In the woods.
Zhang Rong and the others held shovels and dug into the earth with me.
We had found these shovels in the other houses. They were rusty, but still barely usable.
We dug for ages without finding anything.
Zhang Rong began to have doubts. "Chen Mo, are you really sure the people in this village... were all buried down here?"
I nodded. "Unless I interpreted the hexagram wrong. But this hexagram wasn't complicated, and the answer it gave fits why this village became deserted."
Decades ago, a village deep in the mountains like this was unlikely to have moved elsewhere en masse.
There were no natural disasters such as mudslides or earthquakes here. If the villagers had moved because they couldn't stand the cold, then wherever they went, as long as they stayed in the Northeast, they would still have had to endure the freezing winters.
What convinced me even more was that so many belongings had been left in these abandoned houses. It looked nothing like people had moved away. Rather, the people were gone, but they hadn't taken anything from their homes.
Since the villagers hadn't all moved away, where had they gone?
Considering the explanation in the hexagram, I could only take it to mean that someone had buried them in these woods.
Things turned out as the hexagram had predicted. After roughly another half hour of digging, Zhuge Ming called to us from nearby.
"Come look!"
"There really are bones!"
We hurriedly dropped our shovels, climbed out of our pits, and ran over to Zhuge Ming.
A section of human bone was exposed in the pit he had dug.
It was probably a human thighbone, and it crumbled at a touch.
It must have been buried for at least several decades...
"Holy... crap..."
Zhang