Chapter 39 of 310

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Just like the building we were in, the water village from the previous part of this hallucination also had its doors and windows closed. There must have been an ambush, and Claw and Asa were captured. Or maybe Asa was actually a cover, and the villagers actually lived outside the village, lying in wait for scheming outsiders like us to come.

But there were at least a hundred people in this village— which made it a rare big village—so even though everyone on the raft was an expert, there were ways of dealing with them. They wouldn’t even need to muster a large force. It would only take a dozen crossbows pointed at the raft to force us all to surrender. The group of people I was with had excellent ears, and even though we had been in this building for at least ten minutes, we hadn’t heard anything. I wasn’t sure, but my gut said that no one was in this village.

With Claw and Asa not coming back, I was afraid something even stranger was going on.

Poker-Face’s ghost whistle went back and forth several times, and then he turned and listened to the sound of the horn. It was the only sign of movement in the entire village. It wasn’t the wind blowing, which meant someone was up to something.

I found the way out. The doors of these multi-storied buildings were usually at the back of the house, close to the cliff. There were paths leading up to the other buildings, but they were hidden and difficult to find because the buildings were often close to the cliff, and densely packed together. That was definitely the case with this building. The hole was in the corner, hidden behind several bundles of straw. Once the straw was parted, a wooden door leading to the cliff outside was revealed, and we could see a path that was only half a meter wide.

The sound of the nearest horn was coming from our side. There was a turret-like building near the top of the cliff, which was uninhabited. The multi-storied buildings didn’t reach that high, so it had to be a lookout tower. If we wanted to go all the way up there, we’d need to go through the whole cliff complex, and then go more than thirty meters up the path.

“I’ll go.” Poker-Face said. “Spread out and check the surrounding area.” With that said, he turned and went out, quickly disappearing as he made his way up.

Phoenix followed him out and went to another building at another fork in the path. There soon came the whistle of “empty building”, which was far inferior to Poker-Face’s whistle, but ordinary people shouldn’t be able to tell what it was. I also climbed out, went in the opposite direction of Phoenix and came to the door of another building.

The Yi people’s customs were simple and honest, and they didn’t bother locking their doors at night. When I entered, I found that this building was also a home, but it was even darker and more cramped. I looked around, but there was no one there. I used my whistle to relay the information and found that the bedroom on the second floor wasn’t a single bed, but a row of four or five plank beds that surrounded a carbon stove.

This was similar to an “inn”. Many people must have come to the Yi village to do business and would stay in this building. Those Yi people who didn’t work would set aside some space in their homes and make food for these businessmen in order to earn a living.

This “inn” was full of things, and I easily found that three of the five beds here had been occupied. There were little rattan-woven things near the first one, which I had seen a lot of on the first floor just now. This was a rattan merchant who went door to door to buy rattan goods. Well-made rattan goods needed very good materials and a tung oil finish once they had been dried at the right temperature. This businessman sold high-grade products and needed to look for them one by one in the village.

On the other side of a screen were two beds that had also been occupied. These two guests may or may not have been together, but either way, there weren’t many things next to their beds. All I could see were clay pots.

These were insect medicine farmers. I had heard long ago that some Yi villages sold centipedes on the side, but insect medicine and herbal medicine belonged to Chinese medicine merchants. Insect medicine— especially live insects— couldn’t be processed on these cliffs, so the live insects must have been taken to the nearby river towns. As a result, they were more expensive. At that time, there was a kind of centipede product called Golden Wings, which was actually a scam made up of two kinds of insects. It was said to be a full-proof treatment for rheumatism. The price was about the same as that of gold, so these insect farmers would dry the fake bugs in the village. This basically meant that these people would live in the village almost all year round.

If these people were here in the village, then that indicated that the villagers were very open, and there was a lot of trade. Phoenix whistled and asked me: where’s the snake? If I run into it, I’ll hack it to death.

I reached out to pick up one of the pots by the bed, but at this moment, a small snake on my waist moved fiercely.

I was startled and immediately stopped my hand. The snake was very sensitive to the environment, so the fact that it was twitching indicated that there was something in the pot making it uncomfortable.

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