We got out of the car, and I walked to the front of the pit, brushed away the floating sand at the mouth of the pit with both hands, and pointed to the shovel marks below.

"It's supposed to be the place where the soil was stolen."

Soil extraction is a major event in the lives of villagers.

Everyone knows that in villages and towns, they actually build their own houses to live in. To build a house, you need a place, and this land is the homestead allocated by the village.

But it's not like you can build a house with a homestead. Generally speaking, new homesteads are low-lying and uneven, so they need to be raised and compacted with soil so that the house will be strong and stable.

In recent years, due to the increase in the area of human activity and the increase in industrial and commercial land, land has become a limited resource - every household wants to raise the homestead, so where does the land come from?

Therefore, the village generally selects a few places of land that are not suitable for cultivation as the soil use area of the village. Villagers have to go to a designated area to collect soil, and then pay according to the amount of earth excavated.

Of course, there are also villagers who are very calculating, and they are unwilling to pay for the soil, so they will find remote places to secretly dig for soil use, which is the illegal excavation of earth.

The man in the village named Yantang is my little uncle, and he went to the dry riverbed to dig up the earth. This kind of sneaky work is usually done at night, and it can't make too much noise, so most of them dig with shovels with bare hands.

Therefore, there is no doubt that this pit should be the place where the soil was stolen.

The pit is not deep, and jumping can only reach the thigh. I stepped into the pit first, and then reached out to help Shen Yu down.

Shen Yu's hands were soft and cold, and they felt very comfortable in his hands—could it be that his hands were cold even if he was cold?

As soon as she got to the bottom of the pit, she squatted down, and kept pulling the sand in the pit with her hands, and I did the same, looking for something under the sand.

Unexpectedly, we were lucky, and it didn't take long for us to find another plank.

The planks were blackened, as if they had been soaked in dirt for a long time, and judging from the thickness, they did look like a damaged ship's plank.

However, there is a broken nylon rope next to this plank, and there is something black on the top of the rope, and I know that it is a piece of rubber rubber when I touch it with my hand.

Generally speaking, the bow, stern or side of the ship will be hung with waste tires, or wrapped in rubber for cushioning, and it seems that this plank is a shipboard.

The two of us continued to look around the pit, because I didn't have any tools, and I was reluctant to make Shen Yu's delicate hands thicker, so I dug the surrounding sand with my bare hands.

Soon, we found a second similar plank.

The plank didn't have any rubber sheet, but it did have a few large iron nails on it.

"It seems that this is where the wreckage of the shipwreck was found." I took the two pieces of wood and said, "Judging from the rubber and iron nails, this is just a civilian wooden ship in recent years, and it has nothing to do with our ancient black ships." ”

Shen Yu picked up two wooden boards, put them in front of her nose and sniffed, and then she knelt on one knee and slapped in the damp sand and soil.

I couldn't help but laugh out loud as I looked at her lying on the ground so seriously.

"What?" She probably realized that her posture was a little indecent just now, so she stood up with a crimson face and looked at me fiercely.

"I didn't ...... You're trying to say that these two planks aren't ship planks, right? I asked her.

"How do you know?" She looked at me with some surprise.

"I just weighed these two boards, I think they are a bit dense, if you cut the surface to look at the lines, you will find that this is actually not the common fir of Qiling shipbuilding, but the more valuable Zhennan ......"

"You can even look at wood?"

"That...... You know, I've been a nerd since I was a kid, and I like to study everything a little bit, and although I'm not proficient, I have some basic knowledge. ”

"Well," Shen Yu nodded, but her gaze at me seemed to be completely different, "I also think these two planks are a bit strange, just now I smelled the smell of the plank, and then smelled the smell of the place where the plank was buried—it's completely different." These two boards must have been buried somewhere else for a long time, not in this riverbed. ”

"You're saying that the board was 'laid out' here later?" I asked.

"Yes. Do you still remember that after Yan Tang found the ship's board and the four-corner iron anchor, the District Cultural Relics Bureau came to turn around once? ”

"Could it be that someone doesn't want the Cultural Relics Bureau to dig deep into this matter, so they set up two fake wooden boards, trying to fool up and get by?"

Shen Yu nodded, pointed to the rubber and iron nails on the wooden board and said, "Look, don't these things look like they were made later?" The people from the Cultural Relics Bureau must have gone to look for Yan Tang first, but they didn't see the planks and anchors he had dug up, and then they came here again, only to find a few worthless modern planks, and they returned disappointed without careful investigation.

"If you don't believe me, you can go and inquire, I guess someone must have started early and bought your little uncle's things at a high price."

"You mean - someone is trying to cover up this scene? But what can be disguised as a riverbed? Why hide it? I asked, kicking the dirt on the riverbed.

"Why don't we - let's try digging down there?" Shen Yu looked at his watch, "There should still be time." ”

"Aren't we going to see where you found the Black Ship?"

"Well, actually, I've seen that place dozens or hundreds of times. This time I just want to take you over and show you, so it shouldn't take too long. Shen Yu squatted down and pressed the damp sand in the pit with his hand, as if he was figuring out the fat and thinness of the meat.

"The soil is very soft, so let's not make too much of an area, just dig a deep pit." She said as she shoehorned it with her hands.

"Get out of the way, I'll come." I reached out and pulled her up, "The work of the old men who dig the soil, you just stand there and command." ”

"But ......"

"But what, you have to maintain your hands if they are rough, and it is even more laborious, so I'll come!"

Shen Yu is right, the sand is very damp, the soil is very loose, and it is very soft to dig.

However, she had never done any physical work, but she did not know that it was unrealistic to dig a small deep pit by hand.

Because it used to be a riverbed, the water table is low, and the sandy soil has a poor ability to retain water.

Therefore, as long as you dig deeper, the surrounding soil wall will continue to seep water into the pit, and if there is too much water seepage, the soil wall will collapse like a "landslide".

If you want to dig a deep pit, you have to keep expanding the diameter of the pit and expanding the area of the pit. The pit that was dug in the end was definitely a large and deep one.

So, under her stunned gaze, I dug a palm-sized place into a "dirty pool" where people could stand up.

"Ah...... It's going to look like this. She stood on the edge of the pit and exclaimed.

"Do you want to keep digging?" I asked with sand and mud on my arms and face, sweating profusely.

"No need." She waved her hand again and again, "I still can't do it without tools." ”

"But you don't." I pointed to the muddy water that kept coming up from the ground and said, "This water is so dark, it doesn't look like a river wrapped in sand." ”