Volume 8 Chapter 10 Jungle Ghost Voice

“What else can a lonely ghost say? It’s still the words that will take my life,” said the fat man. Pan Zi told him not to talk nonsense and listen carefully. He wasn’t joking with him.

I really didn’t pay attention to what the voice was saying. When the voice first sounded, it scared the three of us so much that we couldn’t even think about listening to the details.

Moreover, the voice was not loud. If it were not for the unusually quiet forest, we would have probably ignored it. Now, we could not hear it clearly even if we listened carefully. We could only feel that it was a woman speaking in a very strange tone, not sure what she was saying to herself.

It was only when Pan Zi mentioned it that our attention was focused on this aspect. Pan Zi gestured for us to hold our breath and listen carefully.

The distance seemed too far, the voice was slimy, and it came and went intermittently. Even listening like this, it felt like crying, and it felt like reciting something, but I really couldn’t make out what it was. The only thing I felt was that the tone was ambiguous.

“Is it calling in the spring?” The fat guy frowned and said.

Pan Zi slapped him with the butt of his gun and told him not to talk nonsense. At this time, I had a little feeling. “Wait, what, this voice… seems to be calling my name?”

“Calling your name? How come I can’t hear it?“

”It’s not my real name, it’s calling ‘Little Master San’. Listen carefully.”

The fat guy listened and shook his head, unable to hear it. I listened more carefully, but I couldn’t hear it clearly either. But the voice was really a bit strange, like a ghost calling for a soul. ‘It’s definitely calling my name, even if it’s not, it sounds like it’s calling my name.’ I said decisively.

Pan Zi nodded: ”That’s right, how many women here do you know who know your name? I think this is really haunted. That woman, Ah Ning, probably felt that she died unjustly and didn’t want to rot here alone. She wanted to find us to be buried with her.

I shook my head. At this time, I thought of another possibility: “Oh my god, could it be that she is still alive?”

“Alive? How is that possible? Boss, didn’t you see that when you carried her to the mouth of the canyon, she was already rotten?” Fat Man said.

I thought about it and my heart grew cold again. Indeed, Ah Ning’s death was very certain. There was no way to circumvent it. We checked it very carefully at the time.

Pan Zi said, “I think this dead woman wants to lure us over. We must not be fooled. You follow me and we’ll find a way to get around. The situation over there is unclear. There may be many poisonous snakes, and the situation is weird. It’s not going to be good.”

I looked at the fat man and asked for his opinion.

On one side was the undetermined factor, on the other was life and death, and the difference was clear. The fat man also had doubts, and after thinking about it, he had to suppress his curiosity. He said, “You, my dear fat man, I’m not backing out, but Pan is right. We don’t have enough equipment. This time, we’d better be careful. Even if it is Ning, I can’t do it!”

I was relieved. I didn’t want to see any female ghosts in the first place, and I didn’t know what the fat guy was thinking. If there was anything, what could we do to get out of it? Thinking about it immediately responded.

The three of us turned and set off, no longer paying attention to the strange sound. Pan Zi set a direction, and we carefully crept on to continue our journey, trying to go around the place where the sound came from. We could also approach on the side and listen to find out what was going on. If it really was Uncle San’s people talking, then we would have enough distance to remedy it.

We didn’t dare to turn on the miner’s lamp too brightly, so we covered the lamp head with a cloth and walked through the gaps in the trees with the dim light.

We said we were going around the tree, but in fact the distance was not far. The eerie sound kept ringing in our ears, and we were sweating while walking, not daring to say a word.

As we got closer, we got closer to the sound. The more I listened, the less it sounded like a voice. It was very crisp, repeating a rhythm over and over again, and I couldn’t feel what it was exactly.

But I was sure that the sound was coming from somewhere nearby. My psychological effect was in the way, and I felt that the direction I looked at was full of ghosts.

As I walked, I kept my ears open for the sound, and I was so absorbed in listening that I felt like I had heard it somewhere before.

I immediately asked them to stop and listen. Suddenly, I thought of what it was: “Oh no, is this the walkie-talkie on Ning’s body ringing?”

“Walkie-talkie?”

I said that the standard equipment of Aning and the others included a walkie-talkie. I hadn’t seen her take it out of her pocket. This kind of walkie-talkie is waterproof, fireproof, and shockproof. It’s not easy to break unless you’re serious about dealing with it. It can be used continuously for three weeks without recharging. Aning is probably just keeping it on there. “Cover the microphone of the walkie-talkie with a damp cloth, and then if there is static noise, do you feel that it is very similar to this sound?”

The fat guy had no experience, but Pan Zi obviously knew, and nodded vigorously: “Little Master San is right, it really sounds like it.”

“So who is calling her now?” the fat guy asked. “The radio signal in the jungle is very weak and cannot travel very far.”

“But she is in the tree canopy, and if the other person is also in the tree canopy, or in the outer reaches of the canyon, then it is likely that the signal can be received. And you can see that the sound is intermittent, which means that the walkie-talkie is on the automatic frequency search function, which is searching all frequencies in a loop. Obviously, there is a radio frequency being used here. Pan Zi, did my third uncle bring a walkie-talkie this time? Because I was very impressed by the walkie-talkie in the Devil City, I know all these functions by heart.

“Third Uncle definitely doesn’t use this kind of thing, because there’s absolutely no chance that a few groups will be scattered when going down to the ground to dig for sand. Generally, there’s only one group, and it’s good enough to go down. But there’s a radio in the car. Could it be that the people who are guarding the car in the Gobi Desert are using this frequency to talk? I…” Pan Zi suddenly thought of something: ”I understand. They also saw the red smoke. Maybe Third Uncle made an agreement with them, and they’re making a dispatch.”

I said, “We have to get that walkie-talkie so we can talk to the people in the Gobi Desert. We’ll be able to find out their travel plans and why Uncle San entered the center of the swamp before us. And when we leave, we can also ask them to meet us. Maybe we can go straight up the cliff.”

The fat guy got excited. It seems that he was really tired of walking in the forest. He said, “What are we waiting for? Since it’s not a ghost, we don’t have to be polite.”

Pan Zi shook his head and said, “We need to think this through carefully. There are no ghosts, but there are snakes. There are branches everywhere. If a snake suddenly comes out of the dark and bites you, you’ll really become a ghost.”

This snake is actually more of a headache than a ghost. The fat man was so anxious that he scratched his head and wished he had a flamethrower on his body: “It would be good if we had snake medicine. It seems that in the future we really need to bring everything. Who would have known that the ancient city in the Gobi would be like this.”

“This kind of snake is afraid of snake medicine. I doubt it,” Pan Zi said. “In my opinion, these things may not be snakes at all.”

“What are they then? Eels?”

“Where I come from, things that live for a long time can become demons. These may be snake demons, bewitching people’s hearts. This ancient city was built by these things.” Pan Zi said. “It’s designed to lure people in and eat them. This may be a trap. Let’s not go over there.”

The fat man patted him on the back and said, “You’ve read too many books on superstition and have been poisoned too deeply. A snake is a snake. Even if it has a higher IQ, it’s still just a snake. It’s just an animal, after all. We are the spirit of all things. Why are we afraid of these things that have no hands or feet?” At this point, he turned his eyes and thought of a plan. He said, “Hey, how about this? Animals are afraid of fire. You take off all your clothes, I use your clothes to cover all parts of my body, then after getting wet, I pour the alcohol on it and light it on fire. I will rush over. These snakes will definitely not dare to bite a fireman. I will take the walkie-talkie and then come back and jump into the swamp. It will take no more than two minutes.”

“Then what? Are we going to run around naked here with walkie-talkies? I said angrily, “Use your head, will you? And it’s too hard to control. We’re using alcohol at a very high temperature. What if you burn to death? We still need you to carry the equipment.”

“It’s not that easy to burn to death,” said the fat guy. Pan Zi added, “We’re all wearing waterproof and breathable fiber clothes, which dry quickly when roasted and catch fire easily. You don’t need to pour alcohol to burn yourself into a fireman. This definitely won’t work.”

The fat guy cursed, and then suddenly remembered something: “Hey, maybe we should just set a fire under the tree, pile up wet wood, and smoke the snakes away.”

I thought this was a good idea. You can’t fight this kind of thing head-on, you have to take this approach. In the past, people in the countryside often used this kind of smoke to kill mice.

So I nodded and agreed, and immediately began to collect wet firewood. The fat guy asked Pan Zi to help, but Pan Zi suddenly grabbed us again and wouldn’t let me move. His face was very bad, almost guilty.

I looked at Pan Zi’s face and thought of the expression on his face in the tree, and suddenly realized something. I asked, “Pan Zi, did you see something just now?”

Pan Zi nodded, a little hesitant. He paused and said, “I didn’t want to say anything, for fear of scaring you, but now I’ll say it. There’s definitely something wrong with that corpse. We can’t go over there even if we’re dead.”

“No wonder I felt you were scared shitless.” The fat guy said, “What the hell did you see?”

“I saw it, but I don’t know how to describe it. Just now, I saw it in the tree, and I saw…”

Pan Zi’s level of speech was very poor. What he could say in dialect was difficult to express in Mandarin, and he didn’t know how to describe it after talking for a long time.

“Did you see Ning looking at us from the tree canopy like a snake?” The fat guy suddenly said.

Pan Zi nodded, ‘Yes, that’s it, huh? How the hell do you know?’

The fat guy pointed behind us with a pale face. I saw that the fat guy’s expression was wrong, and suddenly my scalp went numb.

I immediately turned around with Pan Zi. I saw a shadow standing in the shadow of the bush next to the tree beside us, which looked like a snake and a human at the same time. It was quietly crouching there, only five or six meters away from us. The faint sound of the walkie-talkie was coming from this thing.