Human bone cart
"This is a leg bone, right?" A voice came from the crowd. Ding Can turned his head. He had paid attention to him just now. It was one of the students who had been hiding in the crowd and had not spoken a word, but now he spoke.
The village chief opened his eyes wide: "Yes, how did you know? It should be a doctor, right?"
"Almost. Please continue."
This human bone chariot sounds brutal, but in fact the production process requires careful selection.
In order to ensure that the wheels can move forward normally without any jamming or resistance, it is necessary to ensure that the length and thickness of the dozen or so spokes in the wheel are roughly the same in order to maintain balance.
The width of the wheel is based on the femur, the strong long bone in the human thigh.
Human heights often vary, and femur lengths certainly vary as well. Even femurs taken from the same person may be of different lengths.
In order to gather enough wheels for this truck, I don’t know how many lives were lost.
Just looking at these femurs on the wheel, although there are some minor differences if you look closely, they are very harmonious when viewed from a distance, which must have been a great test of the craftsman's skills.
There are traces of black marks on the bones, which may be caused by collision during the process.
As for the patella part on the knee joint, it is wide at the top and pointed at the bottom, in the shape of a round cap, which just fits on the outermost edge of the wheel hub. There is also a special-shaped depression in the center of the patella, which looks more like something inlaid with jade that has been picked off by someone.
Along the entire circle of the car body, it was hammered into the dense rows of tibias and fibulas, like the fangs of a tangled beast.
It is called a human bone chariot, but it is more appropriate to call it a leg bone chariot.
"Hey, you can't take pictures!" Seeing the photographer in the cowboy hat trying to raise his camera, the village chief quickly stopped him.
"It's not that I'm worried about the footage of the bone cart being leaked. It's just that since it's made of dead people's bones, there's bound to be some ghostly aura on it. If you take pictures, the ghosts will follow the camera."
Ding Can thought of something: "Do you mean something happened before?"
"The first thing happened more than ten years ago, and it happened several times afterwards." Old Wang sighed. At that time, two backpackers came to Nanhu Village. They didn't know where this place was. They just saw the peculiar buildings and wanted to come in to take a look.
When I saw the bone cart, I took out my camera and took pictures. I thought that after I left, I would go to a nearby county town to develop the pictures and submit them to the magazine's strange stories column. Maybe I could even make a small profit.
Unexpectedly, an accident happened that day. There was a lake on the south side of the village with great scenery for watching the sunset. The backpackers wanted to take pictures to record the beautiful scenery, but they didn't expect the lakeside to be slippery. The two of them failed to survey the terrain in time and fell into the lake and drowned.
At that time, people just thought it was an accident, but later, anyone who took pictures of the bone cart was unable to leave Nanhu Village, and the villagers began to be vigilant.
Everyone speculated that it was because of the ghost haunting the bone cart, and whenever someone wanted to take a photo, they would strictly prohibit them.
Unlike the old rumors, this was something the villagers had experienced firsthand, so everyone was in awe and didn't even dare to take out their cell phones.
"Cheng Jialu, are you okay? Can't you go and rest?" Zhai Ting had been standing in the shadow of the door since she came in and had never walked into the house.
Her boyfriend, on the other hand, seemed very enthusiastic and walked around the car in a full circle, not wanting to miss any tiny details.
"I got it. I'll be there right away." Cheng Jialu stood up again reluctantly, and after standing up, he tidied up his clothes and backpack. He has been interested in this kind of ancient objects since he was a child.
The village chief led the group back to the courtyard, explaining the situation of the village to them along the way.
The current residential houses in Nanhu Village were all newly built decades ago. At the outermost part of the village, there are still some ruins from the past, giving us a glimpse of the appearance of the former buildings.
The lake where people drowned before was called Nanhu. It is said that it used to be very large, but with the changes of the times, it gradually shrank to its current size.
But the water depth should not be underestimated. It is only slightly shallower about ten meters from the shore, while the area near the center of the lake is unfathomable. There is a rift inside, and the amount of water it holds is hundreds of times more than that of a lake of the same size.
When you arrive at this location by boat, looking down, the water surface is pitch black, as if the abyss is leading you to fall.
The internet here was only really available a few years ago. The villagers are self-sufficient through farming and breeding, and have little connection with the outside world, so it is not well-known.
"But why are the houses painted this color?" Gao Wenwen walked under the eaves for a long time and felt like he had entered an old black and white TV.
The village chief scratched his head. "This is what our ancestors passed down. When I was a child, I heard from the elders that it was stipulated by the ancient wizards. The dark main body can suppress the souls of those who died here, and the white tiles on the top are a connection with heaven."
Out of reverence for the gods, no one has ever changed this long-standing custom.
After turning a few corners along the path and stopping in front of a courtyard gate, Yu Fu looked up at the roof and then at the sky.
"Isn't this the back of the room where the bone cart is kept?"
"This young man is quite observant," the village chief paused at the door. "There's no alley in the middle, otherwise we wouldn't have to go so far around."
"What? You want us to live next to dead bones at night." Zhai Ting started to get angry again. She already felt that those bones put together were creepy, and now she was getting goosebumps just thinking about it.
Lao Wang has a simple and honest personality, and the people here are simple and honest, so he probably rarely encounters such picky people. He thinks this girl is really sharp-tongued.
He felt his forehead begin to sweat again, but he couldn't bring himself to argue with a young girl, so he could only slowly explain, "There's a wall between us, and this is the best place in the village. There are so many of you, so you should just stay here for now. Everyone who's been here before has stayed here, so there's nothing wrong with it."
Seeing that no one else showed any resistance, Zhai Ting curled her lips. She didn't want to get angry anymore. She would seem pretentious if she kept talking like this. So she glared at her boyfriend, who was the source of all the trouble, threw her bag at him, stomped her feet on the spot, and walked in.
But the next second, after seeing the interior decoration clearly, she was stunned again.
There is a wooden table in the spacious front hall with a burning oil lamp on it. If you smell it carefully, you can smell the scent of sandalwood.
The shelves behind the wooden table are getting higher and higher, and on each layer are long objects covered with red cloth placed at regular intervals.
A few pillars stand alone supporting the front hall. Without much thought, you know that the things on them are tablets for the dead.
This is clearly the ancestral hall of Nanhu Village.
Zhai Ting quickly turned her head and asked, "You're giving us the ancestral hall to live in?"
"There's no place this big in the village. The rooms next door are just big enough for you to squeeze into. It's the only one here with air conditioning, and the rooms have been carefully cleaned, so you can live more comfortably. If you stay in other houses, you might not be used to it, and you'll have to spread out, which would be inconvenient."
Seeing his girlfriend about to explode again, Cheng Jialu quickly comforted her, "There are so many people here, nothing will go wrong. Besides, aren't you the most afraid of heat? You won't be able to sleep at night without air conditioning in this kind of weather."
"It's because you insisted on coming to such a damn place..." Zhai Ting's face was not very good, but she also knew how to weigh the pros and cons. She was a person who paid attention to living conditions. After listening to the words of the village chief and just walking along the way, she knew that other people's rooms were worse.
Even if there was a place for the two of them to stay, it would definitely be very uncomfortable.
After much deliberation, I reluctantly agreed to stay here, but I specifically asked for a room farthest from the main hall.
No one else made a fuss with her. Since they had chosen to come to a place so far away from the city, they had already anticipated what they might face. Besides, the room looked quite nice and it was obvious that it had been carefully cleaned.
This was the highest courtesy the villagers could offer. After everyone chose a room, they put down their luggage and took a short rest.
The village chief told them that the terrain around the village was complicated and that they should not wander around for the time being. He then went back home immediately. It was almost time for lunch, and people here usually waited for guests to arrive before cooking. The food preparation had been completed long ago, and now he just had to go and notify his family to start cooking.
After more than ten minutes, everyone had packed up and went out in groups of three or four.
There is no need for a guide. The distance from the ancestral hall to Lao Wang's house is very close. After going out, turn right and walk along the path. After about a hundred meters, you will see Lao Wang's house with two red lanterns hanging at the door.
In addition, there is a more obvious sign. The smoke from this house looks much more obvious than that from other houses. The wind carries the smoke upwards, and it can be seen that the fire is burning particularly vigorously.
Probably because they knew there were new guests coming, or wanted to find some delicious food at the village chief's house, a few children squatted on the steps at the door. When they saw someone coming, they opened their eyes wide and looked at them curiously.
Those who are braver will come over and chat directly. Ding Can saw a little girl with a Nezha hairstyle coming over and holding his hand. They were so close that he had to tilt his head high to look at her, which made her eyes look even rounder.
She looked about five years old, probably not yet in school, and her voice was childish: "Sister, where are you all from?"
Ding Can squatted down and spoke to her: "It's a place very far away from the village. Just call me Sister Xiao Ding. What's your name?"
She noticed that the girl was wearing a pendant around her neck. It was a densely packed white bone chain, but it looked like it had been cut, so it was impossible to tell what animal's bones it was made of.
"My name is Xiaoshui, and this is my grandfather's house."
It turned out that she was the village chief’s granddaughter. Xiaoshui ran back to the village chief’s house after saying a few words, still muttering that it smelled so good.
*
At the same time, in the courtyard of the ancestral hall, Zhai Ting just came out of the bathroom. She took this opportunity to take a quick shower. When she came out, she saw her boyfriend lying on the bed with a mobile phone in his hand.
"What are you looking at so seriously?"
Cheng Jialu raised his phone: "Look."
Only then did Zhai Ting see clearly. Because the photo was taken in backlight, the picture appeared very dark, and the light-colored areas were a bit exposed, making the round bones in the photo very obvious. She hit Cheng Jialu on the back with a towel: "Are you going to die? Didn't I tell you not to take pictures?"
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