The end?
With this realization, I felt a little uncertain when I looked at the mandrills weaving their webs in front of me.
Are the mandrills really the children who were quarrying rocks back then?
I increasingly felt that the tragic story my deputy had described to me had too many plausible points and might not be true.
At present, he was just processing and guessing the clues that Mizo had collected during his exploration of this place, and passing them to me under the guise of a "survivor". I don't know if the fallacy was simply due to his wrong reasoning or if he was deliberately trying to mislead me.
But no matter how many questions I had, even though my deputy was right behind me, I gritted my teeth and had no intention of questioning or communicating with him.
The few rules the deputy told me were so weird.
A most basic logical contradiction is:
Since the hide-and-seek players realized in previous explorations that their companions could not communicate, and vaguely described their companions as some kind of vague and terrible source of crisis...then why not just cancel the companions? For the pseudo-human, what's wrong with exploring alone in the water?
This isn't like elementary school students have to hold hands when they go out, nor is it like a group of giant babies can't leave their parents alone.
In the "safety regulations" they repeatedly determined, companions seemed to be necessary.
...Why? Can't people be alone here?
Why did my assistant seem to have undergone some terrible changes almost as soon as he entered the water, but I was safe and sound? What was the key point that determined who would be hit between the two companions? It couldn't be just a random choice.
The more I think about it, the more questions arise, all of which are disturbing unknowns.
I got goose bumps, calmed myself down, and wiped the sweat off my palms on my protective suit. Then I realized that wiping sweat through protective gloves was meaningless.
Grasping the mottled chain again, the deputy's voice lingered again, and he asked in a low voice:
"Counselor, aren't you going to move on?"
This damn thing will keep urging people.
I felt a chill in my heart. The feeling of being out of control and fighting alone was terrible. It was an experience I had never had before.
Without saying anything, I continued to descend quickly with the help of the downward sloping chain.
Traveling through the giant three-dimensional net, there was no conversation and no other sound interference except the wailing of mandrills. The sound of the stone pillars pulling together in the quiet and deep water was amplified a lot.
Strange, I now roughly know that the stone pillars themselves do not "grow", but are passively exposed on the ground because the strata become thinner. So what on earth is this sound like chopsticks breaking?
I should also point out here that, since the mandrills were still obsessed with weaving webs and had no interest in me, I took the opportunity to observe the body characteristics of some of them when I passed by them.
The intuitive conclusions I reached surprised me.
Their hair is very luxuriant and thick, their foreheads are protruding, their teeth are obviously misaligned, and their shriveled and short limbs are in a rigid arched shape.
How to say it, it's as if they are hugging a huge rock at all times, frozen in the moment of stone quarrying, so the entire arm and leg bones are bent and deformed inward.
This doesn't seem like a child at all. Instead, it reminds me of a disease.
Dwarfism, or dwarfism.
In a relatively closed population, inbreeding can easily induce pathological dwarfism.
Moreover, most of these symptoms do not actually cause much damage to intelligence, which is consistent with the nearly normal intelligence level exhibited by mandrills.
It seems that the mandrill is not a deformed person caused by temporary contamination of a ghost story, but more like a primitive species that went astray in evolution and was abandoned, and has reproduced in a closed environment for many generations.
So, are these scavengers also like guards?
Ancient people often carved dragons and other animals in tombs, and folklore even says that people kept pig dragons or pythons. If there really is a palace in the deep water here, it seems reasonable to keep a group of particularly clean water monkeys to guard the gate.
I just don’t know what the water monkeys eat. Do they have to wait for more than ten years for takeaway food from unlucky guys like us?
My random thoughts flashed by and I didn't stop moving. Soon the huge net was above my head.
When I stepped on the ground under the water again, the water pressure around me was a bit high. The feeling of crowding and oppression came from all directions, making my chest itchy and stuffy.
There was no trace of the mandrill nest that the deputy had mentioned, but at least the stone pillars were there from beginning to end, and they were an extremely clear guide in the water.
Dense bubbles were adsorbed on the bluish-black surfaces, making the outlines of the stone pillars look vague and ethereal from this angle, as if they were covered with fuzz, which was creepy.
There are still collapsed pits of varying sizes, and they seem to correspond one-to-one to the collapse above.
I felt a little uneasy again, but it was hard to tell exactly what I felt was wrong.
The only thing that is certain is that these interconnected underwater forks seem to be naturally formed, just like a blood vessel or meridian that has a section removed midway, with the beginning and the end still able to see each other from afar.
Since I hadn't found the mandrill nest that my assistant had mentioned to replenish oxygen, time was still very tight. I didn't make any choices and went into the next narrow waterway again.
After entering the waterway, I was still upside down, so after a while I felt a bit of blood congestion in my head.
I also thought that it would be much easier to go down the stairs in a different direction. At least by comparison, it would be safer to walk down with thick leather soles than to feel the way forward with your hands.
But the fake person who unfortunately fell into the water and was inexplicably cut in half during the day really gave me a bad feeling.
If the mandrill was staged to intentionally cause conflict, then what happened to the fake person who fell into the water and was cut in half? I still have no answer to this question.
The "Big Jiang" in the drilling machine was never seen from beginning to end, and the victim scene could have just been a corpse prepared in advance. But the one who was beheaded was different. If he deliberately killed a companion in front of me just to gain my trust, it would be unreasonable and too stupid.
Therefore, I am more inclined to believe that this was an accident just like the high beam, and the pseudo-human did not participate in it subjectively.
So, what exactly launched the fatal underwater attack?
Could the several "safety rules" summarized by the deputy be related to this attacker?
Taking this into consideration, my subconscious mind made me avoid similar actions until I fully figured it out.
However, as we climbed further, the waterway became flatter.
It wasn't just the slight dizziness from climbing upside down for so long. I could clearly feel that the width my arms could open was increasing. But at the same time, the waterway was being gradually flattened, like a box that was tightened and flattened, causing my climbing movements to become slower and slower.
I had thrown away my headlamp in an emergency when I faced the mandrill, and my vision was extremely dim, relying only on the fluorescent strip on my protective suit for illumination.
I climbed for a while and had to stop. I pulled my arms back and supported them outside my chest, creating a small space for myself to breathe heavily. The mark on the oxygen tank dropped visibly.
There's a burning pain in my lungs, which is caused by lack of oxygen and squeezing.
Just at this moment, the deputy actually caught up with me and crawled not far behind me.
I was frightened by what I heard, and subconsciously I endured the severe pain in my chest and crawled forward another step.
This movement was quite big, and the fluorescent strip on the edge of his elbow was scraped off by the rough and tight waterway wall.
I originally felt like I was crawling in a long, narrow coffin, but now I felt more like I was squeezed in a piece of paper. The light source at hand was suddenly pressed down by my abdomen and I couldn't pull it out, and everything in front of me went black.
In the darkness, I noticed a subtle noise in the deputy's crawling sound, as if something was following him.
Also, the sound of breathing.
It was as if in this waterway, right above and behind my feet, there were more than one person queuing up and crawling behind me, blocking the entire path I was passing through, making it impossible for me to take a single step back or turn around and leave.
I thought of the Snake game.
The pixel snake will only get longer and longer, but the space is still limited. In this process, if you can't avoid it, you will bite your own tail. The game space will be filled with pixels, and the snake will melt and be swallowed up. If you want to stay alive, you have to keep moving, and you can never stop.
I was sure that those things were waiting for me to continue climbing down.
This is a silent urging.
Maybe the scene was so ridiculous that when the deputy's cold, wet hands grabbed my ankles, I didn't kick him away. Instead, I just took a deep breath.
My cheeks, ears, abdomen, and elbows are now covered in blood and abrasions.
The oxygen cylinder took up a lot of space, so I had already untied it and dragged it behind my heels, connected only by the long oxygen pipe. The mask had been torn into pieces, and I bit hard on the oxygen pipe, pressing it tightly with my fingers and my own weight.
In the suffocating silence, the deputy actually stopped talking. Now there was only a maddening silence.
In the extreme crowding and confinement, even the wailing of the mandrills disappeared at some point.
My tense instincts began to give me warnings, reminding me that I must resume action immediately and not move step by step in this hurry.
But I smiled bitterly, and my arm stretched forward touched something hard.
This fork in the road ends here.
The road ahead is blocked.
No, it's not completely impossible. My fingers still felt a little crack, but the narrow crack was no thicker than paper. Even if you peeled me into human skin, I might not be able to squeeze through.
Have I been climbing for so long just to get here and be blocked at the end?
I was in a trance for a moment, as if it was only then that I felt strange and wondered what I was doing.
In fact, my actions along the way seemed to make no sense, but I just didn't have any resistance or doubt.
Instead, a voice echoed in my mind, reassuring me, telling me not to think too much, that there would be a way down there, and that there was no danger down there. I just had to push deeper without hesitation, fill myself in, and keep going down until I filled the collapse and the cracks.
But...what then?
As this thought gradually became vague, it seemed as if a similar scene had been repeated countless times, and I moved forward again as if possessed by a ghost.
Strangely, the solid end actually retreated another inch.
…was it really the first time I realized I had reached the bottom? Where was I?
What is that “end” that is slowly receding?
Feeling something, I slowly leaned forward and tried to open my eyes to see clearly. It was impossible to identify anything in the darkness, but at this moment, there was a slight sound, and the deputy's headlamp behind me lit up for the first time in the darkness.
The light passed through my obstruction and leaked out a little bit over my shoulder with difficulty.
It illuminated a pale, stiff face that already had corpse spots on it.
It was staring at me face to face, stuck in the waterway, sliding down inch by inch endlessly. It was staring at me all the way, calling me, persuading me, comforting me, walking backwards at my pace, and guiding me.
The narrow gap I felt was its empty, gaping mouth.
That was the face of my deputy who was supposed to be behind me at this moment.
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