Viviparity [Rule 2]
The fog and the long night dispersed.
Those countless silent, dark figures were now clearly standing there hunched over, with their heads lowered and their lips moving silently, as if they were muttering to themselves.
But the sound was completely swallowed up.
Only some extremely terrifying light forced all of us to look up, and we saw a huge, round, milky white disk appearing above us.
It was too big, too bright, and the milky white light was squirming and crowding in the huge pit.
Clearly enough, you can see its hazy, thorny edges, curving like gelatin.
Last time, my mind kept telling me, this is the moon, this is the moon, this is the moon.
But at this moment, in this moon mirror, there are countless pale and faded deformed human bodies wailing silently, crowding and melting, with their recurved facial bones and muscles sticking to each other. In the crowd, drops of "color" are squeezed, dripping from top to bottom along with abundant amniotic fluid.
The fishy, yellow and red slurry kept dripping and covering our heads and faces, and soon solidified in the wind, turning into rusty mud.
This is the gentle gaze from the pit mother, which never stops. This is not the moon, but its warm womb, its moist and tender white eye.
A tunnel, no, an umbilical cord, also covered in mud, was hanging down from above, hanging down, hanging down, visibly and invisibly passing through us, connecting our abdomens until it connected to the tunnel entrance in the camp.
Climbing up to escape or leaping into the abyss of the tunnel, they all lead to the same result, the same eternal womb. The infinite Möbius strip is thus completed, connecting the beginning and the end forever.
We, who have been dripping with the colors of those inferior and deformed fetuses and the amniotic fluid, have therefore appeared with our facial features filled with mud and constantly cracking.
For a moment, a voice kept questioning me frantically, how could a "human" lower his head and stay rational to start a vote in such extreme madness?
I thought that on that night eight years ago, those guys were unwilling to make a sound, but now I realize that in this horrible moonlight, the delirium and fear were boundless and they were unable to move at all.
So who made the choices for everyone during these nights I was unconscious?
Cold sweat kept oozing from my forehead, and the cold and sad answer made my vision go dark.
I heard a long sigh behind me.
The voice of the shopkeeper Yan Er was behind him, whispering in a familiar yet unfamiliar voice: "Advisor, if you can make it to the next night, can you figure out all the rules?"
His voice was calmer and kinder than ever before, even a little gentle, so gentle that he sounded like someone I didn't know at all.
In the narrow perspective that was completely confined by the sleeping bag, I saw that Yan Er's face had changed shape at some point. The cheekbones and facial bones of that face were slightly elongated, like a dog or a mouse, about to tear through the facial skin and push out.
"Choose me first, I'm special." He laughed easily, a very happy and relieved smile, which was extremely scary among his distorted features. "If you don't want to vote tomorrow, forget it, just solve more puzzles."
I was shaking all over.
Like a bolt of lightning, it dawned on me that I had been making the same fatal mistake.
Along with this fatal mistake, what flooded into my mind madly was a constant stream of enlightenment and despair.
Just like when I was facing the sixth grade of high school, due to my arrogant and stereotyped cognitive errors, the facts finally told me that it was "her" and not "him".
I was wrong this time too.
At that time, how did Xu You introduce me to this stranger who seemed to have a higher status than him and had been stationed in the pit?
Xu You pointed at the wrinkled face in the camera, which looked intimidating without even getting angry, and said in an unnatural but familiar voice:
"My surname is Yan, and I'm the owner of the second branch of the Yan family."
Xu You didn't lie.
I heard it wrong.
Shopkeeper Yan Er, no, Shopkeeper Yan Er, Yan Tou'er, as the surviving deformed monster that had always appeared in my deduction, was right in front of me, trapped in the pit camp forever and unable to leave, forced to watch Xu You leave in silence and welcome our arrival.
He was forgotten by all his companions who had fought side by side with him, but because of the power of the Mud Demon, he, as a stranger, was naturally regarded as a companion by everyone. He became "Yan Er" again and watched new companions constantly fall into the desperate situation of the pit.
Under the indifferent gaze of the mother in the pit, as an incomplete dead fetus, he has no "organs" to tell the truth and can only keep making hints.
So, when he knew that Xu You's team brought back an inexplicable "young master of the Zhang family", he regarded me as a demon that had obscured everyone's consciousness. Therefore, he immediately contacted the convoy, and cautiously examined me and tested me in the camera, deliberately angering me.
That's why he lost his composure when he saw me pretending to eat the soil from the pit.
So, he deliberately tampered with the equipment provided by everyone, creating a "90% new" flaw to help identify the evil spirit in the mud, and immediately hinted all this information to me.
So, he reminded us who were still climbing in the tunnel that the person who fell down was a living person, and cooperated with Wild Cat to move me away.
He said that his ability was to temporarily isolate people. Wildcat believed him at first, and later I believed him too.
But the captain told me that super powers do not exist.
Yan Er was able to move me because, as a dead fetus eliminated due to deformation, he could move around in the amniotic fluid and the fetal uterus just like those ghosts.
So, after going down to the ground, before Zhou Tingmao's change, he was the first person to have a drastic change. He lost control in front of us, scratching his face and collapsing. At that time, I naively thought that he was just panicking.
So, he provided me with the recording from eight years ago and guided me to find the contact note and metal fragments left by the team leader in the female corpse. He guided me to find and decipher the name registration form hidden in the booklet.
So, he kept saying "tape" naturally. He said it so many times that I was so overwhelmed by all kinds of information that I actually forgot that what Zhou Tingmao left for me in my grocery store was clearly a "videotape".
He transcribed the recordings and I listened to them. I explained the occasional doubts I had by myself: maybe it was a slip of the tongue, or maybe it was inconvenient to carry too many players when I went to the field, so I had to transcribe it into a recording. Anyway, it was enough to get most of the information.
I, who consider myself to be very smart, did not realize that during this process, the visual information that could have been obtained from the videotape disappeared.
This is a scene he absolutely cannot let us see directly.
If what we saw at the beginning was such a horrific scene as the one at the end, most of us would have collapsed in despair under the huge impact.
He also couldn't let me see that Yan Tou'er eight years ago had the same face as the current Yan Er, the shopkeeper.
All the desperate information must pass through a threshold from him to me.
If I hadn't collapsed and become distorted, the information would have been filtered a second time while I was in the painful process of bleeding and unconsciousness, and only then could it be given to my companions around me bit by bit.
He could only count on this kind of tacit understanding without reason.
"Yan Er..." I said with difficulty, "No. Let me think about it for a few more minutes. Don't vote."
Just think of it as, save me.
Yan Er sighed deeply again, his hands trembling a little, and laughed miserably. He gently touched my hair.
"I was lucky last time. It was full and started to conceive. In the end, I was only half dead, half human and half ghost. I don't know how lucky I will be this time... I'm quite scared."
"The purpose of voting is to find fetuses that it deems unqualified. Combined with the rules you have summarized, we can assume that the fetus is protected by a "family", while the "homeless" who is alone is not."
He said: "The rules we risked our lives to make are like this now, but why do we have to have a family? I don't understand why."
"Ha, never mind."
"Hey, my dear mother above my head. Buy one get one free for you, dead fetus: Yan Mo, Zhou Tingmao." He said briefly.
“Boom.”
The mother's gaze above suddenly fell.
In the distance, a sharp wail sounded. At the exact same moment, Yan Mo melted.
As a staunch guard to protect the fetus, the mother captures and eliminates the wall rats that steal nutrients.
The terrifying light disappeared, and the irresistible drowsiness that I had experienced once before came over me.
With the sound of falling to the ground one after another, all the qualified "fetuses" fell asleep and entered this Christmas Eve.
The childhood that was artificially covered with a layer of gentleness came to an end, and the horrific pain of childbirth was about to come.
In the sweet and peaceful sleep, my tears suddenly flowed out.
The warm, fishy yellow amniotic fluid drowned us.
Then, with the pain and contraction, the four sides of the pit began to shrink. I felt a pain in my abdomen, and the umbilical cord connecting us rushed towards me.
Both unreal and real, I felt a kind of fullness coming from all directions, and I returned to the tunnel that trapped me.
Up or down, just like I felt at the beginning, nothing.
At this moment, my mind couldn't help but recall a passage I had once seen.
A writer once said that a person walking on a plain suddenly encounters a wall. The wall is infinitely high, infinitely deep, infinitely far to the left, and infinitely far to the right. What is this wall?
It's death.
At this moment, I finally realized in despair that, yes, this is death.
As an unborn fetus waiting to be delivered, I must wait once again in death, waiting for the passage of time that does not exist.
I prayed more devoutly than ever before to all the unknown existences, praying that during the day and night after Christmas Eve, we could still survive in the pit, even if we were truly distorted and eliminated as a monster in the mud.
Not to survive, not to make it to the final birth, not to end this nightmare.
I took a deep breath and reached out my hand towards the wet wall in front of me.
In the extremely slimy wall, everything else melted and was swallowed up, leaving only some metal fragments that had not been digested.
They were embedded in the mud of the wall, just as we had found them in the tunnel.
The sleeping bag that was restraining me had disappeared. I reached behind me again and, as expected, I found the backpack I had at the beginning.
Come on. I said to myself, don't forget. I took out the earphones from my backpack and tapped them lightly.
I know that at the other end of the Möbius strip, I, who am also trapped and nervous in an unfamiliar environment, will definitely be able to hear this hint at some point and cooperate with me to restart this gestation game.
"High Six, Wildcat, listen to me."
The team channel was filled with the sound of electricity.
I calmed myself down and sorted out my thoughts calmly.
"I don't know if we are lucky enough, if this is the first cycle of childbirth. I also don't know if we will become blank slate again and forget everything we have witnessed."
"I need your help to help me gamble."
There was a light tap in the earphone, and Gao Liu's cold voice answered me calmly:
"When do I jump?"
I forced a smile. "If you guess wrong and it doesn't loop, you'll fall to your death."
"Um."
"So..." I rubbed my face hard, "Gao Liu is different from the rest of us. She has the ability to heal herself. I guess that's why she was able to see the scene of us drowning in the amniotic fluid at the 'camp'."
"Because during the process of the mother's reshaping and nurturing us, Gao Liu can resist some of the damage to us through self-healing."
"Gao Liu, I will tell you all the information I have thought of and speculated. From now on, you will become my information storage. If you remember anything later, you can tell me. Do you understand what I mean?"
"Well, accumulate information and buy time."
"Yes...yes. Sorry, I'm too nervous. I have too much nonsense to talk about now..."
I lost my voice for a few seconds, probably because I couldn't control it, and then I continued:
"Wildcat, Gao Liu's recovery ability has a huge flaw, you know that. Once she has a disability such as a broken limb, her ability will be shut down, and the accumulation of information in our loop will be shut down forever."
"...As her corresponding "family" and guardian according to the rules of the pit, you must protect her at all costs. Including now, watching her die."
"I have figured out Yan Mo's last question, why he needs a family."
"Because, regardless of human arrogance, why must the conception and birth of a "fetus" be viviparous?"
"We should be something like a raw egg. The one being protected is the egg yolk inside. And the corresponding family member is her egg shell and egg white, providing her with nutrients and protection. The closer the blood relationship, the less loss of nutrition will be in transmission."
"So you can only choose one, no more and no less."
"So every day, there is always one person who dies. That is actually the nutrients that the mother naturally thinks must be absorbed and eliminated after completing the fetal recognition. The one who executes the command and kills this person is the family member who paired with him the night before."
"So, no matter where they are or when they are, they are completely defenseless."
"Wildcat, Gao Liu. The fetus selected will definitely be the healthiest and strongest one, with the closest blood relatives to provide nutrients and protection. The lucky one who can survive this time, I am sure it must be Gao Liu who can maintain the most perfect condition through self-healing."
"So, Gao Liu must choose to die, and die before successfully giving birth, forcing the cycle of pregnancy to continue. In this way, we will have a chance to think about whether there are other ways for the rest of us to survive."
Then, without pausing, I began to review all my findings in an almost grim manner, talking non-stop, with a dry mouth and a dizzy head.
Wildcat remained silent in the headset. After a while, he asked with some difficulty:
"So, if I just give up and don't jump, my sister might be able to be safely delivered and leave in a little while. And as her mud ghost, I can also be her monster and accompany her out, right?"
"yes."
"If the bet went wrong, maybe there wouldn't be another cycle, and my sister would have died right after jumping off, right?"
"yes."
I laughed. "So I choose to tell you the truth. I have always been such a bad person. I don't like feudal dregs, but I like moral kidnapping. I am unwilling to accept it."
"Well, see you later, Advisor."
Gao Liu said lightly, and she laughed coldly in the headphones.
"Brother, I'm jumping, you better watch me carefully."
Above my head, at an unknown location, there was a movement of light and shadow, and a tall and thin figure, without any protective equipment, jumped down without hesitation.
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Rule 2, see the words in this chapter.
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