Disappeared (the previous part has been overhauled and changed)
Not to mention the unknown fate of the living people who jumped down for unknown reasons, the commotion above was quickly calmed down.
Gao Liu asked a few questions in the communication and told me that the team had just found a tall and thin guy wandering around the tunnel entrance. Before the patrol could get suspicious, the guy suddenly jumped up, and everyone who saw it was stunned.
After a while, probably because Manager Yan Er also heard the report from the camp on his personal channel, he complained quietly: "Ancestor, we are about to go to the fields, why are you still leaving a prank up there to torment us?"
I was still wondering who the person who jumped down was. I was stunned for a moment when I heard the words. I thought, what the hell is going on? How can I be blamed for someone falling from a high altitude?
Then I realized that Jingjing probably saw that it was getting dark, so he went to carry the Xu You brand express box for me without any care. He didn't expect that the situation in the camp suddenly became tense when he encountered this chaos, so he was caught.
This was such a coincidence. Although I followed the principle of acting first and reporting later, and had intended to give an account, man proposes, God disposes. I came to my senses and felt a little amused.
But now that things have come to this, there is nothing that cannot be said directly, so I opened a team-wide channel and asked sincerely:
"Second Manager Yan, after this trip, aren't you afraid that someone will suddenly shovel dirt over our heads and seal the entrance to our cave?"
Manager Yan Er choked, probably remembering that there might be some half-human, half-ghost creatures lurking in the camp. He was the one who gave me this information.
I continued, although it was a bit cold, but as a tool, Xu You was indeed much more reliable than anyone else in this matter.
The pit was in conflict with the alienated and distorted power, so he only needed to stay at the entrance of the cave and continue to sleep and recover. I believed those ghosts would not approach easily. If something happened, he would be the first to be alerted and awakened.
"so……"
I hesitated for a moment, but out of selfishness I added the sentence I wanted to say the most:
"After all, he is the one who is keeping us alive. I hope no one will urge us to kill him as soon as possible to avoid his pain, or talk about him behind his back."
"If he really can't be saved, then it doesn't matter if he takes his last two days. Let him finish his last duty and go away in peace and dignity."
After I finished speaking, I felt a little embarrassed, thinking that I was a little naive. This idea was more emotional than feasible, and there was actually not much evidence. I just couldn't get over it, and I was still unwilling to leave.
But the team suddenly became quiet for a while, as if people were sympathizing with their own kind, and their breathing became a little heavier.
This made me feel uncomfortable, and then I heard one of the guys suddenly say, "The road is long, let's get off quickly", and there was a hint of depression in his nonchalant tone.
What surprised me even more was that Manager Yan Er didn't say anything. He just asked his superiors to release Jingjing and told me to cooperate with everything. This was considered as his tacit approval and support for my somewhat ridiculous attempt.
I thanked him and he gave a complicated, forced smile.
Even if this matter was over, with this incident as a distraction, no one had the heart to talk about the "airborne" incident of a living person just now.
In order to liven up the atmosphere, Wild Cat walked in the front, exploring the way and introducing the situation of the tunnel in the channel.
According to him, the biggest difficulty we faced on this descent was that the journey was extremely long and it would take us more than three hours to climb down.
Being in such a confined and narrow space for a long time, with no end in sight, and crawling mechanically and repetitively, people are easily stressed. One of the people who was digging the tunnel with him suddenly lost his concentration due to excessive fatigue. If he hadn't been tied with a traction rope, he would have fallen headfirst.
It was my first time crawling underground, and I was a complete novice. I had a bit of the "exploration and adventure" mentality in my head, and I had no idea that crawling underground meant just crawling most of the time. I felt a little numb on my scalp when I heard this, and I felt a bit disappointed that my fantasy had been thwarted.
But in front of others, I am still a consultant and the heir of the fake Zhang family. I still want to save face, so I pretended to be indifferent and said "hmm" to indicate that I understood.
What must be said here is that since we have to go down there for more than three hours, even Superman cannot do rock climbing with bare hands, so the relevant tools must be prepared very completely.
In addition to the traction rope around the waist, small blades and wax-sealed tablets sewn on the corners of clothes and backpack straps, various small props for clearing paths and taking samples in the bag, there are also hooks and spikes specially used to fix along the way.
The spikes are made of cowhide soles and have a row of barbed hooks to increase resistance when climbing. In an emergency, if you push hard on the wall, the barbs will pop out and grab firmly, making it difficult to pull out, so you can temporarily hang most of your weight on the wall.
The other guys actually knew all this, but they just told me to save my face.
I was stunned by what I heard, and I followed the team as they climbed, while also being a yes-man. Occasionally, I heard someone secretly laugh a few times, as if they were teasing a child.
And the guy in front who was pretending to be nonchalant and urging people to hurry up, now forgot about his discomfort and laughed especially loudly.
Before I could lose my dignity and get angry, someone hissed:
"Advisor, there are some metal fragments in the soil. Be careful when you step on them. They are very sharp and almost pierced through the sole of my shoe."
Everyone in the team was a little surprised. An anxious guy reached out to scratch the wall next to him and found similar metal fragments in the mud on the wall.
We all stopped. Soon, a triangular fragment wrapped thickly in tape was passed up.
"Boss, look!"
I reached out to take it, but the guy below took a step upwards and raised his hand out of habit.
The "boss" Gao Liu reached over my shoulder and caught the fragment directly with his gloves on.
“……”I looked at the guys below and then at Gao Liu.
They both looked at me in unison.
Oh yeah, I really can’t see what’s so special about this thing. I’m a layman.
I was slightly embarrassed and silently retracted my hand. I thought that after I went down to the ground, my rookie status had risen sharply, but how come there was nothing left except respect? Wouldn't this mean I would end up like Yan Er, a mascot?
Just at this moment, Shopkeeper Yan Er was still in the channel. He suddenly became energetic and started to pretend to be cool, saying that this thing looked familiar and he wanted to taste it carefully.
I asked, "Hey, the one who laughed the loudest just now, what's your name?"
The reply from below was very quick and somewhat energetic: "Advisor, my name is Fang Ao!"
"Okay, Fang Ao. Beat up Yan Er when we get to the ground."
"Ah?" Shopkeeper Yan Er was surprised.
This time no one opposed the sabotage, and the atmosphere in the whole team was very harmonious and united.
Gao Liu carefully examined the metal sheet, handed it to me, and showed it to me. I took a curious look at it, and saw some particularly broken metal lines on it. I really didn't understand, and Gao Liu also shook his head.
That's strange.
But since we didn't see anything, we continued to go down, occasionally stopping to drink water and eat some energy bars by hooking on the wall.
Here I would like to say something off-topic that I find very novel:
In the backpack, we all have a sleeping bag like a child seat, which can be unfolded and hung on a hook. The hook is driven into the wall and fixed, and it can be supported into a small platform like a chair, where you can sit and take a nap.
People sit on it suspended in the air with their feet dangling, and there is an abyss below. It feels really magical.
But I was the only one who felt this novelty. The guys in the team were all bored and just sat down and closed their eyes and snored.
We climbed and stopped like this, stopping about four or five times in the middle, each time for five to ten minutes to rest. No one asked for silence, but the chatter in the team became smaller and smaller, and finally turned into a kind of numb silence after exhaustion.
In the entire dark tunnel, for a moment, the only sound was the slight creaking sound of soles of shoes stepping on the dirt walls, and the tunnel still extended straight up with no end.
If the leash on my body hadn't been constantly getting longer, I would have suspected that I was trapped in a ghost wall.
In addition, I measured it with my arm's length, and the width of the hole in the wall remained unchanged, except that there were more and more metal fragments in the soil, but they were all repetitive and there was nothing special.
I climbed down like this in the same routine. After the initial novelty wore off, I felt a little restless and disappointed. I looked at the time more and more frequently, and when I looked again, I was surprised to find that more than three hours had passed.
It was at this moment that I suddenly realized that the wild cat seemed to have been silent for a long time.
As the leader of the exploration, has he reached the end?
"wildcat?"
I tapped the headset to express my doubts, and after a while, someone in the team below turned on a flashlight.
I couldn't see which guy it was. He was holding the flashlight, and the light through the back of his hand turned into a dim red. The dark red flickered a few times, which was the agreed signal to remind the people who were still on the channel to keep quiet and not speak casually in the channel.
Almost at the same time, a very slight scratching sound was heard in the earphones, and the flashlight went out immediately.
Then there were some high-pitched breathing sounds.
I was startled and my mind quickly became clear, and I felt the rope under my feet that was pulled taut by the human weight suddenly loosen.
I suddenly turned off the light on my body.
In the quieter environment at this time, I found that the light source and breathing sounds above my head had disappeared at some point.
The sound of fingernails scratching rang through my headphones again. My eyelids twitched, and I realized that I shouldn't stay on the rope any longer.
Without much time to think, I immediately did four things simultaneously in a flash: pulled off the buckle of the traction rope around my waist; grabbed the hook with my fingers; leaned back against the wall and pressed the soles of my shoes firmly to grab the nails; and loosened the traction rope and threw it out.
“Shua…”
There was a slight breeze in front of me and I realized that it was the tow rope that had fallen away from me.
There seemed to be no one left on the rope.
In other words, before I let go, the traction rope was empty and I was the only one left.
My whole body stiffened and a chill instantly ran down my back.
The distance between me and my companions in front and behind me was no more than half an arm's length. Given their skills and reactions, there was no sound of resistance or struggle before they disappeared.
At this moment, thinking that someone had been here before and jumped down without hesitation, the whole picture was filled with some extremely ominous meaning.
There was still an inexplicable noise in the headphones, like nails scraping on metal, slight but very harsh.
I knocked on the earphones again, but there was no response, so I immediately pulled them off and stuffed them into my backpack. Then I still felt it was not enough, so I dug out the gauze for bandaging and wrapped the earphones with thick layers.
After doing all this, I slowly controlled my fluctuating emotions, recalled the road I had just traveled, and began to think hard about whether I could still return the same way.
I also have a pair of spare spikes in my bag that I can use as a climbing tool.
But without the rope, I could only rely on the spikes and the hooks I had set up to climb back. If I used my hands and feet alternately, I could only climb halfway up the original route before I was exhausted.
We had been climbing down for so long that it seemed as if we were passing through the center of the earth to some unknown gate of hell.
"Pah!" I slapped my face hard to wake myself up. The long-term confinement in the dark had a huge impact on me.
It’s not realistic to go up, I said to myself, I might as well keep going down and find a way to meet up with others at the destination.
We had been climbing down for more than three hours, and if their previous estimate was correct, we should arrive in half an hour.
At least, Wildcat Gao Liu and his sister would try their best to wait for me there.
Sweat beads rolled down my forehead to my mouth, very salty and bitter. I opened a protein energy bar, bit it and slowly softened it with saliva, and reached down in the dark to find a new foothold.
The strange thing is that there is no earth wall to be found on either side of my feet.
I remember looking down before I turned off the light source. This flat hole was far from ending, nor did it get wider. At least I was sure of the one or two meters below my feet.
I was stunned for a moment, then tried to touch it with my foot, but still nothing.
what happened?
I hung the gauze on the hook and wrapped it around my arm, then slowly curled up and squatted down. Maintaining this extremely strenuous posture, I reached out to touch, but I only felt a blank space.
It was definitely not an illusion. Everything under my feet seemed to have disappeared. I felt something in my heart and touched the top of my head. The soil above me also disappeared.
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