The dreary darkness resembles a giant canning box, and those in it can only hear their own breathing, and the dull echo of the sound of the breath. As far as the eye can see, there are faint rolling hills in front of you, but the cold wind from the north of the Saibei gives Beiling, which is still in September, a strong taste of winter.

Team Cao got into the jeep, lit two cigarettes, handed me one, and took a deep breath. "Boss, it looks like we're going to have to spend the night here tonight. Don't go to the village, just get it in the car. ”

A few dozen meters away from our jeep, there was a small village shaded by numerous tall poplars and shrubs. Ten minutes ago, we had rushed into the village with great expectations, trying to find someone to borrow for the night, but we did not expect that the village had long been abandoned, with broken bricks and tiles, and it was pitch black, and there was no one to be seen.

This village should have a history of several hundred years, most of the buildings are built with bluestone, the most central is the mansion, the high wall and eaves, the eaves are also decorated with animal stone carvings, there are some characteristics of Jinnan dwellings, originally it should be a big family.

But except for this mansion, most of the other houses are mud houses and straw huts, which have collapsed to the point that they are no longer in shape. Team Cao and I walked around the bluestone mansion, many tiles on the roof had fallen off, and the heavy rain had made the house muddy. Some of the large pieces of furniture that were difficult to carry back then have long since decayed, and we don't even have a place to stay. It seemed that there was no way to do anything in the house, so Cao and I had to walk out of the village.

"Okay, Lao Cao, we're better in the car, but there are wires in the big house just now, and there are power sockets installed on the wall, so it seems that the time for abandonment is not very long. Along the way, we have encountered several such deserted villages, how can it become like this?"

Team Cao opened the car door, and the two of us got into the car, turned on the heater, and then told me while smoking a cigarette: "In the remaining area of Taihang in northern Shanxi, the land is barren and can't grow many crops, and since ancient times, the land can't support too many people, so many villages are small and have few households. At the end of the eighties, a large number of coal seams were found here, although the quality could not catch up with Linfen, Yangquan and other places, but the local people found a way to get rich, and there were many foreign bosses who came in to open mines and build factories. The labor force only came from the surrounding villages, and the young and middle-aged people basically went down the well, and only some of the old, weak, sick and disabled people remained in the village. ”

"In the past two years, the mining volume in Shanxi is too large, and there are many open-pit coal mines in Inner Mongolia have been discovered, the mining cost is much lower, and the price of raw coal has fallen a lot. The mountains in this area used to be full of small coal kilns, but now they are all hollow. Now that the coal kilns are closed, they can't go back to the village to farm, and the land is completely barren, so they have to leave their hometown and go to work in other large coal mines, and when the old people in the village die, their families will move away. Naturally, these villages were deserted. ”

"And these places, in the past, they were blindly excavated, there was no awareness of environmental protection, the water and soil were polluted, and the vegetation was basically destroyed, and if you wanted to stay, I am afraid you will not be able to live." "Team Cao said a little sad, and indeed it is difficult for me to imagine that this rolling mountain has become a dead place where no one lives.

"Then where are we going this time?" I put the blanket on Team Cao's car over my body, and the temperature outside is estimated to have dropped to about zero degrees, but fortunately, Team Cao drives out all year round, and the equipment on the car is still relatively complete.

"I was in a hurry in the morning, and I didn't bother to report to you, you should take a look at the information first. Team Cao took a brown paper file bag from the back seat and handed it to me.

"I estimate that if you drive another 45 kilometers along this road, you will be able to reach Nanduling Town, and there is a rural road that will drive another 70 or 80 kilometers to the north, which is our destination, Chengjialing Village. In fact, the straight-line distance between us and Chengjialing Village is only more than ten kilometers, but we are separated by a big mountain, and we have to go around a hundred and ten miles of mountain roads. There are many households in that village, one or two thousand people, all supported by a state-owned coal mine called the Chengjialing Mine. Team Cao yawned, covered the blanket as well, and kept rubbing his hands.

I opened the file, looked at it carefully, and wondered in my heart, what kind of case would alarm the Special Investigation Department directly under the Ministry of Public Security, and drag me out of the bed in the morning, eat one meal a day, and travel almost a thousand kilometers?

"Chang, it was my idea to call you along, this case is a bit weird. About two months ago, more than a dozen fires broke out in the staff dormitory area of Chengjialing Mine, killing more than a dozen people, but this kind of fire is a bit strange. Team Cao said, taking out a few more photos from the file bag and placing them in my hand.

The lighting in the car was a little dim, so I picked up the photo and got closer, and I got a rough idea. The photo is a standard on-site survey photo, perhaps because the lighting is not very good, and the flash makes the photo a little overexposed, miserable and white, which is even more shocking.

In the photo, it is a very simple hut, there is a small square table in the middle of the room, one side of the small square table is baked charcoal black by an open fire, and there are four strange-looking wooden sticks standing on the ground next to the small table.

It is estimated that the highest temperature at the time of the fire was the seat of the chair, and the high temperature melted the lacquer or other oil-rich substances, and the grease flowed down the four legs, sticking the legs to the ground, causing the strange scene of four black short sticks standing upright.

In front of the four sticks, there were two severed feet in rubber shoes, about halfway up the calf, pitch black and charred, but there was no trace of the body on them, only in the middle of the four sticks, there was a small pile of black charcoal-like substance.

It is hard to imagine how high the temperature must be to burn people to the bones, of course, the cremation oven can achieve this effect, but it is in a closed furnace, under the action of high temperature and high pressure can be achieved, natural combustion may not achieve this effect.

There is also a strange place, that is, at such a high temperature, it is an open flame, and the furniture around the fire point and even the whole house will be quickly ignited, but judging from the photos at the scene, the square table next to the chair is basically intact except for some deformation and blackening due to the temperature. In other words, the area of the fire was only the size of a chair seat and the temperature was extremely high, but it did not ignite the surrounding objects, which is a paradoxical inference.

I shook my head self-deprecatingly and flipped through a few other photos. The tragic situation of the deceased in the photos is not much different, some leave one foot, some leave a piece of arm. Some burned a big hole in the bed, but the frame and back of the bed were intact, and some burned half of the two-seater sofa and the other half fell to the side.

What's even more bizarre is that there is also a shot in a public bathhouse. The tiles of the bathhouse had left a distinct grayish-black humanoid imprint, which was evident to be the result of a person struggling in extreme pain. But the deceased must have been under the lotus canopy at the time, as most of the ashes were washed away by the water, leaving only large chunks of black charcoal ballast.

This picture once again subverts all my assumptions, there is water pouring down on it, and in a very humid bathhouse, how did the fire ignite? and what ignited it? I put the picture down and fell into deep thought.

"How about it? This trip didn't run in vain, did it? The way the victim died in this case is so bizarre that I have never heard of it. Team Cao, who was driving the seat, said while rubbing his hands.

"Looks like a spontaneous combustion?"

"At first, we also thought so, from the perspective of the burning situation and the degree of damage to the surrounding items, it was very similar to the phenomenon of spontaneous combustion of the human body, but the problem is that the spontaneous combustion of the human body is something that has not been scientifically verified, and we can only use it for reference, not for finalization. Xiao Lei checked some information, in fact, there are several cases in the whole country every year, but in one place, within a few kilometers in a straight line, there are more than a dozen cases in a row and densely, which has never happened. "When Team Cao saw that I had finished reading the file, they turned off the small lights in the car, and we went back to the endless night.

"Team Cao, did you find any clues in the early investigation?" I also learned from Team Cao, put the back of the seat down, people can lie down in recline, although the back will be very uncomfortable, but at least you can curl up and sleep for a while.

"The file you see is the investigation done by the local criminal police brigade, the first case was a month ago, and then three days in a row, a total of four cases, the initial criminal police brigade made the conclusion that the circuit was aging and caused an accidental fire, but it soon became clear that this conclusion was too hasty, and then more than half a month, there were seven or eight cases in a row. After receiving the report, the Provincial Criminal Police Brigade sent someone to do another investigation, but there was no progress, and it took more than a month to wait for it to come to us. ”

"The Chengjialing mine is not a big mine in Shanxi, and the place is remote, and you will know that there is a small restaurant and a grocery store in the whole town, and more than 1,000 people are basically from the mine, so the reporting process is too slow, delaying the best on-site investigation time, and there are not many valuable clues. ”

"There must be some common evidence of so many dead people, right?" I asked, glancing at the hands of my watch, which was close to midnight.

Team Cao wrapped his body in a blanket, turned around in his seat, and finally found a comfortable position and stretched.

"Of course, the deceased were all men, all of them were employees of the mine, and they all went down to Mine No. 17. Xiao Lei arrived at the mine two days before us, and he said that the mine had stopped production, and the No. 17 mine was closed, just waiting for us to go over and investigate. ”

(Things have nature, things have separation.) Some are near but not visible, and some are far and known. Those who are near but not visible do not notice what they say, and those who are far away and can know will be able to experience the future. --"Guiguzi")