Chapter 165
Chapter 165
After working like a beast of burden all morning, Qin Ying was covered in soot and dust.
She had said she would teach Aman how to make filter charcoal through smoldering, but she knew she was only an armchair expert. She had crammed the theory at the last minute without ever trying it herself.
Qin Ying was a pragmatist. She would never throw out a theory and simply assume the method would work.
Thus, she conducted the charcoal-burning experiment together with Aman and the Sand People serving as guards.
After weighing countless options, they finally settled on dried camelthorn roots.
Dried camelthorn roots could be found all over the dunes outside the village.
Roots more than three years old had natural honeycomb-like pores when cut crosswise. Since the dead roots had lain buried in the sand, they did not even need to be dried and dehydrated first.
The Water Jade rested in a small pit nearby, producing an endless stream of clear water.
They crushed clay dug from the dry bed of the Redwater River.
After cutting the thorny roots to an even length and stacking them in layers, they mixed the clay with water and built a half-buried, dome-shaped kiln over them.
Qin Ying took part in the entire process and ended up filthy from head to toe.
Once the fire was lit, she, Aman, and the others crouched in a row on the ledge and ate dry flatbread.
She had dropped off some rice in the village yesterday, but with members of the Fengshan Elite Cavalry moving around, all that rice had been hidden away.
Qin Ying was happy to try something different, so she joined Aman and the others in eating sea buckthorn and camelthorn flatbread, a local specialty of the Kuxi Tribe.
When Old Shaman from the Kuxi Tribe came hurrying over as if the sky were falling, Qin Ying had just choked on the dry, throat-scraping flatbread. Her neck craned so far it looked ready to stretch for miles.
Seeing Old Shaman rushing toward them from a distance, she struggled to swallow the mouthful. Her instincts told her something had happened.
Sure enough, his voice reached her before he did. “Shaman Ah Ying, we dug something up!”
Qin Ying immediately perked up.
They had found something? Treasure left behind by their ancestors?
“Shh!” She raised a finger, signaling Old Shaman to stop shouting. Treasure should never be flaunted.
She stuffed the uneaten half of her flatbread into her robe and whispered excitedly, “Let’s go take a look. Make sure the tribespeople don’t blab about it.”
Without waiting to see whether Old Shaman understood, she lifted her robe and ran in that direction.
Aman, whose throat also ached from a mouthful of flatbread lodged in it, hurriedly got up and chased after her.
Distance was the best filter. After spending several days with her, Aman felt that the Divine Envoy did not seem nearly as lofty and untouchable as he had imagined.
As the people of Great Xia would put it, she could be as still as a maiden one moment and as wild as a mad rabbit the next.
She could sit motionless for half a day, staring blankly into space, yet she would also chase gerbils across the dunes.
He forced the flatbread down his throat and shouted after Qin Ying, “Wait for us!”
Old Shaman of the Kuxi Tribe might have been advanced in years, but he was remarkably spry.
He was no slower than Qin Ying, and the two descended into the cistern one after the other.
Inside the cistern, everyone had stopped digging.
The pitch-black cistern was filled with standing water and reeked of rust. There was an opening in the wall to the right, and a rusty red glow leaked through it.
The moment Qin Ying climbed down, she noticed something was wrong. There was actually a cool breeze inside this sealed underground chamber, and she could faintly hear the wind whistling through the narrow opening.
She waded through rusty water two fingerbreadths deep, walked over, and pressed an eye to the hole in the wall.
Her first impression was rust.
The passage beyond was dark red, and she could not tell whether the stone had always been that color or had been stained by corrosion.
Qin Ying noticed that only a single rock wall separated this rust-covered stone corridor from the Kuxi Tribe’s cistern.
In other words, the rusty smell in the water did not come from groundwater seeping through the surrounding rock. Instead…
The water they had drunk for generations had flowed out of this rust-covered stone corridor.
Qin Ying clicked her tongue softly. Beside her, Old Shaman rattled off something she could not understand.
Aman translated, “He’s asking whether we should dig through the wall and go inside to take a look.”
Qin Ying frowned.
Logically speaking, the Kuxi Tribe had been drinking the water seeping out of this place all along, so there should not be any lethal pathogens inside.
Still, it always paid to play it safe!
That was precisely how Qin Ying had managed to court death time and again yet still grow up alive and kicking.
She moved away from the fist-sized hole, scooped up a lump of wet mud from the ground with her bare hands, and plugged the opening.
Then she ordered, “Reinforce it with wet felt and seal the opening.”
“Everyone who’s come into contact with this hole is to stay together in a vacant room and be kept under observation for a day.”
Aman was beginning to realize this might be serious. He pulled off his hood, soaked it on the ground, and plastered it over the opening.
He then translated Qin Ying’s instructions word for word for the Kuxi Tribe’s Shaman.
Before long, everyone who had been digging the cistern was gathered inside one of the village’s vacant cave dwellings.
The child who had uncovered the hole even got a room all to himself.
Qin Ying did not wander around either. She sat alone in a cave dwelling whose owner had died.
She wasn’t nervous. If anything, the restless streak buried in her bones had been stirred awake.
There might be something beyond that stone corridor far more interesting than any ancestral treasure.
Qin Ying’s eyes gleamed. She ordered people to catch some gerbils and prepare torches to test the air.
Because of Hanba, the desert had grown so hot that even the gerbils were nearing extinction.
Several adolescent boys from the Kuxi Tribe went out in force. Even with trap cages baited with the urine of female gerbils in heat, they only managed to catch a dozen or so.
Big and small alike, every one of the gerbils had met with disaster thanks to its lust.
Inside the cistern, the small opening was widened until it was nearly the size of a shot put.
A test with a torch flame showed that the air inside appeared normal.
A gerbil tethered to a Sand Lizard-hide cord was pushed through the opening.
As soon as it entered, it scurried down the corridor and vanished into the distance in the blink of an eye.
Aman, who was watching from the side, breathed a sigh of relief. “Gerbils are extremely timid and alert. They’ll curl up into a ball the moment they sense danger. Judging by this one, there shouldn’t be anything dangerous inside.”
The instant he finished speaking, the Sand Lizard-hide cord in his hand snapped taut and began to shiver. Aman’s expression changed at once.
“Pull it back!” Qin Ying ordered.
He immediately hauled on the cord.
But the weight at the other end was clearly wrong: it was much heavier than before.
As the cord was gradually reeled in, the gerbil’s carcass was dragged back to the opening.
The moment they saw it clearly, Qin Ying, Aman, and the Old Shaman all sucked in a sharp breath.
The Old Shaman cursed in some kind of Sand People slang.
Aman blurted out, “May the Supreme Deity protect us.”
The Supreme Deity herself, crouching right beside him, felt her pulse quicken as well.
The gerbil, which had still been alive just a minute or two ago, was now covered in reddish rust.
A huge mass of rust had completely engulfed its head, making it look as though it were wearing a misshapen helmet.
…
“It died from a combination of suffocation and compression.”
Atop a low table, Qin Ying held the gerbil’s head with a pair of wooden tongs.
Before her lay the gerbil’s remains, crudely cut into several pieces with a dagger.
“Why are you standing so far away?” When no one responded, Qin Ying looked in confusion at Aman and the Old Shaman, who had retreated a considerable distance. “Have you never killed a gerbil before?”
What a pair of cowards.
Aman hunched his shoulders. Of course he had killed gerbils before, but he had certainly never peeled one apart to carefully inspect its guts and windpipe like this.
Realizing that neither of them would be any help, Qin Ying turned back and continued examining the carcass after removing the chunks of rust.
“Its claws have turned bluish purple, and there’s foam in its mouth.”
“But there’s no rust in its windpipe, lungs, muscles, or internal organs. That’s good news.”
It meant the rust that had encased the gerbil’s head had not invaded its body.
Aman had no idea how that was good news. He only found the sight of the Divine Envoy holding up a gerbil’s lung rather frightening.
Qin Ying set down the wooden tongs. “Record the length of the Sand Lizard-hide cord, then keep sending the gerbils in, batch by batch.”
They needed to determine exactly how far into the corridor the gerbils encountered the deadly threat.