Notes from the Sunken Abyss

My name is Chen Mo. Back home, drought and famine drove us into debt, and my mother was so sick she had only a breath left in her. In the bitter winter of 2009, I was turned away from a construction site in the county seat. I was completely out of options. Then Wang Laoguai, a crafty old crook with a limp, lured me into a shack deep in the mountains with a bowl of noodles and a lie about a short-term job in an orchard. That night, a constant creaking came from below. He was gnawing at the earth with an iron tube, which I later learned was called a Luoyang spade. When the tip brought up five-colored soil and a shard of blue brick, his eyes lit up. “We’ve found the burial pit! You go down first, kid!” The cold rope dug into my waist as I was lowered into a black hole like a corpse. Endless darkness, bone-chilling cold, and the stench of soil that had rotted for a thousand years swallowed me up. In the darkness, my foot hit something hard: a broken pottery jar caked in mud. I held it with trembling hands. Only then did I understand that it wasn’t just my body that had fallen into this tomb pit. My whole life had fallen in with it.