this way. If they’re still using the bounty hunters to scan, they’ll find this place sooner or later. Let’s leave a large signal.”
He immediately set to work, finding a clearing in the forest and using a branch to draw an arrow on the ground about two or three meters long. The arrow pointed east, with large characters reading: “Safe, San, Yan.”
Yan Hongsha gathered many yellowed leaves and placed them along the arrow and characters, making them especially eye-catching. There were no people in the mountains, and even if animals passed by, they probably wouldn’t completely mess up the signal. When Luo Ren and the others arrived, they would surely see it.
Finished, they dusted off their hands, gripped their branches, and headed toward the source of the sound, one in front and one behind, vigilantly looking left and right.
After walking about half a li, both stopped simultaneously.
They had found it—a small cave opening at a higher elevation.
This was what’s known as a “visible cave”—a slight indentation in the mountain wall, too small for shelter, too tiny even for rain protection. In the mountains, these were visual blind spots—a glance would pass over them as nothing special.
The tapping sound came from inside this small cave.
Looking closer, they saw a pile of dug-up earth, with occasional handfuls of soil being scooped out.
Yi Wansan and Yan Hongsha exchanged glances, cautiously approached, and tentatively called out: “Liberation?”
The tapping abruptly stopped.
It was indeed Cao Liberation. It had lost many feathers and had some wounds, probably from the previous night’s battle with the pheasant flock. Two small wooden tags still hung stubbornly around its neck. It looked at Yi Wansan and Yan Hongsha with vacant eyes, its sharp beak somewhat worn down.
After a moment, it lowered its head again and resumed pecking.
Yi Wansan understood now. Initially, there had been a pile of earth in this small cave. After Cao Liberation had dug through it, a stone appeared underneath. Unable to move or dig through the stone, it had continued pecking at it with single-minded stupidity.
He quickly picked up Cao Liberation, saying: “Come on, Liberation, let’s stop pecking now. If your beak wears away, you won’t be able to eat.”
Cao Liberation continued to peck, instinctively pecking at the air, its head bobbing up and down.
Yi Wansan felt quite distressed and asked Yan Hongsha, “How do we get Liberation to stop?”
“Doesn’t the book say?”
It didn’t. It only said the method was deviant, quite harmful, not worth the cost, and not recommended to try.
Seeing Cao Liberation in this trance-like state, Yi Wansan felt guilty. He kept stroking Cao Liberation’s neck, saying softly: “Liberation, let’s stop pecking, stop searching. We’ll never drink alcohol again.”
Yan Hongsha went over and patted Cao Liberation’s head. Seeing that Yi Wansan wasn’t going to move for a while, she didn’t call him but took a branch and dug around the edges of the earth pile herself.
Would there be a bronze artifact thousands of years old under the stone, as the handwritten manual had mentioned?
Soon, all the earth was dug away, revealing the stone in its entirety. It looked like an ordinary mountain stone with an irregular shape and rough edges. The only difference was that it was relatively flat, like a slab.
When the slab was pried up, there was only soil underneath. The branch wasn’t as effective as a military shovel; digging and stirring barely reduced the soil. A girl using a branch wasn’t very efficient. Yi Wansan watched anxiously and handed Cao Liberation to her: “Let me.”
Not afraid of getting dirty, he rolled up his sleeves and began scooping out soil with both hands. Yan Hongsha reminded him: “Be careful, don’t hurt your hands…”
As if on cue, before she could finish speaking, Yi Wansan cried out in pain and raised his hand to look.
A long cut had opened on the pad of his middle finger. Angry, he grabbed a branch and began poking forcefully, sending soil flying everywhere while Yan Hongsha backed away, holding Cao Liberation.
At one point, the branch tip seemed to catch on something. Yi Wansan gritted his teeth and applied great force. Suddenly, the branch slipped free, flipping something that rolled away, bumping against Yan Hongsha’s foot before turning face up.
Yan Hongsha looked down.
It was a charred black skull, eye sockets facing upward, eerily staring at her. The jaw was exaggeratedly turned up, as if in a great laugh or an angry snarl.
Trembling, she looked at Yi Wansan, only reacting after a few seconds. With a scream, she kicked away the skull, tossed Cao Liberation into the air, and ran for her life. Even at a distance, she still stamped her feet frantically, as if the skull had grown teeth and was still biting her foot.
Cao Liberation flapped chaotically in midair. Suddenly, a whistle sounded from afar, along with Mu Dai’s voice: “Hongsha? Is that Hongsha?”
Yan Hongsha shouted: “I’m here! Here! Here!”
Finally reunited, with no one missing, they were overjoyed despite still being shaken.
According to Mu Dai, after Cao Yanhua returned the previous night, they hadn’t slept at all, constantly worrying about the two of them. They had barely made it to dawn before burning smoke cakes at the campsite for positioning. Without breaking camp, they had set out with light gear to search.
Upon reaching the arrow, they knew the two were safe and had just breathed a sigh of relief when they suddenly heard Yan Hongsha’s desperate screams.
When Cao Yanhua saw Cao Liberation, he thought of the wound on his head from the pheasant pecks and felt quite annoyed. But seeing Cao Liberation continuously pecking in that dazed, wooden manner—after all, he had raised it himself—he felt deeply concerned and kept asking Luo Ren: “Brother Luo, with your extensive experience, do you know something especially effective for sobering up?”
Luo Ren didn’t have time to answer him. He was carefully examining the skull, then walked to the stone slab and wiped away the wet soil from its back.
He said, “There are characters here. Didn’t you see them?”
Characters too?
Yan Hongsha and Yi Wansan came closer. Indeed, on the back of the stone slab, near the top, someone had chiseled crooked characters with some unknown tool. Incomplete, they read: “Wei Dahu Liu’er zhi.”
Wei Dahu, Liu’er zhi—what strange names.
Yan Hongsha read them over and over before suddenly realizing: “This… this is a tombstone, isn’t it?”
The proper punctuation should be “Wei Dahu household, Liu’er, zhi…” Following normal convention, it would be “zhi mu” (meaning “tomb of”).
Wei Dahu, Liu’er—who were they? The surname Wei—was there any connection to that Miss Wei and Old Master Wei?
Luo Ren said, “Let’s dig it up and we’ll know.”
He unfastened the military shovel from his backpack and quickly dug a small pit. He didn’t find the rest of the corpse but unearthed a jade bracelet, a hairpin, a decayed red embroidered woman’s shoe, and a pouch that had also rotted. Luo Ren used a twig to open it and found a lock of hair inside.
The skull belonged to a woman? Realizing that the skull had been right against her foot, Yan Hongsha shuddered and stepped back several paces.
Luo Ren put down the shovel, sat down nearby, and after a while, pointing at the stone slab and the excavated pit, said: “This is an unfinished grave.”
An unfinished grave? Yi Wansan frowned: “Whoever buried her was pretty negligent.”
Meanwhile, Yan Hongsha was still shaken. Mu Dai asked: “Did you kick her head?”
“I did.”
“Then shouldn’t you apologize?”
True to form, Mu Dai insisted on the courtesy of “treating the dead as if they were living.” Yan Hongsha quickly pressed her palms together, muttering “I’m sorry” while bowing several times.
Yi Wansan was also a bit flustered. Had he just… dug up someone’s grave?
Truly inviting divine punishment—he felt as if lightning might strike him at any moment. He hastily mumbled an apology, promising to burn yellow paper offerings another day.
Luo Ren pondered for a moment, then said: “That Tao Wei, or Miss Wei, was burned to death. This skull is charred black. I suspect her given name might have been Liu’er.”
Cao Yanhua was startled: “But wasn’t she buried with her husband?”
He still remembered that her husband’s surname was Tao, and after marriage, she was called Tao Wei.
Luo Ren answered: “Someone secretly brought her here for a joint burial.”
He pointed to the characters on the stone slab: “This is just my conjecture, but this Feng Mountain Ridge was where the literate dog lived out its days and died.”
“The literate dog came to Feng Mountain Ridge prepared to die, but being essentially human, it knew it shouldn’t leave its body exposed in the wilderness. So it dug a grave for itself and prepared to erect a tombstone.”
“Perhaps during this process, it had another thought—feeling that its wishes hadn’t been fulfilled in life, it shouldn’t be alone in death.”
Cao Yanhua shuddered: “Brother Luo, are you saying it went to where the Tao couple was buried and… exhumed Miss Wei’s remains?”
Luo Ren nodded: “It’s possible.”
“The tomb of the Tao couple appeared undamaged from the outside. But I recall that Cao Fatty fell into a pit that day—the pit was low, and from below, it would be possible to tunnel into the coffin. Did you notice if there was a hole in the pit?”
They hadn’t paid attention to this. Yi Wansan frowned: “Even if there was a hole, it would be easy to fill, especially with that…”
In a flash of insight, he suddenly realized something and exclaimed: “Especially with that literate dog’s stone statue, half-buried in the soil. When Cao Fatty and I lifted it, we didn’t pay much attention—could that statue have been used to plug the hole?”
Maybe yes, no, but these were minor details Luo Ren didn’t want to delve into. He continued: “Its body was small, able to crawl through a very small hole. Moving an entire corpse from the mountain to here would have been too difficult and too conspicuous for it. And that fire was very large; I suspect the Tao couple’s bodies were burned beyond recognition. But skulls are easy to identify—especially when placed together, the weight and size alone can distinguish male from female.”
Mu Dai felt a chill down her spine: “So it only brought the skull here?”
“Not just that, but also some…” Luo Ren frowned, pointing at the burial items. “Some might have been salvaged from the fire, but things like the hair and embroidered shoe—I suspect it had hidden these away. If the mistress lost something, she wouldn’t likely suspect the dog.”
Finally, looking at the stone slab: “This Wei Dahu might have been the literate dog’s name—it was adopted by the Wei family and decided to take their surname. Dogs are kept to guard homes, and Old Master Wei was a private tutor who perhaps observed rules and elegance in all matters, naming his dog ‘Dahu’ (Great Protector).”
But that literate dog later lived for a very long time and, due to the evil bamboo slips, tried to leave Feng Mountain Ridge. Before departing, it filled in the grave, flipped over the tombstone, covered it with soil, and restored the area to its original appearance. Even if someone entered the mountain, they wouldn’t pay attention to a small cave like this—who would have thought that despite all precautions, Cao Liberation would peck it out?
So that’s how it was?
Yan Hongsha stared blankly at the skull and burial items, then, after a pause, said: “Let’s… bury it back. Miss Wei had a pitiful fate. She kindly took in a dog, lost her life because of it, and couldn’t rest in peace even after death.”
Thinking of how she had kicked the skull, even though she had apologized, she still felt uneasy.
Yi Wansan sighed, walked to the edge of the pit, and pushed soil in, pushing the hairpin, pouch, and other items back in, saying: “When I saw Liberation pecking away, I thought the method from Hongsha’s family manual had worked—but it was just finding these gold hairpins and jade bracelets…”
Luo Ren had a sudden thought and said, “Wait.”
He took the bounty hunter, turned it on, and aimed the detector plate at the pit.
For the first time since entering the mountains, the LCD lit up, with beeping alerts sounding continuously.
Everyone suddenly became tense. Luo Ren instructed Yi Wansan: “Take away the hairpin and the jade bracelet.”
Yi Wansan’s throat went dry. He grabbed the hairpin and bracelet and, fearing they might affect the bounty hunter’s sensitivity, ran quite far before putting them down and returning.
The bounty hunter continued to beep, with chaotic outlines gradually appearing on the LCD screen.
Luo Ren said in a deep voice: “Dig deeper.”
As dust rose, Yi Wansan and Cao Yanhua, each with a military shovel, worked simultaneously. Luo Ren knelt, keeping the detector plate pointed downward, the beeping alerts growing louder.
With a clang, the shovel tip hit something.
Yi Wansan and Cao Yanhua exchanged glances and simultaneously set their shovels aside.
Holding their breath, they reached into the soil, slowly scraping aside the earth. In this moment, they felt like archaeologists excavating artifacts.
There was a dark, purplish, glossy, elongated wooden slip. Measuring its length and width by eye, a string of numbers automatically came to Luo Ren’s mind.
For some reason, Cao Yanhua felt his nose tingle, tears nearly welling up: “Brother Luo, is this an evil bamboo slip?”
Without malevolent energy, it couldn’t be called an “evil” slip—it was merely one of the wooden slips into which Laozi had guided seven evil energies.
Luo Ren reached out to pick it up. It was very heavy. He tapped it with his finger, producing a clear sound.
It seemed to be made of iron birch, reportedly harder than some steels and sinking immediately in water.
“Keep digging.”
One, two, three…
With each rise and fall of the military shovels, the pit gradually revealed several wooden slips crisscrossed in disarray, lying between the half-moist soil layers.
After another shovelful of soil, a gleam of light revealed a golden, intricately carved phoenix head emerging from the soil, reflecting the increasingly bright sunlight so intensely it hurt their eyes.
Cao Yanhua asked in bewilderment: “Why is it gold? Wasn’t it supposed to be bronze?”
He had never specifically visited a museum to see such artifacts, but from television and pictures, he had seen plenty of substantial bronze objects with their grayish-blue color that immediately suggested great antiquity.
Yi Wansan said, “Didn’t Hongsha’s grandfather’s manual call bronze ‘auspicious metal’? I looked it up later. Bronze is golden in color, close to 18-karat gold. What people see nowadays is mostly oxidized bronze with a green patina.”
Luo Ren remained silent.
He had been puzzled all along: seven evil bamboo slips sealed by the phoenix clasp must have been carefully hidden in a secret place. How had the literate dog accidentally opened them?
Now he understood.
Perhaps it went back several decades, or even nearly a hundred years.
On some day, whether daytime or night, that literate dog named Wei Dahu had laboriously dug its own grave in the silent, uninhabited mountains.
It had plenty of time to carefully chisel characters onto the simple tombstone. When tired of chiseling, it would dig a few shovelfuls of soil, with everything it wanted to take to the grave neatly arranged beside it—the embroidered pouch, gold hairpin, jade bracelet, and the skull.
One shovelful, then another. As the sand and soil were tossed aside, a secret buried for a long time was about to see the light of day once more.