So I took out a set of clothes from my backpack and put them on him, and then we climbed up the trail. With the two of them leading the way, we were more than twice as fast as before. But Shen Bing kept muttering along the way, why is their village so far away from the road out of the mountain. I was actually puzzled too, the village is deep in the mountains for seventy or eighty miles, which is indeed a bit strange.
Yazi told us that originally, Nanwupo had a wide road leading to Heixugou, and the road from Heixugou to the city was not as bumpy and difficult to travel as it is now. This village was built on the mountainside by a general during the Qing Dynasty, who spent a huge amount of money to build a road. But in 1945, the Soviet Union sent troops to the three northeastern provinces and defeated Japan. Many Japanese soldiers were trapped and fled everywhere, most of them hiding in the mountains. The Soviet Union dispatched bombers to bombard the mountains in this area, destroying all the roads and bridges, so the villages in the mountains became what they are now. Nanwupo was the most unlucky, living more than 70 miles deep, and there was no proper road to go.
Since this area is a no man's land, it is like a forgotten corner of the world, no one cares about it, and no one has built roads since liberation. Life in the mountains is quite hard. Fruits can be grown in the mountains, but they cannot be transported out. The villagers have to accept their fate and live on the little harvest given by God.
Therefore, those who can leave here have all left. Many families send their children outside to learn a skill when they are a few years old. For example, many of them learn Errenzhuan to make a living.
So that's how it is. We have been to such poor and backward places more than once or twice and we are speechless.
As we walked, we talked about the evil spirits in the mountains. Ya Zi told us that the number of yellow foxes has indeed decreased in recent years, and we rarely hear of people being harmed by these things. But the yellow foxes all live deep in the mountains. In the past few decades, they have never appeared on this road, and no incidents of hurting people have occurred. It is precisely because of this that the brother and sister dared to rush home at night. Like the old man in the car said, it was not the case. The old man just heard it from someone. Ya Zi has been walking this road to work in the city since he was a child, and he knows it better than anyone else.
I touched my nose and thought about it. Adding to the characteristics of the yellow fox that the duck mentioned that it harms people, I felt that the dead thing that almost ate them today was not a yellow fox. In the Northeast, there are many legends about yellow foxes. Some are said to be great immortals, such as the four great immortals Huang Daxian, the snake fairy, the fox fairy, and the earth fairy (hedgehog), all of which can become guardian immortals. In some places, they are regarded as evil spirits and often eat people, especially children. They are fine before going to bed, but when they wake up, the children are gone. When they are found in a deep mountain ditch, they can only see a pair of shoes and a pile of bones of the children.
Although the head of this dead child looks like the ghost of a harmed child, the yellow-skinned devil will never make a fuss about the ghost of a child. They will either attach themselves to you directly or kill you directly. They don't have the time to play hide-and-seek with you.
What is this thing? It doesn’t look like a ghost, which really stumped us.
Ya Zi also said that during this period, he heard that someone had encountered a dead child's head outside the village on the north slope, which is opposite the south slope. Fortunately, this person was very clever. He heard that human urine can ward off evil spirits, so he smeared urine on his forehead and returned home safely. But that night, he had a high fever and was talking nonsense. The next morning, the family found a piece of black skin outside the village, which was similar to the dead face skin we saw. They took it home and burned it with fire according to the method given by the old man. They burned incense and prayed to the gods, and the person's illness was cured.