The Lost Tomb : Extras & Special Stories

(Extra Story: 2009 Chinese New Year Special) Chapter 5: Black Water

It was quite common for there to be liquid in a coffin. When a coffin is sealed, wooden nails are used to secure it, and then all the gaps are sealed with clay lime and a cement-like substance made of rotten fishing nets. If this procedure was done perfectly, the body would rot in an absolutely enclosed space and all the water from the body would remain in the coffin.

Sixty to seventy percent of the human body is made up of water, which is a staggering amount. This is especially evident when the body decays and the small bones are hard to find under all the water.

This kind of water is called corpse fluid, or coffin fluid. Of course, some coffins weren't tightly sealed, and there was water in them from accumulated water in the tomb's burial chamber. In our case, the volume of coffin fluid was large, so that was why Biao Gong asked.

My father answered with great certainty—I had also caught a glimpse at that time— that there was really no water in the ancestral tomb. So this coffin fluid must not be rainwater, let alone corpse fluid. With so much water, I was afraid the body was fatter than Shaq.

Neither was possible, which left only one extreme situation—the liquid may be antiseptic medicine poured into the coffin when it was buried. This was indeed more likely, because this coffin's black water emitted a strong smell of traditional Chinese medicine.

There was also an interesting legend here, which I might not have mentioned before—in ancient China, people used the liquid in coffins as a medicine guide. This legend sounded strange, but its origin was reasonable because the antiseptic medicine poured into coffins contained a very rare ingredient, which was lost in the late Ming Dynasty. If the world wanted to use this drug, the only way was to have the patient go to a tomb to find the liquid containing this ingredient.

However, there were too many quack doctors at that time, and they were misinformed. As a result, many patients vomited and had diarrhea because they drank the liquid from the ancient coffins. In addition, arsenic and cinnabar were placed in the coffins to prevent insects from getting in and to keep the coffin dry. The liquid in the coffins was highly toxic and instantly killed people.

This bad habit spread to modern times, and Lu Xun was also deeply affected by it—he hated traditional Chinese medicine for a reason.

I felt uneasy when I looked at this coffin's black water, and knew that if there was anything in the coffin, it would have sunk to the bottom. I didn't know what would happen, but the feeling that the large volume of water would overflow quickly creeped me out, and I kept imagining something terrible under there.

Biao Gong and the others naturally weren't afraid. They put down the crowbars, gathered together by the edge of the coffin, and carefully looked into the black water.

It was black water, of course, but the cloudy light formed the illusion that it was ink. Biao Gong lit up one end of some paper money and held it close to the water.

When I looked at it from a distance under the firelight, I saw that the black water was so deep that it seemed as if there was no bottom.

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The black water in that coffin felt very strange. Seen from above, it wasn't like looking at water held in a container, but like the water in a well. The water wasn't pure, and debris could be seen to be deposited underneath, but if I looked deeper, I couldn't see the bottom of the coffin at all. It was as dark as an abyss, and gave me the illusion that the coffin was connected to another world.

Of course, this was impossible. The coffin wasn't deep, only about the height of one arm. The water wasn't like ink, so how could such an illusion be created? I felt that it may be due to precipitation that a large amount of impurities were deposited at the bottom, preventing the light from passing through.

Just as I was thinking all of this, Biao Gong poked his crowbar into the black water and stirred it. As expected, the water in the coffin darkened and many floating objects could be seen. The smell of traditional Chinese medicine was also more intense.

I didn't know if the black water was poisonous, but no matter what was inside, it was definitely unwise to touch it with bare hands. After muttering a few times, Biao Gong called my father to help and asked him to clean up the water.

As he spoke, he picked up the washbasin we used for burning paper money from the floor and dumped the ashes out so we could use it to hold the water. Then another old man clenched his teeth and inserted a crowbar into a slit in the coffin, prying a bigger gap out of the side with a crunch. The black water immediately flowed out of the gap and into the basin.

My father went to help, bringing three washbasins to catch the water. When one was full, he poured it into the ditch outside the back door of the ancestral hall. Even watching from a distance, I felt sick, but I could finally see the black water wasn't pouring out as fast now.

The first thing that emerged was an outstretched hand that had rotted and blackened in the water. The hand was claw-like and seemed to want to reach out to grab something.

Obviously, this person's death wasn't peaceful. In general, when a dead person was placed in a coffin, he would lie flat, but this posture made one feel that the person had died in a strange way.

Biao Gong's brow furrowed and he leaned over to look at the hand carefully. After looking at it for half a day, he suddenly took a breath and said, "Huh?"

Everyone else turned to look at him. He grabbed a pair of chopsticks, picked up something from that hand, and waved it in front of us: "What do you think this is?"

When we got closer, we found it was a river snail the size of a nail. The cover of the snail's shell hadn't been closed, but it was still unexpectedly alive.

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