Ladder to Heaven 1
The surrounding light became soft, the grass and trees swaying in the wind were shrouded in a thin twilight mist, and shadows lurked under the feet of all things, blurring the outlines of objects.
Song Qi, who was leading the way, stopped. Although the sun was high in the sky, the forked branches blocked most of the sunlight, and the end of the dense forest was dark and deep.
She instinctively felt uncomfortable, but seeing that others behind her were having fun, she didn't say anything to ruin the atmosphere.
"I remember there's a big lawn just a few steps away. Shall we have a picnic there?"
"good."
The oversized red plaid lunch mat was opened and swung, making a clearly audible sound of breaking wind.
The so-called botanical garden is actually a hill in the city, which has been simply fenced off and decorated as a tourist attraction. Except for the asphalt road for sightseeing buses, the terrain is bumpy.
They found a flat open space and had a picnic.
"Wow, what a big bird." Jiang Kesong leaned his head on Yinsui's shoulder. The fallen hair tickled his neck, and Yinsui gently hooked it back.
A huge bird with its wings spread passed across the gray-blue sky and flew away towards the height of the botanical garden. She looked in its direction, but was dazzled by the light and blinked rapidly. She raised her hand to wipe away the tears that were flowing.
The big birds in the city... their flying posture is similar to that of egrets, gliding with their wings spread out, but they are much larger than egrets. The shadows they cast pass over the people sitting on the ground one by one, causing sighs.
The child in overalls broke free from his parent's arms like an arrow and ran after the baby. Halfway through, his foot got stuck in the depression next to the picnic mat and he burst into tears.
Song Qi looked away irritably
"The internet is terrible."
"Even mountains are like this. Last time I went hiking with my mom, I didn't have my phone to play with for the entire afternoon."
"The signal at the Botanical Garden is so bad."
"The weather is perfect today. It's sunny but not too glaring. Go to sleep, kid. Go to sleep." Lin Xiao yawned, caught a glimpse of the half-lying figure out of the corner of his eye, and asked, "Are you sleepy?"
"A little bit." Song Qi replied.
After a while, I was no longer sleepy and sat up to join the sisters in chatting.
"I--" A sudden bitterness came over me, and my eyes flashed, just like some boys in the class who would intentionally turn their lenses to reflect light towards the person they were trying to trick.
"how?"
"No, there's sand in my eyes. You tell me first." After saying that, he took off his glasses and wiped them carefully.
The overall slope of the lawn was gentle, and the surrounding scenery was visible from this position, so she accurately captured the flash that appeared again on the left.
Looking up, I saw only five young people gathered together on the uphill slope taking pictures of each other. The reflector in the hand of one of the boys was probably the culprit.
Oh, didn't mean to.
She felt relieved. She didn't expect the same thing to happen for the third time, and her hand didn't move away unconsciously.
There is no such thing as a third time. When you reach the point of being intolerable, there is no need to endure it any longer.
With his hands on the ground, he was ready to stand up and ask for an explanation, but his angry expression suddenly turned awkwardly into confusion, and then changed several times like a palette, finally freezing in astonishment and horror.
Most of the reflector had been stuffed into the bag. The man was leaning sideways and flirting with the fashionable girl who was holding his arm. He didn't look like someone who was in the mood to do childish tricks.
And at some point, the sky became very bright, like an endless focusing prism, and it was getting brighter and brighter... until it was so bright that people couldn't open their eyes.
Even if I closed my eyelids tightly and raised my hands to fold them together to block the pain, it still couldn't stop the unbearable soreness in my eyeballs.
The entire gray cloud layer seemed to be lifted up, revealing the deep and shining sky.
The snow-white layer was its smooth and delicate skin, which was slowly shrinking and stretching. Upon discovering this, Song Qi suddenly stood up from the uneven mat.
"The sky is alive! It's moving!" The out-of-tune shouts of fear echoed in the bustling grassland, and then the bustling voices suddenly stopped.
The crowd in the distance turned into accomplices of unknown creatures disguised as the sun and the sky, but actually something else. They took off their rough facial features and skin, revealing their true face as a lens, coldly casting light from all directions.
Nearby, the four people who were originally talking and laughing stopped smiling and turned their heads away at the same time.
Their originally rosy skin turned into the texture of mercury, just like the sky at that moment. Two crystal clear eyes without black spots stared at her silently, warning her with a meaning of "you did it wrong".
Stumbling out, Song Qi felt that his gaze, no matter how hard he looked ahead, was unable to focus. His eyes flickered and turned pale, and everything around him turned to dust, gathered into substance, and then turned to dust...
The instep of his foot suddenly hit the cold, angular concrete surface. His feet went soft and he fell down, rolling down the endless steps one by one.
Repeatedly struck, his internal organs were twisted and tangled into a ball. At the same time, the light above his head solidified into needles, piercing through his skin and flesh, causing pain all over his body.
Stop it, do something to make it stop.
In a panic, he gripped the steps tightly with his ten fingers, trying to slow down the rolling, but his two outstretched hands were red and stained with blood, and they were slipping. There was also blood on other parts of his body, and he couldn't find a foothold at all.
The howling wind was approaching, and there seemed to be a bottomless abyss under my feet. If I fell in, I would never be able to climb out.
There was nothing to see, and nothing to cling to. Despair was like a clock, striking the hour.
Until someone heard her screams and pulled her up, bleeding profusely: "Why are you here? Come quickly, to heaven, we have been waiting here for a long time."
"Remember to come up, I'll be waiting for you here."
I opened my eyes and the sky above me was still gray.
“He dreamed that there was a ladder standing on the earth, with its top reaching up to heaven, and there were angels of God ascending and descending on it.”
What ladder and what messenger of God?
Song Qi looked around in panic, but didn't see anyone who might have said this. The scenery around her and her friend sitting next to her were no different, as if what she had just said was just an illusion.
Before he could figure it out, a piece of cucumber-flavored potato chips was stuffed into his mouth.
Lin Xiao, who was feeding me potato chips, sat cross-legged opposite me. She was wearing a bright yellow dress, her hair tousled. She unscrewed a bottle of soda and handed it to me, jokingly saying, "I said it was a good time for a nap, but I didn't sleep and you did."
Did you dream while you were asleep? Such a real dream.
She was still frightened.
"You can actually sleep even in such a bright sunlight. I wish I could sleep half as well as you do. Come on, drink up. One bottle per person. There's only one left for you. Look, there are a lot of snacks here. We'll pick some out and save them just for you."
"Okay, I'll fill my stomach first." After calming down, Song Qi reached out to take the buttered French fries closest to the snack pile.
The plastic bag was torn open with great force. With a crisp, clear sound, she heard the dream talk that came from the sky:
"You will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man."
It rang directly in my head and went straight to the top of my head, making my scalp numb and my whole body tremble.
"Did you hear a man talking about steps or something?"
Thinking that the people around him were half asleep, Lin Xiao was so happy that he fell over laughing: "Hahahaha, what are you doing? You woke up from a nap and started talking nonsense."
It seems that I am the only one who can hear it.
Song Qi lowered his head thoughtfully. After a while, he suddenly remembered something and asked, "Where are Yin Sui and the others?"
"Croissant felt sick and wanted to go to the bathroom, so Yin Sui went with her."
Were they both also called and have they already gone?
Thinking of this possibility, Song Qi became restless. Finally, he decided to take the mule or horse out for a walk and then leave to find out the situation.
"I want to go to the bathroom, too."
"Then when you go, pay attention to whether they are in the bathroom. They have been gone for almost half an hour and haven't come back yet."
"Did you call?"
Lin Xiao shrugged helplessly: "I can't get through."
Her words confirmed Song Qi's suspicion: "Half an hour is unusually long for a simple toilet break. What if they really go and I miss it?"
"Okay, I'll go and see." He said coldly with his thin lips, and then quickly turned into the fork in the road.
Bai Jinqin, who had been silent the whole time, nudged Lin Xiao with a hint of worry: "Is Song Qi feeling unwell? He doesn't look well."
"No way."
Having said that, she still stood up and chased after him. She just turned a corner, but the other side was empty.
The long straight walkway can be seen to the end at a glance. There are old trees with lush branches and leaves on both sides. There is no room for maneuver. Logically, if you rely solely on your legs to walk, you won't be so fast that you disappear.
"This is weird," Lin Xiao said, scratching his head in confusion after returning. "I watched her walk by, and when I went to look for her, there was no one on the road. Could it be that people can grow wings and fly up there?"
"Song Qi may have really not been able to hold it in any longer, so he went into the woods to solve his physiological problems." Everything is self-explanatory.
After hearing the reasonable explanation, she realized that her previous question was stupid and sat down awkwardly: "Ah, so that's how it is."
Bai Jinqin changed the subject: "By the way, why haven't Croissant and the others come back yet?"
Looking around, three or five children were either running wildly with their kites or jumping and dancing to pop the bubbles blown by others. A middle-aged woman with a baby was amusing her two or three-year-old baby while blowing crystal clear bubbles all over the lawn.
Colorful dragonflies hovered low in the sky, passing by soap bubbles that had not yet burst. This should have been a lively, peaceful and tranquil scene.
However, the atmosphere was ruined by the increasingly dark and gloomy sky. The flocculent cumulonimbus clouds turned upside down on the earth, making it particularly gloomy.
Only two were left out of the five people, and I always felt uneasy.
Naturally, Lin Xiao's heart was also filled with ripples. What were they doing?
"I can't find the way."
Jiang Weike held his forehead and wailed, unable to understand why one could get to the back mountain by just following one road.
The botanical garden covers a large area and has many trails, but it is just one mountain, so there are only two ways to go up or down. As long as you keep going down to the bottom and walk around, you will always find the exit.
God knows why he ran to the back mountain after coming out of the toilet. According to common sense, he should walk along the asphalt road to the winding stone road and finally cross the peach blossom forest.
I was clearly going down stairs all the way.
"It's so desolate here." I didn't even want to go in.
As the most pristine area, the back mountain directly preserves the deciduous forest, and opens several narrow paths in the middle for tourists to visit.
The two girls stopped at the gate, as if they had accidentally walked into the set of Far Island.
The dead branches were intertwined with each other, and the spots of light that had struggled to reach the ground were extremely sparse.
Yinsui's expression froze, and he ran straight towards the direction where the sound of tires rolling over had just come from: "There's a car over there." Finding the sightseeing bus means finding the widest flat road down the mountain.
As if to prove her words, the clear and quiet horn of the sightseeing bus on the opposite side sounded at the right moment.
He was eager to confirm the growing suspicions about the old nightmare in his heart, so he put all his energy into it.
It was too slow to find the path across the woods to the other side, so they just went through the middle. No matter how hard they tried, they were greeted by a steep upward staircase.
“Beep—beep—”
This time, the voice came from behind.
Jiang Kesong subconsciously wanted to follow the sound, but was stopped. He turned back in confusion: "What's wrong?"
"It's too late."
What's too late?
I looked carefully in the direction my friend pointed, and even if I didn't get an answer, I would understand after a little thought.
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