Chapter 203: The Black Boxes

He Yu supported me as we walked to the aft cabin, which was used for storage. He moved the heavy crates aside one by one, then somehow scrounged up a folding stool from somewhere. Pointing at it, he ordered me to sit.

The blood from my nose had already dried, mostly around my collar. Lu Ayao had given me some medicine right away, but then he’d been detained in the main cabin. They seemed to need him urgently, though they didn’t have much use for me.

He Yu handed me a clean towel to wipe my face, then set to work moving the crates of various sizes. As he shifted them, he said, “I’m telling you, you were too impulsive back there. We’re still on Gan Rong’s boat. If she gets angry, even if she doesn’t throw us overboard to feed the fish, at the very least, what if she stops feeding us? What then?”

After my outburst, the tightness in my chest had actually eased. Having finally vented my anger, I felt much better. I leaned back against the stool and wiped the blood away with the towel. “This day was coming sooner or later. This way, at least she won’t give you two a hard time for a while.”

The words had barely left my mouth when I heard a loud clatter. Looking back, I saw that He Yu must have slipped, tumbling right onto a pile of crates.

“How do you manage to fall while just moving boxes?” I stood up quickly, walked around to the back, and reached out to pull him up.

He remained motionless atop the pile, silently catching my eye and giving me a look. I glanced at him, then wordlessly squatted down where I stood to inspect the crates crushed beneath him. They were empty. When He Yu landed on them, they had all crumpled.

Why was the cargo hold filled with empty boxes? I looked around and kicked a few other crates. They rang hollow; they were almost certainly empty as well. I reached out and pulled He Yu up from the floor.

As he scrambled up, something caught my eye beneath where he had been sitting. It was a large black box. Hidden deep within the hold, behind the ordinary empty crates, were dozens more like it. It appeared the empty crates were merely placed there to conceal the black boxes inside.

I stepped deeper into the hold and touched one of the black boxes, frowning. They were covered in a layer of white residue that flaked off onto the floor at a simple touch.

“Salt?” He Yu asked, leaning in.

I shook my head, picking up a few white granules and rubbing them lightly between my fingers. A trace of moisture appeared in my palm. “It’s not salt. It’s snow.”

“Snow?” He Yu reached out to touch a box himself.

It was too dark in here to see anything clearly. I gauged the size of the topmost box and patted He Yu. “Come on, give me a hand! Let’s haul this out to take a closer look.”

Grunting with effort, He Yu and I scrambled over the empty crates and lugged the topmost black box out, dropping it onto the floor. I didn’t know what was inside, but despite its modest size, it was dead heavy.

He Yu sat back down on his stool and complained, “So heavy. What’s packed in here? Look, there’s no label or anything on this box. It might even be illegal. You really ought to ask your mom about this. Does she even know about it?”

I knelt down to examine the brass lock on the black box, my heart sinking. I’d been so excited earlier that when I came out, I’d forgotten to bring my bag from the cabin. I couldn’t force this lock. If I broke it open and couldn’t put it back together, that wouldn’t be good.

Just as the thought crossed my mind, He Yu tossed a bag over to me with a loud clatter. I barely caught it and realized it was my backpack. The dark cloud hanging over my face vanished instantly.

“I’ve been holding onto it for you. By the time you remembered, it would’ve been way too late.”

I pulled out my tools, worked them into the lock cylinder, and gave a sharp tug in one direction. The brass lock popped open. He Yu leaned over curiously as I lifted the lid of the black box with a click. Inside, there was even more snow, and a cloud of white vapor billowed out as the lid opened. I saw a full row of ice axes and iron shovel heads laid out inside.

He Yu picked up a shovel head and gave it a couple of experimental swings in his hand. “I thought it was going to be something novel. It’s just this kind of junk? The boxes in the back couldn’t all be filled with this stuff, right?”

I reached into the open black box to feel around. After searching for a while, there was nothing but ice axes and shovel heads, every single one frozen rock-hard. Many were even stuck to the edges of the box, impossible to pull free. My hands hadn’t been digging around for long before I couldn’t take the cold anymore.

There was no climate control on this boat. I was more inclined to think these boxes had been delivered from an even colder place and loaded onto the boat from the start, stacked here until the ship docked, when they would finally be quietly moved off.

Looking at the crate of ice-cold tools, I really couldn’t fathom why anyone would hide stuff like this. After pondering for a moment, I decided to keep looking; maybe some information was hidden beneath the ice axes.

Just as I was about to reach back in, the door to the aft cabin was suddenly pushed open from the outside. He Yu and I both sat bolt upright and looked toward Lu Ayao as he walked in. Seeing that it was him, we both breathed a sigh of relief at the same time. Lu Ayao looked at us, then silently scanned the cargo hold.

I glanced around. The two of us hadn’t noticed before, but now I saw that the floor was covered in melted snow water. We had turned the entire cargo hold into a complete mess.

He Yu felt no guilt whatsoever about the cargo hold turning into such a disaster. He went over, pulled Lu Ayao inside, shut the cargo hold door, and explained the whole story to him.

Lu Ayao frowned after listening, then looked back up at the two of us. I nodded to confirm that He Yu wasn’t talking nonsense. He hesitated briefly, glanced at the crate full of ice axes, and said, “Something is off here. Open the other boxes.”

He Yu sighed. “Come on, is that really necessary? I lifted the other two boxes just now, and aside from their dimensions being different, the weight felt pretty much the same. Those two are most likely full of the same junk.”

I ignored him and walked over to two long crates stacked together. I opened the brass locks one by one and heaved the lid of the second box open. Inside were frozen gloves and trekking poles. However, these items had clearly been used; they were worn and battered.

“See, what did I tell you!” He Yu walked over to my side and shrugged. “Let me open it, let me open it. The last big one!”

He and Lu Ayao went over together to lift the second crate down. I took a step back to give them space. The lid of the final crate was heavy; He Yu, being the strongest, spat into his palms, rolled up his sleeves, rubbed his hands together, and wrenched the lid open in one swift motion.

The two of them froze simultaneously at the sight of the contents. I stood on my tiptoes, trying to get a better look, but they blocked my view so completely that not a single gap remained. My heart sank, sensing that this crate probably didn’t contain anything special either.

“If there’s nothing in there, let’s just get out. Maybe they’re just ordinary crates and we’re overthinking it,” I said.

He Yu cursed under his breath. “This is getting goddamn creepy.”

I don’t know which word flipped He Yu’s switch, but as soon as he finished cursing, he suddenly turned around and brushed past me. His face was deathly pale as he began frantically moving the other crates in the cargo hold. Watching his movements, I quickly understood what he was doing: he was stacking the crates toward the door to barricade us in.

My heart skipped a beat. My first reaction was to stride over and see exactly what was in that crate. The white mist had mostly dissipated by now, revealing a crate full of snow. Lu Ayao was using a small trowel to dig through the contents buried beneath the white powder. I felt it with chilling clarity: it was a person.

It was a frozen corpse. The body had been dismembered at every joint, hacked into small pieces and stuffed into the snow. Due to the temperature, there were no signs of rot. It was impossible to tell how long the person had been dead.

Expressionless, Lu Ayao first unearthed a leg with his trowel, then a wrist, followed by feet and fingers. Standing behind him, watching him work was horrifying. I found myself unable to speak.

Lu Ayao stopped halfway through. He turned and handed me the trowel. “The head should be pressed down at the very bottom,” he said. “I need to reach in and find it by hand.”

“The very bottom?”

He didn’t wait for my answer before plunging his hands into the black crate. I watched with wide eyes as his hands dug through the snow, turning up the legs and arms from the upper layers. I felt a surge of relief that the body was frozen; if it hadn’t been, the smell would have been beyond description, and I would likely be retching my guts out by now.

Lu Ayao’s movements paused. I realized instantly that he must have found the head.

However, he didn’t immediately pull it out to show me. Instead, he pulled his hands back, knit his brows tightly, and whispered, “This is bad. We have a problem.”

I had never seen him look so serious. He looked as if this dismembered corpse might reanimate and spring up at any second. Frightened by his expression, I looked up and asked, “W-what’s wrong? Is there something wrong with the head?”

He stepped aside to let me see for myself. I shuffled forward. He had placed the head upright on the surface of the snow, its eyes tightly shut, its face ashen and aged. Much of the frost on the skin had melted. One look at that face and all my thoughts ground to a halt; I stood frozen as if time itself had stopped.

I had made plenty of mental preparations before looking at that head. I expected a hideous face, or perhaps one that had reached an advanced state of decay before being frozen. Any of those would have been within my limit of endurance. But I hadn’t expected the main issue to lie not in the state of the head itself, but in something else entirely.

I recognized this face. I had seen him countless times, spoken to him, and he had even smiled at me before. There was absolutely no way I was mistaken!

Tian Xiao.

Lying in this black crate was the very same Tian Xiao I had met before.

My first instinct wasn’t to pick up the head for a closer look, but to call Tian Xiaoqi right then and tell her I’d actually found her goddamn great-great-grandfather. But that was just a fleeting impulse; what followed was a long period of deep thought.

This time, Lu Ayao stepped back to guard the door while He Yu came over to take a look. He stared at the head for a full ten minutes, his mouth hanging so wide his jaw looked ready to drop off. “Th-th-this… this… this is way too much of a s-surprise! No, it’s goddamn terrifying!”

I pushed his jaw back up to close his mouth, feeling a headache coming on. “It seems the other two crates were just a cover for this one. Let me close the lid for now. If the snow inside melts, we’re going to be in for a world of trouble.”