The old man's excitement somehow comforted the few of us who felt like we were being dragged to our deaths, but the sickly-looking guy still didn't say a word. Asking him anything was like talking to air, as if his eyes only saw that knife, constantly peeling off the dead skin on his palm.

  The endless murals seemed to have no end, and Mr. Gu took as many photos as possible. He said these things were priceless treasures, but I wasn't very interested in them. In short, going in for a spin, at worst, just go back and find a hospital to cut off the skin on the back of my neck.

  "Come on, come on." I urged: "The big brother outside has given us a time limit. If we can't get out to see the sun outside by 7 o'clock tomorrow morning, we'll be stuck here looking at murals forever."

  Zha Wenbin leaned in close to Bing Shuai and said, "Brother, doesn't your intuition tell you that we should go in now?"

  The sickly youth's half of his face was covered by his hair and I couldn't see his expression, all I saw was him lightly shaking his head.

  "Then shall we continue diving?"

  He shook his head again.

  Fat boy saw sickly thin boy just shaking his head, also a bit impatient: "In or out, it's not, brother, don't play with us, okay? Can't be really appreciating art here? Let's go, Zha Ye, this guy is not our kind of people anyway, we'll go our way."

  "Go in and you will die..."

  Fatso's fiery temper flared up in an instant, and he raised his fist to the back of the sickly-looking guy's head. I saw the situation wasn't good, so I quickly grabbed him and said, "Don't cause trouble, let it go."

  Ke Baozi still grasped the sickly youth's shoulder, shaking him back and forth like a scarecrow, saying: "Who will die? You're just pretending to be mysterious and intimidating, who are you trying to scare?"

  I thought the sickly kid would be thrown into the water like a rag by the angry fatty, and all the anger that had been building up in him for two days would be vented out at once. I tried to stop it but couldn't, just praying he wouldn't hit too hard. But I was wrong, I only saw the sickly kid use his finger to lightly tap the fatty's wrist like we swat flies, and that was all, then I saw the fatty immediately withdraw his hands, and with a pained expression and red face, he kept retreating backwards, clutching his left wrist with his right hand.

  I walked up to Fatso and whispered: "What's going on?"

  "He has two punches." The fatty pinched his wrist and said, "Now my whole arm feels like it's been electrocuted, numb and unable to move."

  Cha Wenbin also noticed something was wrong with Pangzi and asked: "Nothing's wrong, is there?"

  That sickly-looking man turned around and said to Cha Wenbin, "Just one minute will do. I've just been hit in a vital spot. If you really want to go in, then let's all go together."

  Going up the stairs for about thirty meters, a gray arched gate wall appeared. The bricks on the wall were damaged and about half of the area had collapsed, as if someone had knocked out the front teeth of their mouth. The hollowed-out parts were filled with cobwebs, which I swept away and peeked inside to see a small hall of less than ten square meters.

  After flipping it over, I found a corpse lying in the corner, wrapped in thick spider webs and dust, resembling a mummy. After sweeping away the cobwebs, a corpse wearing olive green clothes was exposed, with muscles long rotted away, leaving only a skeleton, and many black fly corpses scattered all over the body. What made me blink even more was that next to the corpse was an army green canteen, which was a modern industrial product that didn't appear until much later.

  "Somebody's been here before, damn it, we might've made a wasted trip." Fatso's logic was always in the realm of grave robbing, and this kind of thing didn't seem rare to him. People who did that line of work often saw plastic bottles in ancient tombs, and sometimes even corpses would appear, which meant someone had been there before.

  The small room was sealed all around. Did this person die after running here? Then who is he? And when did he come in?

  I noticed that there was a canvas bag on the corpse, and after taking it away to sweep off the dust, I poured out all the things inside. There were two unlabeled medicines, a half steamed bun that had hardened into a stone, a dagger, and four dry batteries.

  I suddenly remembered what that sickly-looking guy said, he said someone would die here, I looked at him, but he was looking at the corpse on the ground, I wanted to ask him something, but he squatted down and started unbuttoning the buttons on the corpse's clothes.

  He removed all the clothes from the corpse, leaving only a skeleton. From the pelvis, it was clear that this was the remains of a young male, with an intact skeletal structure and no signs of fractures. The right hand of the remains was clenched into a fist, and the doctor gently pinched two fingers, causing the bones in the hand to shatter with a "crack".

  "What are you doing!" Zhang Wenbin shouted: "This is disrespect to the dead!"

  The sickly pale-faced man ignored Cha Wenbin, I saw him rummaging through the pile of broken finger bones on the ground, then picked up a black thing and handed it over, saying: "What people grasp for before they die is often the most important."

  He spread out his palm, and I saw that it was a button, sauce-colored with a bit of yellow, the size of a fingernail cover. The biggest difference between this button and ordinary buttons is that it's rhombus-shaped.

  "Good stuff." This was said by Old Gu, and I thought to myself that this button is quite something. He continued, "This is made from tortoiseshell, very expensive, ordinary people can't afford to wear clothes with such buttons."

  I said, "Let's deduce that Mr. Gu didn't say before finding evidence everything is conceivable? This person died here, assuming he was murdered, then he must have hated the person extremely before his death, and grabbed his clothes with one hand, finally leaving this button."

  "Hey Xia Ye, we're not Holmes solving mysteries here. This place looks like it's been thoroughly searched. Now we should ask that Intuition guy where to go next."

  I went to see that sickly guy again, and this time he was moving the corpse. Just as he dragged the body away, I suddenly noticed a large hole in the corner of the wall, and the corpse had been leaning against it just now.

  "This is really amazing! How did you know this?"

  Cha Wenbin pulled me aside and whispered: "This is wrong, this person is too familiar with this place, he must have been here before, and may even know the person on the ground!"

  While I was still talking to Zhang Wenbin, when I looked again, that sickly-looking man had disappeared. We didn't even bother with the corpse, and one after another we slipped inside. It's just about the thickness of a wall, but here it's already completely different from that small hall just now.

  Here is a square, the ground of which is paved with long rectangular stone strips one meter long and half a meter wide. In the middle of the square stands a huge pillar, on which there are horizontal bars stretching out every half meter or so. When I went in, that sickly guy was climbing up the pillar.

  On top of the pillar, visible to the naked eye, is a mass wrapped in something like tree roots, with several iron chains extending outward from those roots. The sickly child's hands and feet were very agile, and he quickly climbed up. I saw him standing at the top of the pillar, poking his head into that heap of tree roots, and to my surprise, he slipped inside like a bird entering its nest.

  "Wow, what kind of person is this? It's just like being at home, come and go as you please. Even if Xi'an Qianye were to compare with him, it would be too much!"

  I stared at Fatso with wide eyes and said, "What are we going to do?"

  "Or else we'll go up too? Good things can't be monopolized by him alone, it's empty here, not even a fart, I reckon there must be good stuff in that bird's nest."

  "Don't go." Cha Wenbin's eyebrows were furrowed as he said, "I have a bad feeling about this."

  "Fatso smiled and said: 'Cha Ye, you also have intuition?'"

  "Ah, I've got a bad feeling about this place," said Cha Wenbin, waving his hand. "My eyelids are twitching like crazy, and I think we should get out of here ASAP. This place doesn't seem suitable for the living; it's too thick with the smell of death."

  Mr. Gu said, "Maybe we understand it differently, we call this breath oppression, although it looks spacious here, but it makes people feel uncomfortable in their hearts, your sixth sense may be correct. I once had a similar feeling under an Indian temple, and later they found more than 3,000 corpses there."

  "What's down there?" The fatty stomped his feet on the ground twice, and the solid echo made me temporarily believe that it was unlikely to be standing on a pile of corpses.

  Before long, that sickly fellow came out of that "bird's nest" again and fell to the ground like a monkey, walking towards us with empty hands. The fatty said: "It seems it's an empty nest, no bird, no eggs left."

  That sickly-looking kid came over and glanced at us before saying, "Which of you is coming with me?"

  "Where are you going?" Zhang Wenbin asked him.

  "He pointed at the pillar and said: 'Go inside there, but people will die.'"

  "What do you mean?"

  "It's going to be fatal." He raised his head and stared at me directly: "Are you afraid? If you're afraid, then don't go, and stay here forever like that dead body outside."

  I said: "Can't you be more straightforward? We're all in this together."

  "Can't be put into words, intuition." He still used this word to answer me.

  Fatty pushed the sickly-looking guy forward and said, "You really think we're stupid, don't you? Heh heh, with your intuition, I'll take you to Hong Kong to buy lottery tickets, guaranteed to win big."

  Cha Wenbin also asked: "How do you explain the hole behind that corpse?"

  He crouched down and gently stroked the black blade, saying: "I really want to remember that I've been here before. Everything here feels so familiar to me, but it's as if I've never been here."

  "Friend, what's your name? Where are you from? I've seen this knife before, it doesn't belong to you."

  "Yè Qiū." He paused and said: "This is also what they told me, I don't know where I came from, they took me there. When I passed by a room, I saw this knife, I heard the knife calling me, I broke the glass cover, and then it was mine."

  "Is the knife calling you? Can the knife talk?"

  He gently stroked the ancient black blade and said, "It does, it keeps talking to me, my intuition comes from it, it's telling me that if I go back I'll die, but if I keep going forward I'll also die, only with fewer deaths."

  "Ye Qiu..." Cha Wenbin muttered out this name, then fell into a moment of deep thought...