The Lost Tomb : Extras & Special Stories

(Extra Story: 2016 Chinese New Year Special) Chapter 10: Rods & Steel Bars

Fatty and Poker-Face dug through the equipment and pulled out the Luoyang shovel. We had each brought five threaded pipes with us. These days, they were all special carbon fiber poles that were made in a fishing rod factory and were particularly lightweight. Fatty positioned the shovel head and began hitting the salt field. The surface cracked, but the section below was much stronger than we had thought. The salt had actually crystallized after accumulating, so the shovel head couldn't penetrate like it would if we were digging through soil. But the salt surface cracked piece by piece every time it was struck.

I opened my lips that had turned into pickled sausages and asked Fatty, "Remember when we used a stove to melt and dig holes in the ice on the snow-capped mountains?"

Fatty panted a few times. He was prone to shortness of breath as he got older, and it became more and more difficult to breathe in the strong wind here. He pulled out the alcohol stove [1]. "Does salt even melt? Damn, we can't die here. We'd become ham in minutes."

At that moment, the old man also spread out his equipment nearby. He pulled out two steel pipes that were very similar to the Luoyang shovel. One was a drill bit and the other was a handle. It was a hand-cranked ice drill that was used for ice fishing [2]. The old man stood about three or four meters away from us and started to drill a hole in the ground.

Fatty made an expression that meant, "Look at him. That's what a professional would do."

I knew how hard salt was. Even if the area below us was hollow, our stable footing here meant that the salt layer must be very thick and the old man's drill bit wouldn't be long enough. I watched the old man slowly start to drill. After he had drilled down a bit, he took out a threaded steel pipe and connected it. After turning the hand crank for more than ten minutes, he stood up and rested before continuing. We squatted nearby and watched him while smoking cigarettes that tasted more and more salty. I wrapped my scarf around my mouth and looked around in the dark. The salt particles briefly blew into our limited lighting range before quickly disappearing into the darkness. I turned to look at Poker-Face, but his light was moving away into the darkness. He apparently wanted to go exploring.

He ventured much farther than I did, so I was relieved to take a cursory look at the few hundred meters surrounding us. After Poker-Face arrived in Rain Village, he traveled to practically all the mountains around the village. There was even a time when I would only see him a few times a week. But every time he came back, I was excited to see what strange local products he brought back with him. There was one time he brought back a strange fish head, which Fatty tried to eat. It took him three days before he finally finished eating it.

"You know, ethnic minorities have the custom of salt burial." Fatty said to me while taking the salt on the ground and building a snowman.

"I know what you're going to say. Don't. I'm a man who's achieved a lot and survived great catastrophes. I should have a pepper noodles burial instead." I said while silently adding, I should stop talking. I really don't want to open my mouth. If I eat any more salt, I'll suffer from high blood pressure.

"Look at you." Fatty said. "We've worked so hard for so many years. We should at least get a curry burial. But like you said, things have gone very smoothly this time. If it was the old days, we would have definitely encountered something bad by now. This time, we didn't even meet anything scary. It's a little weird."

I squinted, feeling rather bored. The amazing sight of the salt field stretching out in front of us was a spectacle that ordinary people wouldn't be able to see at all. But for me, this kind of scenery really only excited me for a few minutes. My body and nerves were tense, just waiting for the inevitable danger. I had forgotten that this wasn't a strange tomb others had designed, just waiting for us to enter. It was merely a cave.