teeth
The girl's question seemed very odd to me.
Because until now, I still don’t know what these little yellow-rash people who look like mandrills but have many different details are.
If they are transformed from miners, then where does their resemblance to mandrills come from? Could it be that after transformation, the height and size of their bodies are fixed, but they still mature and age, and finally become short dwarf mandrills with adult faces?
But this conjecture still cannot avoid one question: where are the miners?
There were only six or seven yellow rash figures in the mine cart, and they had already been digested by the transparent water-like things. So where were the remaining miners hiding, and how could they continue to live and multiply until the stone forest appeared and the honeycomb-shaped exit appeared?
In the face of these fundamental logics that cannot be resolved, it seems meaningless to consider whether the little yellow rash people are still conscious while being digested. At least it is far less important and less of a priority in terms of the severity of the matter.
Her question made me feel more of an extraordinary concern and sadness.
Normally, people shouldn't have such soft emotions towards strange things in dangerous environments.
I couldn't answer her questions, but I had a lot of guesses and wanted to ask. But this time I couldn't open my mouth because I realized that some very ominous truth was about to be revealed, and it would be very cruel for both me and her.
"First of all, I want to say that I think you should have guessed the essence of the Goddess' immortality."
After thinking for a long time, the first words she said made my eyelids twitch. "I have only been a goddess for two nights. Before that, there was another consciousness active in the goddess' body. I am just a link in the relay."
"To be more precise, the goddess is not immortal, but every time the goddess becomes exhausted and dies, a new consciousness will take over and drive the body to move again.
But the environment here is too harsh. From what I have observed since arriving here, every time a newborn goddess wakes up, she will not last more than four or five days before dying from various complications or malnutrition."
These words made me break out in a cold sweat.
When Wang Yongfu and Wang Ping were discussing the discrepancy in the number of miners, I did have a similar guess, suspecting that there was something else going on with the number of goddesses, and that there was more than just one. Perhaps there was only one goddess who was pushed to the front, and the other candidates were hiding and waiting to be replaced. They were just using the same title without a name or surname.
But even in my bold guess, I never thought that the goddess was always rotating in the same body.
Why?
As if she could see my astonishment and confusion, she touched her arm as if she had a chill, seemed to shudder, and then stretched her hand out to me.
I was slightly startled, and when I looked down, I discovered that the pair of little hands that I once thought were full of calluses and very rough were actually covered with man-made scratches, some new and some old, which had formed scabs one after another.
It wasn't obvious when we were writing with gestures and talking at the time, but now, looking at it vaguely, those scratches are clearly words scraped out by fingernails, but due to the haste, the strokes are incomplete and only some of the starting points can be vaguely seen.
"I have a lot of these words on me. I think they are clues left by the previous goddesses."
"They told me... It's very strange, I don't quite understand what it means... 'Fake people? Are they teeth?' This sentence was repeated the most times."
I was stunned for a moment.
Fake person, is it teeth?
My head buzzed, and almost subconsciously I looked down at my hollow belly, then looked at her, and very rudely reached out and pressed the outside of her clothes on her belly.
It was empty when I opened my hand, no, it was sunken, and the goddess' body did not even have any organs.
A certain scene in the stone forest flashed through my mind like an electric shock. At the very beginning, I saw the pseudo-human fellow under the cantilever of the drilling rig falling on his back with his abdomen wide open, and finally floating on the surface of the accumulated water.
In that scene, the fake guy's abdomen was covered in blood, so I always thought that he died because he was attacked by a mandrill and his internal organs were eaten.
At this moment, a very strange thought came to my mind:
Is it possible that the mandrill did scratch the pseudo-human's body, causing bleeding, but underneath his torn clothes... it was originally hollow and had no internal organs?
Just like when I woke up from the mine, I could feel the pain of various injuries, but I never felt the discomfort of a hollow abdomen.
"… Pseudo-humans are the hunting organs of the prophets. They simply don't have a digestive system." I murmured, "They don't really need to eat, so the teeth in their mouths have never been used and are not worn out at all."
As the conclusion came out of my mouth, I got goosebumps all over my body, which were hard to go away. Then a horrifying thought popped up in my mind:
"In the mine, you and I, these two bodies originally belonged to pseudo-humans.
They are part of the connection that grows outside the Prophet's body, so there is no real death before it is used and falls off in a weird hunt. It is just closer to the dead leaves falling off, and new leaves will grow back on the branches to fill the gaps. "
The girl obviously didn't know what a prophet was, but she still roughly understood my confusing speech.
"So...the pseudo-human is the tooth?"
When she asked me this, I started sweating again, and I realized that the message from a certain goddess in the past was correct. The series of events that happened here may be best described by teeth.
I remembered the news I had read before, which said that some children had developmental problems during childhood, and their new teeth grew too much. After taking the film, you can see that the upper and lower gums are full of rows of teeth. Some of the proliferating teeth are even densely distributed near the eye sockets, and the whole head is covered with supernumerary teeth.
For children, when the old teeth fall out naturally, the new teeth that have been growing underneath will come out from the gums. When outsiders see the new teeth again, they will naturally mistakenly think that it is the same old tooth.
But this time, there were too many teeth that had grown long ago and were waiting to come out. It was creepy once you saw those large numbers of teeth hidden away, even approaching the eye sockets.
All I have come into contact with are fake people. Some are crazy and strange like Taizi, and some are like Laoban and Sanyi, who communicate like ordinary people and cannot be detected at all. Now, the two of us seem to have accidentally entered the body of a fake person who is almost dormant and suspended animation, and have come into contact with a different state.
But in any case, I have not seen the form of the Prophet himself.
At this moment, some abstract and terrifying shapes began to change before my eyes.
I suddenly realized that I needed the help of this child in front of me to help me break through the possible obstacles to knowledge and understanding. Because the power of the prophet always stops at the essence of the self, the pseudo-man cannot truly recognize himself. This moment may be the moment when I can get closest to the pseudo-man, be least disturbed, and most likely to draw a conclusion.
I spent some time briefly and quickly describing to her my experiences since meeting Tai Tsai, and explained the meaning of false men and prophets. She listened patiently, and her face gradually turned pale.
After a while, she took a deep breath and looked at me seriously:
"I think the structure of the Prophet might be a little strange, and I'm not sure if what I think is right."
"According to what you said, I think there are three known states of pseudo-humans:
The first is that the mimicry is infinitely close to that of a human, and in the ghost story it is contaminated by power. Perhaps in order to prevent the contamination from spreading to the prophet's body, it is abandoned and disconnected from the prophet. This is the true demise. At this time, the pseudo-human is like a scale, blocking the contamination and can fall off at any time. "
I nodded, that was the later Taiwanese.
His death was probably due to the fact that he was exposed to too much ghost story pollution during the process of hunting Xu You, and finally tracked us to the snow mountain town. The power of the moving rat was too cruel and far exceeded his tolerance. So the prophet instinctively abandoned this rotten and unusable scale.
"The second type is when approaching the target or in the process of converting the target. At this time, the pseudo-human's function is more about silently imitating and approaching the prey.
Perhaps some of them also make similar moves like peeling off human skin to cover themselves, but that is just some kind of learned helplessness, and the simulated personality of the individual chooses a radical way of expression. Most pseudo-human individuals do not have this kind of behavior, and they look no different from ordinary people. At this time, the pseudo-human is like fur, changing color, assimilating, and hiding its own abnormality. "
That is the performance of the boss and San Yi.
I gradually found her train of thought: "And now, the prophet seems to have become less active, and even the pseudo-human hunting organ in its body has gone dormant and is not functioning. It is only after the organ is so weak that it is about to die that it is supplemented with basic 'nutrients' to maintain the existence of this organ. At this time, our state is similar to the teeth that are constantly replaced in the gums. This body is the rotten gums that are never empty."
She smiled. It was the first time since we met that she smiled with relief, and she finally had some childishness.
"So I thought, great. Then we who appear and fill the pseudo-human bodies may not be real living people either."
"When a prophet or a pseudo-human comes into contact with a human, he or she might collect some personality mimicry and fill it into the pseudo-human organ for use, just like copying data.
The alternation of the Goddess's life and death may be the same. It is just that the weakness caused the operation of the previous personality to stop, resulting in the loss of the simulated personality, and she had to evoke another new personality to use. "
She said softly: "——So, you don't have to worry that Pingping is suffering here, Ranran."
My brain seemed to be struck by thunder. I was blank for a moment and stared at her in a daze.
As soon as we looked at each other, I saw a smile on the child's face that was very familiar to me.
My eyes immediately became sore and I turned my head away, afraid that she would see my tears. But that cold and scarred little hand gently held my palm and shook it as if to play tricks.
"You don't dare to ask, but I know." She whispered, and couldn't help laughing again, "The first time I saw you, I knew you were Ranran. But you didn't dare to let me know, because you were afraid that if something happened to you, it would make me too sad, right?"
My throat was choked and I couldn't speak at all.
But she became serious and looked me in the eyes seriously.
"In the two days since I arrived, I have witnessed the entire process of quarrying."
"Ran Ran, let's just call you that for now, even though we are probably just copied and simulated reflections of some kind of personality.
The miners are present during the day, and they are mining and looking for traces of some kind of water flow."
"The mountain people were very strict in their supervision, so I had no actual communication with the miners. I was just driven by instinct, knowing that I had to survive and try my best to ensure the survival of the miners. When the evening came and the mountain people evacuated and closed the wooden door, I was extremely tired and urgently needed to rest. After falling asleep, I didn't have time to talk to the miners."
"But I can be sure of one thing. The mandrills you mentioned, or the little yellow-rash people on the mine carts, were not transformed from miners."
I calmed down and became serious:
"So where are the miners?"
“Maybe it’s right here.”
She said, looking up, raising her hand high and pointing at the walls of the mine that were still smooth and flawless above and around her.
I seemed to sense something and turned around to look around.
She... No, let's just call her Pingping for now. Xu Ping gave me an unprecedented inspiration.
After waking up in the mine, I always thought that the time point here might be in the past, or maybe it was just some kind of memory that was stored and could be looked through.
But Pingping's conjecture reminded me that if "I" was just a simulation of Xu Ranxing, then the me who encountered the invisible giant corpse might not be really dead. The "being eaten" he encountered might be that I was taken away by the giant corpse.
But the moment I was copied and taken away, I lost contact with Xu Ranxing, and my memory began to turn to the starting point, but I mistook it for a death transfer.
My boss, Sanyi, and Xu Ranxing and I were in the same area, maybe not at different times.
"I was thinking, maybe pseudo-humans are just a basic structure," Pingping said. "Just like hematopoietic stem cells can differentiate into different organs to grow, pseudo-humans can have functional expressions at different stages or states."
"So, they should or may not all be humanoid, right? When a certain function no longer requires them to express themselves as human bodies, will they be like the transparent water stain in the mine cart, instantly digesting the food, losing the temporary body shape given by the food, and returning to their original basic appearance?"
"The false person's knowledge and understanding obstacles may be essentially like the limbs not being aware that they are limbs, and the heart not being aware that it is a heart. But some special individuals may take on the role of the brain, be able to touch the truth in a special way, realize that they are the brain, and then fall into the confusion and doubt of their own existence."
The communication with Pingping was incredibly smooth. Many obscure obstacles that were difficult to express clearly disappeared. I think this might be the natural and inseparable tacit understanding between my sister and I. It was a long-lost wonderful feeling.
As we exchanged words, for the first time I felt a pure joy in the face of increasingly bizarre and terrifying answers.
"The stone forest and the miners may be here, and the densely packed honeycomb-like entrances and exits are also here. It's not that they disappeared, but that we can't see them. Just like a person needs to turn his arm to see his elbow, now the driving force that can "turn our arms" has temporarily disappeared because of the arrival of night."
I said, although this conclusion is somewhat shocking: "Here, what exists in this mine may be the sleeping prophet. Those people and environmental features that we suddenly can't see may still be there, but after the function of the part that connects to us stops working, we can't recognize them as the transit organs."
"Pingping, it may sound funny and scary, but maybe there are not only swaying water marks and shadows here, but it is really filled with a lot of groundwater. There may be a group of Xu Ranxing swimming around us, at least a dozen of them."
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