The Lost Tomb : Sea Of Sands

Chapter 174: Digging Graves

They put on masks, turned on the centrifugal fan, and started digging. By the time they finally dug up NanNan's coffin, everyone was ashen-faced.

The coffin wasn't damaged at all, but the coating on the edge was covered with rat carcasses.

They estimated that there were thousands of dead rats, all of which were highly decomposed and giving off a strong stench. They didn't dig anymore, but assumed that the area beneath the surrounding acres was full of rat carcasses.

The rats had burrowed underground and gathered around the coffin, but the people didn't know why they had all died. This kind of behavior was inconceivable and incomprehensible, and the people believed the reason why the stench didn't dissipate was because the rats had been gathering there over time, and then died. At that time, the incident became well-known in the local area.

The old lady could only think that there was a problem with the feng shui. They moved the coffin to the mountain grave, called in a dump truck, and dug all the way down until they had shoveled out all the rat carcasses. They then dumped the mangled, yellow pulpy pieces onto the dump truck, and dragged them to the sandy riverbank in the distance to ignite and burn them. The smell from the smoke killed more than a dozen chickens in the village, and didn't disperse for three days and three nights.

It wasn't until they dug through three or four meters of rats that they finally saw soil. They began finding porcelain pieces, and managed to dig up about three hundred porcelain bowls when all was said and done. All of the bowls had a red glaze on them.

The people at that time didn't recognize the goods, and only felt that they were unclean. Some of them were brave enough to take a few back home with them, while most put them back. The old lady was suspicious, but she still took a dozen bowls back home with her and washed them. She was afraid to use them, however, so they always stayed in the cupboard. It wasn't until later that the old lady accidentally learned how valuable the porcelain bowls were.

She sold two of them so Lin Qizhong could finish college and buy a house in the city, but she didn't dare sell the others, nor did she dare go back to the field to dig up the rest. But this thing— together with the dead rats and NanNan's death— left her with a knot in her heart, and constantly made her feel like something was wrong.

After that, the stench slowly dissipated and the land returned to normal. After the feng shui master did his rituals, nothing else strange happened at the graveyard. It was from that moment that the old lady believed in feng shui.

Unfortunately, she didn't expect that something strange would happen again when they were moving the grave this time.

This was the most significant part of the old lady's account, and I fell into deep thought after listening to it.

In this part of the narrative, there were some parts that I was familiar with, such as the underground porcelain bowls. There were various reasons for burying porcelain bowls in mud, such as war, ancient kiln sites, cargo teams encountering mudslides, or even temporary placement of goods taken during grave robberies. If you were entangled in something like this, then you were going against history. Only an old master who had nothing to do would have the patience and time to do this kind of analytical research.

I asked about the condition of the porcelain bowls they had dug out, theorizing that it was unlikely that a coffin would coincidentally be placed right above a pile of Ming dynasty porcelain bowls (I assumed the porcelain bowls were a Hongwu glazed red). According to the old lady's description, it could probably be inferred that there were a lot of those kinds of porcelain bowls buried beneath her land.

I needed to verify this, but based on how the information had developed so far, I was afraid that what had happened that year had already reached the ears of my peers, and the place had already been swept clean.

But it was impossible to completely clear out things like porcelain. If it was exactly as I had predicted, then there would be quite a lot of porcelain pieces under the soil here, and I would be able to tell after a few pokes with a Luoyang shovel.

There were no strange incidents before the rats, and this incident only happened after NanNan had been buried. This indicated that the situation with the rats had something to do with her body, since the only thing that would attract them was either food or a scent of some kind.

NanNan was an ordinary little girl, so her body shouldn't have undergone some strange phenomena in her everyday life. I was almost certain that the car accident was what caused her body to change.

For the time being, it was impossible to determine the relationship between these bowls and the incident as a whole. Maybe it was related, maybe it wasn't. Either way, I needed to check some of the local information.

I would simply sort out what I wanted to do, go to the old lady's field for a walk, and then go to the library archives to investigate. In the 1990s, China spent about three years sorting out the county records and going through all the local folklore and anecdotes. Everything the elderly dictated was gathered into a book. I seemed to remember my father participating in such a thing in the past—and even several times later— but it wasn't as serious as the one in the 1990s. Of course, the data collection at that time amounted to nothing, but the government's work gave me an advantage, since everything was probably still there and hadn't been lost. The only problem was that I didn't know where they were in the archives.

This small town hadn't undergone any major renovations for a long time, so the chances of finding these things were very high. I wasn't even sure if what I wanted would be in there, but I found that reading these kinds of things was fun. Even though this was a rare opportunity for me to pass the time, I still decided to take the old lady seriously.