I don’t know why, but this weird cage made my scalp numb a little bit. It also gave me a new perspective on the dense jungle in front of me. This is not a primitive jungle that no one has ever set foot in. Some people have been there, at least a few.
Groups of people have been here, including the entire army that disappeared here.
"Could this be something left behind by the engineer battalion?" Zhang Houhou also stretched out his hand to gesture at the cage in front of him, but the cage was rusted beyond recognition and it was difficult to determine the specific time it was abandoned.
I don’t know whether the engineer troops decades ago needed this kind of thing during operations, but I always feel that there is no connection between cages and the tasks of the engineers. Geng Changgen also mentioned it in a chat before, if you are brave,
People will go to the border jungle here to poach Indochinese tigers. However, poachers will not take away the whole tiger. They often dismember the tiger carcass on the spot and only take useful things. There is no need for such a cage.
.
"Let's go." I don't think there is any need to speculate and make associations around a cage here. Only chasing the person discarding the cigarette butt in front of us with all our strength is relevant to our purpose.
But the appearance of this weird cage cast a mysterious and gloomy cloud over the entire jungle. The guys were more careful. We walked to the opposite mountain, but the previous traces disappeared when we got here. I looked around
Looking at the surrounding environment, the people who discarded cigarette butts probably wouldn't have broken in alone. They should have been a team, otherwise it would be difficult to survive here. They may have penetrated from an area that we haven't discovered yet, so we can't find any traces.
.
The route we took was not a straight line, but it was generally heading west. Zhang Houhou asked me what to do next. If we estimate based on the standard map, we will leave the national border after more than 140 kilometers to the west.
.
At this moment, we were completely in the deepest part of this dense forest, with vast mountains and forests surrounding us. I thought for a moment and then told him to keep looking.
It's not that I'm willing to take risks again. In fact, in the past two years, the calm and ordinary life has been boring, but it is the life that normal people live. At least I don't have to worry about whether I won't be able to see tomorrow morning before going to bed every day.
of the sun.
It's just that I don't want to lose again, no matter how much I pay, especially those who are very important and important in my life. Because I have lost it, I know how painful it feels, so much so that
Thinking about it now, I can't help but feel sore eyes and a dull heartache.
This feeling of loss is indescribable, and it is impossible for any bystander to understand such emotions and feelings. It is like seeing a death in someone else's home. The onlookers may feel sad, but they will not be as sad as the family of the deceased.
I asked the guys in the team to spread out in a planned way and look for possible human traces around them. But the people who discarded cigarette butts before seemed to have adjusted their way of traveling. They didn't want to leave too many traces of movement, even in this situation.
It was almost impossible to find human traces in this place, but these people gradually became cautious. It took us four or five hours to finally find several broken branches in a very inconspicuous place. Following these branches, we found
Footprints left on a piece of turf.
There was only one footprint, which was left on a very soft spot on the turf. Fortunately, there had been no rainfall in the past few days, so the footprints remained.
"Master Lei was kidnapped?" Zhang Houhou guessed and said to me, "If they weren't forced, those travelers wouldn't have come all the way here."
I looked at the footprints and thought, it is impossible for a person like Lei Yingxiong not to offend others during his rise in the past. I would not be surprised if he was retaliated against after washing his hands. But Xu Wanting and Du Qingyi's gang died
It fell. Although Lei Yingxiong lost his family in Panlong Mountain, he still did not fall. Who dares to take advantage of him?
To take a step back, even if Lei Yingxiong was retaliated against, the avengers would not be so big as to hold down more than a dozen unrelated people at once, and they would not have to expend so much effort to kill Lei Yingxiong directly in the woods.
Even if it's done.
I don't know if there is a certain connection between the traveler and the owner of this footprint, but based on Zhang Houhou's speculation, I made a judgment.
If Lei Yingxiong was really kidnapped by some people, then the purpose of those people was not just Lei Yingxiong alone, but the entire travel group. Lei Yingxiong only happened to join this group of travelers.
Surprisingly, if he were still drinking tea at home in Changsha, then these things probably would not have happened.
Of course, these are just speculations because we have no other clues.
Because of the appearance of this footprint, I feel that the route we have traveled so far is basically correct. The next road will be slower. In such a large dense forest, we must try our best to find the traces left by the people before us.
, in order to try your best to avoid losing the other party.
Although the people who discarded the cigarette butts deliberately concealed their route, it is difficult to completely remove all traces in such a place, unless there is a sudden heavy rain and everything is washed away. So we walked more slowly
Slowly, but always following the inconspicuous traces.
In the evening of that day, the two guys discovered something while traveling. Because they were all earth-eaters, they were very sensitive to changes in the soil layer. They found a piece of land under a sal tree that had been backfilled.
The soil that has been returned will not take too long to be filled back, at most within half a month.
In other words, within half a month, someone dug up this piece of soil and then filled it back in. As for what they were digging, we still don't know.
The two guys told us the situation, and then Zhang Houhou asked me if I wanted to dig more and have a look. According to the habits of these guys, they would not touch the backfill soil because the valuables had already been taken away in advance.
.But now it’s not the same thing as going down a pit to find goods, so I let them try to dig.
The backfill soil was very loose, but the soil was very moist. A few guys were digging carefully under the light of flashlights, and we watched from the side. As soon as the shovel went down, what was dug out were unimaginably large earthworms and insects that couldn't be named.
When the digging was more than one meter deep, the man's shovel hooked up a large lump of something.
The thing was thrown onto the pit, and it was a gaudy mess. It was impossible to tell what it was. Zhang Houhou washed away the soil on it a little with water, and then used a knife to poke at the thing. After looking at it for a few minutes, we could see some things.
Clues.
This thing is not a whole thing, but several things stuck together, glowing with a green color like patina. An iron box with a side length of about fifteen centimeters, and a flat pot, like a kettle,
There was also a gun whose model could no longer be identified, and the rest of the items were so rotten that they could not be distinguished.
"What is this mess?" Zhang Houhou asked me doubtfully. I could only barely tell that it seemed to be a set of equipment.
"This..." A guy stood behind, pointing a flashlight at the rusty iron box, and tentatively told us: "This seems to be the Rude Jungle First Aid Kit."
"What? What Rude what box?"
This guy might be more interested in these things and often read relevant information online. He said that this thing has been around for a long time. It was an emergency medicine box that the United States equipped in the army during World War II. This kind of medicine box is equipped with
Basically, they are expedition troops to Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, and the medicine boxes are specially developed according to the needs of jungle warfare.
"And this gun." The man squatted down, turned the rusty gun back and forth with a branch, and said, "It's very rusty, but judging from the appearance, it looks a bit like an M3 submachine gun."
Like the jungle medicine box, this gun was also developed and produced in the United States. The manufacturer was General Motors. The production stage was during World War II. It is said that a total of hundreds of thousands of them were produced.
"Is this something Americans left behind?"
"It's hard to say." The guy denied this statement, because although the medicine kits and submachine guns were made in the United States and were used by American troops, during World War II, the British and a small number of Chinese Expeditionary Forces also used Rude Jungle First Aid Kits.
.As for the M3 submachine gun, the range is even wider. Americans are using it, the British are using it, the guerrillas in the German-occupied areas of Europe are using it, and even some Japanese are using it.
Judging from these equipment alone, it is impossible to determine the identity of its owner.
The appearance of this piece of rotten equipment was completely beyond my expectation, and it also made me feel strange, because no matter in every aspect, it was far away from me, too far away from now.
When we were looking at this group of equipment, the guys over there were still digging. In a short time, they dug out some more things, specifically, some scattered bones. The guys in the team were very interested in bones, especially human beings.
Bones are quite well studied because they are often seen in pits. So after they dug out some bones, they concluded that they were human bones.
But these human bones have a bit of a hairy feel to them.
They might have been dismantled when they were dug out and buried in a mess in the pit. The muscle tissue on the bones had long since rotted away, and the bones themselves, for some unknown reason, had growths all over the bones just like the piece of rotten equipment.
There were patches of pale green upon the ground. Someone put all the excavated bones together, and there was a dense green skeleton on the ground.
Almost all the bones of the skeleton are there, indicating that the person died directly here and was buried bit by bit underground as time and environment changed.
"His wife stole someone? Even her bones turned green. She died so cruelly."
I don't know who this person is, I just know that he must have been dead for a long time, and if he hadn't been dug up, he might never have a chance to see the light of day.
"I seem to know who he is." At this time, the guy who spoke before was rummaging around in the mess of equipment for a moment, and suddenly turned to us and said: "If these equipments belong to him, then I know his identity.