Chapter 8 Catfish

Fatty came to look at the crack. It was about as wide as two people, quite exaggerated, and exposed the rock. This kind of gap couldn’t be formed naturally except by an earthquake.

It had been formed a long time ago, so there were many small shrubs on the crevices in the wall below the crack. When we kicked a rock down, we could tell that the crack went very deep, because we could hear the rock continue to hit the wall as it went further and further down.

This was a cut that seemed to lead to the very heart of the mountain.

When we looked up at the crack, we could see that it got wider and wider as it went all the way to the top of the mountain. If the crack developed any further, it would probably become a one-line sky kind of landform (1). Bird droppings and soil in the crack enabled vegetation to grow there, and the vegetation increased as the area widened. Pine trees as thick as a bowl were also growing in the crack.

In the place where we had originally found the crack, Xiao Hua carefully tested the protruding rocks on the wall, and then climbed down. He was very fast, and had to turn on his flashlight as he quickly reached the place where the light shifted to darkness.

“Water!” He shouted in disappointment. I also saw the reflecting light, which could only come from the beams hitting the water’s surface.

I took a deep breath. Water meant that the bottom was blocked off. Maybe fallen leaves had mixed together with sediment, and then rain water poured into the crack and formed a pool.

Whether this was an entrance or not, it was definitely impossible to enter.

“Is the water moving or stagnant?” Fatty asked.

“How can I tell?” Xiao Hua retorted.

“Put some dandruff into the water to see if it’s flowing slowly.”

“I don’t have dandruff.” Xiao Hua said angrily.

“Don’t fucking bullshit with me. Everyone has dandruff. No one will laugh at you.” Fatty said.

After a long silence, Xiao Hua shouted below: “It’s running water.”

Fatty looked at me and said softly: “Moving water means groundwater. The hot springs here are well developed, and there are underground water systems everywhere. The imperial tomb we went to last time had a moat, which means there’s a hidden river in that huge underground crater from before. This is a clue.”

I nodded. I knew what he wanted to do, so I waved to some people to get a wooden bucket. There were more than a dozen eight-whiskered catfish in the bucket, and each one had a GPS locator on its upper gill. They had all been removed from those eighty-yuan wholesale electronic watches in North Huaqiang and sealed with wax. We lowered the bucket down the crack and let Xiao Hua drop them into the water.

“It’s a pity.” Fatty couldn’t bear it. I was a little surprised and thought, when people get older, do they also become soft-hearted? But Fatty continued: “It would taste good with chili peppers fried in garlic and then put in a soup.”

I wouldn’t blow up the mountain today, because I was afraid that the crack would expand and cause the whole mountain to collapse. It would be a shame if I had to sleep here forever before Little Brother even came out.

We went back down the mountain, cut down some dead trees and dodder vines to make a fire, and waited to see the results the next day.

Fatty tried to find out why the dodder was flourishing so much here, but nothing came of it. I had been resting with my eyes closed, and said nothing for a day and a night. The next morning, I figured it was almost time, so I turned on the computer to see where the catfish were.

To my surprise, all the catfish signals that could be found were distributed in a narrow area like a centipede, and they were more than ten kilometers away from us.

Considering how the GPS signal could only be identified in the open air, and the catfish were in a long and narrow distribution, the river might have come out aboveground.

Fatty found it boring and insisted on blowing up the mountain, but Xiao Hua and I had to go and have a look at this situation. In the end, the soldiers were divided into two groups. Xiao Hua and I took Kan Jian to find the place where the GPS signal was coming from, and walked until dusk.

Once we made it over the hill, I thought I would see a lake or a river, but I only saw a forest with dense vegetation. There wasn’t any kind of water system at all.

“Strange.” I looked at the signal distribution on the IPAD, which showed that the catfish were definitely in this forest. Could there be a lot of puddles connected with the underground river in this forest?

We walked into the forest before the sun set, and found that the ground between the lush shrubs and pine trees was covered in dodder. It was like a giant net spread on the ground, which made it difficult to walk. As Kan Jian opened a path with his knife and we went deeper in, we found more and more dead trees, which made me feel that things were getting stranger. More dodder creeped along the ground, and almost covered the entire forest floor. We could see that these dodder lumps were hiding ancient, vine-covered dilapidated wells, which were distributed every meter or so throughout the forest. They numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and looked just like graves.

<Chapter 7> <Table of Contents><Chapter 9>

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TN Notes:

(1) A “one line sky” looks like this: