Yinquan Town (V)
"We're here. This is where the silver miners work." The priest stepped aside.
"Why is the secret passage of the silver mine in the church?" Liang Qing followed the priest's gaze.
Shi Xiaofeng lowered his head. The abyss was pitch black, with winds from the earth's core surging outward, weaving through the jagged rocks and making subtle noises. A battered transport vehicle hung on a cable, swaying slightly in the wind.
Faced with Liang Qing's questioning, the priest fell silent again, with a formulaic smile on his seemingly kind face.
"You took the initiative to crash into our car and led us all the way here. You talked a lot of useless nonsense, but you refused to tell us the important things..." Liang Qing scratched his chin with a smile, "This is a script only villains use."
The priest's face changed. The next second, he didn't know how Liang Qing did it. He was held upside down by his ankles, head down, and plunged straight into the abyss.
"Ah! Ah! Don't do this to me! Put me down!!"
Liang Qing looked at the priest with satisfaction as the hypocritical smile on his face disappeared. He deliberately loosened his grip slightly, and the priest's ankle slid down slightly.
The priest's screams immediately intensified, his voice hoarse. At that moment, a huge, restless noise echoed from the depths of the distant abyss—a horde of zombies had been awakened.
"The clothes you're wearing are the same as the ones you wore during the celebration ceremony when the church was first built in the town history museum. I guess you've lived for over a hundred years. Many of the zombies down there are probably your old friends or grandchildren. Do you want to say hello to them?"
"Ah! No! You have no right to do this to me!"
"I've always been curious. The zombies won't hurt you, but you're still so scared. Isn't this a classic case of a guilty conscience? You've been hiding this from us, leading us here step by step, isn't it just to get us to go down and feed them?"
The priest struggled even more violently. Liang Qing sneered, threw him into the mine cart, and pressed the button.
The tattered mine cart squeaked as it went down, and the priest screamed all the way but couldn't climb up.
Soon, the minecart sank to the bottom. From below came the priest's screams and the excited voices of the zombies.
Liang Qing waited indifferently. After a minute, she shouted, "Is he dead?"
"Not yet..." the priest's weak and dejected voice came up, "They... are climbing up along the rope."
"Get out of the way."
Liang Qing pulled out a lighter from his pocket, aimed it at the abyss and threw it in. The light from the lighter grew brighter and brighter, illuminating everything in the mine, and then burning the nearby zombies as if it had eyes.
The priest dodged, the corner of the minecart trembling. In the firelight, the three saw that the priest's clothes were torn, and his face and body were covered with deep and shallow marks dug by the zombies' long nails.
He received no real attack, nor was he transformed into a zombie.
"Is this... Lao Mu's lighter?" Shi Xiaofeng recognized the pattern on it almost immediately.
Liang Qing pressed the mine cart button and nodded.
Shi Xiaofeng's eyes lit up: "You were the one who finally moved Old Mu away?"
"It's just a matter of convenience. He can't survive, and there's nothing else I can do except let him go in a dignified manner."
Shi Xiaofeng lowered his head, his eyes slightly red: "Thank you."
As he spoke, Liang Qing pulled the priest up. The priest was so shocked that he seemed to be on his last breath.
"Tell me, I know you can't die, but if you don't confess or lie, I can play this game with you a hundred times until you go completely crazy."
Two lines of tears flowed from the priest's eyes, and he covered his eyes with his dirty hands: "Eternal life is indeed a painful punishment..."
——
In 1795, Derek, the youngest priest in town, built the first church in St. Augusta with the support of several wealthy local businessmen. He was very successful and was a priest that the whole town relied on.
The following spring, a spring accidentally exploded while working in the quarry of wealthy businessman Holway. This wasn't unusual, except that the spring revealed a vast supply of silver. Following the lead, they discovered what was then the largest silver mine in the United States. Holway instantly became the richest man in the East, and a flood of wealth poured into St. Augusta. The obscure town was renamed Silver Springs, and opportunists from around the world flocked to it, making it prosperous and bustling.
Decades passed, and Derek was now a white-haired old priest. He had witnessed countless people in his town suddenly become wealthy, and he had also witnessed the Holway family's wealth soar, eventually becoming a legend in the North American business world. He still guarded his small, shabby church and lived a simple life.
A turning point came when a group of environmentalists suddenly appeared in St. Augusta. They collected soil, air, and water samples, tracked a mysterious illness that had been quietly spreading through the town for decades, and submitted a report to the local government. The report claimed that rampant mining had severely contaminated the land with heavy metals, leading to widespread infection with an incurable pneumonia. While not contagious, the pneumonia caused rapid weight loss, coughing up blood, insomnia, and ultimately death from exhaustion.
St. Augusta was no longer controlled by a few wealthy businessmen. Over the past few decades, numerous forces had become entwined within it. Closing the silver mine and remediating the environment would inevitably affect many people's livelihoods. However, no matter how many people threatened or bribed them, the environmentalists' determination remained unwavering.
One ordinary afternoon, Derek was napping behind the curtain of the confessional when a thin young black man walked into the church.
He lowered his hat and whispered a secret to the old priest he trusted. His grandmother, who came from the South, had once been a revered witch among the serfs. Ten years of service in the Holway mines had left the young black man with a severe lung disease. As he lay dying, his grandmother performed a magical ritual on him. Afterward, he found his lungs no longer ached, his breathing was free, and he felt like he had been reborn.
Derek stared at the young man in front of him through the small hole in surprise. He was about thirty years old. Many young people in the town had never seen Holway, let alone worked for him. If what he said was true, then this young man was at least sixty years old.
"But I found that I had no desire for food, and I wouldn't feel tired even if I stayed up all night. My body seemed to have endless energy..." He said this, hugging his head in pain and sobbing softly, "Father, I don't know if you understand what I mean, but I have become a devil."
Derek calmed himself down. He casually asked a few questions about facts only an octogenarian like them would understand, and the young black man answered them fluently. Finally, perhaps guessing Derek didn't believe him, he held out his wrist and cut it right in front of Derek—only a scar, no blood. His hand already had countless scars.
"Why, why are you destroying your own body!" The priest was shocked and incoherent for the first time.
"Father...you don't understand. Eternal life is a painful punishment."
Liang Qing continued to write and draw, recording some details of what the priest said. Shi Xiaofeng stared at the priest, while Nie Yun looked at the words on the secret passage.
The priest lowered his head and remained silent for a moment, not saying anything further. The three of them exchanged glances in tacit understanding, and a terrible truth surfaced in their speculations.
"That black man was the first zombie you encountered, right? But he wasn't aggressive. Did you, or did you guys, do something later that made the zombie aggressive?"
The priest moved his mouth. He didn't expect Liang Qing to ask the key question.
Shi Xiaofeng sneered, "He's immortal and doesn't bleed, but you can bleed. This shows the two operations are different. They..." He gestured at the group of restless zombies below, "Another operation. Tell me, what kind of unscrupulous witchcraft is this?"
After verifying that the young black man was neither alive nor dead, the first thought that came to Derek's mind was not how to soothe and save his soul.
He thought of his ex-wife, who, driven by his own poverty, had been having affairs with other men in town. Twenty years earlier, she had fled Silver Spring with their daughter and had recently died of illness in a foreign land. Their daughter, meanwhile, had endured constant abuse from the men around her during her years of wandering with her. Now married, she lived in even greater hardship than he had. His daughter was about to give birth, and she needed a lot of money.
The idea took hold and became a powerful obsession. The next day, Derek dragged the young man, David, to meet the town's most powerful mine owner.
A month later, the government's nearly finalized ban was reversed. Environmentalists raged at the government's inaction, but the investigation team presented medical evidence—the young people they claimed had incurable lung disease were clearly fine. And the contaminated samples had been swapped long ago.
Derek saved Silver Springs's wealth, becoming a sought-after savior. He received a bounty from several major families, enough to allow Derek and his daughter to live a life of luxury. But just as Derek mailed the check and prepared to leave Silver Springs to reunite with his daughter, David suddenly died.
No one knew why David had died. Before the incident, David, the owner of a small mine, was smoking a cigar and counting US dollars when something suddenly sucked his blood from his bones. In the blink of an eye, he shrivelled up like a mummy, dying without even a sound.
His deputy witnessed it all and was nearly beside himself with fear. The news spread like wildfire throughout Silver Springs and even reached Derek's ears.
He had originally locked the church door with his suitcase and was about to leave by car, but upon hearing the news, his eyes widened in fear and he ran towards a certain place...
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com
