"Wu Xiong, your mafa grandfather's grave is in these old woods?"
"That's right! And not just my mafa. My ama lives here too. There are lots of dead from our tribe, all living in the old woods on this back mountain!..."
"Wu Xiong, this is your whole tribe's burial ground? Then where are their graves? Why don't I see them?"
"? What are you looking down for? Look up!"
"Look up?"
"Yeah! The graves of the dead are on the trees, of course, on the tall, huge 'Solon Pillars'! The higher they're buried, the more sain it is, and the more auspicious after death!... You don't even know that? Are you really a Shaman of the tribe?..."
"!!..."
The forest sea stretched vast and boundless, green leaves covering the dome of the sky; when one raised his head, no daylight could be seen. Thirty-meter-tall firs stood silently in the dim world of the forest sea like mute stone pillars. Their thick old branches crossed and tangled, like a natural barrier, shrouding everyone who looked up at them. And in the air here drifted a damp smell of earth, the stench of mold-rotted fallen leaves, and an indescribable fishy sweetness mixed with mildew.
The few who had come were all used to death, and with one sniff they knew this was the smell of corpses rotting into white bones. Yes, corpses that had been rotting for a very long time no longer had much stink, leaving only a gloomy, sunken mildew that one could clearly sense, yet could hardly describe.
This cold, damp breath that seeped into the bones mingled with the moisture of the forest floor, like the Maya people's chill Sacrificial Well, also called "the breath of the dead" by the tribes of Mesoamerica. Only, the Maya people's Sacrificial