Chapter 15
I'm totally panicked now.
Erma held me back and said, "Sister, even if you're anxious, you still have to prepare."
When I heard Erma's words, I stopped and couldn't suppress the sadness in my heart.
"Let's get ready quickly." I said anxiously.
"It's not us who are preparing, it's you. It's easy for something to get into trouble if you go into the mountains like this." Erma said.
"But I'm really anxious now," I said.
I took Erma and Qingyun back to our hotel, picked up our backpacks, and set off. Before entering Mount Eshan, the three of us had a simple meal.
I was familiar with the road ahead, and I arrived at the orange tent where I entered that day with basically no obstacles.
"That night, I met an unclean thing here. Actually, I don't know if it was a ghost, but it felt like a corpse," I said.
"Don't worry, I'm here. Any ghosts will run away when they see me." Erma said confidently.
Erma’s confidence gave me confidence.
"Should we see what's in the tent?" I asked her.
"I'll do it," Erma said.
The three of us walked to the tent, and Erma opened it, and it was empty inside.
"That's not right. I did touch the body in the tent," I said.
"Maybe it left here," said Erma.
That's right, that thing may not be here.
We continued to walk deeper according to the signs, and using Erma's method of finding people, we soon reached the heart of Eshan.
Just then, the satellite phone in my backpack suddenly rang. I quickly took it out and answered it. The voice on the other end of the line was intermittent and sounded like Mao Jianming, but I couldn't make out what was being said.
This also confirmed Erma's method of finding people. They were indeed still alive. This was undoubtedly good news amidst the bad news.
"Stop!" Erma suddenly stopped.
She looked ahead warily. I followed her gaze but saw nothing.
Qingyun then took out a sword made of copper coins from his cloth bag. It was about thirty centimeters long. He also looked ahead vigilantly.
There must be some danger ahead, but I can't see it. However, Erma and Qingyun, as people from the Tianshi Mansion, are extremely sensitive to these things.
I could even hear my own breathing now, and within a minute, I heard footsteps in front of me.
When it appears, I think of the body I encountered that night.
Its clothes were rotten, its eyes were pale, and all the exposed skin was rotten, revealing its white bones.
But judging from its features, it can be recognized at a glance that it is Zhang Yu.
It was now walking towards us slowly, in halting steps, like a robot.
I was so scared that I couldn't move.
Erma extended her hand to Qingyun and said, "Talisman."
Qingyun immediately handed Erma five talismans.
Erma pinched a talisman between her index and middle fingers and threw it at Zhang Yu. The talisman floated towards him in the air as if it had a tracker.
The talisman landed on Zhang Yu, causing an explosion and a large hole in his chest. Then I saw Zhang Yu fall heavily to the ground.
We walked up to Zhang Yu's body and saw that all his internal organs were gone.
"I felt a very powerful evil force from him." Erma said, looking at Zhang Yu's body.
"Be careful, it seems your friend is not in danger of natural causes."
After hearing what Erma said, my heart tightened and I said, "Then let's hurry up and find them."
The situation is urgent now. I don't have time to deal with Zhang Yu's body. I'll deal with it when we return after we meet up with Mao Jianming and the others. So we continued to move forward. After walking for a long time, we saw towering ancient trees in front of us. Their roots were as thick as the trunks of ordinary trees outside the mountain.
Erma paused again, staring ahead without blinking. I followed her gaze and saw three bodies hanging from the roots of the ancient tree in front of us. They were like mummies, completely drained of moisture, their bodies shrunken like gourds hanging from a thick vine.
Erma looked up again, and I looked up too, gasping. The crowns of the towering, ancient trees were covered with hawk moths, crawling on the branches and leaves, their wings slowly fluttering.
It turns out that the locust-like ghost-faced swans I encountered that day actually came from here.
I didn't dare to breathe, for fear of disturbing them.
Erma crossed her arms, signaling us to step back.
As luck would have it, I stepped on a dry branch, and the sound of the branch breaking was very clear in the quiet forest. Then I saw a swarm of ghost-faced swans flying towards us.
What gave me goosebumps was that a bunch of ghost-faced moths also flew out from the three corpses in front of us.
The corpses wrapped around them like a cocoon.
"Run!" I said anxiously.
But no matter how fast we ran, we could not escape their pursuit. Finally, a talisman flew out of Erma's hand, and the talisman turned into a blazing fire in the air, like a wall of fire, blocking the ghost-faced moth.
"Why are there so many ghost moths here!" said Erma.
"I don't know either. I encountered them the first time I came here, but I escaped in the tent that time."
"There are too many of these things, and we have no way to eliminate them all," said Erma.
"What should we do now?" I watched the ghost moths rushing towards the wall of fire one after another, worried that the wall of fire would be destroyed by them.
"The only option now is to take a detour," said Erma.
If it weren't for her, we would have been blocked by this ghost-faced hawk moth and would have been unable to move forward.
We used the tracking pin again to determine the direction and bypass the creepy group of ghost-faced moths.
Along the way, I learned from Erma that these hawk moths hatch from corpses, and a single corpse can produce countless of them. Thinking back to the swarms of young hawk moths I'd just seen flying out of those three corpses, a chill welled up in my heart. If I were to become one of their chrysalis, I couldn't even imagine what would happen next.
We circled around for quite a while before finally getting around that area. This was already the heart of Eshan, and Mao Jianming and the others should be here.
As I was searching, I suddenly saw the body of a man in his sixties or seventies hanging from the roots of an ancient tree. The moth must have been over two meters tall, and with its wings spread, it was probably four or five meters wide. On its back was a strange, ghostly face.
I patted Erma beside me, and now I can't speak.
Seeing me staring straight ahead, she also looked forward.
At this moment, I saw the mouthparts of the ghost-faced moth inserted into the head of the corpse. The corpse moved, picked up a black brick-like object, and pressed it a few times.
Then the satellite phone in my backpack started ringing.
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