The Lost Tomb : Sea Of Sands

Chapter 168: Records

Translator's Note: That last chapter was the end of Sand Sea. From here on out, there's no more mention of Li Cu, Su Wan, or Liang Wan. We're back to Wu Xie's POV! This is basically a completely different story that has nothing to do with Sand Sea even though it's "Sand Sea Part 4" (weird, I know). From here on, it probably takes place before Sand Sea, and before Wu Xie targeted Li Cu. I just wanted to give you a heads up so you wouldn't be super confused after this chapter onwards.

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Grave Robber's Chronicles Sand Sea Gap

Wu Xie's statistics file

I thought about it for a long time before I decided to write these things down. This kind of thing had long since passed, and I didn't plan on leaving anything to prove to later generations how wonderful my life was. I wrote it down because I found that if I didn't, I could easily miss some details that might have been found.

I always felt like a lot of things weren't worth mentioning when I first saw them, but their real value might not be revealed until a long time later. It would be really bad if I had completely forgotten the information by then.

So I had to write down everything in detail. Although it would waste a lot of my time—which I didn't have enough of anyways—I decided to do so. I hope I won't regret it in the future. In fact, I'm almost certain I won't regret it now. Sometimes a good habit only needs to play a key role.

Life can have any number of crucial points, but it's only one or two that really matter.

I'm unlikely to disclose specific core information when I record, so as not to endanger my safety.

The first thing I recorded, in fact, was quite beyond my expectations. For a certain period of time, I always told my staff to pay attention to the abnormal phenomena of soil and water in various places, and to sort through the rumors in those places. I had a strong interest in villages and mountain areas where the people lived unusually long lives, because there would be a contradiction between the local conditions and the people's longevity. Or, there might be one village out of a dozen nearby villages that had people with long life spans. Among those difficult remote mountain villages where the people had short, average life spans, and there was no characteristic difference in geography, such a long-lived village would be very suspect.

But the news in this regard was actually quite good. Famous long-lived villages often had their own explanations for being famous and long-lived. The hidden long-lived villages— which hadn't yet been discovered— were difficult to find even if there were many centenarians in the village, because there were no census records. The first bit of information I gathered had nothing to do with longevity, but rather some wild and bizarre local stories.

Most of these stories were made up by people who had rich imaginations and were bored, so I once thought they would all be fake. It wasn't until this incident happened that I realized that there was no absolute proportion of things in this world.

The version I heard was so strange that I couldn't find a suitable point to believe it until I finished listening.

It happened during a thermal power plant engineering project. A large-scale thermal power plant had been built in the area near Yinchuan, where one of my classmates did infrastructure and hoisting work. This kind of work was a derivative of our science major, and he did a good job. The only disadvantage of this job was that he had to leave home for a long time. Since a thermal power plant engineering project usually took two to three years to complete, he had to live for a period of time in the project area.

When he got involved in the power plant project, he was no longer working on the front line, and tried hard to work in administration so he wouldn't have to leave home as much. As a result, before the project was started, he went to the local area and took part in some local land sales as a reserve official.

In China, buying land from farmers to build thermal power stations was a test of patience and political finesse, and the land he was responsible for was even more difficult to get. It was the local farmers' graveyard, and the place where the burial mounds of several past generations were located.

In fact, the price they paid for the mountain was more than twice the amount they had been expecting, mainly because there was a spokesman among the villagers. People who did this kind of work hated this kind of person the most. It was a highly educated man who had left the countryside to go work in the city. He was about thirty-four years old, dark, slender, and gentle, but somewhat gloomy. He gave lectures at a university.

The man's family also had several graves in the graveyard, so he presided over the village's negotiations with the developers and won. Generally speaking, a little overspending for such a large-scale thermal power station project was nothing, so things quickly moved to the actual stage of grave relocation.

The problem was that the lecturer's family had three graves, two of which were ancestral graves. He told them directly that the two ancestral graves had been moved into the collective tomb of their ancestral hall in order to save money, and many people had raised funds to build such a large tomb.

But there was a new grave. His mother was unwilling to put it in their ancestral hall, and hoped to relocate it to another cemetery. It was the grave of his sister who had died when she was four years old. The reason for her death seemed to be related to him. He blamed himself, and his mother obviously hadn't forgiven him, so bringing up the matter was quite malicious.

Many people were present when he moved his sister's grave, and it just so happened to be the busiest day for relocating all the graves. On that particular day, there was heavy rain, and the mountain became very muddy. After the soil had been dug up, they found that the coffin had rotted very badly, and the corrosion on its surface had reached an alarming level. The whole coffin looked like foamy, moldy tofu with fungus, and they felt as if it would collapse with just one touch.

After they pulled the coffin out, they would carefully carry it down the mountain and place it in a temporary transfer station while they waited for the new grave to be dug up. As a result, when they went down the mountain, the porter of another family slipped and hit them with the other family's coffin.

When the two coffins collided, the bottom of his sister's coffin was knocked off, and the contents fell out, and rolled into the mud.

The old lady fainted when she saw this scene, and the lecturer rushed up and cursed the porter while he searched for the bones. It's common knowledge that there has been a tradition in the countryside from ancient times up until the present to wrap the bodies in quilts. After the lecturer pieced together the bones, he immediately discovered that something was wrong.

"His sister was interred when she was four years old, but what he picked up from the coffin was an adult skeleton." When describing this matter to me, my classmate gesticulated about the length of the leg bone: "The leg bone was that of a grown person. The skull and phalanges of a four-year-old girl are quite different from those of an adult woman, so the people on site were slow to respond."

"Was it replaced?" That was my first reaction at the time. When we had to move the graves back in my hometown, I had also encountered a strange thing. It was later confirmed that my Uncle Three was the ghost, but there were real cases in many places about bodies being replaced in coffins.

"If it was replaced, I wouldn't have come to you." My classmate told me: "They reported the case later. Although the criminal investigation was of little significance in this matter, the police proved one thing. The skeleton was indeed his sister's."