Chapter 195

Fatty couldn’t hide his shocked expression, “Fishing? Fishing with children? What were they fishing for?”

As the cold firework went out slowly, the children below disappeared into the darkness, leaving only the light from our flashlights. I pointed my flashlight at the pool, but I couldn’t see clearly since the water was too deep for the light to penetrate.

I sighed, scratched my head, and looked at Poker-Face, who was still looking at the water. “Is there really something in the water that would eat children? But the children are still there, so is it just a cult superstition?”

Poker-Face started another cold firework and Fatty immediately said, “Little Brother, take it easy. We’re on an entrepreneurial venture this time. There aren’t that many cold fireworks. I still have three here and Wu Xie still has two, but that’s all we’ve got.”

Poker-Face obviously had a purpose this time. He waited, pointed the cold firework at a certain position, and then threw it down.

This time, the cold firework slowly sank against the edge of the spring and fell to a deeper place next to one of the child corpses. We could see that there was something on the wall of the spring below the child corpse. It was a huge arch that stretched across the bottom of the spring and appeared to have been carved from stone. Poker-Face said, “These children’s corpses were soaked in something while they were in immense pain. These people were using the children’s corpses to catch that thing and poison it.”

Black Glasses touched the water with his hand. “The water temperature here is fine. Could it be some kind of fish?”

“These child corpses are still here, which shows that the thing is very smart,” I said. “But why use children? If it was an animal, couldn’t they just use pork?”

According to the ancient legends, virgins or women were used as sacrifices to worship Hebo (1), while men were used as sacrifices to worship the gods of war and agriculture. But offering sacrifices was usually done in fear and awe of the gods. The sacrifices here were meant to poison the thing below, so it might not have anything to do with ordinary sacrifices.

“Wait a minute,” Fatty said. “In my hometown, I heard several Taoist priests say that when bridges were built in the past—especially large bridges—children were used as sacrifices. There are very few rituals that require child sacrifices, so do you think that thing under this spring is a bridge?”

We took a closer look at the arch and found that it really was a bit like a stone bridge. There were dark shadows on both sides, which seemed to be caves.

“Can the bridge god even be poisoned and killed?” Fatty asked Poker-Face. “Did you remember wrong? Your memory isn’t good after all.”

Poker-Face glanced at Fatty, and I thought he meant to say: You can go down. But Fatty didn’t understand at all and pulled out a detonator, “There are many things that can’t die from poison, but I haven’t seen anything that can’t be blown up yet. If you think there’s something below, let’s fish it up again. But this time, we’ll use the detonator to get rid of it. Even if there is something below, it should’ve died long ago since it’s been so many years.”

“You just said that you’re still a child, so we’ll leave it up to you,” I said to him.

Black Glasses looked up, “When they were building this tower, they must’ve come upon the spring water here. They wouldn’t have stopped and would have certainly continued building, but the rock layers would make it very difficult to excavate. It’s possible they used the stone bridge below to continue digging in another direction. We haven’t found anything yet, but there were more earthen mounds earlier. Should we go up and switch to another one?”

The cold firework’s light gradually faded.

At this time, all of us suddenly saw that there was a splash in the water and ripples appeared. Something seemed to have fallen from the beams higher up and landed in the pool.

Then, there were two or three more “drip, drip, drip” sounds and three more ripples appeared. When we moved our flashlights and looked up, we saw a huge thing hanging on the ceiling.

<Chapter 194><Table of Contents><Chapter 196>

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TN Notes:

(1) Hebo is a river God associated with the Yellow river