Answer
At this point in the conversation, we all discovered a very big problem.
The pseudo-people I have come into contact with before would directly imitate their target prey and gradually replace them. This is something I have experienced personally and there is absolutely no mistake about it.
Especially among the pseudo-people in different states and functional expressions, Taizi's desire for survival and prey is so strong that it is almost radical. It can be said that his action pattern is subject to the prophet's hunting instinct.
I think this has something to do with his weakness and being on the verge of collapse. As someone who has been overly polluted by the ghost story and is about to be abandoned by the original body and face death, all his driving forces should be striving for survival so as to seize the opportunity to practice the final skinning.
Just like many short-lived creatures, they don't even go out to look for food after they are born, but directly seek to reproduce, fulfill their mission of continuation, and die immediately after the mission is completed. Living in the morning and dying in the evening is not just an adjective.
For a pseudo-human in a predatory state, replacing the prey and completing a complete transformation in the face of inevitable death may be a special mode of continuation.
But here in the mine, is the prophet merely feeding on and copying people's consciousness?
This seems a little too sentimental. Whether as a "biological entity" or as some kind of alienated rule, it seems to be inconsistent with basic logic.
In fact, if you think about it carefully, ever since the pseudo-people in the hide-and-seek game were all assimilated into "Xu Ranxing" on a large scale, that assimilation and replacement seemed to have come to an abrupt end; so much so that I was alone in the stone forest with such a large number of pseudo-people for a long time, but I was not directly eaten and replaced. It was really strange.
Do you need so many pseudo-humans to awaken their functions to prey on an ordinary person? From a rational point of view, if we regard them as organs, then it is also unreasonable for so many predatory organs to stop and idle for one prey.
Xu Ping looked at me and we exchanged worried looks.
I thought we were probably thinking the same thing, and sure enough, I heard her whisper, "Is there something wrong with the prophet?"
"It's very likely that something went wrong with the prophet." I also said, my subtle emotions fluctuating. "It's not that the prophet suddenly became magnanimous and didn't attack us poor little ones, it's that it can't do it for the time being. The current feeding may just be that it can't make a real biting action, so the replacement action has not really been initiated."
My guess is that, for example, the action of eating food may be just the first step for the pseudo-human to identify and mark the target. In this process, the pseudo-human first obtains the personality portrait of the target food, and then begins to imitate it. After the imitation reaches a certain mature stage, it can replace and completely prey silently.
But now, the prophet opened his mouth wide, but he didn't have the strength to bite down. So we, the food, were still jumping around in his mouth inexplicably and without any harm, and he didn't realize that he had failed to eat.
Xu Ping thought about it and wanted to get to the bottom of it: "So how exactly is the feeding step accomplished?"
I was slightly startled, and immediately realized that Pingping was not asking me about my experience only this time. Because when I was talking about the pseudo-man just now, I had roughly told her that I seemed to have been taken away by that huge invisible corpse.
Yes, if our current speculation is correct, then how did Xu You and I in the hospital get infected for the first time?
In the past, I thought the incident had been resolved, and there was not much information to infer, so I could only not understand some of the details. But now, so many people have escaped due to difficulties, and this is related to the prophet, so I am afraid that some questions really need to be dug to the bottom of everything I can.
I was thinking hard, and Pingping didn't rush me. She just sat quietly on the ground and waited for me to sort out my thoughts.
I sat down too, but the water dripping from my body was really choking me, so I tried to stay as far away from her as possible and said slowly:
"Based on what happened to me in the underwater stone forest, the prophet took away a small part of my body and gave me something else."
However, I didn’t get to see the thing I got in exchange directly, because Sanyi had already put it in a bag and locked it up.
So, have Xu You and "I", who were targeted by Taizi in the past, ever had similar moments?
It seems so.
Take me for example, I lost some flesh and blood on the bus in the snowy mountain town. As for when I was given and what I was given, I am not sure now and can only put a question mark.
And Xu You...
I suddenly remembered something, and recalled it over and over again. My heart skipped a beat and I said, "Oh my god! This is impossible."
This happened a long time ago. When Xu You made up the story about the homeless man to trick me, he seemed to have a very detailed description, which scared me to death.
The description said that a homeless man was discovered biting cats and dogs by security guards. After he was expelled, the security guards even found one of the homeless man's ears that had been frozen off.
I must say that I am sure that when Xu You was in front of me, both of his ears were intact and never missing. Otherwise, I would have recognized such an obvious feature of one ear long ago, and I would not have been so scared when I suddenly found out in the convoy that he was the tramp in the story.
But Xu You is a talkative person who never tells the truth. Since my brother Zhang Tianyi said that the story of the tramp was a complete fabrication, I didn't care whether the details in the story were completely consistent with reality.
This is where the problem lies.
I never asked Xu You in person about the homeless story he made up.
This is a dark place under the lamp.
When Xu You was writing the story at such an urgent moment when he was being hunted by the sentry box ghost story, the materials he used were most likely real-life.
In a critical moment, people's brains will go blank. It is not easy to make up some details out of thin air, nor is it necessary. It may even increase the risk of being questioned. This is not something that an experienced person like Xu You would do.
Damn, is there a possibility that Xu You really lost an ear, but it was restored for some reason? So it only left an unconscious impression on Xu You, who was seriously alienated and confused at the time, and eventually became the material for the story.
If this is the case, then Taizi's feeding on him began by taking away one of his ears. This was the first step for him to become the prophet's prey.
The more I thought about it, the more astonished I became. My body started to feel hot. “That is to say, the prophet cannot just approach the target and transform it out of thin air.”
"The prophet took a part of the prey's limbs and gave something to repair the prey's missing parts. To put it bluntly, it took a piece of my flesh, and when I was not paying attention, it hid a piece of its own flesh on me and disguised it as me."
"This kind of exchange is like installing a signal source or tracker on a person. This is the key to the pseudo-human being being able to locate and continuously transform to replace food."
Pingping's eyes lit up: "So, this is the key to getting rid of the Prophet's contamination? We need to find the part of ourselves that is being eaten and remove the source of the signal."
I nodded, and suddenly I understood Sanyi's strange behavior.
He took out a bag and held the things that the huge corpse gave me. Perhaps after realizing something was wrong, he immediately tried to interrupt the exchange to prevent "me" from establishing a complete connection with the prophet in the mine.
Is this some kind of information that pseudo-humans instinctively grasp?
He didn't seem to be trying to play tricks on me at the time, but he really had no way to explain the meaning of this action. He was just reflexively prepared for the sudden change, which caught him off guard and made things worse.
In connection with this, a lot of information that the boss had explained finally connected. He said that in the underwater mine, the only thing we had to do was to quarry stones, perhaps referring to finding the signal source "stone" hidden on the real Xu Ranxing among the crowd.
Only in this way can Xu Ranxing be completely freed from the Prophet's hunting. Only by disconnecting can the seemingly funny and somewhat terrifying assimilation of more than a dozen Xu Ranxings be stopped.
I think as pseudo-humans, they only have a rough intuition about a lot of information. Or maybe they are limited by the prophet, and they can't see the essence, can't find a reasonable explanation, let alone explain it to me. Using metaphors like quarrying may be the best way to cross the gap.
But this only made things seem worse.
"One good news and one bad news," I said, with a wry smile.
"The good news is that since the initiative and self-awareness of the boss and Sanyi seem to be much more relaxed than that of Taizi, and they can even directly talk about Tianyi. This means that the prophet is probably too weak to control his own "disease" and has lost control over the pseudo-man.
Our partial amnesia may be the prophet's last desperate counterattack.
There has never been a better time for us and the fake people to be free.”
Xu Ping sighed slightly and continued helplessly: "Bad news, isn't it? It seems that there are two prophets, and they are both dying."
She is right.
I think this is the most reasonable explanation I can come up with after considering all the information.
The prophet in the Stone Forest Mine Cave was probably already on the verge of death and dormant many years ago, so the pollution and impact on this place were minimized, and it just kept repeating the last predation action to struggle. But because of extreme exhaustion, I am afraid that the only pre-action that actually worked was the feeding.
For the people here, all they could observe were a few pseudo-human shells left outside the prophet's body; those shells could not even support the shaping of adult forms, but were instead some skinny children.
And after constantly eating to obtain personality mimicry, because the prophet cannot continuously supply nutrients, the pseudo-person will often stop and show signs of death, but will "come back to life" soon after, causing a miracle of a goddess in the eyes of the mountain people.
I can almost imagine how many people will be attracted to this place by this spectacle, and the dying prophet will instinctively want to hunt more to obtain the corresponding nutrients to maintain his functioning.
But those greedy mountain dwellers who kept coming knew nothing about the strange stories, and couldn't even see the existence of the stone forest. For the prophet, the existence of mountain dwellers who were almost always isolated from the strange stories must not be on the prophet's menu.
Taizai's indifference to the mountain people is a good proof. These ordinary humans who are not even food are probably no more than stones to the prophet.
Even if the prophet was really hungry and filled his empty stomach with these stones in a madness, the smoldering hunger would only burn more and more.
When I thought of the sharp blue-black edges of the stone forest at this moment, I shuddered and suddenly felt an indescribable horror and sadness.
The so-called mountains of swords and seas of fire seemed to be happening in reality. The prophet was transforming into a hungry ghost. Because of excessive weakness and hunger, he could only eat stones continuously. In his silent roar of resentment, he filled the indigestible stone chips and spit them into the carcass of his prey.
This quarrying against both sides is truly horrific and pointless.
"I think the body of the prophet in the mine may have already rotted away." Xu Ping said, "Ran Ran, do you know crabs?"
I don't know why, but when I heard her whispering like that, I felt a sudden chill down my spine.
"Crabs are creatures that rot before they die." She said softly, "You said that in Taizi's memory, they found a very strange crab. At that time, I thought that every detail in the memory or dream must have meaning."
She slowly reached out and touched the hem of my still dripping clothes. I immediately stepped back and almost subconsciously said in a harsh voice: "Don't touch it!"
After I scolded her, I finally realized what was happening. I felt a little scared and quickly went to check if she had any changes.
Pingping couldn't help but smile when she saw this. Her smile was very clear and innocent. "Didn't I get wet in the mine cart just now? I almost choked."
Seeing that she was still in the mood to joke, I felt angry and helpless, but there was really nothing I could do, so I had to raise my hands and surrender.
She kept saying "stay away, stay away, little by little it adds up to a lot" but she kept backing away like an old woman.
Xu Ping looked at me with amusement, muttered something to me, and then continued the topic of crabs, gradually becoming more serious:
"Ran Ran, you said that Taizi once saw a huge black shadow, projected from somewhere unknown, but no one else noticed it. I was thinking that maybe at that moment, he saw the prophet himself in the mine."
I understand what she means, which is why we all think there may be two prophets.
As a prophet's organ, Taizi cannot perceive his own essence, but what if he encounters another prophet? Given his "depth", his vision is probably different from that of the mountain people or the Zhang family. He may see another prophet crawling under the stone forest in an instant.
When he realizes this huge monster of the same origin, he must be extremely terrified and panicked, and may even choose to avoid it out of stress, closing off this cognition and passing it on.
Perhaps the crab lying in the white mud in the dream that Taizi had drawn for me was the epitome of the intention of the mine prophet. It was just because of extreme fear that Taizi had to avoid it infinitely, but he still dared not forget it, and finally described it in detail to Xu You, telling about such a small thing as being pinched by a crab and hurting his finger.
As Pingping said, the biggest characteristic of crabs is that they rot before they die.
Because the crab's nasal passages are osmotic, the loss or decay of part of the body will not directly affect its survival. Eventually, it will develop into a situation where everything rots and necrotizes, and then it dies.
Based on our current understanding of the Prophet, its characteristics are close to this. The immortal replacement of the Goddess, the differentiation of the pseudo-man as a basic structure expression into different functional organs, all of which can be seen from this, its existence is indeed like some kind of giant arthropod.
I even suspect that Taizi had died when he saw the huge black shadow, and then he quickly preyed on one of Zhang's fellows, completing his replacement and rebirth, and escaping the disaster. Even if the later Taizi used the same body and personality, he was no longer the original Taizi.
But the newborn Taizi probably didn't know about it, and just fled in panic, which led to Xu You's confusion of past memories. Until he came to find me and unconsciously began to prey on me, he synchronized this distorted memory with me.
But the worst part of the whole thing is that even animals know that there can't be rotting corpses near water sources.
Could it be that a mine prophet who was constantly festering but had not yet died had infected Taizi at that moment, and spread the rotten disease to the prophet where Taizi was?
If this is the case, then the inexplicable dripping incident that happened to me and many other people in the hide-and-seek game has a very terrifying answer.
This is not stagnant water, it is the Prophet's rotting body fluids.
What manifested itself in me and the pseudo-hide-and-seek people was that the prophet's body/fluid was dripping onto us drop by drop through our connection, even dragging us down to the level where the prophet was several times.
As for the Shilin Mine, the so-called flooding of water underground was actually the prophet's accidental floating up.
The moment it could be observed by humans, the prophet emerged from the deep sea of strange stories in the secular world, and the rotten body/fluid that originally filled the ground gradually appeared.
We entered no other place than the body of a dying prophet in the mines, and with us as the medium, the prophet to whom Mi Zang belonged was constantly decaying at an accelerated rate.
"So, if the hidden prophet stays here for a long time, and eventually collapses and rots due to the plague, and even interacts with the mine prophet and dies together... what will happen to the pseudo-people belonging to it?" I murmured to myself, with an unpleasant look on my face.
Wrong, all wrong. It's not just the two of us who are in danger. In fact, the ones who are in danger and may die at any time are the twenty or so fake people who are hiding and "Xu Ranxing" who has not yet broken the pollution of the prophet.
It is not us who are trapped and need immediate rescue, but the hidden prophet himself.
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