SES Chapter 217 Part 1

Chapter 217

Could it be Cao Jiefang? Had he sobered up and finally gotten down to business?

Wan San’s heart was pounding. Yan Hongsha thought the same thing and whispered, “Should we go take a look?”

She glanced down from the tree. Maybe it was just psychological, but even with wolves around, daytime still felt safer than night.

They climbed down from the tree and each picked up a thick stick. If a wolf dared show its head, they would smash it without hesitation.

After orienting themselves, they listened carefully. The duk-duk-duk sound seemed to be coming from the eastern side.

Wan San was about to head that way when Yan Hongsha grabbed him. “Um… we didn’t go back all night. Luo Ren and the others must be looking for us.”

Right on cue, as if responding to her words, thick rolling clouds of white smoke suddenly began to rise in the distant sky.

At night, they used light; during the day, they used smoke. Luo Ren and the others were probably burning signal cakes.

Wan San hesitated. “If we go back now, will we still be able to find this place again?”

Yan Hongsha thought for a moment. “I won’t. I’m terrible with directions.”

“Me neither,” Wan San said, pointing east. “The sound is so faint. Walk a few steps away, and you can’t hear it anymore. If it stops pecking later, we’ll never find it. Besides, this is the direction deeper into the mountains. Luo Ren will search this way sooner or later. If they sweep the area like bounty hunters, they’ll find it eventually. Let’s leave a signal. A big one.”

He immediately put words into action. Finding an open patch in the woods, he used a stick to dig and draw a huge arrow on the ground, two or three meters long, pointing east. Beside i,t he wrote, in characters as large as bowls: Safe. San. Yan.

Yan Hongsha gathered a pile of yellowed leaves and laid them along the arrow and the words, making them stand out clearly. There was no one else in these mountains, and even if animals passed by, they probably wouldn’t destroy the markings completely. As long as Luo Ren’s group came this way, they would see it.

When they were done, they dusted off their hands, tightened their grips on their sticks, and moved forward one after the other, alert to both sides, heading toward the sound.

After walking about half a kilometer, both of them stopped at the same time.

They had found it: a shallow cave high up.

A “bright cave” was a slight recess in a cliff face, too small to live in and barely enough to shelter from rain. In the mountains, it was a visual blind spot—something you glanced at and dismissed as unremarkable.

The duk-duk-duk sound was coming from inside it.

Up close, they saw a mound of freshly dug earth. Every so often, another clump of dirt was pecked loose and tossed out.

Wan San and Yan Hongsha exchanged a look and carefully approached. He called out tentatively, “Jiefang?”

The pecking stopped instantly.

It really was Cao Jiefang. He had lost quite a lot of feathers and had several wounds, probably left over from last night’s battle with the pheasants. Two small wooden tags still stubbornly hung around his neck. He stared blankly at Wan San and Yan Hongsha, and even his sharp beak had been worn dull.

After staring at them for a while, he lowered his head and started pecking again.

Wan San understood now. At first, the cave had been filled with dirt. After Cao Jiefang dug through it, a stone had appeared underneath. He couldn’t move it or dig through it, so he kept pecking at it stupidly, over and over.

Wan San hurriedly picked him up. “Come on, Jiefang, stop pecking. If you wear your beak down completely, you won’t be able to eat.”

Cao Jiefang kept pecking, instinctively pecking at the air, his head bobbing emptily.

Wan San felt awful and asked Yan Hongsha, “How do we make him stop?”

“Didn’t the book say?”

It hadn’t. It only said that the method was strange, highly damaging, and not worth the cost, and strongly advised against trying it.

Seeing Cao Jiefang in this almost delirious state, Wan San felt like a real jerk. He gently stroked Jiefang’s neck and whispered, “Jiefang, stop pecking. We won’t look anymore. I swear I’ll never drink again.”

Yan Hongsha went over and patted Cao Jiefang’s head. Seeing that Wan San wasn’t moving anytime soon, she didn’t call him over. Instead, she took a stick and began digging around the edges of the dirt mound.

Under the stone—could there really be the thousand-year-old bronze artifact mentioned in the handwritten notes?

Before long, all the dirt was cleared away. The stone was fully exposed. It looked like an ordinary mountain rock, irregular in shape with rough edges. The only unusual thing was that it was relatively flat, like a slab.

When they pried the slab up, there was nothing but soil underneath. A stick was no match for a military shovel, and digging with it barely removed any dirt. Using it was also awkward for Yan Hongsha. Watching anxiously, Wan San handed Cao Jiefang to her. “I’ll do it.”

He wasn’t afraid of getting dirty. Rolling up his sleeves, he dug at the soil with both hands. Yan Hongsha reminded him, “Be careful, don’t hurt your—”

Before she could finish, Wan San cried out and lifted his hand.

A long gash had been sliced open across the pad of his middle finger. Anger flared in his chest. He grabbed the stick and jabbed furiously, sending dirt flying everywhere. Yan Hongsha clutched Cao Jiefang and kept retreating.

At one spot, the stick seemed to catch on something. Wan San gritted his teeth and put all his strength into it. The stick suddenly gave way, prying something loose that rolled out, bouncing along the ground until it hit the top of Yan Hongsha’s foot. It wobbled a couple of times, then rolled over and came to rest face up.

Yan Hongsha looked down.

It was a charred black skull. The two eye sockets faced the sky, staring at her eerily. The teeth were exposed exaggeratedly, as if laughing wildly or screaming in rage.

Yan Hongsha trembled. She looked at Wan San, and only after a few seconds did her brain catch up. She screamed, kicked the skull away, flung Cao Jiefang into the air, and ran for her life. Even after running some distance, she stomped her feet frantically, as if the skull had grown a mouth and was biting her foot.

Cao Jiefang flapped wildly in midair. From far away, a whistle suddenly sounded, and faintly they heard Mu Dai’s voice: “Hongsha? Is that Hongsha?”

Yan Hongsha screamed back, “I’m here! Here! Here!”

They finally regrouped—no one missing. After the fright, there was only relief and joy.

According to Mu Dai, after Cao Yanhua came back last night, no one had slept. They had been worried sick about the two of them. At dawn, they burned signal cakes at the camp to mark their position, then set out lightly, searching all the way over.

When they reached the arrow, they knew the two were probably safe and had just relaxed, only to suddenly hear Yan Hongsha screaming as if her life depended on it.

When Cao Yanhua saw Cao Jiefang and remembered the wound on his own head from being pecked by a pheasant, he felt irritated. But seeing Jiefang standing there in a daze, pecking and pecking, his heart softened. After all, it was his own bird. He chased after Luo Ren and asked, “Brother Luo, you’re experienced—do you know anything especially effective for sobering up?”

Luo Ren didn’t answer. He was focused on examining the skull. Then he walked over to the stone slab and wiped the wet mud off its underside.

“There are words here,” he said. “Didn’t you see them?”

Words?

Yan Hongsha and Wan San crowded over. Sure enough, near the upper part of the back of the slab, someone had carved crooked characters with some kind of tool. The carving was unfinished. It read: Wei Dahuo, Liu’er zhi…

Wei Dahuo. Liu’er. Strange names.

Yan Hongsha repeated them several times, then suddenly realized something. “This… this is a tombstone, isn’t it?”

If you read it properly, it should be “Wei Dahuo’s wife, Liu’er… tomb.”

Wei Dahuo. Liu’er. Who were they? They even shared the surname Wei. Were they related to Miss Wei or Old Master Wei?

“Dig it up and we’ll know,” Luo Ren said.

He took a military shovel from his pack and quickly dug a small pit. He didn’t find the rest of the body, but he did uncover a jade bracelet, a hairpin, a rotted red embroidered woman’s shoe, and a purse that had also decayed. Luo Ren used a branch to pry it open—inside was a lock of hair.

Was the skull a woman’s? Thinking about how it had just been right by her foot, Yan Hongsha shuddered and backed away several steps.

Luo Ren set the shovel aside and sat down. After a moment, he pointed at the slab and the pit. “This is a grave. An unfinished one.”

An unfinished grave? Wan San frowned. “That’s way too careless for burying someone.”