Chapter 51 Beginning
Xiao Liang asked: "What good stuff?"
The old man replied, "Just candy, bottled water, and some miscellaneous small toys. When he came back last time, he also brought a very beautiful singing glass box. Anyway, the village chief felt that the outside world was very exciting after that."
"It's a music box." Xiao Liang corrected him and said absentmindedly, "In that case, why doesn't the village chief go out with us?"
The old man laughed awkwardly, "We mountain people live off the mountains, and we won't do anything outside. The village chief originally hoped to attract more outsiders to come here for tourism, but we don't have any roads. So it's all gone."
As they chatted, the ox cart drove out of the village, but before they had gone far, the bumpy mountain road ahead began to surge like waves.
Xiao Liang thought he was too nervous and had hallucinations, so he blinked hard, but the mountain road suddenly rolled up like a wave.
The ox cart went faster and faster along the road, then it rushed into the air against the force of gravity.
It felt like riding a roller coaster without seat belts. Several people held on to something, afraid of falling, and staggered around and screamed.
The ox cart went around in a big circle upside down and unexpectedly returned to the entrance of Guojia Village. The road surface returned to its previous state.
Xiao Liang felt dizzy and scared, and his stomach was nauseous. He grabbed the wooden board of the ox cart tightly and leaned forward to vomit: "Ugh..."
The old man driving the cattle didn't seem to notice this abnormality, and didn't even turn his head: "You city people still get carsick?"
Xiao Liang's face turned pale, and after he finished vomiting, he began to look around: "Uncle, why... why are we back again?"
The old man was silent for a moment, then asked, "What? Didn't we just come out?"
"No, no, we've been out for quite some time." Xiao Liang's eyes widened. "Weren't you just talking to us about the village chief?"
"We did chat for a while. But wasn't that what happened just now?"
Xiao Liang was silent. It seemed that there was some kind of deviation between their cognition and that of the old man. She racked her brains but could not find any theory that could help her understand the situation.
Seeing is believing. She didn't eat any poisonous mushrooms, but she did see the road curled up. This couldn't be explained by an old man herding cattle playing tricks on them.
She had no choice but to let the old man continue driving while she started fiddling with the satellite phone, trying to call for help.
This phone that claims to be able to communicate worldwide has no signal at all here. Xiao Liang was so angry that he wanted to smash the phone, but he was afraid that he would not be able to use it after smashing it.
After the ox cart reached the position it had last visited, the mountain road in front of it suddenly rolled up like a wave again, forming a huge circle and carrying them back to the village entrance.
Several people on the ox cart began to feel dizzy and vomited uncontrollably, but because they had just vomited once, they could only vomit out some gastric juice.
The old man driving the cattle still seemed to have not noticed anything unusual: "Hey, you city people, why are you so precious?"
After Xiao Liang finished vomiting, he looked around in fear, but still didn't see anything unusual: "Uncle, why are we back again? Why can't we get out?"
The old man did not turn around, leaving them only the back of him driving the cart. After a moment of silence, he replied: "...How could that be? Didn't we just come out?"
***
After Lu Jiamu and others explored the stilt house, they began to return with the thick-leather notebook.
The return journey was different from the way they came. After changing the angle, Lu Jiamu suddenly noticed that on the outer walls of several farmhouses, there were big circles painted with some kind of black paint. Some of the paintings were quite regular, while others were crooked and inexplicably funny.
He pointed and said, "What is this?"
The little boy blinked: "I don't know, it seems like I just drew it randomly."
Lu Jiamu nodded, secretly memorized the circles, and did not ask any more questions.
After returning to the village chief's house, they found the village chief again.
Lu Jiamu asked the village chief casually, "Village chief, we walked to the abandoned stilt house in the village today. I heard that a girl from another place once lived there?"
He took the initiative and directly restricted the gender, avoiding the possibility of the village chief calling him the fool, while waiting to see whether the village chief would refute him.
The village chief was at a loss for a moment before responding: "Yes, it seems there is one..."
Lu Jiamu asked again: "When we went there today, we saw some old bandages. She seemed to be injured, and we don't know what happened to her in the end. Did she leave?"
...What happened in the end?
When no one mentioned it, the village chief found that he had never thought of such an incident. But even if someone else brought it up, he seemed to have a gap in his memory.
He recalled for a while, his eyelids twitching convulsively, before he vaguely grasped a corner of his memory: "Yes...she was injured, had a high fever, and then died."
"Really? What a pity. Such a nice girl."
Lu Jiamu noticed that the village chief's face was twitching unnaturally and quickly ended the topic.
The village chief did not object to the word "little girl", but just sighed and said: "Yes."
It seems that she is really a little girl.
The few people said goodbye to the village chief and returned to the door of the room, where they saw the security guy still sleeping soundly. They didn't want to be in the same room with him, so they didn't rush in.
The thick-covered book has been in Yu Leng's hands. Although he didn't have a deciphered copy, he kept comparing the words before and after, trying to decipher more meanings of the code through the word order.
But because this kind of communication was so covert, Yu Leng couldn't see anything after comparing for a long time. He anxiously reached out to grab his own golden hair and pulled out several strands.
"Do you think that stranger is really dead?"
Kou Man nodded: "With that amount of bleeding, it is really hard to survive in this place. And didn't the village chief say that she also had a fever?"
Lu Jiamu pinched his chin, glanced at the door, and suddenly laughed. He whispered, "If she simply died of blood loss and fever, the villagers would not have nailed the doors and windows shut with wooden boards and locked them from the outside for no reason. Unless something terrible happened to her."
"For example, everyone knew she was dead, but she came back again."
Considering that the security guy was still sleeping soundly in the room, this guess is at least half reliable.
"This is most likely the beginning. Because in that notebook, it clearly stated that they wanted to go into the mountains to explore something very dangerous.
"The lady lived in a stilt house. The last record only mentioned that the mountain was dangerous and that her companions had died, but it did not say what happened to the villagers. This shows that the village was probably still normal at the time."
This conjecture is well-founded and, combined with the current conditions, is very convincing.
It doesn’t matter who this female investigator was before or where she worked, because this happened long before the story of the village.
The story most likely begins when the female investigator escapes from the mountains, bringing some danger out of the mountains.
However, because the records about this matter in the thick leather notebook were all encrypted in code, they had no way of knowing what it was.
But once this beginning was straightened out, the situation in the village no longer seemed so nonsensical.
This initial guess is still just the tip of the iceberg and is far from enough to deduce the truth about the village, let alone satisfy the wishes of the villagers.
Lu Jiamu added: "I think there is something fishy about that black circle on the villagers' wall."
Wang Biao asked: "How do you say that?"
"I don't know either." Lu Jiamu shook his head, "But some of those circles are well-formed, while others are drawn in a mess, with the beginning and the end not connected. There must be some difference."
Wang Biao nodded, his face gloomy: "...It seems that we can only take it one step at a time. There may not be any normal people in this village, we have to be careful."
In the evening, the ox cart drove to the door of the village chief.
Xiao Liang, the photographer and the girl taking the picture all looked pale and green. They retched as they stumbled off the ox cart and ran into the yard.
The village chief, who was sitting in the corner looking up at the sky, asked in confusion, "Aren't you going to leave?"
The old man said, "We got lost and didn't get out. We came back when we saw it was getting dark."
Xiao Liang looked back at the old man with a very strange look, then stumbled to Lu Jiamu and grabbed his sleeve tightly.
Lu Jiamu immediately smiled: "What's wrong?"
Xiao Liang trembled and said in a tone that sounded like he was about to cry: "We...we can't get out at all...we are trapped..."
Lu Jiamu said, "You are lost today, so you can start again tomorrow."
Xiao Liang was about to cry, and said incoherently: "No... no... it's not that we can't get out... we are not lost at all..."
The three of them rode the old man's ox cart back and forth more than ten times. Each time they were rushed into the sky and then thrown back to the village gate.
Xiao Liang retched again.
The old man had always said before that the journey had just begun, as if he hadn't noticed anything unusual. Why did he change his words now and say that he was lost? Did he actually know everything?
Moreover, for a person who has been walking in the mountains for many years, wouldn’t it be abnormal for him to get lost if he walked on a road he had walked before?
But the village chief accepted it well.
He rocked the rocking chair in the shadow of the eaves: "Maybe the mountain god doesn't want you to leave."
Xiao Liang was terrified and held tightly to the still smiling Lu Jiamu, feeling that only the presence of his companions was reliable.
"If you're not lost, why are you back?"
She held Lu Jiamu tightly and walked into the room, obviously not wanting the village chief and others to hear what they said: "This village... this village is not normal!"
Seeing that she was about to collapse on the spot, Lu Jiamu hurriedly tried to comfort her: "How could that be? What is our slogan?"
After a pause and getting no response, Lu Jiamu continued, "Entering science."
At that moment, Xiao Liang suddenly wanted to slap him.
For a moment, she was suddenly no longer sure whether Lu Jiamu was still normal.
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