Shen Yuan's Notes

My name is Chen Mo. My hometown suffered from drought and famine, and I was forced to pay debts. My mother was so sick that she only had one breath left. In the cold winter of 2009, I was kicked out of the county construction site and was completely desperate. Wang Laoguai, that lame old man, dragged me into a shack deep in the mountains with a bowl of noodles and the lie of being a "day laborer in the orchard." There was a constant "squeaking" sound at night - he was gnawing at the ground with an iron pipe (later I found out it was called a Luoyang shovel). When the shovel head brought out five-color mud and a piece of blue brick slag, his eyes lit up: "The meat cellar is ready! Boy, get down first!" The cold rope was tightened into my waist, and I was like a dead man being hung into a black hole. Boundless darkness, biting cold, and the stench of thousand-year-old rotten soil enveloped me. In the darkness, my feet touched something hard - a broken clay pot covered with mud. I hugged it with shaking hands, and at that moment I realized that it was not only my body that fell into this pit, but also my whole life.