Although there was a “maybe” in the statement, Ding Yudie’s eyes lit up: “What do you mean?”
Unable to find pen and paper, Yi Sa removed a bayonet from a rifle and drew two parallel lines on the ground, dividing the area into upper, middle, and lower sections.
Then she took a golden peanut and placed it in the bottom section: “We’re here.”
She took another and put it in the middle section: “This is Lake Poyang.”
Finally, pointing to the top section, she drew an upward arrow: “This is where we need to go ultimately, right?”
Ding Yudie said: “Right, everyone knows that.”
Yi Sa raised her finger, pointing upward: “So, we need to go up.”
Ding Yudie deflated: “What joke is this? Up there is the cave ceiling.”
Yi Sa corrected him: “It’s the cave ceiling, but it’s also xirang.”
She drew another diagram, this time a simple dome with a vertical line dividing it in half, with a spindle shape leaning diagonally across the line.
Ding Yudie didn’t understand, so Zong Hang explained: “Think of it as a two-room house. The left side is the ship graveyard, this spindle shape is the Shinko Maru, and the right side is the morgue where we just rescued Yi Sa.”
This was more illustrative, though the mention of the “morgue” made Ding Yudie a bit uncomfortable.
Yi Sa asked Ding Yudie: “You already know what xirang is, right?”
Ding Yudie nodded.
Good, this saved explanations. Yi Sa tried to be concise: “Xirang can grow infinitely, giving the impression it’s a substance with its own ‘life force.’ I theorize xirang can be divided into three ages: young, mature, and old.”
Just dirt clumps with ages? Ding Yudie wanted to show disdain, but after a thought, he accepted it: animals and plants have ages, and things being new or old is also about age, so xirang having ages wasn’t hard to understand.
Yi Sa pointed to the dome ceiling in the diagram: “This is young xirang. Like young people, it’s unstable and active. The white water monster like a giant broom that people talk about in Lake Poyang is this. Probably because it’s newly formed and needs to maintain activity, it stretches frequently. Also, xirang needs to interact with water to maintain balance—so it frequently contacts water and serves as the ‘gateway’ or ‘lid’ of this underground dome.”
She drew several downward lines in the right half of the dome, representing honeycomb-like chambers: “That morgue should be the most important central part of this dome, like a beehive with many chambers, densely packed, each like a honeycomb, also made of xirang—mature xirang. It’s more stable and reliable, bearing important responsibilities.”
“Young xirang’s vitality lies in growth, stretching, and external expression, while mature xirang focuses on internal collection. The reason it can preserve corpses so well might be because it uses that growth force for preservation and maintaining the bodies’ condition.”
Ding Yudie listened in a daze: “What about the old xirang?”
“Old xirang gradually loses its activity, possibly used for repairing this dome and handling minor tasks. When it gets too old, it might die.”
“Young, mature, and old xirang take turns in the rotation. When young xirang matures, it can replace mature xirang that’s losing activity. The replaced mature xirang takes over old xirang’s position, and the dead old xirang becomes ordinary soil and sand, regularly cleaned out by young xirang.”
Much like human society, there’s always new life, replacing the old, generation after generation.
Zong Hang grew increasingly excited as he listened, suddenly thinking of something. He looked at Ding Yudie, speaking with slight stuttering from excitement: “Didn’t you say experts took infrared aerial photos of Lake Poyang and found a huge sandbar at the bottom? The Yangtze isn’t like the Yellow River—the Yellow River is half water, half sand. The Yangtze’s sediment content isn’t that high. Could this sandbar be…”
The accumulated grave of old xirang that died and was cleaned out?
Maybe, Ding Yudie’s mind was almost numb: “But if it’s taken out, why not just let it become lake bottom silt? Why pile it into a sandbar? Isn’t that deliberately drawing attention?”
Yi Sa hadn’t thought about this question before, but when one’s thoughts are flowing smoothly, breakthroughs often come quickly.
A thought struck her: “It’s cleaning the ‘combination lock’ at the lake bottom, ensuring there are no obstacles or major sediment on the dial! All these years, due to terrain and narrow channel effects, Lake Poyang has had so many shipwrecks. As locals say, thousands of ships could fill up the lake bottom. If ships were piled upon ships down there, how could you input the combination? How could you open the golden fortress? So, it clears obstacles while sweeping away the old xirang it brings out.”
That lake bottom sandbar, two to three kilometers long, really did look like it had been swept by a giant broom.
What’s this combination lock? Probably another of her metaphors or references, Ding Yudie felt he was swallowing things whole, half-cooked, half-understood: “Young xirang cleans the combination lock… so those shipwreck accidents weren’t caused by xirang?”
Probably not.
Yi Sa remembered Ding Yudie mentioning that Lake Poyang’s shipwrecks mostly occurred before the 1990s. After that, domestic and international scientific teams specifically studied the Laoye Temple waters, discovering the narrow channel effect and chaotic vortex effects on navigation. They established a meteorological observation station to warn passing ships, and after that, shipwrecks rarely happened again.
So those historical shipwrecks were truly natural disasters, not xirang pulling them down.
But why did xirang often appear with shipwrecks…
Yi Sa had a thought: Could it be that when large ships or multiple ships sink due to storms, they create chaotic forces on the lake bottom, like someone inputting the wrong combination repeatedly? The gateway xirang, disturbed, would naturally become alert, come out to check, and then clear obstacles…
But these weren’t the key points.
She went straight to her main point: “If we go to the nest side, climb to the top through the honeycomb, burn the xirang, and ‘burn’ ourselves in, we might be able to use young xirang’s outward pushing force to keep going up and return to the lake bottom.”
After she said this, the room immediately fell silent.
Zong Hang’s whole body broke out in goosebumps. He remembered his previous experience escaping from xirang, that claustrophobic nightmare of almost becoming a person trapped in stone, something he never wanted to experience again, and she wanted to ‘burn’ herself in.
Ding Yudie’s mouth hung half-open, like a clay or wooden statue.
After a long while, he mumbled: “No, no, no, you’re crazy.”
Ding Yudie felt this method was completely unfeasible.
“What about strength? How do we have the strength to climb that high?”
Yi Sa said: “This is our second or third day trapped, though we’re starving, we haven’t reached physical exhaustion. If we wrap and tie up our stomachs tightly, we can still make one last push.”
“What about… those corpses in the nest? Who knows if they’re dead or alive? What if…”
What if halfway up, those corpses all come out—imagine a vertical honeycomb hundreds of meters high crawling with people chasing them…
Yi Sa interrupted him: “From what we’ve seen so far, xirang doesn’t have the power to bring the dead back to life. It doesn’t attack people, repairs holes and fears fire. When Jiang Jun and I fought on the honeycomb earlier, no corpses came out to watch.”
She paused and added: “Besides, if it’s a dead end, making one last attempt is better than starving to death here. You’re a proud water ghost, wouldn’t it be shameful to timidly starve to death here?”
Ding Yudie swallowed what little saliva he had: “Even if we ‘burn’ ourselves in, how do you know the xirang will push us out instead of pulling us in?”
Yi Sa said: “On this point, I’m also just speculating. But every time xirang pulls in a ship or person, it’s after extreme stretching, like throwing a punch—to pull your arm back, you first have to extend it. Imagine yourself as a grain of sand mixed in with xirang. When you’re among them, they won’t clear you away but will carry you along, pushing you with their movement. When I came out of the clam hole earlier, I didn’t see xirang trying to hold me back.”
Ding Yudie felt almost convinced: “If we’re not that lucky, and after we ‘burn’ in, it’s resting and doesn’t push us out?”
Yi Sa pointed outside: “I tend to think it rests when it’s not bright. Now it’s bright, so it should be tending toward activity. But to be safe, we need to be prepared for what to do if it doesn’t push us out.”
She paused for a moment, pressing her lower abdomen inward—talking this much drains energy.
“Have you noticed how xirang is like a chameleon? When it repairs holes, doesn’t the material it presents match the original cave material?”
Zong Hang nodded. Not just match—it connected perfectly, naturally grown. A rock opening, when repaired, was also rock; it wouldn’t give you a cement wall as a substitute.
Yi Sa looked at Ding Yudie: “As water ghosts, we’ve studied the underwater structure of Hanging Water Lake. Below the lake is silt, which isn’t a problem for us; under the silt is an impermeable rock layer, red shale, which is a soft rock that doesn’t resist impact; below that is this dome, limestone. In other words, we need to break through limestone, red shale, and silt in sequence, getting easier as we go up. If it doesn’t push us, we’ll find a way to maintain the ‘burning’ action, keeping the fire burning upward.”
Right, the silt would be like a face mask; the real breakthrough needed was the limestone and red shale. Ding Yudie said bitterly: “We just don’t know how thick these rock layers are. If they’re a few meters thick, we could grit our teeth and manage, but if they’re too thick, the xirang will seal quickly. Fire needs oxygen, and if the fire goes out while we’re trapped in the rock…”
When Yi Sa was unconscious, he heard Zong Hang talk about the clam nest experience. Even without experiencing it firsthand, it was terrifying: fortunately, that stone wall wasn’t too thick, and they could break through with a head-butt.
But between this cave ceiling and the lake bottom, who knows how many meters there are?
Yi Sa said: “The number of meters doesn’t matter as long as we ensure the xirang doesn’t seal up.”
She drew her final diagram, a tall chimney column.
Then she made a mark at the top of the chimney: “This is the first person, responsible for opening the way upward.”
Ding Yudie unconsciously straightened his back. Though they were still discussing, after listening all this way, it already felt like they were assigning tasks.
Yi Sa drew a second horizontal mark near the first person, then a series of vertical lines down to the chimney bottom, like an extremely elongated, thin “T”.
“This is the second person.”
Zong Hang was a bit confused, pointing at the long vertical line: “Then what’s this?”
“Rope.”
Ding Yudie froze for a moment, then instantly understood, excitedly punching the ground: “Holy shit!”
He got it.
How to ensure the fire keeps burning and the xirang doesn’t seal up?
Tie a very long rope—ten meters, twenty meters, a hundred meters, as long as needed—with crosspieces tied at intervals along the rope. The ship graveyard has plenty of cables and wood, and with luck, they might even find fuel. Light both ends of the wood, move up a section, then lower the rope, or rotate and move the rope body up and down. The principle is the same as a fire circle—this way, the wall’s xirang will be wary and won’t seal over.
As long as the xirang below doesn’t seal up, with an air supply, the fire can continue for a relatively long time.
Yi Sa drew a third mark at the bottom of the chimney: “This is the third person.”
The third person was in such a low position, seemingly quite dangerous. Wonder who it would be…
Ding Yudie felt a bit nervous.
“To guard against Jiang Jun appearing and cutting off our escape route. Also responsible for maintaining this fire rope frame, replacing crosspieces, preventing the fire below from going out or burning the rope.”
The plan was complete.
Ding Yudie went over the process again in his mind, his back-breaking out in a sweat, mumbling: “So risky.”
All the risky moves, risky steps, plus having to guard against Jiang Jun suddenly appearing, but it also felt exciting. Having such an experience once in life would be unforgettable in old age.
Yi Sa looked at him, then at Zong Hang, throwing down the bayonet with a clang: “So, what do you say, are we doing this?”
Ding Yudie shouted: “Let’s do it! Let’s do it! Let’s kill those bastards!”
He lay back on the ground, laughing heartily.
This was Yi Sa’s first time discovering that behind Ding Yudie’s scholarly appearance and the trembling butterfly ornament in his hair, there was a rough northern man’s side.
Emotions are contagious. Zong Hang’s blood was pumping, and he followed Ding Yudie’s lead: “Right, let’s kill these…”
Yi Sa gave him a look.
Zong Hang swallowed the latter half of his sentence.
Yi Sa said: “Why are you saying things like that? Don’t learn bad habits from him.”
True, these were swear words, not very elegant to say.
If Yi Sa didn’t want him to, he wouldn’t say them.