Chapter 12 Missing

Sanhetu (1) was at the top of the list of basic funeral knowledge. If you were a new tomb robber in the business, then you’d basically focus on finding sanhetu in the beginning. Sanhetu was often used to make huge coffins that exceeded the normal size. There was a blood coffin in Shangsi, which consisted of a “soil, wood, and wood” structure. The whole outside was packed with sanhetu, so it was as big as half a house.

Of course, I had seen bigger ones made with more sophisticated materials.

What this all meant was that sanhetu could be used as building foundation. Plus, it was a type of material that could easily be found in the mountains. If we mixed clay, lime, and river sand in certain proportions, we would have a solid concrete foundation for our house.

The house had to be built from the ground up, but I didn’t have the financial resources to use golden nanmu wood. Actually, I couldn’t afford any kind of wood, so I couldn’t use the ancient method. I’d first find an excavator to dig out two or three meters of loose soil and then pack the sand and rocky soil down to make the foundation firm. After that, I’d pour the concrete down to form a modern chassis and then spread sanhetu on the surface of the concrete to make it look like the ancient method.

Then, I planned to leave a half-meter raised space before I laid the floor down. Fatty asked me why I designed it like this. Wasn’t I afraid someone would crawl underneath and listen to me sleeping in the middle of the night? I told him I liked the feeling of looking at the yard with my feet dangling down.

After the basic structure was complete, I planned to use sanhetu to fill in all of the basic surfaces. The three of us could finish the process by ourselves with just an iron plate and a wooden hammer. Not only could we save a lot of labor costs, but Fatty’s concerns could also be solved.

Fifty thousand yuan’s worth of sanhetu should be enough for my ambition.

That night, I had a long dream involving sanhetu. I woke up the next day and opened the store, but I didn’t have much time to perfect my idea. Fatty’s sales promotion yesterday was very effective and business was very good. We were very busy and even Little Brother was getting a little busy collecting money.

Fatty also recycled all of the candles from yesterday and put them away so that we could rent them out in the future. In the evening, our profits increased by five thousand yuan. We each took a thousand and kept four thousand for a group fund, which was to be used to buy the sanhetu.

After closing the door, Fatty asked me to go home to draw my pictures this time because he felt that I wasn’t very aware of my surroundings when I was here. I remembered what happened last night and took a flashlight over to the place where I had seen the bamboo man. There weren’t any traces here to show that what I had seen yesterday was real, so I started to think that it was all in my head.

I took a look at the place where I was planning to build the house, but when we were about to go home, six or seven girls suddenly came in.

“Looks like we’ve got some stragglers.” Fatty smiled proudly. “Unfortunately, the boiling water has gone cold or I could’ve fried up a few more dishes.”

Fatty really liked to work, and I had to admit that I was really lucky to have such friends in my life. “We’re closed,” I politely said to the girls, just as I noticed that several of them were crying.

One of the calmer ones came over and said, “Big Brother, can you help us find our friend? She’s missing.”

“What happened?” I said a little warily.

“We went up the mountain today, but when we got about halfway up, she said that her stomach was hurting because she was on her period. She wanted to go down the mountain first, so we separated. But after we came back down, the staff at our hotel said that they hadn’t seen her. After asking around, nobody appeared to have seen her, either. Later, we checked the surveillance cameras on the mountain pass and found that she didn’t go down the mountain at all.”

When the girl showed me a photo, I recognized the missing girl at a glance. It was the girl who had been smoking last night. She’s missing?

“What did the police say?”

“A search party has been organized to patrol the mountains, but the police asked us to come to you. They said that if you’re willing to help, the chances of finding her will be much higher.”

Which policeman is so talkative? I asked myself. All of the policemen here knew that Poker-Face was good at patrolling the mountains, but wasn’t it a bit much to promote it like this?

“Have you noticed anything strange about this girl recently?”

“What do you mean?”

“The road going up and down the mountain is very obvious and it’s not like this is a lawless place. Unless she had other intentions, it’s very difficult to get lost.”

“Ah! Lately, she really likes looking at bamboo groves,” a crying girl said. “She kept saying that she saw something in the bamboo forest.”

<Chapter 11><Table of Contents><Chapter 13>

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TN Notes:

(1) I’ve been calling it concrete or cement, but technically, the raw said “sanhetu”, which could also be called sanhe soil or sanhetu concrete. It’s a construction material obtained by preparing and compacting three materials. Different areas have different types of sanhe soil but hydrated lime is indispensable. Sanhe soil existed in the age when there was no cement or it was scarce. In modern times, it’s just called concrete (or cement), which is why I probably got confused. Science abstract discussing it is here.

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Reader Anna1997 has helped put “Tibetan Sea Flower” into a pdf for you guys. Link is here. Give her lots of love for her hard work (and for putting up with my nitpicky self lol)! She’s working on “Sand Sea” next so I’ll let you guys know when it’s ready.