Leave (repair)
My question came very suddenly. This is something I learned from those old-timers. It's about how surprisingly difficult it is.
After asking this question, I held my breath, feeling a little nervous for fear that he would reveal some shocking and bloody story from his past.
As soon as I finished speaking, my forehead turned red and I screamed in pain. Then I found out that Zhang Tianyi didn't buy it at all and hit me on the forehead with a soybean.
This means that he thinks I'm talking too much and causing trouble. If I continue talking nonsense, he will use the five-spice soybeans as date pits.
"Still chatting?" He cursed helplessly, "You think this corpse-scented hotpot only has red oil but no meat, right?"
I was not in the right, so I immediately shrank my neck in embarrassment, remembering that I still had half a bag of "hidden weapons" waiting to hit me, so I had to be flexible and let it go if I couldn't get any information out of him. I quickly wiped the sweat off my palms, held on to the steel pipe that had just stopped for half a minute, and continued to dig in a slightly softer corner.
I think Zhang Tianyi came prepared. He didn't just find a wall for me to find the way out. He probably knew which area would have the best chance of success. I dug for less than five or six minutes, and then I heard the hollow threaded steel pipe loosen slightly, and it made a sound like it hit some partition mechanism. At the same time, I could clearly feel that there was more gravel underneath, and the semi-colloidal soil was not so dense, which improved the efficiency a lot.
When I heard this, I was overjoyed, and a little bit unbelievable, as if pie had fallen from the sky: "We have found the way!" My hands immediately quickened their pace, and I have never felt so strong before.
Just by pulling off the loose stone skin, the imagined wooden partition did not appear, but an abnormal blue-black color became more and more obvious.
Unlike the glossy bluish-white color of the white clay, that dull color looked very familiar. My eyebrows jumped, and my heart skipped a beat and I said "no way" a few times, and my mouth began to taste bitter.
Probably because he heard me suddenly stop moving, Zhang Tianyi immediately realized that something was wrong, "What's wrong?" He moved his shoulders which were covered with gravel and dirt and looked over at me.
At first glance, Zhang Tianyi couldn't help but fall silent for a moment. He saw that deep in the wall that I had dug open, there were pieces of diamond-shaped blue-black knife edges, stacked together like fish scales, faintly visible behind the gravel.
I was shocked to see how the stone pillar had grown into the wall of the tomb. I hit it twice with a steel pipe. My palms were shaken so violently that they were almost numb, but the stone pillar didn't move at all.
I really didn't expect a roadblock to appear at this critical moment, and I haven't got Alzheimer's disease yet. In my impression, the blades that make up the stone pillars are extremely sharp but very brittle, like diamonds or diamonds, which are sharp but not tough enough, and can be knocked into powder in two hits. But now there is no stumbling at all, isn't it too much? Steel plates are no more than this.
Considering how the stone pillars grew out of it, this wall is probably filled with deformed corpses.
How can we dig a passage out when there are stone pillars and bodies buried in the wall? Aren't they trying to kill us?
Before I could consider how this thing could evolve on its own, Zhang Tianyi suddenly patted my calf and motioned for me to get down.
I thought that he must be in pain after being stepped on by me for such a long time on his shoulder, so maybe he needed to take a break. There was nothing I could do now, so I slid down in frustration.
He had fixed two engineer shovels at a slightly lower place to use as footholds. I stepped on one of them, carefully picking the cracks in the wall with my fingers, and hung on it with my face almost touching the wall.
Then Zhang Tianyi muttered, "Not good."
This is not good, I sighed, and wanted to ask this almighty clam spirit if there are any secret passages hidden. This road is blocked, the stone pillar is at least half an arm thick, it must be blocked.
But I immediately realized something was wrong. He seemed to be staring into the sea of fire.
Looking in the direction, the extremely flattened sea of fire has turned into a mixed and dirty mass of colors, just like the starry sky painted by Van Gogh, full of static vortices composed of lines, but without any magnificence, and looks very evil.
What's worse is that the heads of those miners with only half of their faces left were still intact, maintaining a certain three-dimensionality embedded in the silently burning flat sea of fire. The two were as clear and difficult to separate as oil and water.
I couldn't help but think of some human-faced moths with mimicry on their wings, and the dark dishes made with fish heads while looking up at the stars, and I suddenly felt extremely uncomfortable.
Looking at our most marginal area, we don’t know how wide the quarrying map is. According to Zhang Tianyi, the outline of the tomb built by the miners is built closely to the size of the quarrying map. Now I can be sure that there are indeed not many gaps.
The most impressive thing was the area below my feet: about half a palm’s width away from us, the flames and water had already been infinitely flattened into a painting, and only the wisps of flames were still stubbornly leaping below us, trying to burn the soles of our feet and pants. It was like an invisible boundary with a blurred border, dividing the last bit of swaying flames into two completely different expressions.
Every time the waves swayed the flames a little, once they crossed that fatal boundary line, the dancing flames were suddenly flattened into a ball of dirty blue.
I was terrified by what I saw and could not help but press even closer to the stone wall, wishing I could cut the thickness of my back muscles in half.
Zhang Tianyi's face was solemn: "It seems that we are really going to become two-dimensional paper people."
I was so anxious that I was running around in circles. When he said that, I was so amused that I cried out, "Why are you still talking nonsense at this hour?" He had already turned over and was slowly climbing up the wall, knocking on the place I had just dug with his knuckles.
I had some hope: "Is there any place that is not blocked by stone pillars?"
He shook his head and fell down against the wall again:
"I knocked and the echo was very dull. It's possible that the stone pillars were filled with concrete or molten iron. The miners' records didn't mention this. It seems that later generations reinforced it to prevent the quarry from escaping."
Since it has been reinforced and sealed twice, there is no reason to leave a hole for escape.
I understood what he meant, and my heart sank. I said in frustration, "So we're just going to stay stuck in this crack like an indestructible cockroach?"
Having said that, hanging it here is not a long-term solution, unless we can go without food and drink and don't slack off, otherwise if we are not careful, we will be flattened into the painting if it tilts to the side.
The only thing to be thankful for is that at least there are only two people trapped now, and they can still keep an eye on each other.
I couldn't help but ask, "Where did you find this Thirty-Six Stratagems to Escape from a Dilemma? It doesn't seem very reliable. Were you fooled by some bastard? Tell me, I don't blame you."
A dying man's words are good. These words were spoken from the heart, and I was a little moved. Zhang Tianyi ignored me and said softly:
"Listen."
Listen, what are you listening to? Could it be that Zhang's guys are on standby outside, and when they found out that I was hopeless, they started playing suona for me?
As long as they don't do something stupid and come in to die together, I will still be happy and appreciate it. But the mourning hall is being set up too quickly.
As I was complaining in my heart, I suddenly heard a very subtle sound. I couldn't tell what the sound was, and then I saw that the heads in the flat sea of fire seemed to be inexplicably arched up a little.
No, it's not the human head that's moving; it's something underground that's moving upwards and pushing up the floating objects on the water.
The entire quarrying map has collapsed. How come there are still things like these human heads that have not been completely transformed, which are not flattened and can move?
I was startled, and a series of thoughts flashed through my mind. Then I heard the subtle noise, mixed with a half-ding sound, and my hair stood on end.
"The iron nets are breaking one by one."
Zhang Tianyi whispered, "The thing imprisoned by the quarrying map may be coming out."
My heart sank completely. "Didn't they just say that the prophet, as a cage, would never die? Why is that giant corpse so evil?"
He smiled bitterly, "She won't die even if she has a caesarean section. Athena was born by breaking open Zeus's skull."
My face turned pale, but I still insisted a few words, saying that we are in the East and feudal superstitions must be localized. You might as well change the metaphor to the Peacock King having his back cut open.
After that, there was no thunder in the sky. It seemed that the Buddha was too generous to blame me. But I watched the cracking sound slowly rising like the groaning of evil spirits, and then saw those half-covered heads arched and moving. It was so scary that my scalp numbed. It would be better to be struck by thunder.
Zhang Tianyi calculated and kindly told me that the iron net was very dense and it would last for a while even if it broke.
I thanked him for his useless consolation, and nervously looked at the frozen sea of fire and water. Suddenly, I was stunned:
"How about you help me out again, as a favor?"
Zhang Tianyi probably rarely saw me being so polite, so he looked at me in confusion: "What?"
My eyelids were twitching, and I looked at him, a little upset and asked: "...Where did Sanyi go?"
The two looked at each other and immediately looked around.
The next second, a series of small bubbles appeared right below me, and a face that was almost blue from suffocation suddenly popped out. A person suddenly grabbed my ankle and dragged me into the water.
I was caught off guard and the water submerged my head. I struggled and only managed to hold back half a breath of exhaust air. I raised my foot and kicked back, but was hit on the knee. The numbness in my leg caused me to lose my resistance.
Damn, my mind was in a mess and I cursed in my heart that this guy was so patient. If we hadn’t discovered something wrong, he wouldn’t have held it in until next year.
Then he pressed my neck tightly and pressed my head against the rough wall under the water.
At the same time, there was a movement in the water and Zhang Tianyi fell into the water silently.
I forced myself to open my eyes. The gap here was so small that there was no room for me to cross the line, whether above or below the water. The two of them collided with each other as fast as lightning, and I couldn't see what was going on.
But the water immediately became turbid, and the remaining flames rolled over the two men.
They held each other's joints and sank deep into the water, avoiding the burning green oil on the surface of the water, and took me with them like a human-shaped weight.
Fortunately, with the constraints of the quarrying map, the two could only use 30% of their skills. In order to avoid crossing the line, they had to stick to the underwater wall and stretch their limbs as flat as possible. After a few quick rounds, they staggered and floated up to breathe.
I was completely dizzy and had to gasp for air as soon as my mouth and nose emerged from the water. I almost suffocated to death.
Sanyi's grandson was also ruthless. He almost kicked me out of the boundary. As a result, a green oil with blue flames was swept by the turbulent water and passed directly by his ear.
No one knows what will happen if these ghost things touch the human body. Sanyi didn't dare to take risks. He dodged and kept some distance from me. Then he groaned, and was hit on the ear by Zhang Tianyi, and the whole person fell out in embarrassment.
I took the opportunity to grab the engineer shovel above and climb up, so as not to become a burden and hang on it with dripping water all over my body.
The two fought again, this time without any interference, and San Yi was clearly at a disadvantage. But I don't know why he didn't give up, and continued to fight with Zhang Tianyi, as if it was a life-and-death struggle.
I was horrified, but I couldn't help, so I quickly took off my soaked shirt and wrung it out. The water, which was a little hot from the sea of fire, made me itch all over. I suspected there was some toxin in it that I didn't know about, and when I touched my back, I found a layer of shallow blisters.
Looking down again, the two people's movements could no longer be seen in the completely turbid water.
I always feel that this is not right. San Yi knows that he cannot win, so why is he pestering Zhang Tianyi? Since his goal is to kill "Xu Ranxing", shouldn't he continue to try to sneak attack me, or even use me as a shield to make Zhang Tianyi afraid to act rashly?
Could it be that he was sure that Zhang Tianyi would be killed without a doubt, and felt confident that he had resolved this obstacle before coming to deal with me?
I had a bad feeling, but I was totally out of ideas.
Twisting the wet corner of my clothes, the entangled figures under the water had become very blurry, and I felt a little panicked for no reason.
No, there must be an obvious trap. What is it?
But there is nothing here, only unchanging stone walls, green oil and flames. It is unlikely to use the quarrying map to plot against Zhang Tianyi. Even a fool knows to be careful not to cross the line.
It can't be that he just wanted to drown Zhang Tianyi with water. I shook my head, thinking that it was a bit too unreasonable.
Wait a minute...water, water.
I suddenly stopped, looked down at the corner of my clothes that was still dripping with water, and an idea suddenly flashed through my mind.
In a dry environment, it is easy to find yourself dripping with water. But what about in water?
There used to be a very non-mainstream and pretentious saying that mermaids cry in the water, and only the water knows the existence of tears. This is actually true. Nowadays, if a person has a reaction to dripping water, but is always surrounded by water, it is difficult to notice that there is something wrong with him.
I was startled and immediately shouted, "Brother! Come out! The Prophet is eating you!"
There was a sudden movement underwater and someone poked his head out. I was about to be surprised when I saw that person staring at me sinisterly and then smiled.
It is three changes.
My mind buzzed, and then I saw another figure sinking into the water.
In an instant, time suddenly slowed down, and I felt a surge of electricity throughout my body. I took a deep breath, and at the moment Sanyi came out of the water to pull me up, I dived into the water from the other end.
He didn't expect to lose it, and after a slight pause he reached out to grab it. I gritted my teeth and smiled, shook out the coat that I hadn't had time to put on, and with a somersault, all the burning green oil on the water was rolled up on my body.
The blue flames immediately jumped out of my body. I grimaced in pain. A strange tingling sensation suddenly swept over me. My nose felt hot and my head felt dizzy.
"Damn it, he's really poisonous." I don't know what my expression was, but I just pretended to be ignorant and said to him, tears streaming down my face, "Come on."
After a pause, I dived into the water to chase after him.
He also knew that I couldn't swim, so rather than come down and risk being poisoned together, he would rather wait for me to suffocate and drown. Anyone with a bit of common sense would know that this was the wisest thing to do.
My bet is that he still has brains.
There was a sudden silence below the water surface. San Yi didn't chase me. Instead, he stared coldly at my movements, as if waiting to see when I would drown.
Seeing that I continued to sink without struggling, he paused, hesitated for a moment, and then climbed up to find a way out.
I felt a little relieved, holding my last breath and diving. At this time, I found that not being able to swim was a benefit. I wanted to struggle back to the surface, but I couldn't do it. I sank to the bottom in an instant and caught up with Zhang Tianyi.
He closed his eyes tightly, but did not hold his breath. He seemed to be fighting against something, and his whole body was curled up tensely as if preparing to exert force.
I suddenly thought of Taizai who died tragically in the underground palace, and found that the two people's actions were very similar. The last trace of confusion in my mind about Taizai's condition before his death dissipated.
It turns out that the transparent water mass used by the prophet for digestion, when it is not in a severely rotten state, is how it controls the already alert prey.
The water mass in good condition is like an invisible big-bellied python. When functioning normally, it can tightly bind the wrapped human body and continuously compress the chest and abdomen. This ghostly invisible and comprehensive compression makes people feel like they are climbing in a narrow corridor but get stuck, and eventually they can only die in infinite confusion and fear of suffocation.
I didn’t know what my mood was at the moment, but I sincerely thanked Taizai, kicked my feet and grabbed Zhang Tianyi’s arm hard.
The strange poisonous flames instantly crawled along our clothes and covered Zhang Tianyi's entire body.
The dark blue flame, fueled by the huge corpses and severed limbs, showed no signs of extinguishing in the water. Instead, it exploded with a high temperature, completely igniting Zhang Tianyi.
I couldn't hold my breath any longer and choked on my saliva. A burning sensation spread throughout my body from the inside out and my ears started to tinnitus.
My vision suddenly went dark and I smiled bitterly in my heart. Is this the end? It seems like my efforts to pretend to be a hero have failed.
But at this moment, I heard a sharp sound like a child crying, and my hand slipped, and instantly something began to roll and struggle outside Zhang Tianyi's body.
…It turns out I’m still afraid of getting burned.
I was thinking vaguely, and suddenly felt a little proud, but I immediately choked on the second mouthful of water, followed by constant pain in my lungs, and suddenly I lost consciousness.
In the blur, it seemed that someone quickly dragged me out of the water, then carried me on his back and started climbing up.
I seemed to wake up once on the way, but my mind was dizzy and I didn't know what I said. The person carrying me responded twice in a low voice, and I fell asleep with peace of mind.
I slept for about half an hour, because when I woke up, I found myself surrounded by white and green powder. I seemed to be in a newly dug tunnel, being dragged out by the collar. The tunnel that went up diagonally was full of semi-gelatinous material, which felt like the flesh inside a living organism, and the temperature around was very high, causing the gelatin to be almost incomprehensibly transparent.
I looked around in shock, and it took me a while to recover.
Zhang Tianyi had just put me down and turned around to climb up alone, intending to dig another section of road ahead.
I was still in a dream, and I found that because the soil had become transparent, the surrounding rocks, impurities, and even the countless stone pillars standing in the wall were all clearly visible. Just as I guessed, the wall was full of deformed corpses that had failed to transform, frozen in the wall with hideous faces, everywhere.
It seemed that it was because of this that Zhang Tianyi determined the direction in which to dig. He bypassed the stone pillars that served as barriers and barely found a very narrow gap.
The gap is very narrow. It is probably due to the pressure of the surrounding soil and water for a long time, which caused a crack between the stone pillar and the molten iron, and then expanded under the continuous burning of the high temperature of the sea of fire.
Zhang Tian tightened the threaded tube of an engineer shovel and dug the soil on both sides in this corridor where one could barely pass by leaning sideways.
I noticed that one of his arms was almost completely rubbed, probably because it was inconvenient to drag me while crawling in the cramped space. Looking at our bodies, we were all burnt and covered with blisters and rashes, and we looked really miserable.
But the good news is that the pain and itching in my body have improved a lot probably because of numbness, and the wounds on my body have healed in disguise due to the fire, so there is no heavy bleeding.
But it was inevitable to feel dizzy and tired from time to time. I calmed myself down and looked down. I couldn't help but be surprised again.
Looking down through the transparent gel, it was as if we had climbed to the blank area outside the grid layer, and overlooking the solidified flat sea of fire was actually very strange and eye-catching. Chunks of green grease were like moss, mixed with the orange-red flames, forming the prototype of the large vortex below.
The rusty iron net in the water has been broken in half, and the scarlet broken ends look like a pair of tiny red eyes in the water.
The broken limbs had been burned almost to the bone, all broken into powder-sized gravel, and seemed to be about to fall under the iron net and sink to the bottom. The mandrills' corpses had turned black and red, and fell among the messy and dry hair, as if they were soaked in some inferior and moldy ink.
And the huge corpse, which I could only see partially because of the size difference, was, to my surprise, very strange in shape and almost exactly the same as the statue unearthed in the tent.
The difference is that the statue in the tent holds the bones of miners' children in its palms, while the limbs of this huge multi-limbed monster are empty at the ends.
Right in the belly of the monster, I saw an equally large mass of water lurking within it, with many anemone-like tentacles radiating out around the water.
The tentacles extended into the stone wall and gradually became solidified and blue-black. The sharp serrations on the tentacles became very conspicuous, just like the things growing out of the corpses, like layers of scales or knife edges.
I held my breath and suddenly realized that this was part of the Prophet's appearance.
The tentacles were surrounding it, just like the deformed corpses, spreading throughout the walls of the mine, and also entwined around the huge corpse. The barrier built by people with great effort in the entire mine did not seem to have such a great sealing effect on it, but instead became a climbing frame for it to stretch out.
The miners, with their faces half covered, were scattered on the iron net one by one, becoming the only things with actual volume in this huge painting, staring upwards with their dead white eyes.
But what disturbed me was that, although I didn't count them carefully, I felt that there seemed to be fewer heads of those miners, as if they were eaten by something.
There was also the giant corpse that had calmed down. The scales on its body that looked like barnacles or copper coins had become much less, revealing the pale flesh underneath. It seemed that it had completely lost its previous might.
"…If the prophet is a cage," I suddenly felt a chill and asked myself, "in the evolution of survival, it eats everything in the cage, including the residues that were previously inedible and indigestible. It even gives up most of its limbs and can eat itself. What will it become in the end?"
I didn't have an answer, but I felt that the ball of transparent water moved in the belly of the giant corpse, as if there was a pair of ignorant eyes looking at me greedily.
I couldn't estimate how long it would take for it to completely devour its prisoner. It was also hard to guess whether it would still be a "quarrying map" after changing its form, or whether it would still be trapped in the stone tomb in the mine.
Only the huge colorful picture below continued to collapse and fall towards the infinite plane, compressing everything into lines and pixels.
The transparent mass of water squirmed within the lines, breaking down the few faint rays of light and emitting a creepy color. The next second, its shape twisted, changed again, and disappeared completely, becoming invisible.
I couldn't hold on any longer and fell into unconsciousness again in great fear.
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com
