The black liquid in that coffin gave off a very strange feeling. Seen from above, it wasn’t like looking at liquid held in a container but more like water in a well. The liquid wasn’t pure black and I could see debris 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—and the liquid wasn’t like ink, so how could such an illusion be created? I figured that a large number of impurities were deposited at the bottom due to precipitation, which prevented the light from passing through.
Just as I was thinking all of this, Biao Gong poked his crowbar into the black liquid and stirred it. As expected, the liquid 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 liquid 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 over to help and asked him to clean up the liquid.
As he spoke, he picked the washbasin we had used for burning paper money up from the floor and dumped the ashes out so that we could use it to hold the liquid. 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 liquid immediately flowed out of the gap and into the basin.
My father went over to help and brought three washbasins to catch the liquid. When one was full, he poured it into the ditch outside the back door of the ancestral hall. I felt sick even watching from a distance, but I could finally see that the black liquid wasn’t pouring out as fast now.
The first thing that emerged was an outstretched hand, which had rotted and blackened in the liquid. It looked similar to a claw and seemed like it was trying to reach out and grab something.
This person’s death obviously hadn’t been a peaceful one. In general, when a dead person was placed in a coffin, they would lie flat, but this corpse’s position 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 a long time, he suddenly took a deep 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 that 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.
<Extra 1.9> <Table of Contents><Extra 1.11>
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Updated 11/21/2021
MereBear's Translation 