Chapter 5.24 Yellow River Corpse Fisherman (Extra)

We looked up and saw a lot of round, hollowed-out incense burners hanging over our heads. They were twice as big as walnuts, which was probably because there weren’t as many salt clusters under the eaves. We could even make out their silver-black metallic luster in the midst of all the salt. When I raised my hand and tapped one of them with my knife, a lot of debris fell out. We all backed up and found that the debris appeared to be the dregs of traditional Chinese medicine.

Poker-Face squatted down to look at them and then stood up and picked one of the incense burners up. We found that there were a lot of hooks on top of the shrine, which was what the incense burners had been hanging from. He sniffed it and then shook it, but didn’t seem to know what it was.

Fatty also picked one up and broke the salt clusters off of it. There was an old hollowed-out silver object inside, but it had corroded and stuck together so he couldn’t unscrew it. He emptied out the medicine dregs, made sure there weren’t any bugs in it, and then put it in his bag.

“What are you doing?” I asked angrily.

“I’ve never seen this junk before,” Fatty said. “Maybe it’s worth a lot of money.”

“Are we still short of money? How much can you use in a lifetime?” I retorted.

Fatty gave a tut, “Look at you acting like that. Who cares about your stinking money? What I want is this feeling.”

I ignored him and looked around, noticing that we could keep walking if we went past the shrine. It didn’t appear to be at the center of the lake, so there could be other things up ahead.

I looked around again, but didn’t see anything. As I kept moving forward, I thought about Poker-Face’s story regarding the Stagnant Water Dragon King.

I didn’t know any legends about the Stagnant Water Dragon King, but there were several possible explanations based on the name. One was that this dragon king lived in stagnant water, which often referred to water that didn’t circulate. The enclosed pool would gradually start stinking and smelling fishy. In the ancient Zhiguai novels (1), dragons generally needed high quality water to live in. It was either blessed land on the edge of the world, a deep lake more than three thousand meters deep, had direct access to the sea, or was the center of nine converging rivers. But I didn’t know why a dragon king would be in stagnant water. Was it because he was poor?

When I thought about it some more, the dragon king with a fish head definitely wasn’t convincing.

Another explanation for the stagnant water was that people would die if they touched it. It didn’t even matter if it was poisonous water, submerged water, or boiled water. I couldn’t help thinking that a dragon king in boiling water was really just fish head tofu soup, but I had no clue as to the other two.

Poker-Face wouldn’t explain it to me, and I wouldn’t ask him. It seemed to be a tradition for him to not impart any knowledge to others, which had to be followed even now.

We kept walking for more than ten minutes, when the wind suddenly became stronger. It was obvious that it had changed from a crosswind to a fall wind. Fatty shined his miner’s lamp overhead, revealing a shocking number of large holes on the dome over the lake.

With the wind blowing out of them, it really made for a rare spectacle.

When we turned all the miner’s lamps and Wolf-Eyes flashlights on and shined them above the lake, we could see a lot of caves and waterfalls. The water flowing down from these waterfalls wasn’t very fast, which was why the sound had been drowned out by the wind.

“Some of the water in this underground lake must be coming from these caves. And all the water from the mountain probably comes here during the rainy season. There should be corroded caves above these openings, and some of them should be holes at the bottom of the lake that are connected to the underground river.” I said.

“Then how can the fish in this lake get to the surface?” Fatty asked.

“Maybe the water level here was very high back in those days and the salt field we just passed through was at the bottom of the lake.” I said.

In fact, this was still a bit illogical. Not only had it been the dry season when that strange fish appeared that year, but there had been a rare drought in Fujian. The water level back then was probably lower than it was now. But it seemed like this fish could go on land. Was it because the water had dried up that the fish in the lake had to come ashore in search of new water sources? Was that why it went on land?

Fatty pulled out his phone and took a selfie. There was no signal here, so there was still enough battery power for the flash to work. He took several pictures with Poker-Face and then asked Poker-Face to take a picture of the two of us together.

“If the phones back then were this advanced, we could’ve already become internet celebrities by now.” Fatty said. “It’s a pity we didn’t take one in front of the bronze door, Mr. Naïve. But we could always go back and make it up.”

I chuckled to myself and then urged them to keep going. As we walked for nearly half an hour, I began to marvel at the huge lake. As the flashlight illuminated the water, we found that it was very shallow here and there appeared to be a plateau at the bottom of the lake. It didn’t come out of the waist-high water, but we could still see the white lake bottom from this position.

I didn’t see any fish, which was a bit like seeing a shallow coral reef from the beachside. Our flashlights continued to shine, revealing a huge building on the dam up ahead. The shape was very similar to the shrine we had just seen, but the miner’s lamps and flashlights weren’t strong enough to see the whole picture. We could also make out another statue of the Stagnant Water Dragon King on the section of stone wall leading up to the building. This time, however, it was facing us instead of the water.

We all stopped, thinking that something must really be inside. What the hell was this place?

The shadow was at least dozens of stories high, and the whole outline seemed to be in the shape of a statue. Fatty and I looked at each other and then looked at Little Brother. The three of us hooked our arms around each other’s shoulders, and Fatty used the remaining battery power on his phone to take a group photo with the shadow in the background. As soon as Fatty’s phone shut down automatically, we turned and left without any hesitation.

It was no longer my business.

When we walked all the way back to the shrine, I saw that Lei Benchang had followed after us. All his fishing tackle had been set up, and he was gripping the steel bar with the yellow flag in his hand. In other words, it was the corpse fishing rod. He had used a hammer to make a gap in the stone wall, where he put the fishing line and flywheel. Then, he took out a lunch box full of sand from his bag that was also covered in yellow paper.

Lei Benchang lit three incense sticks, knelt in front of the lunch box, and kowtowed three times. He then grabbed a crab from the wet sand inside the lunch box and stuck it to the yellow paper before tying it to the fishing line and throwing it into the water.

“What kind of fishing method is this? I haven’t seen it before.” I asked.

“A corpse fisherman from the Yellow River gave me this crab.” Lei Benchang said. “It’s to help me find my son.”

Fatty sighed, patted the old man, and went to fiddle with the lunch box. There were a lot of crabs in the sand that were all a modest size. I was surprised when Fatty shook his head in disgust. What the fuck? I thought. Are you even willing to eat crabs used to catch corpses?

That evening—in fact, it was almost dawn—we set up a tent on the shore. Fatty made several traps nearby and strung up a warning wire. We boiled some water and prepared to get a good night’s sleep. After we woke up, Lei Benchang would start fishing for that strange fish. What he wanted to do twenty years ago was finally coming true.

Fatty brought out the wine. After Lei Benchang became slightly tipsy, he opened his mouth and started telling us the detailed story of what happened to his son that year.

<Extra 5.23> <Table of Contents><Extra 5.25>

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TN Notes:

(1) Translates as “tales of the miraculous”, “tales of the strange”, or “records of anomalies”. They were a type of Chinese literature which appeared in the Han dynasty and were among the first examples of Chinese fiction. They dealt with the existence of the supernatural, rebirth and reincarnation, gods, ghosts, and spirits. More info here