Misleading
I originally wanted to argue that this was impossible, that the surface of the water would not have a fixed outer contour out of thin air. Without the constraints of boundaries, water would flow to the lower places and would only disperse to other low-lying areas.
But for some reason, before I could say anything, I felt an uncomfortable intuition jump, and at the same time, I smelled that familiar strange smell coming from the seemingly clear stagnant water again.
Taizi's memory described this as a smell close to that of "a corpse of the same species."
He was right, it wasn't corruption, it wasn't fermentation, it wasn't some other animal that died.
Even though it didn't make sense, when I experienced it myself, my instinct told me that this was an extremely accurate warning signal coming from the deaths of a large number of my kind.
At this moment, the guy in charge of flying the helicopter suddenly took a deep breath with difficulty on the channel, as if he was adjusting his mood.
"It seems possible. Oh, I'm not saying that it will be submerged to the soles of our feet in a short time."
He said: "The valley we are in is surrounded by mountains and the ground is sunken, forming a basin."
"I was looking down from the highest point in the sky before, and this place is like... like a natural dam that has been piled up over time. And we are almost at the bottom of the dam."
"No, saying dam isn't quite accurate." He thought about it, but couldn't find the right word and was stuck.
San Yi had already answered, and asked softly, "Xuanhe?"
"Yes! Yes! The surrounding silt deposits gradually raised the riverbed, and the water level was higher than the outside ground, which actually turned it into a suspended waterway.
A suspended river more than 30 meters above the ground is not an uncommon sight—"
The guy's excited voice slowly turned into fear and confusion halfway through his words. "Then, what about these stone pillars...?"
The surroundings became even quieter, with the endless wailing of mandrills being the only background sound.
My heart sank and I slowly touched the stone pillar under my feet. The ominous premonition finally reached its peak.
"Yes, maybe we have been thinking the opposite." I said, "This valley is constantly being dug down, and the mud and soil are piling up, reinforcing, and stacking up at the valley peaks around it. Originally, the valley here might not have been so sunken."
In fact, the stone pillar is not growing continuously, but has always been very long. However, most of it was buried underground, with only a small section exposed.
The height scales of those children were not growing upwards along with the stone pillars, but on the contrary, were falling downwards as the stone pillars became exposed.
A strange and bizarre feeling of realization swept over my whole body at this moment.
So that's how it is, I shuddered and said to myself, the so-called quarry doesn't actually mean collecting anything from the stone pillars.
Quarrying refers to the excavation of the stone forest itself that is buried deep underground.
Over the past twelve years, the soil layer on the ground in the valley has been getting thinner and thinner, moving deeper into the ground, closer to the true base and source of the stone forest.
At this rate, the accumulated water may not reach our feet in just one or two nights. But if no outsiders come here for a long time, this valley will eventually become a natural reservoir or a large lake one day.
Deep in the lake, mandrills swim and weep, while the strange metallic stone forest seems like a palace that will forever sleep under the water.
At that time, all traces will be covered up, and even if people look at satellite cloud maps, they will no longer be able to find the valley after the great change in terrain. It will disappear silently from this world, along with the nightmare that once happened here.
Therefore, when the Nian family had no energy to take care of it, they did not leave any means to isolate the stone forest; and the later Zhang family did not use too many means to hide this place.
Because just wait for time and everything will disappear naturally.
...It's strange, why don't Zhang and his men who came with me on the mission know about these things?
No, or rather, I came here with the mission of leading the team, but I don’t know why.
I suddenly felt a sense of uncertainty.
What followed was a deeper and strange feeling of helplessness, as if things had gone haywire.
Even if these things were hidden in a pile of old papers and difficult to find, or were simply sealed up on purpose... now that I have taken over, the Zhang family, out of past caution, should search and check them all, and tell me everything after they are sure.
——Did I forget something?
My intuition told me that I was overlooking something very important.
The memory began to rewind, and scenes flashed one after another. The first thing that emerged was the severed limbs that fell from the drilling rig.
Wait a minute, is there something wrong with those three guys who were attacked by the mandrill?
I felt a slight sense of dislocation, as if I had been misled about something fatal.
The broken limbs held by the mandrills that jumped off the cantilever, the corpses floating on their backs in the water with hollow bellies, the bodies that had fallen into the ground and were mostly cut in half...
It seems that it was all what I thought, what I speculated, and what the guys involved told me, that those were probably done by mandrills.
But have I ever seen a mandrill actually kill anyone?
In the closest and most dangerous encounter, the mandrills attacked the guys who were climbing the pillar, but no one died;
On the helicopter ladder, my calf was nearly grabbed by a large mandrill, but after that, neither I nor my assistant were actually attacked by a mandrill;
It was not until I grabbed the mandrill's ankle that it opened its mouth in anger and tried to bite me. But after I let go, it did not take advantage of the situation to chase me, but continued to climb onto the helicopter.
Even the guy who was bitten by a mandrill on the helicopter and lost blood and energy, I didn't actually see the moment he was attacked until he leaned out to tell us what happened. I just saw him fall down in extreme weakness.
What the mandrills really did, and what I saw, was carrying and gnawing on the body parts, but this is not completely equivalent to killing.
Jackals on the grasslands love to eat carrion, and they are often seen tearing apart rotting fawns, but it is most likely that they followed a well-fed carnivore and picked up a piece of meat that was improperly stored and discarded.
In fact, the only death scene I witnessed that was completely clear was that of a giant mandrill that was killed by a bullet.
——Speaking of which, when I fell asleep, a few guys were arguing about recovering the remains of the dead.
Why?
At such a critical moment, the normal logic should be to preserve the living forces as much as possible, and then recover the remains and relics of the companions. This is a predetermined and established practice, and the Zhang family who have been with me for so long have always been accustomed to it.
What made those guys keep arguing in this scene when most people were asleep? What was the difference between those bodies?
Also, the deputy joined the discussion, and he was vehemently opposing the touring of the remains.
Why is this?
All the details seem to point to the same thing: there were problems with the victims, problems that we cannot really observe and examine.
I felt a layer of heat all over my body and my heart beat faster again. I didn't look at the ground like the guys around me, but turned my head silently to look behind me.
During the time I was asleep, in order to save fuel, the helicopter had landed on the stone pillar, occupying almost all the space on the top of the stone pillar. Others were lying crookedly on the edge, using safety ropes to secure themselves to prevent rolling off.
The helicopter's door is now wide open.
There was only one guy in charge of the cockpit. He was concentrating on recalling his experiences in aviation with his eyes closed. He had an intercom in his ear and was talking to us who were very close to him. He had completely forgotten that he had landed on a stone pillar.
Then there was the body of the companion who had died of exhaustion during the day.
I moved my stiff body, carefully retracted it, and moved towards the helicopter little by little.
I want to see the body.
Maybe everything was just my far-fetched thinking under great pressure. I said sorry in my heart. I had no intention of desecrating the victims, but my body did not stop moving at all.
I'm not sure how long this process took, but I soon broke out in a sweat and tried not to make any sound under the urgency and pressure.
We must not alarm others, especially the deputy and those quarreling guys.
Because I couldn't hear clearly in my dream, I had no idea who they were. But more memories came to my mind, and I realized that since entering the valley, I had actually been living in an information cocoon.
All the questions, casual reminders and discoveries that I thought were natural seemed to be too smooth, without any detours that led me directly to the final guess.
But during this process, most of the information was told to me by my deputy, a survivor from many years ago.
The sighting of the mandrill seemed to have been caused by a sudden warning from one of the guys, which then caught our attention. Including the photo of the mandrill gnawing on a human head, it was so blurry that we couldn't tell the time of death of the head.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that the mandrills seemed to be using laughter and ground changes to scare us and try to drive us off the stone pillars.
The malice and evil deeds that those mandrills were convicted of all came from information that was constantly provided by a few people around them.
Thinking back to the story told by the deputy at this time, it seems to constantly hint to us that it was the tragedy of that year that led to the birth of the mandrills, and it was those helpless children who became so hideous.
Then it is only natural that the mandrills, as victims of distortion and symbols of revenge for their tragic past, launch an extermination attack on the strangers who appear in the stone forest.
That story was so tragic, so tragic that it touched upon the empathy that almost all of us present were unwilling to touch again, and no one would continue to cruelly question it at this moment.
Even I was so afraid of the possible connection between that story and Pingping that I fell into a nightmare and was unable to extricate myself, but I was still too afraid to delve into it further.
Something is wrong. Something is wrong between the adjutant and those guys.
I suddenly became alert, there must be something wrong with the bodies of those guys. As long as we see them, the seemingly perfect scam will be exposed immediately.
What was it? I got a little anxious and started to think about it.
Just as I slowly retreated to the edge of the helicopter, although there was still some distance, the faint light of the wall lamp in the helicopter cabin still allowed me to vaguely see the body and his slightly open mouth.
At the same time, the shocking human head in the photo became extremely clear at this moment.
I knew something was wrong.
It was the teeth of the human head, the blurry but perfectly neat white patch. And the body in the cockpit.
Their teeth were so new that they looked as if they had never been used.
That is the characteristic of a hypocrite.
"Perfect Clothes" is indeed perfect. When did they sneak in naturally? Among the living people now, how many have been transformed into "Perfect Clothes" human skin?
What did he, no, they want to do by misleading us? To cause a life-and-death conflict between us and the mandrill?
"——Counselor, what are you looking at?"
I don't know when a voice spoke very softly in my ear.
As my heart palpitations grew stronger, my palms began to sting again. It felt like a mandrill's claws had left bloody marks on them, or like a tiny hand had written on them, leaving a warning that was extremely important to me.
The words that warned me in my dream appeared on the screen again.
Perhaps it was my restless instinct that was pretending to be my most trusted family in the dream, reminding me to wake up quickly. The screen read: "Be careful, Ranran, he is fake."
I looked up stiffly and saw my deputy smiling at me.
As if on purpose, he once again asked me the question he had asked me many times in a low voice: "Advisor, when will the group of people you are waiting for arrive?"
"...Maybe it has already arrived?"
I opened my mouth to call San Yi and the other guys, but no sound came out. The deputy hugged me intimately, turned his head to make sure that no one else was alarmed, and at the same time lowered his hand to put a black dagger against my throat.
His hands were so steady that I had no doubt my windpipe would be cut before I could make a sound.
"Hush," he said, his overly young and handsome face almost demonic, "I'm really not good at lying, please don't expose me. It's very embarrassing."
On the black dagger, one could easily see some juice and bark powder on it, as if it had been used not long ago.
This trace blatantly reminded me that the secret code left by the previous hide-and-seek organization, the message that they were hiding in the dark and not willing to meet for the time being, came from the owner of this dagger.
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