The Sorrow of Plus Two (Two in One)
Forget, what forget. How could there be a group of people who were all forced to lose their memory by the prophet because they were trying to find out the truth? This is too ridiculous.
When I met the boss's vaguely hostile gaze, my scalp went numb.
Without thinking, he said seriously: "Yes, I am here to guide you. Brothers, just be patient and listen to Dad's instructions."
San Yi obviously gave me a gloomy look, as if he was sneering.
I knew this guy was a ruthless person, so I couldn't give him a chance to find fault with me. I immediately changed the subject and asked the boss what the whole thing was. He shamelessly said that I was short of oxygen and my brain was not working properly, so I gave him a chance to repeat it.
The boss looked at me, and when he saw that I was testing him, his face twitched.
But he still said patiently: "First into the stone forest."
I was almost carried away by a group of guys, and I had to be careful to avoid the dense iron chains. It felt quite funny, as if I was forced to wear a yellow robe, but I was quite amused.
I don't know how the situation has become so weird. Now a group of fake people are forcing me to be the boss of Mi Zang. If I refuse, I will probably be killed.
I've heard of kidnapping, but I've never heard of kidnapping one's ancestors.
I couldn't help but feel nauseous, so I turned around and asked the boss, "If I slap San Yi twice now, what will the boss say?"
Sanyi was still holding my collar. He looked at me speechlessly and bit his back teeth implicitly.
"You can do whatever you want, as long as you don't give up." The boss was stunned, then smiled happily, "All the minions here are yours now. I have no right to control how you deal with my minions."
I let out a sigh and became even more confused.
As the chains were being removed, the group of people were so gentle that it was scary. They first pinched the small bells on the chains one by one, and then carefully passed me over like a courier box. It took us some time to get to the center of the stone pillars, and when they put me down, the guy who was responsible for carrying me breathed a sigh of relief without disguising it.
I was infected by their caution and inevitably became a little nervous. Looking around, I saw that everything was dark blue, which made me dizzy.
After a while I whispered, "Can I tell you now?"
What I want to point out here is that because we were in the water the whole time and wore oxygen masks, it was actually quite difficult for us to speak and we were not that free and relaxed.
It is just a special mask, which includes a spare oxygen tube with valve control, two emergency nasogastric tubes, a waterproof intercom hanging on the ear root, a transmitter, a mouth-bite respirator hanging at the philtrum and a one-way air pressure bag that can drain water out. It can be adjusted according to the needs in light diving and heavy diving.
This thing is quite cumbersome. It is more like a closeable aviation helmet than a mask.
However, considering the unpredictable situation underwater, it is difficult to communicate and warn in time with sign language alone, so this modification was a last resort. It was so heavy that my neck was almost broken.
When I lowered the volume, it was difficult for people around me to hear me. Sanyi said sinisterly, "What are you mumbling about?" It seemed that he was very dissatisfied with my suggestion of slapping me in the face.
I have rarely seen such a petty and vengeful guy. All the glorious image he had built up with me was immediately marked with the word "bad".
"Okay, why are you bickering again?" The boss was a little annoyed and asked the waiter to physically separate us and told me to be quiet for five minutes. "Didn't you ask me to explain?"
I loved hearing this, so I made a zipper-like motion with my mouth.
After calming down, everyone adjusted their postures and controlled their movements, and a sense of oppression ensued all around.
I was just wondering at the sudden silence when I heard a very faint sound, as if a bell rang somewhere.
The sound of the little bell was very clear and could definitely not be mistaken for any other noise. Just one ding-dong sound made the hairs all over my body stand on end.
Holy shit, there's something here.
Although it was difficult to detect the tiny ripples of the water when in the water, after the bells rang one by one, I vaguely felt as if something was floating over and accidentally scratched the plectrum of the bell, the outline of which was completely irregular.
The sound of bells kept ringing in my ears, sometimes far away and sometimes close, making me feel creepy. Then came the familiar sound of chopsticks breaking, and finally the faint smell of death.
My chest felt tight and I almost vomited blood, but I also knew that I couldn't react at this time and I almost bit off my tongue.
I don't know how long it was before the dinging sound stopped. We still didn't dare to breathe. After a long time, I felt the hand that was pressing on my shoulder relax its strength.
"...left?" I closed my mouth and made a wave gesture with my fingers.
He took his hand away and said angrily, "Boss, he has too many problems. Is this possible? I can't stay with him for even a minute."
I was too lazy to pay attention to Sanyi and just yelled at my boss to hurry up.
The boss didn't know whether to laugh or cry, but said that it was an emergency act to avoid that thing. Sanyi was the only one who knew the cause and consequence of everything that happened next. He was also the only one who said that there would be no accidents or failures halfway. They would all withdraw and make room for us to communicate properly.
I was stunned: "You can't listen?"
The boss shook his head and patted my shoulder. This young man, who had changed my attitude several times in a short period of time since we met, pointed to his head and smiled with some regret, "I'm afraid I will become ignorant again."
Maybe it was because he acted too normal and vividly. I had gradually forgotten his identity, but after hearing what he said, I felt a chill again.
They set off as soon as they said they would, and immediately surfaced. This time, without my burden, it was much easier for them to move between the chains and bells.
In an instant, only Sanyi and I, two people who were at odds with each other, were left in the depths of the stone forest.
I felt a little embarrassed for no reason, but the stone pillars were covered with sharp edges and there was nowhere to hide, so I could only grit my teeth and watch him.
San Yi hesitated for a moment and said to me, "Do you feel that there is something ambiguous or wrong with what the boss said?"
I was startled, and then I heard him say, "It's normal to feel strange. Because now no one can figure out what's going on. In your words, it's like sending a misleading message to hide the tree in the forest."
His tone sounded familiar to me again.
I stopped arguing and got serious. I didn't want to keep guessing what was true and what was false, so I asked him directly, "What was that thing just now?"
"A huge corpse. The twitching sound you hear is partly the bones in its body breaking loose, and partly the rock walls around it are cracking slightly after being hit by it. What you smell is its rotting."
"Where are the Zhang family members?"
"According to your original plan, you should wait outside the stone forest. It is best not for them to come in unless it is absolutely necessary. Otherwise, it will only promote the changes here and make the situation worse."
"Are you Zhang Tianyi?"
"I don't know. Seeing how displeased you are, he probably isn't your brother."
"——Am I Xu Ranxing?"
San Yi suddenly stopped talking.
This series of rapid questions and answers made me feel a little breathless, and the sudden pause gave me a sudden illusion of suffocation.
After a stalemate of more than ten seconds, he raised his eyes and looked at me solemnly:
"I don't know. Now no one can tell clearly where Xu Ranxing is hiding among us. But this is a good thing. No matter what our position is, we hope that Xu Ranxing will not be found."
"In fact, we suspect that the boss was targeted here because his identity is so unique and distinctive among us."
We stared at each other for a long time. Maybe because my expression was too ugly, Sanyi finally made a gesture and gave in.
Next, he told me a very incredible story.
To make it easier to understand, he did not use the pronouns "you", "me", or "him" here, but described it from an absolute third-person perspective.
He said that less than three days after Xu Ranxing temporarily escaped from the underground palace, he often felt water dripping on his shoulders from somewhere.
The water was very small, and it just smudged on the clothes. At first, some people thought it was a leak or condensation from the air conditioner, and didn't take it seriously.
But as everyone got ready to set off for Stone Forest, the water accumulation became more and more serious. Sometimes Xu Ranxing's clothes would get soaked quietly and almost instantly, and even after changing his clothes, there was still a faint fishy smell lingering around.
At this time everyone felt something was wrong.
What's worse is that sometimes Xu Ranxing would suddenly feel a sharp pain and find that his arm or some part of his body was scratched by something, leaving faint white marks. In serious cases, there would be inexplicable squeezing or dragging injuries.
When asked if he had noticed anything unusual, he replied that he occasionally felt like he was falling and had landed in some warm body of water, but without any prior warning.
The Zhang family immediately became alert and asked the servants to organize the team to return to the ruins of the town. The original underground palace collapsed, and after the snow and ice melted, the underground palace ruins were full of mud, and no one could get in, but a servant immediately sent a message:
"We couldn't dig it open, but we used an air pressure gun to create a very small airway. There was a very faint rotten smell, as if something had been rotting in there for several days."
At the same time, Xu Ranxing accidentally entered the underground palace again while he was asleep.
After being discovered and awakened by the broker, Xu Ranxing's face turned extremely pale. After a long time, he said that the underground palace had undergone great changes, and the replica hospital inside no longer existed. All he could observe was a damp and quiet place.
Not only that, Xu Ranxing found Taizai's curled up terrified body in the dark.
The corpse was in great pain. Although it was curled up tightly, it still looked like it was crawling on the ground, trying to escape somewhere.
Moreover, he pressed himself to the ground with his hands in a fist shape, squeezing his chest cavity and breaking his ribs. The broken bones could be clearly seen with the naked eye.
His face was extremely hideous, with purple and swelling. After a quick search, it seemed that there was no damage or bleeding in his trachea and throat, but it looked like he had held his breath and suffocated to death.
"...Taizi is climbing the waterway?"
I felt a chill in my heart, and having experienced it myself at this point, I could intuitively relate to what had happened.
Taizi's death sounded like he thought he was crawling in the waterway, but was stuck in a small nodule due to lack of oxygen. In desperation, he compressed his body desperately, hoping to reduce its size and squeeze out of the waterway as quickly as possible, but he still suffocated to death in the end.
"That's the problem." San Yi said coldly, "Advisor, you... no, let's talk about Xu Ranxing. Xu Ranxing tried to press the lungs of the corpse and found that there was no water in Taizi's lungs. His symptoms were more like dry drowning."
I have heard of the so-called dry drowning.
This symptom has an incubation period and usually occurs mostly in children, and it will only appear about two or three days after choking on water.
I don't know much about medicine. It's just that because Pingping has always been weak, I have some basic knowledge of various aspects of common sense. I roughly know that the main cause of this symptom is strong stimulation and fright.
Simply put, excessive tension and fear cause the human throat to spasm and the glottis to close. Even if there is no water in the lungs, it is still impossible to breathe normally, which leads to suffocation and arrhythmia.
I felt cold all over, and it was a little hard to accept: "That means he was scared to death."
Taizai's neurosis and collapse are indeed very different from the fake people I have come into contact with so far.
But if what Sanyi said was not made up to deceive me, then it is very likely that Taizi had been to the bottom of the Stone Forest and witnessed something with his own eyes, and was lucky enough to escape death. Although he did not die at the time, he was in a state of fear and panic.
When he was eager to find me to solve the problem, I ran away again, and the situation was completely out of control. It was not until the symptoms broke out that he fell into the nightmare that he could not get rid of before, repeating the actions of escaping in a blurred consciousness until he suffocated and died of despair.
"At that time, Xu Ranxing couldn't tell what Taizi had been through, but the signs on his body seemed to indicate that he would also be dragged into some unknown and humid environment without any warning."
"Under this circumstance, the Zhang family seemed to have urgently taught Xu Ranxing how to swim, but I don't have any information to confirm whether he actually learned it. I only know that he experienced several unprovoked suspected falls into the water."
"It was under this threat of uncertainty that Mi Zang found the body of a fellow who had drowned for no reason."
Sanyi looked at me and said, "It was also dry drowning. The signs beforehand were exactly the same as what you experienced, with inexplicable accumulation of water and knife scratches."
I thought about it carefully, and my heart sank a little: "Will the fake people inform each other of their whereabouts in a timely manner?"
"Apart from their regular hide-and-seek get-togethers, they keep to themselves."
I understand, and I calmed down. Since the pseudo-people who play hide-and-seek rarely inform each other of their whereabouts, no one knows what Taizai had encountered before, what kind of pollution he had attracted, and why it spread to other pseudo-people and me.
The only clue, or the only place that can be confirmed to have been to, is Shilin.
Even if they are not related at all, everyone has to gather here with all their might for the sake of survival.
This deadly knife is hanging over everyone's head, which is why Mi Zang agreed to unite at all costs.
It’s not that Zhang Tianyi has great charisma, nor that Micang lacks a leader. It’s that when the time comes, everyone has no choice but to become grasshoppers tied to the same string.
But if you want to save yourself, you must at least understand the ghost stories and summarize the rules of the ghost stories. However, a fake person is destined to be unable to get close to the core of the truth of the ghost stories. This is a dead end that a fake person cannot solve, and must rely on me as an external force.
"So, the people from Mi Zang came to the Zhang family to meet with you, the consultant. In order to avoid contaminating those guys, the Zhang family evacuated the hospital beforehand."
When San Yi reached this point, he found it somewhat unbelievable.
He said that after the two parties met and talked, considering that I might quickly lose myself among a large number of fake people, the two parties agreed to first test the boundaries of information exchange in an attempt to find a safe critical value that would not cause me to get into trouble completely.
However, during this testing process, perhaps because one of the fake people was too close to Tianyi's knowledge, it caused some kind of power to confuse and erase it. Afterwards, almost everyone present had varying degrees of amnesia and confusion.
The two parties checked the surveillance footage together and found that it was also broken and missing.
Everyone could only roughly piece together the original situation and did not dare to think about or discuss the relevant information about the fake man and Tianyi in detail.
"Advisor, the safety rules that the deputy told you before entering the water were tried out by the hide-and-seek people, and the losses were extremely tragic. However, the information obtained was very limited, and it also caused the group of people in front of you to be trapped here."
I nodded, shook my head, and nodded again.
"Stop playing Tai Chi." I chuckled. "What does it have to do with me playing nesting dolls with you guys and repeatedly playing the real and fake consultant tricks with me?"
Sanyi looked at me seriously, his dead face without a trace of smile.
"That's the problem. On the day of the Zhang Family Hospital gathering, all the parties involved lost their memories. As a result, the contamination of the pseudo-people seemed to be out of control, and they had serious assimilation and synergy with each other."
My eyelids twitched, and I suddenly understood what he meant, and thought to myself, no way.
The situation went against my will, and San Yi's voice filled my ears like a devil's voice:
"Yes, after waking up from the coma, everyone had the same face, and they all felt as if they were Xu Ranxing. A few of the minor ones were fine, only their faces had changed, but some scars, birthmarks, and abilities and habits were still preserved.
But after comparing and talking with them, I found that among the twenty-nine people, there were about ten who were severely assimilated. Their body shapes, thinking patterns, speaking habits, and vague memories were almost the same as each other. They had completely turned into 'Xu Ranxing'. "
He pointed at the guys floating in the water, and at a glance, most of them looked the same in terms of body shape and weight.
"In order to avoid confusion, I, who have excellent skills and look different, was excluded. In the end, only you and the boss are left, two weaklings who are still unaware."
The more I listened, the more outrageous it seemed. I slowly opened my mouth and even stopped breathing oxygen. I almost forgot that I was still in the water.
Damn, I think I guessed what these dozen copy-and-paste Xu Ranxings would do, and I'm not surprised at all.
Sure enough, San Yi said unhappily:
"Those Xu Ranxing who had seen the surveillance and knew the source of the chaos were quite excited and discussed it. They decided to separate you and the boss and take one of them back to take charge. They kept trying to prove that I was Zhang Tianyi, but soon they all said that it was impossible for me to be Zhang Tianyi with my bad temper. I was probably just some passerby who could fight. "
This time I finally understood where his resentment towards me came from.
I shrank my neck and muttered to myself, it seems that I have done too many bad things and finally it has come back to haunt me. Since it was indeed my thinking pattern that led me to do this, it seems that it is really my fault.
Just to put it this way, the fake people are actually psoriasis. If one of them doesn't die on the spot when something happens, the rest will be in trouble.
I suddenly felt some sympathy, thinking that I was now a Mongolian doctor forced to treat stubborn skin diseases.
Now, there is only one question left.
"I got confused at the time. Why didn't you tell me and my boss earlier so we could tell who was who?"
"Because after that, the inexplicable dripping gradually disappeared."
I was caught off guard and uttered a cry of surprise, totally confused. But then, I suddenly understood.
"Based on this accident, you deduced that confusing identities might have a buffering effect? And these are vaguely similar to the companion rules you explored and summarized?"
San Yi nodded.
I couldn't help but look at him again, and I felt infinite sympathy for this comrade.
After he explained it this way, I realized that the one who suffered the most was actually him, an outsider who didn't fit in. We all became a loving family of Xu Ranxing. Some of us slacked off, some watched the fun, and some probably hid and watched.
Only he, besides working hard, gets nothing in return and has to endure the humiliation. I am afraid that I often get the look from someone and ask him why he is not Zhang Tianyi.
I said awkwardly that I understood, touched the back of my head, and my voice to him became quieter.
He didn't bother to pay attention to me and said coldly: "So the current objective situation is ridiculous. It was Xu Ranxing who impersonated all the fake people and mixed in with them. All of us were surrounded by him. If we don't solve the problem quickly, I'm afraid that in the end all the fake people will be skinned and put on by Xu Ranxing in a sense."
"Since we can't find Xu Ranxing right away, we can only consider the two most likely ancestors. If you are the consultant, he is the boss. Unfortunately, he was the one who took the lead in the exploration and is now trapped here and cannot escape.
We had no choice but to take advantage of you, the last suspicious person, being still asleep, and bring you here overnight, leaving you to figure out how to break the situation yourself. Who would have thought that your amnesia would be so severe that you even forgot the agreement with Mi Zang."
Sanyi's face darkened, and he pointed at the boss who was still facing away from us, waiting for us to finish our conversation. "Considering that he is most likely either the real Xu Ranxing, or our damn real boss who is also powerless, we can only hold our noses and try every possible way to save him."
I felt even more guilty and looked in the direction Sanyi pointed. The more I looked, the more I felt that the boss's back was just as sneaky as mine. He was a double cancer of capitalism and feudalism, an evil young master and a naughty child.
What if he is Xu Ranxing? How embarrassing it would be. Doesn't it mean that the image of "Xu Ranxing" is so sinister and immoral?
I had completely given up on the embarrassing possibility that I was the consultant.
Xu Ranxing’s image is a bit bad, so let’s not use him for the time being.
As if they sensed my gaze, a few guys turned to look at me. Although they were all wearing oxygen masks, when our eyes met, I still felt a sense of familiarity that was both terrifying and funny.
Based on my understanding of myself, most of the time, every Xu Ranxing is doubting that he is the real one, and is intentionally hiding himself, pushing the identity of "Xu Ranxing" onto others. I am just the most suspicious one at the moment. But it is precisely because everyone thinks that he is Xu Ranxing that this scene is simply impeccable.
Looking at the boss who just pretended to be a decent person and said he was afraid of knowing nothing, he was obviously secretly glancing here. Even the mask couldn't hide his wicked look of wanting to laugh but not daring to.
Seeing our eyes changing back and forth, and our glances communicating with each other as if we had a tacit understanding and were starting to act badly, Sanyi finally seemed to be unable to bear it anymore and let out a sigh of frustration.
This time I saw him in a brand new and friendly way, and I immediately shook his hand vigorously. He is our only reliable and unmistakable master.
"Brother, it doesn't matter who you are. The things that our Xu family lacks the least are chopsticks and household registration books. From today on, you will also follow my brother's surname, Zhang. His name is Tianyi, and your name is Jiaer."
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