At first, I thought the shadow in the fog was a person, but when I looked closely, I realized that it was not a person, but a stone statue. And it was supposed to be very close, but the fog was so thick in this place that it was a haze on the banks of the river in the sunlight.

"What's there?" The girl climbed up with my hand.

"I'll go and see, I've got to get dressed first! Otherwise, you will not see the light. I jumped back to the shore from the stone and walked towards the stone statue.

In the fog, I turned on my flashlight and soon saw that the "thing" turned out to be just a wood carving. The wood carving is a main body and a square pillar that drags it underneath, and the wood carving is a hideous monster. The monster painted the Tai Chi Bagua diagram, the leopard's eyes were angry, the teeth were bared, the canine teeth were protruding, the bloody mouth was open, the nostrils were huge, the cheekbones were high, and a tongue spit out from the bloody mouth like a demon and a monster, looking at me couldn't help but shudder.

Just as I was amazed, the girl was also dressed on the reef and jumped over, and when she saw the wood carving, she shouted, "Swallow? How could this place have this? ”

"Swallow?" I wondered, "Is that the name of this wood carving?" ”

"That's right? Don't you know? She looked at me with a little disdain: "You won't come to Shennongjia to learn about the local customs?" Swallowing mouth is a wood carving that is hung on the lintel of some ethnic minority areas in Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, Hunan and other provinces to ward off evil spirits. Most of them are mainly animal heads, but there are also those that combine humans and beasts, and there are also those that hang gourds or wooden scoops. ”

"Totem?" I asked, but I wondered how there could be such a statue in this place.

"But if it is, it may not be counted." The girl said, "Swallowing mouth is a mutation of the mask of folk art, which originated from totem worship and primitive witchcraft, and is a product of folk culture that combines ancient totem culture and witch culture and has been transmuted after a long time. ”

"But what does the totem mean here?" I asked, "Or was it ever inhabited?" And what about the years? Do you know the age of this thing? ”

The girl thought for a moment and said to me, "You should be able to see if there is anyone living there!" As for the age, the Chinese folk custom of hanging swallowing mouths to ward off evil spirits is not later than the Han Dynasty. However, it is impossible to verify when the custom of hanging and swallowing mouths of ethnic minorities began, but from the shape of swallowing mouths and the customs used, it should be related to the migration of the Han nationality in history, and it is the product of the combination of foreign culture and local traditional religious culture. At present, the swallowing of ethnic minorities is mainly distributed among the Bai, Yi, Yao, Buyi, Shui and other ethnic minorities in southwest China. ”

"The Tujia family will also have it! Isn't there a majority of Tujia people here? ”

"I don't think it's like it, this thing has been here for a long time, but the earliest Tujia swallow according to the current discovery is also in the third cultural relics survey work in Wushan County, the team members accidentally found it in the blast furnace village of Hongchun Tujia Township, I remember that the swallow is from the hands of the Three Gorges craftsmen in the Guangxu period. What's more, Shennongjia is not just Tujia, right? ”

"That's just as well." I circled around the totem, and felt more and more that the fog here was a little too thick. Even the clothes I just put on were a little wet.

At this time, the girl seemed to be a little tired of the humidity, and took a few steps forward and shouted to me, "Here are some wood, I'll see if I can set them on fire." ”

"Okay." I want to go with you, as long as you don't go far, you won't lose anything you do as a housewife. Then he silently squeezed his own thinking. "I used to be able to remember something at any time, but now I can't think of anything." It's always as if my memories have really become a blank slate, and I have forgotten everything before.

When I was just recovering from amnesia, I could think of some of the different scenes I encountered, for example, I remembered a lot of professional knowledge in archaeology, and I would wonder if I was a student of archaeology. For example, sometimes I will feel familiar with someone's face and name, for example, I will dream at night, or when I am unconscious, I will dream about some pre-amnesia, or scattered things. But now there's nothing.,It's as if someone has completely formatted my USB flash drive.。

I covered my head and signaled that I didn't want to care so much, but when I came back to my senses, I realized that I couldn't see anything at all in front of me, and I reached out and wiped it that my face was already covered with water droplets, "Oh my God." I shouted to myself, "This place really feels like it's in a river." "I shook off the water in my hand and suddenly realized that something was wrong, it seemed that the water vapor mist in other places was not so serious, right?

I crouched down and watched the wood carving swallow it, only to realize that there was a steady stream of mist coming from underneath it. But this wood can not rot under such a fog, and I knocked on the stake, and the sound was very dull, like a tree.

"What kind of wood is this?" I said to myself, I wiped some of the moisture around the wood, and saw that the skin of the wood was as blue as seawater. It's not yellow, it's not black, it's blue, and I was shocked when I first saw it, thinking it was paint, but when I touched it with my hands, I realized that it was the skin of wood, and it looked like new.

"Dry boxwood." The girl's voice rang in my ears again.

I was really frightened at this moment, my tense nerves suddenly made me jump away from me, I touched my chest and said to her loudly, "Do you want to be so elusive?" Didn't you go and make a fire? ”

"You still want to make a fire in this place?" She said a little helplessly, "Those woods are very wet, if you give birth here, it would be fine." ”

"You and me?"

"Isn't this Shennongjia?" She looked at me with a glint in her eyes, "There are wild people here!" I'm sure you can develop well here and create a tribe. ”

"What do you think?" I pretended to be sick to my stomach and vomited.

"Doesn't it feel like home?" The woman's real name was revealed again, but when she saw the blue wood through the moisture, it completely changed, "This is a dry boxwood." It is a kind of boxwood, it is said that this boxwood is grown in the sea, belongs to the best boxwood, some people in the industry pointed out that the dry boxwood, sea yellow, golden silk nan are extremely rare in history, but what is the dry boxwood has not been seen, only very early in an antique bracelet forum someone pointed out that the dry boxwood is sea blue, living on the bottom of the sea does not actually belong to one of the boxwood. ”

"And what is this?" I asked. "The reason why boxwood is precious is because its wood is extremely delicate and the most of the hundred trees, the color of the new work is elegant and elegant, and it shows different colors after more than a hundred years, so this one that grows on the bottom of the sea is also called boxwood because it will change color?"

"I don't know, let's just say so! Many people say that boxwood changes color, 'orange red in a hundred years, golden yellow in a thousand years', but the fact that it turns sea blue is really only said by a tourist on that forum, but let's say it's boxwood for the time being! But why would the people of this place make it into a swallow? ”

"The thinking of local tyrants is something we can't understand." I smiled and tried to move the stake to see what was down there, but after I had used all my strength I realized that I couldn't move it at all, or that the strange wood was starting to take root here again.

I looked at the girl, and the girl also spread her hands, but after thinking about it, she was still quite excited and said, "But I've also heard others say that swallowing a stone dares to say it, and the effect is similar, especially in some very evil places, this kind of totem will become very evil after staying for a long time, so I'm wondering if it will be?" ”

"Shi Dang?" I thought of it, "I know this thing, Shi Dang, also known as Taishan Shi Dang, stands in the streets and alleys, especially on the wall called the murder position at the T-junction and other road rushes." The stele is engraved with the words "stone dare to be", or "Taishan stone dare", and there are bas-reliefs such as lion head and tiger head on the stele. Shi Dangdang's intention has developed from the initial pressure of ominousness and warding off evil spirits to a variety of effects such as driving away wind, waterproofing, warding off evil spirits, stopping evil, and eliminating disasters. The stone dare dang of the fifth year of the Tang Dynasty (770 years) unearthed in the Song Dynasty is engraved with "Shi Dangdang, the town of a hundred ghosts, the pressure of disasters, the blessing of officials, the health of the people, the prosperity of the wind and religion, and the prosperity of Lile Chang." Text, you can see the role of Shi Dangdang at that time. And what about this swallow? ”

"Repression?" The girl and I said in unison.

Wiping a handful of water vapor, I suddenly said, "I want to see what's down there now, you can help me push this thing away with some strength later, whether it's evil or not, this thing has a history of many years in this forest, I don't believe it will go anywhere." ”

"Do you think there are only big bad wolves and little red riding hoods in the forest? Don't forget that this is a primeval forest, and apart from the expeditions, no one will visit it for hundreds or thousands of years. ”

"I can't care so much." I said and tried desperately to push this thing away, at this time it seemed to me that the girl's reminder was just a simple desire to protect this thing that was precious in her opinion, but when I struggled to push it away, I realized that I was wrong, I was so wrong, because at the same time I saw with the naked eye that the fog in this area was frantically surging towards the place below, like an inverted sea water, endlessly, the scene was like a fairyland sea of clouds, but the beauty was indescribably weird.

Just like the purple gourd of the King of the Golden Horn and Silver Horn in Journey to the West, without a trace of resistance, the hole in the ground of the black Kuikui appeared in front of us, with an unprecedented powerful suction, sucking me and the girl and the fog from the ground into it. (To be continued.) )