Dancing Neighbors (Complete) [Revised]
Li Zhaoying's almost hoarse voice lingered in the dilapidated house for a long time. Niu Biaoxi got goose bumps all over his body. He almost felt like he was there. He smelled a fishy smell of rust as if in an illusion, and felt a cold corpse pressed against his face. He turned his head and saw a pair of empty and lifeless eyes.
He yelled and fell to the ground, almost peeing in his pants/crotch. Then he realized where he was, and his face was still pale.
Military Advisor Gou, who was holding Li Zhaoying, was not in much better condition. His lips were pale and the words were stuck in his throat, but he couldn't say them out loud. His whole body felt heavy as if it was filled with cement.
Li Zhaoying remained indifferent and said in a daze that she was not afraid of evil things like ordinary people, nor was she afraid of the deformed corpses.
But at that moment, her heart felt extremely cold and she even felt a huge despair.
Because of that thing, there was no sign of distortion or contamination on the dead person, and there was no sense that it was being driven by any distorted rules. It was as if it simply didn't know that it was dead, so it moved out of habit.
After a while, a hint of blood even returned to the creature's cheeks, and the wounds on its body began to wriggle and heal. It staggered and struggled, and along with the immobile Li Zhaoying, it fell out of the concrete wall that hid the body.
"He's alive. Do you understand? He's alive."
Li Zhaoying said, "Even things like us will only continue to fall into the more twisted depths of death, reaching the death at the end of death. Once you cross the line between life and death, there is absolutely no turning back. This is an iron rule. There is no resurrection from the dead in this world."
But right in front of Li Zhaoying's eyes, the thing that had come back to life crawled up, its limbs became soft and warm again, and it looked around the room in confusion, as if it had just experienced a hangover, and staggered around the house.
The thin figure who killed it was also stunned when he saw this. After a moment, he let out an extremely hoarse and determined laugh.
“…That’s impossible.” Inside the car, I also fell into anxiety and confusion.
Yan Mo said: "I heard these stories from Niu Biaoxi. He was almost crazy when I found him. Advisor, you'd better just listen to these as stories. After all, no one knows how much of his own assumptions and delusions he added."
"Especially when it comes to something as important as resurrection, I can't hear any price being paid in his story. The temptation is too great, and it's not something that a human being can take on casually. If it weren't for you, my advisor, asking about it as a follow-up to the story today, I wouldn't have mentioned it to anyone else."
I understand what Yan Mo means. Over the years, the Zhang family has encountered and heard countless anecdotes, and there are also exaggerated statements. For Yan Mo and others, it is impossible not to distinguish and just believe everything just because they encounter two similar words. If you don't make a decisive choice between the security and reliability of information, it will only hurt others and yourself.
Niu Biaoxi's narration is undoubtedly the most unreliable of all the crazy talk.
Just as Li Zhaoying said, until now, even the twisted rules like those of the prophet cannot violate the boundary between life and death; the banyan tree can at most disrupt the time before and after life and death, and still has to pay a huge and irreversible price for it.
From birth to death, it is a one-way ticket that even ghost stories cannot reverse.
Yan Mo himself had experienced the life-and-death experience in the womb of the Moon Palace. As a half-dead fetus, he knew that if he took one more step forward and was completely swallowed and hatched by the Moon Palace, something else would crawl out. It would only be a new twisted life, and even if it was similar to him, it would not be his second life.
I believe in his judgment. No one has experienced this more personally than him. After understanding the infinitely vague gray area between life and death, what kind of terrifying scene it is to go deeper. It is not something that someone like me who has only experienced false death in the closed loop of a comb jellyfish being cut off can compare to.
But there is one thing that really bothers me:
"The album that Li Zhaoying got," I asked Zhang Tianyi, feeling a little overly nervous, "is that Ping Ping's, right?"
Let’s skip the contradictory topic of resurrection from the dead for now. I heard a lot of familiar shadows in the past events narrated by Niu Biaoxi.
The owner of the album, the way she thinks, the tone of her voice, the flower pot she mentioned about her mother, so many details made me sure that it was Pingping.
Things have become quite complicated by now.
The strange corpse that met Li Zhaoying should, unless there were any major surprises, be Nian Huairen, whom Zhang Tianyi had been trying so hard to find.
Who could be the thin figure that killed him? I have a ridiculous assumption that it might be Jia Er, my playmate who left me in the shabby house without saying goodbye.
Could the slender ghost that Jia Er was trying to escape from be Nian Huairen's strange corpse? If so, being hunted and entangled by a ghost that could not resist at all and could be resurrected even if killed, was indeed a despairing and disgusting experience.
What's even more terrifying is why Jia Er got entangled with Nian Huairen. Did Nian Huairen's strange corpse target him, or did it target our family long ago, but was accidentally discovered and intercepted by Jia Er, who habitually followed me home, before it could break out.
The dead Nian Huairen, the missing Jia Er, Ping Ping who can see walls, the little fake person who stole identities, the situation is too chaotic, all of them colliding together for me to imagine.
"Have you noticed? That fake person is aware of her own nature." Zhang Tianyi said calmly, "She didn't tell Niu Biaoxi everything. Before she was trapped by the wall, she should have had contact with the banyan tree and made a wish."
I rubbed my aching forehead:
"You mean, being trapped in the wall is also a price to pay? She got the truth about herself, escaped the control of the prophet and gained freedom, but the price was to be stuck in the wall forever, trapped in a place that even the prophet could not touch."
I thought of Xiao Yu and the college student couple, whose bodies were hugging each other in the concrete wall. They were not disturbed or assimilated by the rats in the wall, but simply fell in and were trapped to death. Their situation is very similar to that of the fake person Li Zhaoying.
In that community, besides the homeless people who hanged themselves one by one, there were also unlucky people like Xiao Yu and Lao Lin who got into the trap by mistake. At first I didn't understand why they were contaminated but didn't become rats in the wall, but left intact skeletons for us to find. Now maybe I have the answer.
At this moment I had a lot of new ideas. "Maybe I should correct my speculation. The rats in the wall did not dig out those hollow waterways, but just 'discovered' them."
I opened my hands to the air, thinking, "The rats in the wall can be seen and move in those cavities. They move around like gifts given by children to each other. It is difficult to observe them at ordinary times. When a part of the cavity overlaps with the building, we can observe the whereabouts of the rats in the wall with the help of real materials, and believe that they are active in the concrete and steel walls."
In fact, they are everywhere.
The wall is a boundary, and in the area outside the wall, things are not seen and are considered non-existent, just like my Dongzai.
"——So, brother, are you saying that people like Xiao Yu, Lao Lin, Li Zhaoying, and even Ping Ping are born with talents similar to rats in the wall and can also touch the cavity?"
I nodded to myself. This might explain why the wanderers chose to become banyan trees. It wasn't a flash of inspiration. The wanderers also had similar keen inspiration and could often peek into those cavities. They occasionally saw the roots of the banyan tree slithering through a cavity like a snake, which allowed them to see the inevitable future again and again.
Has this world always been so fragile, crumbling and surrounded by unclear cavities, and there has never been a completely solid shelter.
"So Pingping said it was the sea." Sanyi suddenly said, "In the picture album about Lu Xixi, she said she was a whale and got a strange dragon ball. This metaphor is the ultimate answer she gave us."
"We are in the deep sea of a strange story. There are plenty of bubbles in the sea water everywhere, and the whales are swimming in it, until one moment they are stuck by the increasingly condensed sea water and are completely trapped to death."
Sanyi's face was lit up with a light I had never seen before. He murmured and laughed from the bottom of his heart, "That's right, those missing people fell into the sea and disappeared from the eyes of us mayflies who can only live in bubbles. Children can throw gifts from their own bubbles to another bubble, but how the gifts drift in the sea is beyond human control."
"The 'yellow bud' medicinal material that the wanderers are looking for is actually selected based on the same species that can see the real world."
"This is so weird. Is this how the world looks like in Pingping's eyes?"
When he said 'strange', his expression was filled with extremely complicated relief and fascination:
“Although people gather in groups, they are actually scattered and divided among floating cavities. If you go deeper, you will become a foreign object like a rat in the wall, able to move more freely but losing your original appearance; if you retreat, you will fall into the sea and melt and merge with the ghost story.”
"And the most embarrassing thing is that you fall into two bubbles that happen to be close to each other, neither going forward nor backward, and get stuck at the boundary where they merge, but not drowned by the sea water. This is what happened to Xiao Yu and the fake person Li Zhaoying."
I have to admit that at this moment, Sanyi's words painted a picture for me of a world that was extremely magnificent, mysterious, lonely and terrifying. I shuddered, but I couldn't help but be drawn to it.
When people face such a brilliant and cold scene, which has never been seen before and will never be seen again, it is like witnessing the wind, rain, thunder and lightning between heaven and earth for the first time. It is hard not to be shocked, feel fear and be moved.
As a lonely and intelligent pioneer, what kind of mood would a young child like Pingping be in when she glimpses the true face of the world layer by layer alone?
"So - the people who placed the flower pots in the community - were actually marking the boundaries of the two cavities that they observed were gradually approaching each other?"
I took a deep breath and clumsily changed the subject, bringing myself back to more realistic and concrete issues, so as to avoid completely losing my composure and ability to think.
Think about it, think about it, could this be the true appearance of the wall? What is important is not the wall, but what makes up the wall.
What Huang Yazi wanted me to see with my own eyes was perhaps not the birth of the banyan tree, but the moment when the two walls came close to each other and the flower pot was pushed and fell. This was the truly important thing for her, because once the opportunity was missed, it would be difficult to recreate it. Did she think that I had survived so many strange stories because I had the same talent of seeing cavities as my sister Pingping?
But now, I have a hunch that the person who has the talent and has to guard the wall may not be guarding the rats in the wall, but the cavity tracks that are constantly moving away or approaching in the sea.
Manpower is limited, so it is more eye-catching and intuitive to choose to observe the wandering wall rats. Once a large number of wall rats emerge and escape from the wall, it seems that it can be judged that a large number of cavity bubbles have burst in succession, and the sea water from the ghost story will flow back, and people will easily disappear and drown in it, unable to return.
This is the true meaning of "Don't let the rat escape". This is why I was afraid of the wall being smashed and broken in my hallucinations, and I was in a state of panic all day long. The scary thing is not the eyes exposed in the wall, but the moment of looking at each other, the two people in the bubbles can cross the distance and see each other in the sea water, which means that the shelter is lost in an instant.
If this is the case, the appearance of the banyan tree is not a bad thing in some way.
Supported and filled by the ever-thirsty banyan tree, have those fragile hollow waterways been reinforced in disguise? The hollows are no longer moving arbitrarily with the current as usual, but have become fixed rooms that keep a relatively distance. People are blocked from view by the banyan tree, and it is not so easy to see the truth that should not be peeped.
However, this is too much of a black humor. The safety of the world is largely entrusted to the shadow of the sinister and insidious ghost stories. And the ghost stories themselves have no good intentions, they just unconsciously induce killing.
And this structure sounds so familiar, the banyan tree is really a natural and easy-to-use filler. I thought of the bronze cloak that the Nian family made for the banyan tree in the insect fog and the snow of migrating mice. I wonder if the Nian family got the same inspiration at the beginning.
"Did the fake Li Zhaoying say anything else to Niu Biaoxi?" I forced myself to cheer up, with a hint of anticipation. "Maybe, maybe she mentioned more about Pingping's movements. And that Nian Huairen."
Yan Mo shook his head.
My heart suddenly dropped and my face turned pale. "What? Now that things have come to this, is there anything else you can't say?" The strong disappointment made me want to say something without thinking.
"It's not that she wants to hide it."
At this time, it was Sanyi who spoke.
"That little fake person is dead," he said. "After she showed those signs of losing control, Gou Biao, who was holding her, didn't hesitate and directly attacked and killed her with her red scissors."
My mind suddenly went blank.
"Niu Biaoxi was moved by kindness and refused to turn back, while Gou Biao sighed and made up his mind. He killed the fake Li Zhaoying and buried her body in the wall of the dilapidated house as she said.
Out of fear, he covered Li Zhaoying's eyes with thick yellow talismans and put her in a narrow suitcase, making her unable to see or move, thinking that this would forever get rid of this unexpected nightmare. "
"As a result, Li Zhaoying's body began to move. Just like Nian Huairen, she was alive. She broke free from the suitcase and cement and began to crawl around the house, as if she was looking for something. Gou Biao set a fire in horror, but Li Zhaoying was still moving. She kept moving in the flames, and the charred corpse twitched as if it was dancing. At that moment, he and Niu Biaoxi both went crazy."
I was dumbfounded. A strange chill invaded my whole body and I suddenly felt very cold.
"Sanyi, how did you know?"
"Of course I know." He suddenly laughed and said grimly, "I was there, in that shabby house. I was the one who killed Nian Huairen."
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