Volume 7 Chapter 22 The Devil’s Call

I “mm’d” and felt something was wrong. Listening again, the more I listened, the more it sounded like it. It definitely wasn’t talking, and it couldn’t be laughter for sure, but it was very similar.

The others also realized it, and Aning stopped calling. We looked at each other, a little surprised.

The team doctor said, “What’s going on? Why are they laughing? Are they happy to hear our voices?”

Tashi asked in return, “Is this how you laugh when you’re happy?”

Aning was also puzzled. She stopped calling, but continued to adjust the walkie-talkie a little, wanting the sound inside to be a little clearer.

The debugging did not work, but the sound got a little louder. We listened again and heard it a little more clearly. It really sounded like a sneer, so spiteful that it was not at all normal. But if you listened carefully, you could hear some other sounds after the laughter, very faint. The two sounds mixed together and sounded quite strange in this city of demons with its horror.

Listening to this malicious sneer, I felt very uncomfortable. Even Zaxi, who had been smug all the way here, was now scared, his face pale, and he swallowed his saliva: “What’s going on? This laugh is really fucking ugly.”

Aning made a gesture to tell him to be quiet, put the walkie-talkie to his ear, and listened for a while, then said, “This doesn’t sound like a human voice!”

“Don’t talk nonsense!” the team doctor shouted, “If it’s not a human, is it a ghost?”

“Listen carefully.” A-Ning asked us to get closer. “The frequency of this voice is very fast, and the tone is almost flat. It has been ringing for five minutes. Can you try to laugh like this for five minutes and let me hear it?”

I felt that it made sense, so I asked, “Then what is this sound?”

“At this frequency, it should be a mechanical sound, such as a watch attached to a walkie-talkie. However, the frequency is not fixed, and it could also be someone scratching the mouthpiece of the walkie-talkie with their fingernails.” A-Ning demonstrated, “Add the sound of static electricity, and it becomes like this.”

“Why would they scratch the mouth of the walkie-talkie with their fingernails?“ the team doctor asked. ‘Why don’t they just scream? Maybe we could hear them that way.’

As soon as he said that, Tashi and Aning’s faces changed, and I suddenly realized something: ‘They may be in a situation where they can’t scream or speak, and they can only use this method to communicate with us.’

”Quicksand pit! They’re stuck in a quicksand pit!” Zaxi shouted, “They may have sunk to the point where only their heads are showing. In that case, even farting would sink them!”

“Damn it!” We all became nervous at once and stood up, looking around at the darkness. Where the hell were they?

At this point, Aning remained quite calm. She patted us on the back to calm us down, saying, “Calm down. They can send out a signal to indicate that they are temporarily safe. We can receive the signal, which means that their walkie-talkie must be nearby. We should be able to get there soon.”

“But they said it was nearby, and this area is very large. How do we find it?”

Aning told us to follow her and started walking around with the walkie-talkie, judging the direction the signal was coming from.

I realized that it was true. How could I not have thought of it? I’m considered an educated person, but in this terrain, to be able to receive a radio signal, there must be a gap-shaped terrain where radio waves are diffracted, and the degree of radio wave attenuation is closely related to the distance. Therefore, the degree of radio wave reception through the walkie-talkie can be used to determine whether we are getting closer.

We immediately followed, and after walking around, we found that the signal was strongest in the depths of the canyon, so the source of the signal was obviously inside the canyon. Aning called out, and we quickly ran inside, while the flashlight was already being used to shine. Tashi shouted, “Watch your step, don’t just look for it!”

We couldn’t care less, so we ran and looked for it at the same time. Soon the canyon came to an end, and in front of us, a huge half-moon-shaped mound blocked the way. It was 50 meters high, like a huge sail, very steep, and it looked impossible to climb over.

Anyone who knows the walkie-talkie knows the situation at a glance. In this kind of terrain, the radio signal is the weakest, which is the same as the poor signal in the valley of the mountain. However, when we looked at the walkie-talkie, the sound was now very clear and had not weakened at all. That means the source of the signal is definitely within the area enclosed by the roughly 110-meter-long and 110-meter-wide half-moon-shaped mound.

“Right here?” We all broke out in a cold sweat, feeling that something was wrong, because when we swept the area with our flashlights, we could see everything clearly, and there wasn’t a single trace of a ghost.

“Could it be that they’ve already sunk?” A bad thought occurred to me.

Aning shook his head because the sound in the walkie-talkie was still ringing, so he called out for us to split up and look for them.

We spread out and carefully searched for traces on the ground. Soon, Tashi called out that he had found something. We rushed over and found very messy footprints on the ground. They weren’t ours.

“They were here,” said Tashi. “This half-moon-shaped mound is like a haven. They must have been forced in by the wind to take shelter, and there was almost no wind inside, so the footprints were left behind.”

We immediately followed the footprints and found that the footprints were very clear on the sandy ground. We could see that there were three people. We followed the footprints for more than ten meters and came to the base of the mound. There were no footprints around the corner, nor were there any quicksand pits.

“Damn. Did they go inside the mound?” Zaxi said in surprise.

“No!” Aning looked up at the mound, which was pitch black and could not see anything.

This is strange. We were all stunned. Looking up, we saw that the backlit mound was pitch black, like a huge black curtain. Our flashlights were too weak to illuminate the whole scene.

What were they doing up there? Could there be something on the mound?

At this point, Aning told us to step back and then took out a flare gun and fired a shot into the sky.

The flaming signal shot into the sky, and after exploding, it lit up the entire area like daylight. In that instant, all the hidden scenes around us appeared.

We all turned our eyes to the surroundings. It was a bit uncomfortable to have our eyes exposed to such brightness. Before we could see clearly, we heard Aning scream, “Oh my God!”

We all squinted and looked up into the sky. Under the flashing light of the flare, we saw that halfway up the huge half-moon-shaped hill, there was a huge object embedded in the hill, half buried in the hill and half protruding into the sky.