Chapter 77: Secrets (2)

When the dark hole appeared, Gao Ning let out a sigh of relief, sat down on the ground and took a break. He took out a cigarette and handed it to me, saying, “Have a cigarette and take a break. There won’t be a place to rest later. In this rotten village, I can only get five packs of cigarettes a month. When I get what I want, I’ll definitely leave without looking back.”

I took the cigarette, lit it, and then leaned against the earthen wall behind me to rest. According to Gao Ning, my treatment was not bad. As soon as I opened my mouth, he gave me two cigarettes, which were still very good Hongta Mountains.

After taking a puff, I asked Gao Ning, “Can you just leave?”

Gao Ning looked at me and said seriously, “No, how could I just leave with my grandmother’s belongings? I’m going to leave with you, and once we get out of this village, we’ll all go back to our own homes and find our own mothers.”

Gao Ning was going to escape with me? I looked at Gao Ning in surprise, not knowing what the kid was up to. But I didn’t want to ask. Everyone has their own secrets, and I was relying on him now.

A cigarette was quickly finished, and I stood up and looked at the dark hole, eager to try, but Gao Ning grabbed me. He said, “This is the most important place in the Black Rock Miao Village. Do you think the defense will be so weak? Just four gatekeepers? And there are ten minutes to get through? If you keep going like this, you won’t know how you’ll die later.”

Is there anything in this cave? I looked at Gao Ning in puzzlement. He didn’t explain, just laughed and pulled out a clay pot from his clothes. “This is what I’ve secretly collected. This little pot! Use a little this time, and you’ll run out of it next time.”

He then opened the sealed plastic wrap on the clay pot and took out a small bamboo piece. He dug a little bit of something out of the pot and was about to rub it on my body.

As soon as the jar was opened, a pungent smell came out. It was so bad that it reminded me of corpse oil. I had been with my master for so many years, and in order to make me brave, he had taken me to sleep in a graveyard. The smell of corpse oil came from the broken, old graves.

The smell was not exactly like corpse oil. I could sense with my spiritual senses that this stuff was actually full of a kind of mixed vitality. But it was so disgusting that when I saw Gao Ning smear it on me, I subconsciously dodged it.

Gao Ning yelled at me, “Don’t hide. It smells bad, but unless you want to die, you don’t have to wipe it.”

Of course I didn’t want to die, so in the end I had to let Gao Ning smear this gray, faintly fluorescent substance on me. My nose was so irritated that it was almost numb, and my eyes were also blurred with tears. Fortunately, after Gao Ning gave me two pieces of paper to block my nose, the situation improved slightly.

“What is this stuff?” I asked Gao Ning after he finished applying it. This stuff, when applied to the body, makes me a gray man, and it also emits a faint glow. If an uninformed person sees me in a grave, they might be scared to death.

“Secret.” Gao Ning laughed, knowing that I was in this situation and could only follow him. He had the final say in what I could and could not know.

After smearing the disgusting stuff on himself, he took out a small flashlight and handed it to me, saying, “Put it in your mouth and be careful when you go down. The slope is steep!”

Are we finally going down? My heart began to beat violently for no reason, but Gao Ning was very calm and went down slowly first. I followed him down with the flashlight in my mouth.Taoist priest

I had to crawl in the cave with my hands and feet to realize what it meant to be careful when going down!

The hole was a deep hole that was almost 90 degrees vertical, and the light from the flashlight couldn’t reach the bottom. It had a slight slope, probably just to make it easier for people to climb down. If you let go accidentally, I guess you’ll just die.

It is said that there is a ladder in this hole with a diameter of about 2 meters, but this so-called ladder is nothing more than a hole dug out one by one. In order to prevent slipping, a layer of cement is smeared in the hole, which is extremely dangerous.

In such a hole, I felt my heart racing just from climbing down 5 or 6 meters. I have a slight fear of heights!

But I couldn’t speak, I was using my hands and feet, and I had a flashlight in my mouth, so I couldn’t speak at all.

When I was about to continue down, I suddenly heard Gao Ning’s voice from below. He said, “Slow down, I’ve stopped. I have something to tell you.”

I had no choice but to stop, release one hand, hold the flashlight, and, like Gao Ning, cling to the cave wall like a gecko to see what he had to say.

“Wait a minute. No matter what you see, stay calm. I’m afraid you’ll fall if you don’t stay calm. In fact, this is an old road from a long time ago. It’s been abandoned for a few days. The new road is better to walk on, but the defenses there are too strict. We can only die if we go there.” Gao Ning said to me.

So this kid is taking me on an old, abandoned road. If it’s an old, abandoned road, what can I see? I asked in confusion, “This road is an old, abandoned road. Why isn’t it sealed off? According to you, there are even still defense forces left.”

Gao Ning didn’t explain anything, but just said to me, “I won’t explain now. Just remember not to let go under any circumstances. Let’s talk about it when we get down.”

Yes, it’s not fun to be a gecko here. I could only take the flashlight again and quickly follow Gao Ning down with my hands and feet. I only had to climb down less than 3 or 4 meters before I understood what Gao Ning meant.

Because when I got to a certain step, I saw my face being brushed by something soft and fluffy. I didn’t know what it was, and I was suddenly scared. When I turned my face to the side, the light of the flashlight also turned to the side. Then what I saw almost made me drop the flashlight in my mouth, and my hands and feet suddenly became a little weak.

What just brushed past my face was a wing, the wing of a moth, and I saw a giant moth with a head the size of my head resting on the side of the stairs. I just brushed past it with my face!

How could such a scene not make me feel creepy? I have personally experienced how terrifying the paralyzing toxin of the blood-thread moth is.

But this moth was just like that, brushing past my face without moving, as if it had fallen into hibernation. I buried my head between my arms and took several deep breaths before I could steady myself and climb down step by step.

The rest of the way was like a journey to hell. I found that the walls of the cave were almost completely covered with blood-thread moths, both large and small. The small ones were about the size of a regular moth, while the large ones were terrifyingly huge, almost half the size of my body.

Are there moths that big? In my memory, I once read an interesting fact that the largest moth species is only half the size of a human arm! These Hmong people really cannot be judged by normal circumstances.

If a person does not collapse in a terrifying environment, then they can only adapt. During the process of crawling down, I gradually became numb. Thanks to my past experiences, I was able to adapt to the terrifying environment.

Otherwise, a moth the size of a human arm would have been enough to scare me.

The moths seemed to ignore Gao Ning and me as we crawled through the cave. Sometimes we would even step on one or two moths that happened to be resting on the ‘stairs’, but they didn’t seem to care.

They didn’t fly, so they didn’t carry the deadly poison powder, but with so many bloodline moths in there, I suspected that the air was also full of toxins, but I didn’t feel any discomfort at all.

Could it be that the gray “corpse oil” was having an effect? I don’t know, there are so many examples of the mutual influence of the art of witchcraft in Miaojiang that it is simply impossible for a layman to understand.

So, I don’t know how long I had been crawling, almost to the point of numbness, when my feet finally touched the ground.

I looked up in fear, and immediately a rash of goosebumps appeared on my back. What I saw was the wings of the blood-thread moths, which were densely packed on the cave wall. Under the light of the flashlight, the patterns on the wings emitted a strange fluorescent glow.