Unfinished Ending (fix typos)
I was in a coma for about a week, and it took another week for me to regain consciousness and recognize the white ceiling of the hospital.
During this period, I had a very long and unfamiliar dream, but the story in this dream was very long, and there was a lot of information that I could not understand for the time being. Let me tell you about it later.
Let me first describe my situation when I woke up:
When I first came out of the coma, my perception of the surroundings was greatly distorted. I couldn't remember things or recognize faces.
When I saw my reflection on the window glass of my hospital bed, I would scream in shock and horror. I was completely unable to understand concepts such as "reflection", "shadow" and "mirror image". I didn't understand that the thing in the mirror was myself.
Even smarter small cats and dogs can do this, which led the doctors and nurses to believe that my long-cultivated self-awareness had collapsed.
At the same time, the "bright red" that was turned outward did not disappear out of thin air.
In the subsequent examination report, the record described that I had extensive burns and severe frostbite on my body, and almost my entire body was covered with blisters and frostbite.
The expert group discussed it intensely for a long time and concluded that with this kind of injury, my body surface was almost completely necrotic and "ripe". A large-scale outbreak of infection would cause a series of complications. It would be no exaggeration to say that there was no cure.
But on the fifth day, I was still in a deep sleep, with very weak signs, but I was not dead. The nurse who was on guard stayed up all night, and at dawn, he found a small piece of "bright red" floating on my body.
The nurse was startled and didn't dare to move. She rushed to the bedside to press the emergency bell. As a result, she saw me move unconsciously, and the floating bright red dead skin was rubbed onto the bed sheet, revealing the red and white new skin underneath that looked like fish scales.
About a day and a half later, I was freed from the oxygen mask and intubation tube, having maintained my basic human form. I began to talk nonsense, saying that I was thirsty and wanted to drink water. I also muttered that my throat hurt and wondered if my tonsils were inflamed.
This medical miracle scared the nurse so much that she thought I was a yellow-skinned demon who was painting his skin to become a human. When I was able to open my eyes, I often heard someone whispering in my fuzzy state, asking me to be quiet and not to kill people.
But this person is also a ruthless person. She was so frightened that she still insisted on her post. She just emphasized to me several times that I couldn't understand her language at the moment that I must give her a raise. Even the yellow-skinned immortal could not deduct a cent from her.
In this atmosphere of both science and superstition, I often had to stay in bed in a daze because of dizziness and body pain, and my periodic delirium and talking incoherently were very severe.
Apart from having that strange dream intermittently, sometimes I would force myself to sit up, point at my arm, and seriously ask the nurse: "Who is this? Why is he also on my hospital bed?" It seemed that I had difficulty identifying my own limbs.
Another time, when the nurse turned around to get me some liquid food, I wrapped myself in a bed sheet and was about to jump out of the window, saying that I had to leave the ground immediately and return to the rock and soil in the sky.
He also said he felt itchy all over his body and asked if they could use an ultraviolet lamp to kill all the bugs in his body, otherwise they would crawl out.
The nurse was so scared that she was trembling and asked for half a day off in the afternoon.
Finally, she came back with a clay pot of pork rib soup and asked me with tears in my eyes if I wanted to drink the soup. If I said yes, I nodded, and told her not to act like a troublemaker in the future, as this meal was a loss for her.
He even took out the shopping receipt and told me in a sad tone that this clay pot cost him a lot of money and it was also my fault.
I calmed down a little and instinctively took the receipt to help her with the bill. I told her in a hoarse voice with gestures: it was too expensive, the cooking was average, and it was too salty.
Even Fa Dian did not try to dissuade the nurse from leaving, but her comments on her cooking skills were so hurtful that the nurse calmly but angrily chose to resign.
Before leaving, she pointed at the lamp and swore, saying that if it weren't for her good character, she would have scolded me and called me a bad person.
I paid her the bill honestly in a daze, adding the cost of accompanying her. Although I couldn't speak well, I apologized sincerely and asked her to keep the jar after much persuasion. I only said that when I recovered, I would taste it well, start a new life, and clear my elder sister's wrongful accusation.
Well, I have to say now, it's still very salty.
After that, a new caregiver was hired. He was an old man with gray hair and a lively look. It was said that he used to be in charge of cremation and corpse carrying. He had a rather stubborn and bold personality.
This guy stayed with me for only three hours because I suddenly sat up stiffly in the middle of the night and asked him in confusion if he was whispering something.
The old man broke down and complained to the doctor on rounds, saying that "whispering" was used between two people, and that his ancestors came from a scholarly family and they couldn't stand an illiterate person like me.
The doctor on rounds smiled bitterly, but seeing that the old man's face was so pale with fear, he just let the old man keep his mouth shut for fear that he would scare another patient.
As a result, my reputation for going crazy spread far and wide, and coupled with my unexplained injuries, it soon became difficult to find a new caregiver to come to my house.
The hospital was quite responsible and sent someone to persuade me and asked me what my demands were.
I was speechless and shook my head, thinking that it would be best not to let anyone else get close to me for the time being.
It's not that I deliberately want to cause trouble, I really can't control these behaviors. Moreover, I vaguely feel that my loss of control may hurt others, which is really not a good thing for these ordinary people.
Apart from anything else, the fact that I couldn't distinguish between "limbs" and "people" was very confusing to me.
When I woke up in the middle of the night, I was indeed confused for a moment, wondering why the new caregiver kept muttering to himself at my bedside and why he kept talking to the motionless stranger.
From my perspective, he was whispering with the strange stranger, turning his head to look at me from time to time with extremely vicious eyes, and openly discussing how to kill me.
I sat up stiffly on the hospital bed, my nails almost digging into the new skin on my palms. I controlled myself not to do anything out of reaction and slowly asked them what they were whispering about.
But the last bit of clarity told me that the actual situation of these abnormalities must not be the case.
The next day, after the nurse left, I slept for a long time. In my sight, the weird stranger was still standing at the head of my bed, with half of his body turned and looking at me sinisterly.
I was sweating for a long time before I realized, in some slow-witted way, that it was a chair with a beige jacket draped over it. I equated "wearing clothes" with "it was a person."
The night before, the old nurse just sat in the chair to accompany me. He did not have any impossible conversation with the chair, but often glanced at me nervously from the corner of his eye. Those voices that I heard clearly all came from my own head.
This is a typical sign of schizophrenia. The next step will be to deepen the idea that someone wants to harm me, and I may even hurt others unconsciously.
But I also know that psychiatric drugs are ineffective for me, because these chaos are caused by the pollution left by the rat-moving rules, not by the secular sense of the disease. Seeking help in vain will only affect the normal order of common sense.
When I was conscious, I had to persuade the hospital not to send anyone to contact me and just leave me in the ward.
Fortunately, not long after that, the Zhang family heard the news and took over the hospital. They took me back and took care of me together with the other guys who were also seriously injured and recovering.
When I arrived at the familiar hospital and saw the familiar white ceiling, I slowly breathed a sigh of relief and fell into a deep sleep.
In fact, I was in a coma for about four or five days.
But when I opened my eyes, I found myself wrapped in a very thick and old raincoat. The smell of dust was choking and made my nose a little itchy. But at the same time, a soothing sense of security gave me a chance to breathe.
I rested alone for a while before someone came to my bed and looked at me in silence.
As I recovered, my delirium has almost disappeared and my basic cognition is no longer confused, but I still have some congenital face blindness and cannot recognize who is in front of me at once.
"Counselor," the man said softly, "Your symptoms are the most severe. When we found you, you had already left the others who were still unconscious and jumped off the foghorn alone."
I was stunned for a moment, and fragments seemed to flash through my mind, reminding me of what I had done.
Yes, we blew up the Snow Mountain Underground Palace, and the punishment for reversing the rules was stopped.
As we quickly slid down to the outside of the foghorn, we found that the boiling rain water had already filled up the cabin of the foghorn, and the guys who stayed on lookout inside had already escaped with water dripping from their bodies.
We all stood outside the transparent hull of the Fog Horn and found that the murals of human faces had all faded and turned into a kind of dust that was almost like volcanic ash, with only the general outlines still vaguely retained.
At this moment, the shock waves of the chain explosions stirred up the fog and heat waves around us, the entire foghorn quickly smashed towards the ground, the rubble above our heads kept exploding, and the entire huge snow mountain collapsed above us.
The only chance of survival was to immediately lower the zipline and collectively jump under the foghorn, using the hull to block direct impact.
But at that moment, as the eggs were consumed and entered a period of weakness and dormancy, an irresistible drowsiness swept over us, causing us all to lose consciousness and fall into a coma.
One by one, the people were hung on the traction rope with buckles, and suddenly they stopped and passed out while trying to avoid it.
But what greeted us was not the collapse of the Five Finger Mountain, but a slight buzzing sound.
The ground below cracked, and the volcanic eruption seemed to have stopped with the destruction of the underground palace, but scorching heat was still surging to the surface.
Then, the fleshy banyan tree grew rapidly in the wind, becoming taller and taller, with pale branches that looked like broken limbs rising into the air.
We all fell and hung on the banyan tree.
As my consciousness was about to disappear, an extremely resentful, dark, yet familiar face popped out from the banyan tree, came closer, and stared at me stiffly.
That was the young man who had been missing.
I once mistook a seriously injured broker for him in a cave, and afterwards, numerous things happened to me so that I had no time to care about where the young man had gone who, in my instinctive fear and enlightenment, seemed to have been "picked" away because some of his characteristics had matured.
It actually returned to the banyan tree.
As if some well-regulated growth rules began to operate, the last banyan tree sapling that was lodged in Nian Ziqing sprouted with the help of the mature Nian Ziqing and the high temperature emerging from underground.
The banyan tree grew bigger and bigger, its bizarre roots took deep root, and eventually spread to the vicinity of the collapsed platform building. With a sound that sounded almost like sucking, the metallic luster was pulled up against the roots, covering the surface of the fleshy banyan tree and began to grow synchronously.
During this process, some of the guys woke up inexplicably one after another, but after seeing the banyan tree, they fell into unknown madness and were swallowed up by coma again.
I seemed fascinated and ignored Nian Ziqing's face close to me. I just stared at this banyan tree that was finally complete for a long time, watching how this unexpected life sprouted.
In Western mythology, the World Tree supports the entire earth, but the banyan tree before us, facing the towering snow-capped mountains that are looming above us, still just stretches out its roots, which are also twisted and deeply rooted.
Suddenly, a strange scene appeared:
The banyan tree has roots extending horizontally and symmetrically above and below its bare crown, with the scorching hot earth on one side and the still cold snow-capped mountains on the other.
This makes the newly born banyan tree look like a strange-shaped funnel, or a non-standard DNA helix structure with a bulging midsection.
Then, the town's surface began to pump out boiling groundwater due to high pressure. In the yellow, swirling groundwater, the edge of the town was collapsing and sinking, and the depression in the middle turned dark red. Although the active volcano did not erupt, several thin streams of magma were still squeezed out from the cracks in the ground.
At this moment, the town turned into a huge pupil.
In the center of the pupil, dark red surrounded the banyan tree. The overwhelming network of tree roots obscured the vision of this terrifying one-eyed creature.
I heard the guys around me mumbling in their sleep, as if they were about to wake up from a long movie. I seemed to be aware of something, and I felt that the unexpected blindness of this pupil was causing the "hole" to appear and disappear.
So, when the caves disappear, where will the shadows and murals go?
I turned my head, and the young man's face was still dull and resentful. It no longer had the consciousness of a human. The malice, jealousy and ambition that had been hidden in it had now all disappeared without a trace in this inhuman face.
It looked at me for a long time, then raised its head and let out a sharp cry in an extremely childish voice.
Along with the cry of the newborn, I felt a pain in my body. The layer of bright red twisted, floated, and crawled down on my skin, and fell onto the bare, pale banyan tree.
With a crackling sound, like another heavy rain, countless bright red leaves fell from us and hit the banyan tree, like one extremely bizarre, terrifying yet vibrant flower blooming after another.
I touched my arm in a trance and found that there was still some bright red left on it, but it would not move. It was more like some kind of prank paint, as if someone just played a joke and painted a bold and shocking picture of hell on us.
Then, at that moment, I accidentally looked towards the small building on the platform.
Among the rubble, I saw a rattan box. It seemed to have fallen out of the wall. It was very similar to the box that originally contained the county annals, but it was larger and more tender.
I heard the helicopter, too, and the Zhangs’ second wave of rescue workers arriving, shouting in shock as they moved through the banyan tree’s branches.
Someone shouted from behind: "Advisor, what are you doing! Don't move!"
However, the remaining magma was also slowly advancing by then. The guys around were all unconscious, and it was too late.
I took a deep breath, grabbed the traction rope and jumped down to the platform building.
It seemed that at the moment I grabbed the box, the groundwater erupted again, and I accidentally lost my footing and was swept into it. In the chaos, I only had time to throw the box up high before I was swept away by the turbulence and separated from the rescue team. When I woke up later, I was alone in an unfamiliar hospital.
The memory of the following part was very confusing and vague, and I couldn’t explain it clearly to the person who came to my bedside.
"Where's the box?"
I asked, “Did I really get it?”
The visitor smiled bitterly: "Yes, but that person took it away during the chaos. Disciple, you may not understand why I cooperate with him. He has helped us a lot like you and has experienced some things.
But a few years ago, we suffered a terrible betrayal, and we were separated and went our separate ways. I have no evidence of what he did or whether he was involved in the betrayal. But since then, he has kept his mouth shut, and we can no longer trust him."
"Zhang Tianyi?" I asked.
Xu You nodded.
I let out a breath, slowly lay down, and thought about that long and irrelevant dream again.
"Xu You, I want to rest quietly for two days. Then, I have a dream that may have no basis to tell you."
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