Escape (Repair)
Being lifted up by the man grabbing my shoulders, I was furious to the extreme. I turned my head away desperately, wishing I could bite off the arm on my collar.
But as soon as I struggled, the hairs on the iron net tightened immediately and pulled me back. I bounced back onto the net heavily, my heart, liver and lungs ached, and I choked on a mouthful of cold water.
At this time, the water with a strange and foul smell had completely submerged the iron net and the giant, gnarled corpse, and flooded from my chest to my head. I was choking so much that my legs and feet became weak, and my consciousness suddenly became blurred.
The man didn't let go, but just held my back and reached out to break those intestine-like hairs one by one. At the same time, I heard the clinking sound of the giant corpse hitting the iron net becoming more frequent and rapid.
"Walk!"
He growled and pulled me up with force. The broken hair squirmed and immediately entangled itself around him again, wrapping around his forearm, leaving a deep bloody cut, and then drilled into his arm.
I was so frightened that my soul flew out of my body. I didn't care about anything else and just pushed hard on his shoulder, trying to knock him away.
But his wrist shook and fell down with a click as if it was dislocated, and he shook off the hair restraint. Instead, he was not prepared to be hit on the shoulder by my hammer, and his head reflexively pressed on my throat.
This really took a lot of strength and I almost broke my throat. I couldn't catch my breath and started coughing madly, with tears streaming down my face.
Without my intervention, the man took out a small square glass bottle from his waist, and smashed it on the iron net. A fragrant smell of alcohol diffused, and then there was a click. I guess he lit a lighter or something, and a nearly blue flame suddenly jumped out from the hair and broken limbs.
I was still coughing and my eyes were so sore that I could hardly open them. The man had already carried me on his back and swam quickly to the side, letting me hang on his back so that I could breathe a few breaths of stale air.
In my blurry vision, the flames spread very quickly, and I felt the horrible white mist and heat waves accompanied by a strange crackling sound, almost rolling after us, and my hair immediately curled up; at the same time, the strange burnt fragrance and the fishy stench of burnt and melted skin and flesh mixed together, making my stomach churn, and I almost vomited.
The man immediately cried out in regret, it was that damn Zhang Tianyi, and told me not to spit on him, but to take revenge on that pile of dirt.
I angrily said, "Stop talking nonsense. I haven't settled the score with you yet for tricking me into this damn place." Before I could finish my words, I couldn't help it and leaned out.
Before I could even feel sick, this guy quickly stuffed something into my mouth. I was caught off guard and was shocked. I asked vaguely, "What?"
I didn't want to vomit now, but the familiar salty fragrance and the slightly rancid smell of dampness made me stunned and said angrily:
"Five-spiced soybeans! It's only half a bag. Are you sick for carrying it with you?"
At this critical moment, I couldn't chew it and had no place to spit it out. I was almost furious.
He then smiled, pulled out a plastic bag wrapped in oil paper from his arms, handed it to my back, and said that he had nothing to do anyway, so I should eat soybeans while running for my life and not to be too nervous.
I think he has a problem. The fire is almost burning his appendix. Who has time to eat snacks?
But I couldn't swim, and I couldn't find my way in the steaming white mist. I found myself doing nothing but staring anxiously, as if there was really nothing else to do.
After chewing two spiced soybeans and coming to my senses, we had already reached the side wall of the mine. Zhang Tianyi had an engineer shovel on his waist and knocked upwards. The sharp blade used the force to dig deep into the wall, and I was hanging in the air.
But we were only 20 to 30 centimeters away from the water surface when the flames suddenly reached our feet. Fine crackling sounds continued to explode, and a layer of strange green oil that seemed to be covered with moss floated on the water surface, and the entire sea of fire was shaking with rapid tinkling sounds.
For some reason, the mandrills did not flee, but staggered in the sea of fire, screaming continuously, maintaining the posture of gazing at the moon, and then fell dead one after another in the gaps of the iron net.
It was the first time in my life that I had seen a sea of fire floating on the water. The soles of my feet were burning hot, and I could hear the creaking sound of the engineers' shovels above. I felt like I might collapse at any time and plunge into the hot water. My whole body was numb.
Looking again, a series of bubbles emerged from underwater, and limp human heads with only half a face appeared one after another on the water surface like overflowing green algae, covering the entire fire scene in an instant.
But these heads burned much slower. Even the air was slightly distorted in the high temperature. There were only a few tongues of fire crawling around above their heads, and they all looked over at me eerily as they flickered.
I was stunned and immediately got goosebumps, but the terrible thing was that Zhang Tianyi just hung there with a clear conscience and didn't make any next move for a long time.
It would be a lie to say that I was not in a hurry. I could not help but ask in confusion:
"Where to run next? Where's the road?"
Zhang Tianyi thought for a moment and said, "It's hard to say. It depends on the situation."
After saying that, probably seeing that I looked extremely unhappy, he continued leisurely, "These ghost things are more durable than I thought. I guess there is a lot of grease in them. It's no problem for them to burn for half an hour."
My heart sank when I heard that. Half an hour? If two of us could hang here for ten minutes with our arms, we would be superhumans. Not to mention that the oxygen might be burned out. If we didn't die of suffocation or heat, we might be poisoned by the stench of the corpses.
No wonder this bastard had the time to bring snacks, it turned out he wanted to have a good meal for hospice care.
In the midst of sadness, I felt something was wrong. I had heard clearly with both ears the suspicious conversation between him and San Yi just now. Could it be that he didn't want to escape and wanted to die with me? There was no need for that. After all, how much hatred would there be between our family members? I hadn't done anything immoral that was worthy of being expelled from the household registration book.
My face turned green as I thought about it. I asked him to give me an explanation quickly, otherwise I was afraid there would be no time to tell him.
I didn't doubt that he really wanted to harm me because of the prophet. After so many years of blood connection, there is still some trust, but what if someone misled him into thinking I was something else?
When I'm done with "exorcising demons and monsters", not only will I die, but he will also be dumbfounded and cry for me.
Zhang Tianyi lifted me up and asked, "Did you see that?"
I exclaimed in surprise, suspecting that he was trying to change the subject, but when I glanced upwards, I discovered that there seemed to be a slight dent in the wall of the mine. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that it was probably due to the high temperature that many places on the wall of the mine were smoldering.
Zhang Tian unscrewed a small section of the steel pipe at the end of a military shovel and lent it to me, and helped me stand on his shoulders. I took advantage of the situation and used the steel pipe to push away the wall, and found that there seemed to be a layer of softened plant ash coating underneath.
The clay shell, which had been baked to a crisp, fell down with a crackling sound when it was lightly tapped. I used my hand to block it to prevent it from falling on Zhang Tianyi. When I swept it away, I saw the green and bumpy ground underneath.
"What is this?" I became curious, grabbed a handful and smelled it, but there was no special smell.
Zhang added: "White mud." Let me dig deeper to see if there is anything.
I am not unfamiliar with white clay. It is actually a kind of bentonite with a relatively fine texture. It is often used in firing ceramics and its color is white or bluish white.
This is also a commonly used sealing material in tombs. After absorbing water for a long time, it will become a viscous gel, and its waterproof and anti-corrosion effects are also first-class.
However, this stuff is usually filled between the bottom of the stone bed of the tomb and the rubble. It looks inconspicuous at first glance, and in a wet state it might even be mistaken for silt at the bottom of a lake. No wonder I was blind and didn't see any clues until now.
"The miners in Shimen Village built and sealed this place as a tomb. They hope that this mine cave can be a place where they can rest and die in peace forever."
Zhang Tianyi said briefly, "Look around. There should be some bark or wood filling inside. If we find some wood, it means we are close to the outer layer of the tomb. We should have a chance to find the tomb passage, or even find a way out."
I was shocked and immediately motivated, but I had never done this kind of work of digging holes and soil, let alone doing it on Zhang Tianyi's shoulders.
I was sweating while digging here, and I couldn't help asking:
"If we find the outer layer of the tomb, how far is it to get out?"
"If I'm lucky, I'll measure three or four meters. If I'm unlucky, I'll measure twenty meters."
I was stunned, thinking that he was not kidding me. We only have three to five minutes left to live, so how could we have the time to dig for so long?
I heard creaking noises everywhere becoming more and more obvious. I looked around subconsciously and felt that everything was becoming flatter. Even the blue flames seemed to be turning into some unreal pixel blocks.
Clinging to the wall of the mine, I suddenly felt dizzy and felt like I was split in two. One half was falling toward a plane along with the flames that were gradually compressed into blue lines, and would eventually collapse into a line without width and thickness; the other half was still mechanically swinging the iron pipe, with the white clay powder falling all over my shoulders.
Zhang Tianyi patted my leg lightly, signaling me to speed up.
I came back to my senses abruptly, still somewhat out of control: "What is this?"
"The size of the tomb chamber is almost consistent with the border of the quarrying map." Zhang Tianyi said, "We are now stuck at the very edge of the painting and may return to the image at any time."
I felt a chill on my back. “How long will it take for this thing to become completely flat?”
"I don't know." Zhang Tianyi smiled, "But I know what will happen if I don't get out in time."
He didn't even need to say that! My mouth suddenly felt bitter and I immediately thought of those strange "half-covered" heads in the sea of fire.
As expected, he was willing to take on the challenge and supervised my progress like a human scaffold. He introduced me, "These were the last group of outsiders who attempted to mine. They looted Shimen Village and took over. But when they climbed out of the quarry, everything had completely fallen to the ground."
I felt a chill as I heard it, and the picture came to my mind: a group of people excited about escaping were poking their heads out of the tomb, but the surrounding passages and the entire mine tomb were instantly closed and flattened, turning into a piece of withered old paper.
At that moment, only the upper half of their faces that were sticking out from the ground were cut off by the invisible line, like a knife cutting into butter.
When the quarrying picture was unfolded again after an unknown amount of time, the heads fell back into the dark mine. Only half of the faces were left, and the rest of the parts trapped in the picture had turned into messy lines, sticking and hanging like hair.
"What are those mandrills?" I asked, my hands still moving, but I suddenly felt a little uneasy. "Are they transformed from the miners who were trapped in the mine before? How are they different from the yellow rash people? Compared with these half-covered faces, are they just choosing to live in the painting because they didn't escape? What are the gutless miners to this giant painting?"
Zhang Tianyi was silent for a moment after hearing this. Just when I thought he would not answer me, he said seriously:
"If you regard the Prophet as a strange creature, then as you can see, after it could no longer maintain its normal feeding function, it has been trying to transform other predatory organs."
"But its diet is too narrow. In the past, prophets would only prey on targets that were deeply polluted by ghost stories, and they had extremely high requirements for the purity of their targets, just like a phoenix that feeds on morning dew and only roosts on phoenix trees. Now that it is in the terror of dying, it will be forced to drink rotten water and swallow gravel, transforming different organs to digest these foods that it could not absorb originally. It also needs new organs to centrally clean the parts that it cannot digest.
What you see are its organs. These can be considered as the failed attempts and lesions it has made. You can also see that there are food residues everywhere because it chose to swallow stones, but found that it still couldn't survive. "
At this point, I asked him to stop for a moment and found that there were many things I needed to think about first.
Because I suddenly realized something very sad:
"First, Taizi and the other pseudo-people were infected by the plague because the prophet could not control the spread of his own corruption. Second, the dripping water on my body is because the digestive organs wrapped around me are rotting and dripping. This is the common inference of the goddess and I, it should be correct, right?"
"Yes, but there is still a key missing."
Zhang Tianyi said silently, "You should have discovered the problem. Water is also dripping from the fake people, which means that the prophet also tried to eat the fake people. It's just that the digestive organs have been rotting, so the swallowing has not been completed."
"When stray cats and dogs are malnourished, they will bite and eat their newborn puppies. This is what the prophet is doing."
"It's not that the restrictions on the pseudo-people's cognition were suddenly relaxed because of the Prophet's weakness, but because the Prophet was too weak to swallow them directly, so he had to give them a certain amount of freedom, allowing them to immerse themselves in the illusion of self-cognition and automatically walk into his open mouth."
I suddenly clenched the steel pipe in my hand and stopped, feeling a sense of foreboding in my heart.
"So, the fake people chose to cooperate with me in order to save themselves from the water dripping incident. But in fact, that was the moment when they were closest to freedom. All their subsequent actions were actually pushing themselves to death. The more the prophet told them invisibly, the more they would think it was their own discovery, and they couldn't wait to rush here to seek a way to survive."
My hands started to shake.
"——Then do you know this? When did you know this?"
I pretended to be relaxed and wanted to laugh, but my mind flashed with my boss, San Yi, and those faces like me. I asked, "Did you watch them die on purpose?"
"You, deliberately set up a plan to kill these Xu Ranxing?"
"This is another angle." Zhang Tianyi was still holding my calf steadily. I had goose bumps all over my body. I heard him continue to say softly, "If you regard the prophet as a grotesque picture, then the quarrying picture is just its appearance."
"Chaos was alive only after his seven orifices were chiseled open, but he died immediately. Stone monkeys also had to break open stone eggs before they could hatch. In Roman mythology, the god of agriculture received a prophecy that he would be killed by a child in the future, so in order to survive, he chose to stuff his child into his mouth and chew it in a panic."
“The prophet is alive. According to the information left by Shimen Village, the prophet was called Sangbudo by the miners, which means living stone.
All its meanings or rules are just to explain how to be on the verge of death and then struggle to survive. In this process, it will devour its own kind and itself at all costs, using all the methods it can to transform or deceive. "
I suddenly felt a strong sense of fear.
Maybe it was some kind of empathy, or maybe it was because those fake people had borrowed my face from the first contact, which made me have many unrealistic feelings. It might also be because I also briefly inhabited the body of a fake person, so I was able to indirectly glimpse the goddess, and even saw the fake screen created based on my memory.
In any case, the predetermined fate of the pseudo-people sounds ridiculous.
If it were me, I would be born just to become a predatory organ, and would eventually be devoured by myself, but it would still be just drinking poison to quench thirst. What a desperate situation that would be.
If this is the case, how sad it is to still briefly think of ourselves as "human beings".
"Look."
Zhang Tianyi said, I looked under the iron net and saw that the huge strange corpse was still hitting the iron net desperately. The stench did not dissipate amid the continuous and chaotic tinkling sounds.
He was right, the prophet was more than a picture of quarrying. What I saw before my eyes was the skin and flesh of the god of agriculture falling off, tearing his young off in panic and helplessness, devouring without any joy, only deeper and more helpless fear and confusion.
This is an extremely absurd picture of the god of agriculture eating his children.
"But because of this, the Prophet is, to some extent, a cage that will always exist and will never truly perish. No matter how it is deformed or polluted, it will adjust itself to survive and complete its molting."
Zhang Tian paused and said, "Like I said before, this is a cage, used to imprison things that we cannot face, resist, or witness."
"In order to prevent someone from accidentally entering and releasing prisoners from the prison, the miners in Shimen Village have been keeping a promise and always come to the quarry to patrol and remove impurities, and also escort innocent tourists away safely.
In order to obtain permission not to be killed by the Prophet, the miners became the prototypes of the first mandrills and gutless miners, and reached a kind of parasitism and symbiosis with the Prophet. They transformed into things like toothpick birds and scavengers. "
"But the prophet was too hungry and had no real reason. He couldn't even accept a long-term symbiosis. He quickly devoured the parasites that the miners had transformed into."
I touched the white clay and suddenly felt a mixture of emotions. "So, this is why the mine keeper sealed this place forever and built a solid tomb for this mine? The prophet is short-sighted. It is just a muddled rule without any way to communicate or exchange ideas."
However, the faces of Taizi and the boss flashed in my mind. As predatory organs that could be discarded at any time, they were given human nature as embellishments by the prophet, regardless of their likes and dislikes. However, the prophet himself was still deeply trapped in madness and ignorance.
"It's not just the prophets. In the past, miners and Nian people have tried many ways to coexist with ghost stories." Zhang Tianyi looked up at me and said slowly:
"But whether it was sacrifice or radical confrontation, these predecessors have been submerged in the dust, leaving no trace. The Zhang family is a gathering of all the remaining displaced people, and it may not be able to survive forever."
"What about you? Which one are you?" I looked at him, a little sad. "Do you want to kill everything related to ghost stories?"
Zhang Tian was stunned for a moment, then he sighed and smiled bitterly. "No, I am just a person who cleaned up the footprints of the pioneers. It is not accidental that miners were robbed and killed by robbers for ridiculous reasons. I was asked to hide them all."
I nodded, and the next second I suddenly asked:
"So you have seen the goddess who escaped."
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