Stone Forest Strange Events
During the preparation time, I did not hide anything and told him all my plans.
Several elders nodded readily in front of me and were very easy to talk to, but they turned around and had a fierce quarrel with Zhang Tianyi.
Since the nature of the "Heavenly Clothes" and the Prophet is difficult to explain to people, Zhang Tianyi, who had originally agreed to stay for only half a day, had to stay a little longer and used a lot of metaphors and allusions.
During this time, I often passed by holding the little fat cat with a look of gloating. It was a rare sight to see my brother's face filled with a mixture of laughter and tears, as if he had wanted to escape many times but couldn't.
I must say here that I had been on guard against Taizi dragging me into the underground palace of the snowy mountains again, but these three days were calm and my confused and distorted self-awareness was gradually recovering.
After Zhang Tianyi stopped the tug-of-war with the prophet, he quickly lost his "invisibility" and appeared next to me and the spiced soybeans almost inexplicably in the eyes of others.
But this only solidified his negative image of being elusive and roaming around everywhere. During the quarrels in the past few days, the guys passing by looked at him strangely, which made me laugh secretly.
In addition, I also inadvertently answered a question.
——After being rescued from the town, the parasite eggs on my body were removed by an unrepeatable accident. It was a side effect of being caught and skinned by the prophet. So, how did the other guys who survived the snow mountain collapse recover?
Especially the broker's wife, her condition of being deeply parasitized is even worse than mine.
After asking various medical staff, the answers I got were somewhat unexpected.
"It was the last sulfur springs to erupt." The doctor on rounds sighed. "After seeing you, consultant, being swept away by the turbulent current, we immediately put on our gear and entered the waterway to search and rescue. Because the water was abnormal, we took samples and did a rough inspection."
It is said that there is an antidote within a hundred steps of a poisonous snake. Zhang and his men soon discovered that the sulfur spring had a strong resistance to the parasitic insect eggs.
The first fellow who was rescued by the drug test, after opening his eyes and learning the whole story, burst into tears almost immediately. The contrast between the smooth survival at this time and the various sacrifices in the past became an unbearable sad irony.
Looking back now, what is even more cruel and ridiculous is:
This kind of sulfur spring is usually buried deep underground and never sees the light of day. Under normal circumstances, only when an active volcano erupts completely will the sulfur spring gush out amidst the magma all over the ground and the red light all over the sky.
Those who can finally see the sulfur spring are almost all those who are deeply parasitic on the insect eggs and are barely holding on to their last breath. At this time, the life-saving sulfur spring will most likely become a deadly soul-killing sticker.
The expulsion of the eggs means that the host instantly loses the last bit of life it has held on to, and turns back into a human being from a monster. However, at this time the human body cannot adapt to the magma, dust and heat, and will die immediately.
I was unable to move for a long time as I listened to the calm and sad narration of the doctor on rounds, realizing that if there had not been that last huge banyan tree to draw away the geothermal heat, the situation would indeed be unsolvable.
This is the last layer of inverted logic in Moving Mouse. Life and death, hope and despair, mutation and original appearance, monsters and humans are all reversed on the two sides of the coin.
This is not a deliberate act of the ghost story, it is just the way it is. Just like the hope hidden in the deepest part of Pandora's box, it will only come true after the previous 99 disasters are released.
With the arrival of this unexpected answer, the debate over cooperation with Hide and Seek also came to an end.
"What Mr. Zhang said is right. We can't just sit there and wait for another day to be tricked. Do you think it's fun to play tricks on us? Why?" Xu You patted my forehead fiercely. "Since you are not willing to accept it, just do it."
Now that the plan was set, all the guys started working efficiently.
The long and arduous journey during this period will not be mentioned here.
In short, it took us about two more days to reach the small village where Xu You had led his team twelve years ago.
As soon as I got off the car, an extremely dry wind blew, and the vast blue-gray stone forest that I saw gave me a sudden chill.
The small village here was taken over by the Zhang family and razed to the ground twelve years ago. It is said that most of the original mountain people were confused and had no idea about quarrying, and they were dispersed and sent to other places to resettle.
After the houses were demolished, apart from scattered wall roots and skirtings, only empty valleys and quarrying forests were left. Looking at them now, there is a strong sense that things have changed and people have changed.
It was also the first time that I had this sense of déjà vu, as if I were revisiting an old place. I subconsciously looked at the guys walking around, which alleviated the sense of unreality that seemed like a dream.
"The salty quicksand beneath our feet is the one in the records."
A particularly young fellow said to me excitedly, pointing to the rusty red ground, with a look of curiosity, "Advisor, where did the quicksand go?"
Looking at my bright eyes, it seems that I can predict the future and come up with an explanation.
I was helpless, not because I didn't like to talk to people, but mainly because this deputy was very curious and asked too many questions along the way.
As agreed, we need a group of people who have never been to the fields, so Zhang Jiazhen picked a bunch of idiots for me. It is said that they were all just released from their respective instructors after completing training. They are completely clueless about ghost stories and have no experience other than being obedient and honest.
I was quite confident at first, thinking that this was my first time leading a team and I had to perform well.
But they soon fell into endless curious questioning, which eventually turned into exhaustion, confusion and staring at each other.
Seeing me adjusting the new headphones without saying anything, the guy was still full of enthusiasm. He looked at the stone forest in the distance and asked, "Hey, consultant, didn't you say that there are another group of people who are going to join us and work together? Where are they?"
A few giggles came from the headphones.
The one in the channel was a helicopter flying above our heads, and inside it was a group of happy newbies.
My loyal team leader Zhang Jia originally thought that he could finally touch the cockpit, but when he was temporarily towed away and told that the plan had changed, the unbelievable sadness in it really made those who heard it sad and those who listened to it cried.
As for me, I thought I was here to be the ancestor, but now I find out that I am leading a group of really naughty kids. I regret it so much.
I asked why those disrespectful old men looked at me strangely before we set off, and why the master's wife didn't say anything but just patted my shoulder.
What makes me even more speechless is that the members who were supposed to be part of the hide-and-seek game are nowhere to be found, let alone their shadows.
The only thing that proved that I was not stood up was that there was a row of engraved code words at the agreed meeting point, indicating that my people had arrived and were waiting in the dark, but just didn't want to show up to contact us.
What do you mean by "on standby"? It's just squatting in a corner and collecting mushrooms in a sinister manner.
I was overwhelmed for a moment, thinking that the naughty children were not enough, and there was also social phobia? The true face of this world is too cruel.
The new deputy was still looking around happily and chanting sutras to summon souls. I got so angry that I kicked him to go check the camping situation.
As for the valley beneath my feet, which seemed to be normal, it was indeed a bit strange.
Just as I remembered from Tai Tsai, there was still little vegetation in the valley. The moss, salt frost, and rusty red soil all over the ground matched the area.
But I asked people to conduct a preliminary search and found no large areas of salt dust, and the ring-shaped white mud circles were nowhere to be seen.
This time we were fully equipped with a pneumatic hydraulic drilling rig. The crawler-type engineering drilling rig started with a slight hum, the hydraulic legs opened for leveling, and quickly pushed the drill bit down.
My assistant told me before that this thing can drill any rock or gravel, and drilling 600 meters down is a piece of cake. I touched the cyan-coated mechanical arm and squatted aside, waiting to see what would happen underground.
It stands to reason that if salt dust and quicksand exist and are regularly spit out from underground, then the soil turned up during the well-drilling process would also have some traces of salt.
Considering that there might be a weak salt crust underground that could cause landslides, my friends and I stayed far away from the site and dug a row of drainage channels and reservoirs in advance, for fear that there would be something dirty inside the quicksand after we dug it out.
As a result, after drilling for an hour, there was nothing unusual except mud.
The guy on guard duty on the helicopter also uttered a sound of surprise, wondering in the channel:
"Advisor, we have turned the scanner to the maximum. The bottom of the valley is basically solid. It is unlikely to have the honeycomb coal structure you and the team leader mentioned."
The past memories were still fresh in my mind, and I was a little confused. Could this part be a false memory that I had taken from somewhere? Then what happened to the guy in Xu You's attendance file who actually had white sand coming out of his mouth and nose?
Where are the white mud and quicksand made of salt powder actually?
While I was still thinking, the other guy who was watching over me hesitated and asked:
"What is the size of the white sand circle we are looking for in the records? If it is not a natural phenomenon, is it possible that it was built by humans? If there really is such a scene, could it be that we have remembered the wrong location and it is hidden deeper in the mountains and forests?"
It suddenly occurred to me that his idea was quite fresh.
I roughly understood what he meant, and thought further, if it was built by humans, such a large project would not take a day or two to complete, and there would most likely be a commonly used transportation route.
If you collect all the tire tracks or scattered household garbage and follow the clues, you may get a pleasant surprise.
Especially for household garbage, if it includes plastic bags and packaging paper, they will not rot even after more than ten years.
Given the barbaric and crude behavior of those mountain folks, they probably wouldn't consciously deal with these traces.
Seeing that I agreed, the guy excitedly gathered a team of people and prepared to patrol the mountain and pick up garbage.
It was at this time that another team that went to Shilin returned.
The team happened to hear our conversation, and they looked at each other for a while, and their already bad expressions became even more ugly.
I suddenly felt something was wrong and asked in a deep voice, "What's wrong?"
The team leader, whose nickname was Sanyi, looked a little pale. "Advisor... you just said that at large and long-term operation sites, there should be traces of transportation vehicles and abandoned household garbage, right?"
"Is it possible that a group of at least dozens of children could live in the stone forest without any interaction with the outside world?"
My heart skipped a beat, realizing that this was not a question but an almost exact description.
But how is this possible?
"According to the team leader's records, the group of abducted quarrying children have already been relocated and rescued by us."
Sanyi swallowed hard, and seemed to feel that what he said was a little unreasonable. "At that time, we were worried that some children might be hiding somewhere due to stress and not be discovered. Our people also threw a lot of unopened food and water around the stone forest, and waited outside for several months after evacuation.
But later, there was no sign that the food had been touched, and no human activity was found, so our team led a complete withdrawal."
His next words made me and everyone else present feel a chill down my spine.
He said that the food had been thrown into the stone forest for a long time, and the Zhang family was busy with relocation and rescue and did not recycle it.
But the problem was that when they entered the stone forest, they found that the food that had been discarded for years and covered with dust was about half gone. At the same time, there was no garbage or footprints around.
"...homeless people?" I thought subconsciously, "Is there a homeless person living here who picked up some of the garbage? The discarded garbage may be concentrated at the place where he stayed."
As for footprints, it is normal that no traces are left on such dry and hard ground.
Another idea that is difficult to say out loud is that it may be difficult for an ordinary homeless person to happen to end up here, but it is very likely that a fake person would find this place.
Sanyi shook his head and smiled bitterly. From his expression, I could really sense the indescribable panic and helplessness.
"That's probably not possible. Consultant, you'll understand if you come with us and take a look."
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