She picked up the rusty samurai sword and examined it closely, discovering that it was indeed similar to the command sword held by Japanese officers in movies.
In fact, Chen Hong has seen a real-life example of this kind of knife; her grandfather had a genuine Japanese commissar sword in his collection.
However, her grandfather didn't like that knife and never maintained or cleaned it.
When Chen Hong was in elementary school, she found the samurai sword in the storage room on the ceiling of her maternal grandfather's house.
The knife didn't even have a scabbard; it was just placed in a long wooden box. Not only was it covered in nicks and chips of all sizes, but it was also so dilapidated that even the brass guard was loose.
My family all know that my grandfather hates the Japanese very much, and he never mentions anything related to Japan at home.
Chen Hong was very active as a child, and she would secretly climb onto the ceiling more than once to play with a knife.
Back then, rural children made their own toys.
Chen Hong has been a craftswoman since she was a child. She can sew all kinds of fabric beanbags, fabric hampers, and rag dolls for girls very exquisitely.
I was often scolded by my mother for stealing scraps of cloth from home.
These scraps of cloth were all my mother's treasures; the sturdier ones could be used to patch up blankets, elbows of shirts, and the bottoms and knees of pants.
Even the most worn-out scraps of cloth are valuable.
Add cold water to dissolve the flour and cook it into a paste. On a sunny day, layer scraps of cloth with the paste.
They would paste six or seven layers of the mixture together, then dry it and peel it off; this became the main material for the whole family to make shoes.
The scraps of cloth were treasures in her mother's eyes. After being scolded a few times, Chen Hong began to shift her attention and set her sights on her father's things.
My father has a toolbox that weighs nearly 100 pounds, containing all sorts of small woodworking tools, such as chisels, planes, carving knives, files, ink markers, hand saws, hammers, and whetstones.
He also had a large standing toolbox containing his rulers, saws, axes, and adzes.
All of them are old-fashioned woodworking tools passed down through three generations of my family; there isn't a single electric one.
Chen Hong, who often helps her father with his work, has always been very interested in this amazing craft.
I secretly used my father's tools to make wooden knives, swords, and spears, and occasionally carved a couple of wooden pistols.
However, his father was very strict with his tools and would never allow anyone to touch his things.
Chen Hong was caught stealing his chisel and was even kicked twice, but that didn't deter her. She still tried to use his saw to cut wood whenever she had the chance.
Once, I used the saw incorrectly and broke the blade, so my dad chased me all over the village.
Chen Hong didn't dare go home, so she walked six miles to her maternal grandfather's house. She knew that her father respected her grandfather and would never hit the child in front of him.
Although I wasn't beaten that time, I was severely reprimanded by my grandfather and was eventually escorted home by him.
After arriving at Chen Hong's house and looking at Chen Hong's treasure chest, Grandpa said to his son-in-law with great regret:
"Chen Gang, this child really has a talent for woodworking. It's a pity she was born a girl, otherwise she could have inherited your family's woodworking skills!"
From then on, Chen Hong owned a set of simple woodworking tools that her father had used: a chisel, a plane, and a small saw with little to no sharp edge.
Her family members no longer interfered with Chen Hong's tinkering with random little gadgets; they all knew it was just her hobby.
The countryside is full of trees, and wooden toys gradually stopped satisfying Chen Hong. She then set her sights on the Japanese steel knife at her grandfather's house.
One time, she went up to the roof to play with a knife again and was caught by her grandfather when he returned home. Seeing that she liked it, her grandfather let her take it home.
Chen Hong tried to sharpen the knife with her father's whetstone for several hours, but still couldn't get it right.
That knife was not only badly embroidered, but also had many chips on the blade, making it unusable unless it was reforged.
The blacksmith in their village is okay at making shovels and hoes, but he really can't do such delicate work as forging knives.
The blacksmith couldn't even smelt the broken coal he used to make a knife. In the end, Chen Hong's mother traded the knife, which had been burned and deformed, with a peddler in the countryside for hemp thread and needles.
The wooden knife Chen Hong made for Yu Yang was based on that knife; she always remembered the long blood groove on that knife.
After confirming that it was indeed a Japanese samurai sword, Chen Hong couldn't help but wonder how a Japanese samurai sword could appear in this remote and isolated place.
Didn't Japanese samurai most revere the so-called Bushido, the way of the sword, and the man himself?
Since a samurai sword has been found on this seabed, it is certainly not an isolated case.
Battles at sea often result in the destruction of ships and loss of life, so there is a high possibility that there are Japanese shipwrecks here.
Chen Hong immediately perked up and began searching for traces of the Japanese shipwreck even more diligently.
Persistence pays off. After a morning of thorough searching, Chen Hong finally located the exact location of the sunken ship.
The shipwreck is a modern steam-powered vessel with a steel structure. The hull is intact and has not disintegrated, so it does not appear to have been sunk by an attack or struck a reef.
It is possible that the ship encountered a stormy weather and was submerged by the waves, leading to its sinking at sea.
No wonder the samurai swords around were not far from the sunken ship; it's possible that people on the ship jumped into the sea to escape, only to be overturned and swallowed by the huge waves.
No one can survive at sea in bad weather.
Only two mutilated corpses were found next to the samurai swords scattered on the seabed; the rest had probably long since perished in the bellies of fish, becoming bait for large fish in the East China Sea.
The shipwreck is half a meter below the seabed silt, with only the bow and upper deck visible.
The surface is covered with moss and various shellfish and seaweed, making it a playground and habitat for schools of fish.
If she hadn't been holding a metal detector, she would never have discovered that what looked like a reef was actually the deck of a sunken ship.
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