Zheng Shitou knelt down and said this, which immediately confirmed our thoughts. Those coffins deep in the plank road were all buried with people from the old village. We did not stop him and let him ramble there. After a few minutes, , Zheng Shitou finally finished speaking, stood up and patted the dust off his body, turned around and complained to us with a frown.
"What are you going to do! What are you going to do! You said you couldn't come, but you still came secretly!"
"Don't be angry." Li Fusheng hugged Zheng Shitou, and the two of them walked to the edge of the plank road. If they took another step forward, they would see a bottomless abyss. Zheng Shitou shivered. He was probably a little afraid of heights, so he could barely Following up to this point is already the limit.
Li Fusheng did not threaten him, but just pulled him to sit down on the edge and gave him a cigarette. The lit cigarette trembled on Zheng Shitou's mouth. Kuang Haige and I squatted behind and listened to their conversation.
"What are you doing?" Zheng Shitou threw away the cigarette in his hand and said, "Are you really here to hang out?"
"We academics are here to study something. But if you don't cooperate, we have no choice but to come here on our own."
"Are you a scholar?" Zheng Shitou looked at Li Fusheng with a puzzled look on his face: "If you are a scholar, can I also be an old university professor? Also, I heard something ringing just now. Is it a gun? Who are you, and you still carry a gun?"
Li Fusheng did not argue with him. He stood up and squatted close to the edge of the plank road. He looked down, then looked at Zheng Shitou and asked, "Is it deep down here?"
"You! What are you going to do!" Zheng Shitou immediately panicked, but I believe that Li Fusheng will never leave him behind.
"We just want to know what's going on here." Li Fusheng raised his head and said, "If you are willing to tell us, we miss you. If you don't tell us, we will turn around and leave."
Zheng Shitou was that kind of fool. When he heard that Li Fusheng was going to leave him here, he immediately panicked. He swallowed hard and started to have an ideological struggle. After half a cigarette, he shook his head and said: "Okay. Well, the village is about to be wiped out anyway, so let’s talk about it, there is something very important.”
The old village did have a lot of rules. As time went by, the older people who strictly abided by these rules died one after another. Before the Cultural Revolution, no one actually abided by these rules anymore. What Zheng Shitou knew basically came from the elders. Hear it from people's mouths.
"The rules are broken, but this one is still in effect until now." Zheng Shitou pointed to the top of his head and said: "No one is allowed to touch any grass or tree on this mountain."
"Why?"
The first people to move the village were from the same clan. For a long time, the village had a clan leader who was very powerful. Almost all affairs in the village were presided over by the clan leader. This habit was maintained until before the Cultural Revolution. Once the old patriarch died, no new patriarch was elected.
The patriarch of the village is not only a symbol of status. They may have held the secrets of the old village and even the mountain from generation to generation. However, when the last patriarch died, these things suddenly stopped. It would be very difficult to trace it back today. .
Other rules have been broken for decades, and even Zheng Shitou has forgotten them. He only still remembers the iron rule that no plants or trees on the mountain are allowed to be touched without permission.
"I think back then, when our ancestors first arrived here, they knew something was wrong with this mountain." Zheng Shitou pointed downward and said, "There is a ghost down here."
"ghost?"
"That's right." Zheng Shitou gestured vigorously with his hands and said: "The evil spirits that are bigger than Shandu were suppressed by our ancestors to the bottom of the mountain. This is all justified. If you touch anything here casually,
, if the evil spirits below come out, it will be serious."
Of course I don't believe that there are any evil spirits under the mountain, but Zheng Shitou's story obviously exposed a very important issue. The first people to migrate here with their tribe must have known something, so they said
There is something at the bottom of the mountain. It needs to be contained and it cannot be let out.
This is basically the same argument that Jia Su first put forward back then, except that Jia Su's goal was quite lofty, using the Great Wall to suppress evil spirits, while the ancestors of Lao Village were much more modest and only wanted to suppress the mountain.
.
"No one is allowed to move around in the mountains. In the past, the rules were as big as heaven."
Zheng Shitou said that for a long time, the people in his village have been responsible for guarding the mountain. In the early days, half of the men in the village farmed the land and the other half were stationed at the foot of the mountain. The soil in the mountain was thin and the crops were not harvested.
Unfortunately, in order to make a living, most of the men later had to open up wasteland and farm land, but there were still people who took turns patrolling the mountains. The rules of mountain patrols were always maintained. Even after the last old patriarch died, the elders in the village still presided over this work. However,
In the past ten years or so, the number of people in the old village has become less and less, and the population is aging very seriously. It is really unsustainable and has been discontinued.
"Do you all believe in these rules?"
"Believe it, why don't you believe it?" Zheng Shitou immediately patted his chest and said, "Will our ancestors deceive us?"
People in the past implemented the rules of the ancestors of the old village out of a sense of consciousness, but Zheng Shitou's father's generation was indeed shocked by the facts and did not dare to take it lightly. Zheng Shitou said one thing, probably when he was ten years old
When I was 20 years old, there was a sudden slight earthquake near the old village. It was like an earthquake. The chickens, ducks and livestock in the village were very uneasy. The people in the village were frightened. However, the earthquake only lasted for a while and then disappeared. However,
Not long after, several people patrolling the mountain came back to report that something might have happened on the other side of the mountain. However, after the earthquake was felt, nothing seemed to happen.
As soon as they contacted each other, the old people in the village were frightened. Since the time of the ancestors, there has been a legend that there is something pressing under the mountain. After the earthquake, something happened on the other side of the mountain. Is it a sign that something below is about to come out?
At that time, the villagers couldn't tell what was under the mountain. Someone took the lead and all the men rushed towards the mountain with various weapons. Even a kid like Zheng Shitou, who had a big butt, saw the opportunity to escape.
Come out and run behind the adults.
When the people rushed over, they didn't find anything special. The sinkhole on the top of the mountain looked as peaceful as ever. They observed the sinkhole for a long time, and it wasn't until dusk that a few brave people appeared.
Climbing into the depths of the sinkhole together,
There was nothing in the depths of the sinkhole, but after a few brave people fell to the bottom, they found something and asked the people above to pull it up little by little with ropes. Zheng Shitou was still young at that time, but he could already remember it.
, that may be the most profound memory of his childhood. The adults around him were holding torches, and under the light of the fire, Zheng Shitou saw that what they pulled up were five or six smashed and bloody things.
"That thing is not a human being." Zheng Shitou still feels flustered when he thinks about it: "I can't tell what kind of thing it is."
Although Zheng Shitou didn't know what it was, when he described it, I felt it looked like a shadow creature. Shadow creatures are inherently scary. The first time I saw the shadow in Zhang Qiao's eyes, I was really scared.
It was a shock, not to mention that the young Zheng Shitou saw the bloody corpse with his own eyes.
Those shadow creatures were probably accidentally killed by stones that rolled down during the earthquake. The people in the old village had never seen such strange things. When they put it all together, they felt that it must be the evil ghost sect that was suppressed at the foot of the mountain.
When the little ghost came out, the villagers were very happy and knelt down on the top of the mountain. They all believed that the method used by their ancestors to suppress ghosts had worked, otherwise the thing at the bottom of the mountain would definitely break out of the rocks.
Since then, this mountain has become a taboo for people in the village. Unless it is absolutely necessary, they will never dare to approach it without permission. Zheng Shitou went out to trap rabbits in the morning, and the more he thought about it, the more something was wrong. It took a whole night before he realized
When he warned me last night, something was wrong and he leaked the location, so he followed me right away.
"I advise you not to run around." Zheng Shitou said: "What should we do if something happens? It's a trivial matter for the things at the bottom of the mountain to run out and destroy the village. If they sneak into the city, that's a big deal.
How many people will die? Just take it as a virtue and go back quickly. I will trap a rabbit for you. If you can't trap it, you won't go home. The one who deceived people is the turtle grandson..."
"You are also a person who has been imprisoned in the Northwest. Would you believe such evil things?"
Zheng Shitou was verbose, and I was thinking secretly in my heart. No matter whether the descendants of the old village know the secrets or not, I believe that at least the ancestor who brought people to move here must know everything. I even doubt that,
They moved here not to escape the troubled times, but probably specifically to protect this mountain.
Since the mountain is to be guarded, the relevant clues will not be interrupted and will be passed down in a hidden way, perhaps as secrets passed on to each other among the clan leaders of the past generations, or recorded in rare ancient books.
Then, I thought about Zheng Chuyi again. I felt that although Zheng Chuyi was not the clan leader, he might have learned the secrets about the village and the tiankeng. He was talented and studied hard, so he was better than others.
He had the opportunity to read the contents of some ancient books, or he may have been secretly paying attention to this matter since his father's generation or even his grandfather's generation. When he came here, he went further. I believe that he obviously grasped a very important point, knowing the shadow
The peculiarity of the creature is why he runs secretly and tries every means to capture the shadow in the depths of the sinkhole. He is not only capturing the shadow, but also conducting research. The two cages in his vegetable cellar are proof that he can capture the shadow.
, and then locked it up for future research. However, he probably couldn't feed the shadow, as that grumpy creature would die after being locked up for two days.
Moreover, another idea, or hypothesis, suddenly popped up in my mind. I felt that I knew why Zheng Chuyi suddenly went crazy that night many years ago.