Chapter 41: The Story of the Stubborn Stone (Part 1) To be revised
#"The Stubborn Stone" million-dollar special effects#
#Chinese comics produce another masterpiece. #
#Small company miracle.#
…
Cai Xiaoxiao, who had just walked out of a late-night movie theater, was puzzled by the sudden influx of people going in the opposite direction into the theater late at night.
It is true that cinemas have night shows, but generally speaking there won’t be any noticeable crowds during the evening shows after 10 o’clock.
This unusual phenomenon made her very curious, but the fatigue in the middle of the night made her quickly recall her "mission".
She uploaded the movie ticket and selfie in her hand to her Moments as if she was doing a formal check-in.
This is the seventh time she has repeated this action in recent years.
As a worker who habitually goes to the cinema to watch a movie every week due to lack of social interaction, Cai Xiaoxiao actually doesn't have much preference for recording his mood through WeChat Moments.
She had never thought that one day she would show such a strong class spirit in watching movies.
But there is no way. Ever since main-theme movies started to become popular in the market in recent years, movie theaters’ screenings have almost all been based on main-theme movies.
Of course, that's the market demand, and no one else can be blamed. She was even initially a loyal audience member who was moved to tears by those mainstream movies along with everyone else.
But with the explosive growth of mainstream movies in the past two years, she has gradually become numb.
Even though the quality of these movies is as good as before, and even has better technical effects, just like delicious meat, you will get tired of it if you eat too much.
Today, after watching seven or eight mainstream movies in two years, it is really difficult for her to feel as moved as she did back then.
Of course, as a movie lover who watches a movie on average every week, she is also willing to contribute her movie ticket to mainstream movies.
But in recent years, when one leader, colleague, and even aunts and uncles after another repeatedly recommended the movie to her and even asked her to watch it and forwarded it to their friends, she was really tired.
"Have you seen XXX?"
"XXX took such a great photo. I am so touched."
"You haven't seen XXX yet?"
"How can you not watch XXX?"
As a senior movie fan, as long as the quality of the film is good, she is not afraid of repetitive themes or old-fashioned plots. But the problem is that as a worker who works 996 every day, she really doesn't want to experience the kind of "task" comparable to writing book reviews in her school days during her few rest times.
She mechanically opened her phone and completed her check-in on WeChat Moments according to the usual format.
However, at this moment, the hot search prompt that popped up above the phone caught her attention.
A masterpiece of Chinese comics... The Story of the Stubborn Stone?
If I remember correctly, it seems to be an animated film co-produced with the popular museum in Xian'an City some time ago, right?
Following her memory, she looked at the cinema poster in the corner.
How many years has it been since she last watched an animated movie?
It seems like... it’s been almost six or seven years...
Cai Xiaoxiao looked at the animation poster in front of her and fell into reminiscence.
As a child who used to watch the "Animal Series" as the first movie of the year, her concept of animated films seemed to come to an end in the Year of the Goat as she grew up.
Would you like to go and have a look?
Judging from the style of painting, it shouldn’t be very "childish".
Thinking of this, Cai Xiaoxiao immediately opened the ticket purchasing app on her mobile phone. However, what was unexpected was that when she clicked on the ticket purchasing page of "The Stubborn Stone", what greeted her was a large area full of red words.
What's going on...animated movies...are sold out?
So the people who just came up were all here to watch cartoons late at night?
She looked curiously at the people queuing up behind her for ticket inspection. However, before she could figure out what was going on, she heard the staff at the ticket office suddenly pick up the loudspeaker and shout:
"Please wait, dear customers. We are rescheduling the screenings and will soon arrange an additional screening of The Stone for you."
Not only was it sold out, but there were additional screenings late at night? Was this definitely the animated movie she remembered?
Cai Xiaoxiao looked around. As a child who grew up watching movies, she did not have the prejudice against animated films like the older generation of adults.
She never denied that there were many good stories in animated films, but perhaps it was because she had once unconsciously stopped watching animated films.
She really had no way to make an accurate assessment of the scene before her. And the most important thing was that there didn't seem to be any children around the audience, which was standard in animated films.
But she didn't have time to think about it, because the staff at the on-site ticket office had temporarily opened the on-site ticket sales channel.
After hesitating for a while, Cai Xiaoxiao finally decided to follow the ticket buying queue.
The attendance rate of the additional ticket show was much higher than she had imagined. Although it was a late show that started at around 10 o'clock, the flow of people who came from nowhere still filled up the huge IMAX theater.
After sitting down, she quickly flipped through her phone to find out the reason for this animated film's sudden and unexpected comeback.
At first she thought it was some hot topic in this animated film, but when she opened the clips posted by netizens on Weibo, she was shocked by the detailed modeling of the heroine in the picture, even down to the hair.
Is this... a comparison to the production level of the Snow Queen?
Cai Xiaoxiao suddenly remembered that she seemed to have seen a similar trending search slogan "S-level special effects production" a few days ago. But at that time, a few entries mixed in with the mainstream movie trending searches did not attract her attention.
At that moment, although she was still worried whether these were the only highlights of the movie, her intuition as a movie fan for many years made her choose to put away her phone.
Soon after the familiar dragon head logo, this movie, which had suddenly filled up theaters late at night, had a truly full screening.
The film begins with an inconspicuous little stone.
Since its birth, its body has been soaked in clear mountain springs.
Ten years, a hundred years, a thousand years, the edges and corners gradually faded under the scouring of the water. It didn't know when it began to have its own consciousness.
It wanted to find "kind" people around it to talk to, but it never received any response.
It was not until one day when a group of people came to the stream where it was because of a disaster that it heard sounds other than its own for the first time.
"Is this a human being?"
It quietly watches these outsiders at the water source upstream.
It was very envious of the feeling of having companions around, and driven by this yearning, it took it hundreds of years to successfully transform into a human form.
Born in the riverbed of a stream, it does not know what a so-called disaster year is.
But it could feel the joy from the bottom of its heart when the outsiders found the stream it was in. It spent hundreds of years witnessing humans building a prosperous tribe downstream of the stream, and after witnessing the beauty of that simple life, it wanted to join in as a "human".
But then one day, when it finally transformed into a human form as it wished, it was inexperienced and was completely unaware of the strange phenomena caused by its transformation.
It thought it had found a deserted place late at night, but when the moonlight fell into the stream like silver yarn, the villagers mistakenly thought that the small stone was the incarnation of the river.
They worship him as a river god. She wanted to deny it, but she couldn't speak as she had just transformed into a human.
In addition, this was an era when monsters were rampant, and she, who could not speak, was afraid that she would be misunderstood as a man-eating monster.
So she accepted the identity of the river god.
She spent a long and happy time with the villagers. She was just like an ordinary child in the village, learning to read and write with the gentleman who served as the village chief.
Over time, the first generation of villagers who witnessed her transformation gradually forgot that she was not a mortal, and she also acquired a name called "Shiji" in the process.
Although she is not the river god of the "Mother River" as the villagers call it, she has indeed fulfilled the responsibilities of a river god.
She protected the villagers from the invasion of surrounding monsters, and even used her own abilities to make streams flow along the cracked land and through the farmland that needed irrigation.
Later, the villagers built a small courtyard for her. She thought she would live a simple life in this village until one day, the clear stream suddenly began to overflow with mud and sand.
The sweet stream water turned into dirty yellow muddy water.
The villagers initially thought that the heavy rain upstream had washed away the mud on both sides of the stream. At first, people could collect water for daily use by filtering or boiling water. But later, as the muddy water became more and more serious, not only did the water collection work become increasingly arduous, but many people in the village began to have symptoms such as coughing, rashes, and even high fevers.
Realizing that something was not right, the villagers approached Shiji, hoping that she, the "River God", could help them think of a solution. However, Shiji didn't understand. Although she had magical powers, she was not the so-called river god.
She was just a small stone that was lucky enough to turn into a human form in the river. But seeing the expectant eyes of the villagers, she made up her mind to go upstream to find out what was going on.
However, what she didn't expect was that the riverbed upstream had long lost the charm it had when she was born.
Her former home was now occupied by a dead skeleton that exuded a foul odor. She thought it was the stench of the dead skeleton that polluted the water source.
Seeing this, she immediately mobilized the "demonic power" in her body and went forward to fight.
She thought that by getting rid of the evil skeleton, Shixi Village could return to its past stable life, but she didn't expect that even if the skeleton was smashed into debris on the ground, it would still reassemble again and again under her unbelieving gaze.
And for some reason, while she was fighting with the dry bones, one after another, remains of various shapes kept crawling out from the stone caves that represented the streams and springs.
She was outnumbered and eventually defeated and fell into the stream.
In the embrace of the stream, she was seriously injured and could no longer maintain the human form that she had always been proud of. But at the moment when she turned into a spirit stone again, "it" finally recalled its past in the familiar stream.
It turns out that the original name of this mountain was Skull Mountain, a mass grave formed by the corpses of ferocious beasts killed by Emperor Xuanyuan Huangdi.
Emperor Xuanyuan Huangdi originally thought that as long as he killed these demons, he could completely stop them from wreaking havoc on the world.
But what he didn't expect was that after he killed all the murderers, the plague and virus contained in the corpses of the beasts were still the "god of death" that ordinary people could not resist.
So he used the small stones left by the goddess Nuwa when she repaired the sky to suppress the corpses of these ferocious beasts, and hoped to use the power of the spiritual stones to purify the plague and evil spirit from the corpses of these monsters bit by bit.
Later, this wilderness was purified by the spirit stone, and the corpses of the ferocious beasts were used as the source to nourish this vibrant pure land.
Originally, as long as the spirit stone circulated at the spring for another hundred years, it would be able to completely purify the remaining evil spirit on the murderer's bones.
However, no one would have thought that the spirit stone had actually developed its own consciousness by absorbing the essence of the sun and the moon over hundreds of years.
The spirit stone, not knowing its mission, left the spring out of curiosity and transformed into a human form downstream. Thus, the originally elaborate formation lost its core.
The skeletons that had been struggling to survive under the formation also took this opportunity to gradually increase their vitality by slaughtering the surrounding creatures.
The formation originally used to purify monsters was reversed and turned into a gate to hell that absorbs life force.
Shiji wanted to repair the formation before all the skeletons escaped from it, but he forgot that the formation had been contaminated by the skeletons.
The reason why the skeletons dared to carry out blatant destruction was because they had already completed the magical changes to the formation bit by bit during the years when Shiji left the formation.
Therefore, the moment Shiji returns to the formation, the entire formation will be reversed from its original purification to a demon that absorbs the vitality of the entire "Shixi Mountain".
In desperation, Shixi wanted to destroy the formation by self-destructing, but the White Bone Demons were dismissive of it.
Skeleton: "Are you sure you want to ruin this?"
"Don't forget that everything on this Stone Creek Mountain was created by extracting our power. Even if you have purified that power, the operation of the formation has not yet been completed. Once the formation is broken in advance, those powers will be reversed, and the entire Stone Creek Mountain will return to the place where our bones were buried."
"And this time, we will not only be buried, but also the villagers who have lived with you day and night. Are you sure you can do it?"
"Shiji, stop deceiving yourself. You are gifted with spirituality, but you are ultimately a demon like us, not a god. You are just a tool used by humans, just like us."
"You should be our kind. But you chose to stand on the opposite side of us."
"Look at you now. You could easily become a great demon, but you insist on believing those unreal rumors and pretending to be a god."
"You have lived for thousands of years, but you don't have any of the magical powers of a thousand-year-old demon. If I were you, I would want to run into a wall and die."
"Oh, I almost forgot, how could you die from hitting your stone head?"
"Shiji, stop being so stubborn. Humans and demons are different. No matter how kind you pretend to be, you are still an out-and-out alien in the eyes of those people."
"Don't think I don't know. Ever since the stream was polluted, those villagers... probably haven't regarded you as the river god for a long time."
"Do you think you are getting the companions you want? Their kindness to you is only because you are profitable. Once you are no longer valuable, the first person they will abandon is you, the "outlier."
"Don't look at me like that. Do you think those humans will give up their homes just for an old, immortal "monster" like you?"
"Believe it or not, as long as I make a promise, those humans, driven by their own interests, will not hesitate to send you to the west."
"Oh, I almost forgot. I don't think you know yet, but those humans already knew of my existence long before you went up the mountain."
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