We didn’t find any clues the whole way, only that Yang Daguang's father was a grave robber and there was no grass growing on the grave. But we still had to go and have a look.

Many people in the village were surnamed Huang, so there were Uncle Huangs everywhere. The old man had told us to find Uncle Huang to lead the way, but I figured he was just messing with us. I really couldn’t figure out which one to ask, but no one seemed willing to show us the way for a long time. All they would do was tell us the general direction to go in.

Speaking of Yang Daguang and grave robbing, it didn’t seem like a huge deal in the villages around Funiu Mountain in Songxian County, Luoyang. In those days, grave robbers were taken in and shot by the truckload.

This county was almost all mountains, so there was no flat land and driving almost killed us. I remembered that this was a branch of the Qinling Mountains, and there were many tombs of the Lu Hunguo people (1) from the Spring and Autumn Period here. And since there was a group of them here, if you found one, you could find a bunch of them.

We decided to try our luck and walk to the barren mountain outside of the village, which was a surprisingly difficult walk. After only a few steps, there was no road, but fortunately, there was a dry stream in the mountain. We followed alongside it as we climbed up the mountain.

Yang Daguang’s father was buried a long time ago, and the graveyard was far from the village. We climbed all the way to the wild forest halfway up the mountain, only to find that the earliest burial site had been completely abandoned. The graveyard was set up in layers on the mountainside, with many big trees growing in the middle of it. Their canopies covered the sky, shading the round tombstones below. The tombstones looked to be about fifty or sixty years old, and were covered in several layers of moss and coiled vines and weeds. The tombstones were basically gone by this point.

Fatty looked at the mountain and said that something wasn’t right. This wasn’t a place where ordinary people were buried. He felt as if the mountain looked familiar, like he had seen it in a dream or something.

I didn’t know what he was talking about, so I focused on looking at the graves instead. They all appeared to be old and ownerless, because the families still had descendants who moved the ancestral graves closer to the village and the new graves. If these graves hadn’t been moved, then that meant that their children may have lost touch with them or were dead.

The tombstones were buried in the mud, but the edges and corners could still be seen through the grass and mud on the ground. The colors on them had long worn away, and many of the names were unrecognizable.

One of the open spaces was very strange and small, only about the size of a bathtub. It was completely bare without any grass on it and the mud looked old. Of course, the area around it wasn’t completely bare, for there was some sparse grass growing. It was easy to guess that it used to be a burial mound that had been flattened at some point.

"This is it,” Fatty said. “There’s cinnabar in the mud that’s been lit, so no grass can grow. This is an ancient technique for preserving graves. This Yang Daguang must be one of us, and he had a solid education."

"Why do you say that?" I asked, surprised.

"He could get admitted to college while grave robbing,” Fatty said. “Unlike me, you could say he had a solid education. I can't even distinguish between 2 and z clearly." As he touched the soil at the head of the grave, I started wondering if he was out of his mind."What's wrong with you?" I asked him.

"I’m fascinated by the great rivers and mountains in the Central Plains." Fatty said.

"Speak human," I said angrily.

"Mr. Naïve, can't you see?" Fatty patted the ground. "Most of the people in this village are surnamed Huang, yet Yang Daguang's family was surnamed Yang. They’re foreigners. Grave robbers are usually foreigners. There must be a big tomb nearby. You know, a tomb big enough to live comfortably for three lifetimes. It must be in the mountains under our feet."

I paused and said to myself,

"You're old and your brain is dying,” Fatty continued. “Don’t you understand? On the one hand, the villagers here say that Yang Daguang has never been back to the village; on the other hand, they’re sure that there’s no grass on his father's old grave. You know, once you burn the mud and cinnabar, it’ll soon oxidize. That means the grass will grow again in seven or eight years at most. There’s no grass on this grave, which means that Yang Daguang must have visited the village many times. And he came back secretly.

Yang Daguang may have secretly come back to visit the grave because he felt humiliated with how his father had died, but that was unlikely. Grave robbing was actually common in Luoyang, so there wasn’t as much moral pressure. So, why couldn’t he go back to the village directly to visit the grave? It took a lot of money to chase thunder clouds all over the world back then, so he must have come back regularly to take things from the grave to sell.

"What do you want to do?" I asked Fatty.

When he pointed to the soil on the ground, I knew that there was a strong chance that the entrance was right below us. "You have to give me a reason,” I said. “We’re here to investigate things, not to get rich."

"I’m not going to take anything, Mr. Naïve,” Fatty said. “If I really wanted to, then there's no way you can stop me. I’ll come here myself in the middle of the night and not tell you. But your Uncle Three must have been to this place." He took out the photo of Yang Daguang and Uncle Three, pointed to the distant mountains in the photo’s background, and then pointed to the direction he thought he had seen in his dream. I compared them and found that they were identical.

The photo was taken in this area, which meant that Uncle Three had been to this village. Fatty's inferences were almost always correct.

I frowned. Although I was annoyed, I was still persuaded in the end. We weren’t here to take other people's things, but to find clues about a missing person. But Fatty and I both hesitated at the same time, feeling like something was missing.

After a few seconds, Fatty tentatively said, "If you feel like something’s wrong, why don’t you call Little Brother?""Why?" I asked.

"I'm afraid of your constitution,” Fatty said. “Who the fuck knows what’s inside that tomb? I’m not prepared at all. I didn’t even bring a black donkey hoof (2) with me."

"According to what you said, the grave robbing Yang family has been working here for at least two generations, so there shouldn’t be anything inside," I said. I thought it over a little bit and felt that we shouldn’t bother Little Brother for this kind of thing. "I’m fine."

"I don’t have anything on me. If you open it and an Uncle Yang springs out at you, can you handle it?" Fatty asked me. "Don't force yourself, I’ll call him." With that said, Fatty dialed the number.

As the dial tone sounded, he immediately looked at me and I said, "I bet you five yuan he doesn’t answer."

Before I finished speaking, Fatty said into the phone, "Hey, Little Brother. I have something to discuss with you. The two of us met with a deathly mishap, so you have to come quickly."

****

TN Notes:

(1) I wasn’t having much luck English-wise, but Baidu seemed to say they were basically a nomadic tribe of the Rong people who got a name change in the Spring and Autumn period. They seemed to be established around 683 BC and were destroyed by the Jin State in 525 BC. The Rong were various people who lived in and around the extremities of ancient China.

(2) Not sure if you've seen "Ghost Blows Out the Light", but it’s used to ward off jiangshi (Chinese hopping vampires or hopping zombies), which are a type of reanimated corpse in Chinese legends and folklore.

****