Chapter 156: Empty Person
Li Duojin felt the underground cold wind, the eerie wind howling, he looked at the pale-faced Chen Xiaolin: “Now you have three choices, wait for me here, go back to the car right now, or come down with me.”
“Don’t leave me alone.” Chen Xiaolin chose the third option without any hesitation, with a hint of plea, “I want to go down with you.”
For Chen Xiaolin, the first two options were like waiting for death, she would endure the unknown fear in loneliness, she didn’t want that feeling, although Li Duojin had plenty of strangeness about him, at least she could feel a bit of warmth and sense of security from him.
“Okay.” Li Duojin nodded, leading Chen Xiaolin to find the path down the crevice.
After some searching, Li Duojin only found a steep ramp, nearly 70 degrees, a slight carelessness would bring a near-vertical fall death experience.
Li Duojin grew up in the mountains since childhood, experienced in climbing, but Chen Xiaolin was different, as a reporter, she was fine with tests of long-distance running endurance and sprinting explosiveness, but rock climbing really stumped her.
Upon discovering the steep and perilous ramp, Li Duojin was somewhat worried if this delicate tender meat beauty reporter had the courage to come down with him, if she was too terrified to move, he might have to delay a lot of time for it.
But reality was, Li Duojin gained a new respect for Chen Xiaolin.
Chen Xiaolin grew up in a well-off family, but she was not lacking in pride and courage, she gritted her teeth and followed and imitated Li Duojin’s movements, descending the ramp.
The ramp became more rugged and steep the further down, there were even many sharp stalagmites scattered on the ground and cave top, a slight carelessness could lead to being cut or pierced by the sharp pointed stones, or smashed to death by unstable stones falling from above.
Li Duojin looked back at the way they came, the light at the entrance above was dim, he silently looked at Chen Xiaolin, who had become much calmer enduring the peril, she nodded at him.
They both knew at this moment that they had no way back.
Just as the two wondered how much longer they had to endure the near-vertical ramp, they were surprised to discover they had reached a relatively gentle ramp, no longer needing to worry about their footing or fantasies of being smashed to death.
Stepping on the gentler ramp, the two felt as solid as walking on flat ground.
Chen Xiaolin noticed that the clothes on Li Duojin’s back were almost completely worn through, bloody abrasions and mud, sand, gravel, and dirt stuck to his back, she couldn’t help wanting to touch those wounds, feeling some guilt she said to Li Duojin: “Sorry, it’s all because you had to look after me along the way, causing you to get hurt.”
“No problem, the pain actually makes me much calmer.” Li Duojin smiled slightly at Chen Xiaolin, then he rubbed his arms, able to feel every tightly contracted pore raised, puzzled he said, “Do you feel the temperature here is a bit low?”
“Yeah, very cold.” Chen Xiaolin nodded, breathed out, white mist visible to the naked eye.
The temperature here was at most around ten degrees.
Continuing forward, Li Duojin and Chen Xiaolin increasingly felt the eerie space structure of this underground area, on the way ahead, gravity and magnetic field seemed to have shifted, so much so that sometimes the two didn’t even know if they were walking on a flat-like vertical ramp or struggling to climb down on flat ground.
The eeriness was far from just that, the environment was also quite peculiar.
Later, the two actually stepped into snow with their feet, this place even had snow?
Moving on the snow-covered ramp up to their soles, Li Duojin and Chen Xiaolin endured the invasion of the icy cold, the freezing pierced from their soles through their bodies straight to their brains.
The cold was freezing their bodies stiff, but Li Duojin hadn’t lost reason and thinking, he suddenly noticed a strangely shaped giant stone standing on a section of the ramp, he shone his flashlight on it, only to discover that the face of the black giant stone facing them actually reflected text symbols under the light.
This was no ordinary natural giant stone, clearly a stone tablet!
Li Duojin suppressed the shock in his heart, and together with Chen Xiaolin approached to check the black giant stone, carefully reading the text remaining on it.
On the black giant stone was left a poem: “North wind evening glow Tianshan Cave, seeking lone if dead jade lang bone. Empty Person silent without breath, soul-seizing mind-losing thousand hundred corpses…”
“Such familiar verses.” Chen Xiaolin murmured.
“It’s the poem from the tattered Ye Gong calligraphy and painting in Zheng Yu’s villa.” Li Duojin recognized at a glance that this poem and inscription were absolutely Ye Gong’s own handiwork, the other had been here and left his words on this stone.
Chen Xiaolin suddenly startled awake, then looking at the eerie wording between the lines, she exclaimed: “What exactly did he see here, what is that empty person, why encounter thousand hundred soulless corpses?”
Li Duojin said with a grave expression: “I don’t know now either, but I guess, very likely Zheng Yu’s madness is inseparable from this poem, he probably discovered something from this complete poem, thereby touching some taboo.”
To seek the truth, the two could only ignore the “warning” left by the madman ancestor on the stone tablet, and persevered to the underground.
Upon reaching the underground, they saw the light above their heads, it was the crevice they had seen from the ground before, now about over three hundred meters above them.
Walking under the sun, the two didn’t feel the cold on their bodies alleviated at all, they saw the path laid by the sunlight leading to a cold dark cave, they steeled themselves and went forward, entering the pitch-black cave.
Turning on the phone’s lighting mode, the two looked at their surroundings, breathing rapidly, pupils contracting, they saw strange skeletons without flesh and blood posed with heads bowed, hands crossed over chests, in meditation postures, like goods on display shelves scattered around the cave.
No, those bones were more like believers, they died in pious worship rituals, facing a giant skeleton in the center of the space.
That corpse had its back to Li Duojin and Chen Xiaolin, its skeleton was three times that of a normal person, and the bones grew strangely, on the basis of normal human bone features, other bones irregularly grew on those ribs, arm bones, vertebrae, sharp and slender, like sharp spears.
That giant skeleton was in the same death pose as the surrounding believer bones, hands crossed over chest in meditation posture, only its pair of hands were astonishingly large, if not looked at carefully, one might think they were some kind of wings, not hands.
“Urgh!” Chen Xiaolin looked at the giant skeleton, eyes bursting with terror, tears and vomit uncontrollably spilling out together, she knelt on the ground, nearly driven mad by the scene before her.
There, the missing Wang Kui Shan was currently hugging face-to-face with the giant skeleton, his body pierced by the sharp bones, his flesh and blood melting bit by bit into the giant skeleton’s body, his head exposing a pathological smile at death was tightly pressed against the giant skeleton’s rib, brain swollen and throbbing, just like a heart…
The inspiration for this story comes from a very obscure low-rated cult short film with cult elements, named Empty Person, recommend it to bored people to watch.
