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墨書 Inktalez
At that time, I found his joke both disgusting and uninteresting. However, later I learned that he really did circumcise that developer, right in his luxurious seaside office of over a hundred square meters. He circumcised two people; the other was the developer's bodyguard. After hearing that the developer wanted to take revenge on Song Gang, the bodyguard immediately resigned. As he left, he said one thing: "If you can't kill him, he will definitely kill you. At that point, no one can save you. He has definitely killed before; you can't feel it, but I can. I've never seen someone so calm."
In the end, the developer didn't take the risk. Of course, he wouldn't report it either—who would report being circumcised? Was it a medical accident or an unfortunate incident?
"And you? I found out your new address; the house has been rented out. Luckily, they had your current address; otherwise, it would have been hard to find you. What are you doing now? It seems like you're in the antique business?" Fatty asked curiously as he returned from his silence.
In our area, we nickname boys by adding "zi" to the last character of their name. For example, people who know me call me Qiangzi; my parents also call me that. As for Song Gang, he's always been chubby and strong, so we've always called him Fatty.
"My story is quite long and messy and full of drama," I said as I poured tea for Fatty. "However, there are some exciting parts."
That night, we spent time together in the gentle autumn breeze, occasionally hearing the chirping of insects as we delved into my story.
I graduated from JD Archaeology Department. Let me clarify that this is not a story about archaeology; it's just that I have this professional knowledge, and because of this field of study, I had the opportunity to encounter something incredible.
I think anyone with some knowledge in this area knows that JD's Archaeology program is quite strong—at least among universities in our country. Students in our Archaeology program can start participating in actual archaeological work from their sophomore year. Of course, most people only do some post-excavation classification and sorting work—this involves cleaning, piecing together shards among broken tiles, recording, and preserving them, after which they may never see them again. More valuable cultural relics are not entrusted to us students for sorting.
Whether it was luck or misfortune, after a few months of tedious cultural relics sorting work, I was unexpectedly selected to join an archaeology team led by a research center at JD. The excavation site was located in Shagou village west of Wuwei in Gansu—a site of an ancient town along the Silk Road that had been buried under loess for thousands of years. In recent years, tomb raiding activities had become rampant; any place with ancient relics would be targeted by tomb raiders, and this ancient town site was no exception.
However, there is a significant difference between an ancient town site and a tomb; ancient town sites hold more archaeological value. Excavating them is extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive, and without specialized knowledge in cultural relics identification, one wouldn't even be interested in what is unearthed from an ancient town site. Generally speaking, unless they are very professional tomb raiders, their targets would be gold and silver jewelry or jade and agate; porcelain comes next while bronze and ironware are often large burial items that they typically overlook. Items like clay pots are discarded without a second thought. Ancient town sites rarely yield gold or silver or jade; for archaeologists, their greatest value lies in the culture they represent and the history they convey. Thus, although this ancient town site had also been excavated by tomb raiders before, the damage was not extensive.
This ancient town site was located west of Shagou village because tomb raiders had unearthed a massive bronze tripod there, which caused a sensation and prompted local cultural relics departments and public security authorities to protect the area. This enormous bronze tripod was rectangular—almost two meters long, just over one meter wide, and about 1.2 meters high—with four legs and two ears. Its front was adorned with beast face patterns surrounded by cloud and thunder motifs; each side featured bizarre beast face designs that were unique from one another—ancient yet solemn in appearance. Although I was just an archaeology student, I prepared accordingly for this archaeological activity and did some research beforehand. However, these strange beast face patterns were unheard of to me and rendered my prior studies useless. The massive bronze tripod lay horizontally in a large pit; evidently, the tomb raiders who unearthed it lacked the ability to transport it away or even to extract it from the pit.
As an archaeology department student, I felt equally bewildered by this giant artifact and could only desperately search my memory for knowledge related to it to determine its age. The leader of our archaeology team was a professor surnamed Zhou who was nearly sixty years old. He immediately recognized the value of this bronze tripod and almost lunged at it to examine it closely. Afterward, he didn’t explain its origins but began arranging for us to clear away the loose soil excavated by the tomb raiders.
Soon after, several key members of the Archaeology team held an emergency meeting. Before long, three experienced team members began to scout the cave's location with us students in tow. Captain Zhou, on the other hand, took the Bronze Tripod away.
This Archaeology team was quite large in number. Captain Zhou was a professor at our school; I had attended his lectures and could recall his name, though we were not well acquainted. The other two deputy leaders were unfamiliar to me. I only knew one was surnamed Song, in his forties, wearing gold-rimmed glasses and looking quite refined; he seemed to be a representative from the local museum. The other, Zhang, also appeared to be around forty but looked like someone who spent a lot of time working outdoors, with a healthy red complexion and a sturdy build. Additionally, there were seven experienced Archaeology team members, but the majority were students from our Archaeology Department, totaling twenty-three.
From the composition of the entire Archaeology team, we students made up more than half. Among the student team members, I was the youngest and least experienced. Most of my classmates were seniors, and even those in their junior year had some fieldwork experience in archaeology.
The team member leading us in scouting the cave was highly experienced; they dug twelve shovels deep to determine the approximate area of the Ancient City Ruins. In no time, the outline of this ancient city emerged vividly on paper. Following that, preliminary excavation work commenced in an orderly manner with cooperation from the local government.
At this point, I finally understood the purpose of bringing so many students to this Archaeological Activity, especially someone like me who had little practical experience in archaeology.
The Ancient Town ruins lay about two meters below the surface. Due to its shallow depth and concerns about damaging the underlying relics, the topsoil was excavated only slightly over a meter before we had the hired local migrant workers withdraw from the site. Next, our group of twenty-three students stepped up to outline several Test Pits and continue further excavation work.
Once we reached the familiar soil layer, larger tools were set aside, and everyone switched to hand trowels for scraping dirt. This work was tedious and physically demanding. I thought about it and realized that my selection for this Archaeological Activity was most likely due to my excellent physical fitness—put bluntly, I could provide strength.
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