Chapter Eighty-Five: Ghosts Without Souls

That scene remains vivid in my memory. You could watch with your own eyes as those floating corpses surged towards us from afar, then vanished right before you, as if only stopping by to greet you. Neither I nor Cha Wenbin could remain calm—this had gone far beyond anything we could have anticipated.

“Let’s get out of here...” The words came trembling from Cha Wenbin himself. I could hear the quiver in his voice as he spoke.

“Let’s go…” The person closest to the ladder beside me was Fatty. The so-called platform was really just a one-square-meter stone, and Fatty alone took up nearly half of it. Panic breeds mistakes. In that confusion, Fatty spun around, and his massive backside shoved me clean off the platform.

I have no idea what position I landed in. I remembered the water there was shallow, only up to my calves, but as I plunged down it felt as though I’d dropped into a bottomless lake.

There was a buzzing in my ears, and I felt water surging into my mouth and nose from all directions. I still had my headlamp on, and flailed desperately in the water, lost and disoriented.

In the chaos, I looked up and realized I was sinking. A white spot on the water’s surface was drifting farther and farther away from me...

When I came to, I no longer knew where I was. All around was pitch black, and I could hear the rhythmic slap of water against the rocky shore, a steady “swish, swish.” I tried to move but felt utterly weak—my arms, legs, even my neck ached so much I gasped in pain. But a voice in my mind kept telling me: I’m still alive!

With effort, I patted the headlamp on my head. To my relief, it flickered to life! The water here was icy cold, draining my body’s warmth fast. I knew that if I didn’t move soon, I’d freeze to death.

So I crawled, dragging my half-numb body inch by inch to the side. At last, when I managed to lean against a rock, I saw huge splashes on the water’s surface not far away. Before long, a figure burst out and swam desperately for the shore.

Barely two meters from him, another person emerged about half a minute later. Who else could they be? It was Fatty and Cha Wenbin!

Once ashore, Fatty braced his hands on his knees, gasping, “I nearly suffocated…”

The other was in even worse shape, not much better than I had been when I first got out. At that moment, I was hardly in any condition to help myself either. The three of us collapsed in separate spots, resting for a long while before we could catch our breath.

There was dry grass by the water, along with some driftwood that had washed ashore. We gathered some and lit a fire. What season was it now? Back in the Northeast, on a day like this, even your urine would freeze before it hit the ground. The three of us sat around the fire in just our shirts, our teeth chattering, until our bodies finally began to warm and we found our voices again.

After Fatty had knocked me off the platform, the others only heard my splash. When they looked, there was no sign of me. Stranger still, the floating corpses on the water had vanished as well. Apart from a few ripples, the whole surface was calm. Fatty and Cha Wenbin immediately jumped in to look for me. The water wasn’t that deep; I was a grown man—how could I just disappear?

They panicked, scouring the water by hand, but I’d simply vanished into thin air.

At the crucial moment, it was Fatty’s quick thinking that saved them. He noticed a tiny detail: a few leaves spinning above the current under the platform. We hadn’t gone there before; those drifting corpses had kept us away. Summoning his courage, Fatty took a step forward. Suddenly, a powerful, unreasonable force seized his legs, and with a thud, he was pulled down.

Cha Wenbin thought Fatty had only slipped, so he turned to help. But right before his eyes, Fatty disappeared. Then the whirlpool on the water’s surface grew larger, and soon Cha Wenbin was dragged in as well.

“We fell down here?” I looked up—just three or four meters above, stalactites hung from the ceiling, water dripping steadily down. Yet all three of us had floated up from the water...

“I’ve got it!” Fatty slapped his forehead. “I’ve been racking my brains, but now it makes sense. Xia, this is all your fault.”

“My fault? You’re the one who shoved me off with your fat ass.” I thought to myself, What a godforsaken place—no villages ahead, no inns behind, who knows if we’ll ever get out, and you still have the nerve to blame me.

“I mean, it’s your fault for hitting the right spot. To me, this is classic karst terrain. I didn’t expect to see this in southern Anhui, though—it’s more common in Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, and Guangxi.”

“That’s not so strange. There’s a famous cave, Taiji Cave, in the neighboring county—it’s a fun place, I visited as a kid... Go on.”

Fatty pointed ahead. “Have you noticed? Since we got here, the water level’s been rising. I clearly remember that sharp stone being on the shore, and now it’s partly submerged.”

Cha Wenbin asked, “What does that mean?”

“It explains how we got here!” Fatty gestured with his hands. “This left hand is the river we came down through the mine. My right hand is where we are now.” Fatty’s hands were parallel, then he lowered his right hand. “There was probably once an underground river connecting these two points, which is common in karst landscapes. But when they mined here, they must have blocked the channel. Xia, you really need to lose weight—because when you fell with all your force, you broke open the blocked passage between the two. That caused an instant siphon effect.”

“What’s a siphon?” Cha Wenbin and I looked blank.

“See, this is what comes of not being educated!” Fatty explained, “Ever seen wine sold at a corner shop? They stick one end of a rubber tube into the wine barrel, the other into a bottle. You suck on it, pinch and release, and the wine flows out. We’re inside the bottle now, and before, we were in the barrel. Xia, you broke through the tube, so suddenly there was this huge suction.”

Cha Wenbin nodded in approval. “I think you’re spot on, Stone.”

“With his kind of brains? Never mind. But where did the floating corpses go? I didn’t see a single one down here.”

Fatty said, “That’s a question for Cha. I’m puzzled too—when you fell, the corpses vanished.”

Cha Wenbin mused, “I’ve considered it—the most likely explanation is those things weren’t corpses.”

“Then what were they?”

“Spirits.”

“So—ghosts? There must have been a lot of them. Good thing they fell down, or we’d have been in real trouble!”

“Spirits aren’t ghosts. A person’s essence splits in two: the soul, which comes from ‘heavenly energy,’ meaning yang; and the spirit, which comes from ‘earthly energy,’ meaning yin. Together, they are soul and spirit, one yin, one yang, complementary and inseparable. The soul governs the mind; the spirit, the body. When they first leave a corpse, they still resemble their living form, but over time, they grow faint and eventually vanish, unless they possess a living body or devour other spirits to maintain their shape.

But in certain cases, the soul and spirit can split. Spirits without souls are just shells—if you imagine a ghost as having a body, then the spirit is a ghost without a soul.”

“Then where did they go?”

Cha Wenbin replied, “A spirit is like your reflection in a mirror. When you’re alive, your reflection is your spirit—visible, but untouchable. Those things in the water were spirits. Their sudden disappearance probably had to do with you falling in—the disturbance broke the surface, like a shattered mirror, and the spirits vanished with it. If I’m right, what we saw were only reflections, but I’m not sure what cast them.”

“It all sounds pretty spooky. I’m not planning to stay here long. Cha, I don’t think we can go back now—siphons are powerful, easy in, hard out. If we don’t freeze to death, we’ll starve.”

At times like this, no one could guarantee we’d make it out alive. At twenty, death seemed a distant concept.

We fell silent again—the crackle of the fire, the sound of water. I must have been feeling desperate myself, for I suddenly shouted at the top of my lungs, “I haven’t even married yet!”

Fatty burst out laughing, and even Cha Wenbin joined in. Our greatest enemy at times like this is ourselves—the more you bottle up your fear, the more it controls you, until you’re trapped by your own thoughts.

We took stock of our things—almost everything was intact, especially the three headlamps. Fatty had gotten them from Zhou Youcai; they were high-end, the kind supplied to coal mines, and by Fatty’s standards, practically military grade—one charge would last eight hours. We decided to use only one at a time to save power.

Once our clothes had dried, we toasted two cakes each to stave off hunger. We’d only brought two apiece, meant as snacks, planning to leave at dawn. Bellies full and bodies warmed, we got up to survey our surroundings. The place was about the size of two rooms, with an irregular round pool of water. Fortunately, the water flowed. We decided to follow its course and try our luck...

I spent two days back home, but returned last night.