The Curse of the Sunken God: A True Tale of Suspense from the Guizhou Karst Abyss

Part 1: The Curse of the Sunken God

There are stories you hear that burrow under your skin and stay there, cold and wriggling. This is one of them. It’s not my story—not originally—but it found its way to me, and now I feel compelled to pass its chill on to you. It all started a few weeks ago, when I went to visit my old friend, Lao Hei.

Lao Hei is a legend in the outdoor adventure scene, the kind of guy who thinks nothing of tying a rope around his waist and rappelling into a bottomless pit just to see what’s down there. Years ago, he stumbled upon a cave filled with human skulls stacked into a pyramid. Instead of being spooked, he thought it was "pretty cool." That’s just who he is. He’s the real deal, too—he was part of the civilian rescue team China sent when that Thai youth soccer team was trapped in a flooded cave. Just recently, during the Hebei floods, he was the guy in that viral video, diving five times to pry open a farmhouse gate underwater.

I found him living in a small farmhouse deep in the mountains. An old persimmon tree, heavy with fruit, shaded the yard. A pot of blackfish stew bubbled over a rustic earthen stove, the fish caught by Lao Hei himself with a spear. Next to it sat a huge vat of homemade apricot wine, brewed from wild fruit he’d foraged. A little black dog, a stray he'd adopted, yapped happily as it chased crickets.

The sky was a deep, melancholic blue. Surrounded by the dense, rustling forest and the sound of a nearby creek, it felt like a scene from a Turgenev story—peaceful, yet profoundly isolated. After a hearty meal and a few cups of that deceptively sweet, potent wine, I asked him the question I’d been dying to ask.

"You've been in so many dark, forgotten places. Ever seen anything… strange? Like with those skulls? Any nightmares?"

He just shook his head and smirked. "Nah, nothing like that. The skulls were actually pretty fun." I stared at him, speechless. "I haven't seen anything myself," he continued, his tone shifting slightly, "but I've heard stories. Things that brush up against what you’re talking about."

I leaned in. He told me about the Thai cave rescue, how a revered local monk made the torrential rain stop just by chanting, allowing them to find the boys. But I'd heard that one before. "Give me something new," I urged him. "Something spooky."

Lao Hei’s expression turned serious. "Alright," he said, his voice dropping. "There is one story. A brother of mine, an old teammate, told me this a while back. It’s… messed up."

Xiexing. That's the word he used. It doesn't just mean evil or weird. It means cursed, unholy, a darkness that infects everything it touches.

"This happened in Guizhou province," he began. "Guizhou is a world apart. It's home to more ethnic minorities than any other province in China, many with their own dialects, gods, and taboos—things that outsiders can't begin to understand. The land itself is different, riddled with enormous tiankeng—giant sinkholes. Some are hundreds of meters deep, hiding underground rivers, strange beasts, and unsettling totems dedicated to ancient, malevolent things."

He told me about his early days in a volunteer cave rescue organization. His team leader was a seasoned veteran, a man he called "Big Brother." This story belonged to him.

Years ago, Big Brother was on a rescue mission with a teammate named Xiao Bo. Xiao Bo was a "princeling," a rich kid from a family that owned a publicly traded company. Big Brother couldn't figure him out. Why would a guy like that trade a life of luxury for the dangerous, dirty work of cave rescue? He soon learned that Xiao Bo wasn't there for thrills. He was searching for something.

Xiao Bo was not only a skilled caver but also deeply respectful of local customs and superstitions. Their first mission together was to retrieve a young boy and his buffalo after they’d fallen into a sinkhole. It was a straightforward job. They found the dead buffalo and the unconscious boy quickly and hauled them out. With the rescue complete, the team decided to survey the cave. Inside, they discovered ancient murals and a strange, primitive-looking statue. It was vaguely humanoid but with a serpentine body, like Nuwa, the ancient mother goddess, but twisted and grotesque.

One of the team members, a cynic from Beijing, sneered, "What the hell is this thing? Looks like a big toad with a tail."

Xiao Bo hissed at him to shut up, then bowed his head respectfully to the statue, whispering an apology. The Beijing guy, feeling his pride wounded, deliberately walked over and stubbed his cigarette out on the statue's head. Xiao Bo lunged at him, and the others had to pull them apart.

Minutes later, as they were ascending out of the cave, the Beijing guy’s safety rope snapped. It was a clean break—something that should have been impossible. He fell, and his head struck a sharp rock on the cave floor. Blood pulsed from a hole in his skull. He was dead before they could even reach him.

Xiao Bo pointed, his voice trembling. The hole in the man's head was in the exact same spot where he had extinguished his cigarette on the idol. "It's a karmic debt," Xiao Bo whispered, his face pale. Big Brother asked him what he meant, but Xiao Bo just said, "Maybe it was a coincidence. Or maybe the god answered."

From that day on, Big Brother carried a newfound sense of dread into every mission. He never passed a totem or an idol without offering a quiet prayer. He survived several near-death situations after that, and he could never be sure if it was just a psychological crutch… or if something was actually listening.

He didn't see Xiao Bo again for several years. By then, Big Brother was a renowned expert in his own right. One day, he was contacted by a powerful businessman—Xiao Bo’s father.

The old man told him that Xiao Bo was dead.

"He killed himself," his father said, his voice hollow. He explained that Xiao Bo, his only heir, had become obsessed and paranoid after a caving expedition years ago. The family couldn't accept the verdict of suicide. They investigated and found his diary.

In it, Xiao Bo wrote about a girl he'd met during an outdoor adventure. She was from an ethnic minority he couldn’t identify—beautiful, wild, and utterly captivating. He fell for her hard. She agreed to be with him, but refused to call it a relationship. "I'll have to leave someday," she told him, a strange sadness in her eyes. "I don’t want you to be heartbroken."

"If you leave, I’ll find you, no matter where you go," he promised.

She just shook her head. "The place I’m going is too dark and too cold. I don’t want you to suffer there."

One day, after he returned from a rescue mission, she was gone. All she left was an address and a note: If you miss me, go here and talk to me. I’ll be able to hear you.

He rushed to the address. It led him to the middle of a desolate, primordial forest. There was nothing there. Heartbroken, he thought she had tricked him. But that night, she came to him in a dream. I saw you today, she whispered. I was so happy.

The dreams continued, night after night. She was always calling to him, begging him to find her. "Where are you?" he finally demanded in one dream. "That place is empty!"

Her voice was faint, distant. I’m underground.

He hired investigators. They discovered that beneath that same patch of forest lay a massive, uncharted sinkhole—a tiankeng over a hundred meters deep. He knew he had to go in himself. That’s why he’d joined the rescue organization: to learn the skills he needed to descend into the earth and find her.

And according to his father, he did it. He went into that sinkhole. And he came back out alive.

But here’s where the story turns cold. The pages in Xiao Bo’s diary detailing what happened inside the sinkhole were gone. Ripped out. All that remained were the entries he wrote after his return. They were frantic, unhinged.

I saw her again. She’s still there. I have to get her out!

A short time later, he killed himself. In his last phone call to his father, his voice was rushed, terrified, as if he were being chased. He mentioned he’d left something behind for his father, but warned him, "It might not be a good thing. You should probably destroy it."

The father was convinced his son was murdered, or that whatever was in that sinkhole drove him to it. He believed the secret lay in those missing diary pages and the "thing" Xiao Bo left behind. He hired Big Brother, offering him an enormous sum of money to lead a team back into that same sinkhole to find out what happened to his son.

There was only one condition: everything they found, no matter how strange, belonged to him. And no one could ever speak of what they saw.

Part 2: The Empty Coffin

Big Brother assembled a small, trusted team and ventured into the remote mountains of Southeast Guizhou. The locals called the sinkhole the "Mouth of Hell." They spoke of ghostly wails and monstrous roars echoing from its depths at night. They considered it a forbidden place, a direct passage to the underworld.

With the backing of Xiao Bo’s father's immense wealth, the team overcame incredible obstacles and finally reached the deepest part of the sinkhole. Lao Hei said that Big Brother never revealed the full details of what they saw down there—he was paid a fortune for his silence—but he admitted they found two things: a series of bizarre, ancient statues, and a locked case left behind by Xiao Bo.

The father took the case, paid Big Brother the promised fee plus a hefty "bonus," and reminded him of his oath of secrecy. And that was that.

Until a few months ago.

Big Brother was in Hebei, volunteering with the flood rescues—the same disaster Lao Hei was at. They ran into each other by chance. After the work was done, Big Brother invited him for a drink but said he had to take care of some personal business first. He was gone for hours. Worried, Lao Hei went looking for him and found him in a heated argument with some local villagers.

He pulled Big Brother away and took him to a nearby tavern. Big Brother, his face etched with a deep, unsettling dread, downed several glasses of liquor before he finally spoke.

He told Lao Hei that Xiao Bo’s ancestral home was in that very village. His father, a man of incredible influence, had arranged for Xiao Bo to be secretly buried there in the family plot. Big Brother had been worried the floods might have damaged the grave, so he'd gone to check.

What he found chilled him to the bone. The grave had been washed away, and Xiao Bo's coffin was floating on the surface of the floodwater.

He immediately tried to contact Xiao Bo’s father, but the man’s number was disconnected. He then searched online for the family's company, only to discover it had gone bankrupt and vanished. No one was left to contact. Desperate, he tried to reason with the villagers, asking for help to rebury the coffin. They stared at him with cold, hostile eyes and told him to mind his own business.

Lao Hei, sensing something was deeply wrong, used a connection he’d made during the rescue work to ask around. A local whispered the truth to him later that night. The villagers weren’t just being callous. They were terrified.

They had already seen the coffin. When the floodwaters first unearthed it, they had opened it.

It was empty.

There was no body. No clothes. Not even a single strand of hair. The villagers had two theories. One was that someone had secretly moved the body long ago.

The other was that the dead had risen.

No one knows for sure. But as Big Brother told Lao Hei the story, sitting in that dimly lit tavern, he couldn't shake the final, frantic words Xiao Bo had written in his diary: I saw her again. She’s still there. I have to get her out!

It was never about rescuing her from the sinkhole. It was about bringing her out of death itself. And maybe, just maybe, he succeeded.