Volume 9 Chapter 17 Leaving

The suffocating man lay there, and the fat man gave him a shot of sedative, after which he fell asleep.

I looked at him and felt very blocked, miserable.

He must have come out of the hole while we were sleeping, but how could he have become like this?

I looked at the meteorite above my head. The black and green surface was as ugly as ever, with no changes at all. The countless holes looked like eyes, and I felt suffocated.

What the hell is going on?

I was so depressed that I thought it was just a joke.

What does it mean when it says “no time left”? It sounds like something is about to happen, and there is no time to take any measures. Could something be happening here?

It was as quiet as the universe, with no miner’s lamp to illuminate it, and we couldn’t see anything. If something was happening here, we wouldn’t know.

“He must have been extremely shocked,” the fat man sighed. ”He didn’t react to anything outside, he couldn’t hear or see anything. His senses were all shut down. It’s like his brain froze at the last moment he experienced, according to the doctor.”

I was silent. I didn’t know what kind of person he was, but I could vouch for his psychological endurance. The psychological quality of such a person has reached a realm where it is very difficult to make him feel a great shock. What happened inside the meteorite must have been terrifying beyond our understanding.

However, I really can’t imagine that someone as calm as him would be scared to pieces by anything. I’m sure it wasn’t a monster. I can overcome the fear of a corpse, and even if there was a monster inside, it couldn’t scare him like that. What he saw must have been an extremely strange situation.

At this moment, I thought of Wenjin. Where is she now? Has she gone crazy and can’t get out?

If that’s the case, then I have to go in. I’ll climb in and bring her out even if I have to fall a thousand times. I absolutely can’t leave her in the meteorite.

Thinking about it made my skin crawl. I stood up again, walked to the hole, and shone the flashlight up. This was almost a habitual action, and I don’t know how many times I’ve done it in the past few days. I flashed it into the hole at random, and then walked back.

After I had walked a few steps, I suddenly froze, realizing that something was wrong. This time, the cave was not dark. There was something in the cave!

My scalp went numb, and I immediately went back to take a look. Sure enough, I found something in the depths of the cave!

I screamed, immediately calling the fat man over to shine a flashlight up. I saw a pale face peering out from the depths of the hole, about 20 to 30 meters away.

I was overjoyed, thinking it was Wenjin, but when I looked again, I suddenly felt cold all over. This white face had no expression, the eyes were deeply sunken into the eye sockets, the face was cold as ice, and the expression was extremely eerie. What made me shudder was that it was a face I had never seen before.

Who is this person? My cold sweat instantly soaked my back.

The fat man saw that I was not well and came over to see what was wrong. He froze and immediately went to get his gun. I grabbed him and the mine light flashed. When I looked again, the face had disappeared and it was still pitch black at the end.

The two of us looked at each other, both of us sweating like rain. After a long time, I asked, “Did you see it too?”

He nodded, and I saw that his face was pale, as if he had been scared stiff.

This is beyond my understanding. How could there be a stranger in this meteorite? Could it be that there is a person living inside? Could it be that the ancestors of the Queen Mother of the West are still alive inside?

This is too ridiculous. I thought of Wenjin again, and I let out a sigh. Could it be that Wenjin has begun to turn into a corpse? Was that her face in the transformation?

I looked at the fat man and wanted to ask him if he had seen anything similar to Wenjin, but I saw that the fat man was still pale and staring at the hole, not yet recovering.

The fat guy is not such a timid person. I felt strange and asked him what was wrong. He turned to me and asked, “Didn’t you recognize her?”

“Recognize?” I was stunned for a moment. ”Do you know this person?”

The fat man pointed behind us, and when I turned around, I saw the female corpse sitting on the throne. The fat man shone the miner’s lamp at the face of the female corpse, and the light flashed. Because of the shadow effect, the face of the female corpse suddenly became hideous.

I saw it clearly and understood it at once. I felt a chill run through my heart and almost fainted.

My God, the face we just saw was actually somewhat similar to the way it was carved on the outside of the female corpse!

What is going on? The face we just saw—is it the Queen Mother of the West?

Could this corpse really be a shell? Is the real Xiwangmu still alive in the center of this huge stone?

No, how could this be? How could someone who lived thousands of years ago still be alive? Even if they didn’t die of old age, they would have starved to death here.

“Is it an illusion?” I suddenly doubted my senses and my mental state. ”We’ve been so confused by this meteorite that maybe that face was Wenjin, but because of the lighting, it looked like the female corpse.”

The fat man paused: “Then why didn’t she come out?”

I was dumbfounded. The fat guy said, “It’s rare for two people to see something wrong together.”

The two of us were on pins and needles. We couldn’t stay in this place any longer. The fat man said to me, “Xiao Wu, this place is getting more and more spooky. When are you planning to leave?”

“What’s wrong? Wenjin hasn’t come out yet.” I looked at his face and asked, ”You’re so scared, it’s not like you.”

“That’s one thing, but the most important thing is that we’re out of food. I wanted to tell you today that if you don’t leave tomorrow, I’ll have to take you away, even if I have to knock you out. If we wait any longer, we’ll starve to death here. We don’t have much left to eat.”

I said, “Can’t we last a few more days?”

The fat man said, “I’ve calculated that with the remaining food, we can last for two days if we eat sparingly, which is barely enough for us to find a way out safely. But now that there is a little brother, we have no other choice. Even if we can safely reach the surface, we will have to starve through the rainforest. Now that the rain has stopped, the swamp must have already appeared, and it must be an extremely difficult process to cross it. If you insist on waiting, we will start to starve tomorrow. After two days of starvation, you won’t have the strength to go out again, and we will be dead here.

I looked at the hole and shook my head, “No, we can’t leave her behind.”

The fat man patted me on the shoulder and said, “I know you’re a softie, but I’ve already thought it through. We’ll leave behind everything we can eat. If we go out hungry and make it to the outside, we can replenish ourselves if we get back to the camp. To be honest, I buried a bag of compressed biscuits at every place we rested. As long as we go the right way, we can still get out. I don’t think it’s a good idea to wait for her to come out and see us faint from hunger. Besides, this meteorite is so strange, I think…”

I knew what he was going to say, so I waved my hand. I realized that although he was speaking slowly, his words were decisive and there was almost nothing to refute. I could imagine that he had been holding back.

“And even if you are willing to die, the little brother may not be willing. You have to save at least one person.”

I looked at the oil bottle and immediately compromised. Yes, I always thought that no one should be left behind, but in the end, I might even have killed the oil bottle. And the fat man’s method really made sense. I thought to myself that this might be the only way for us to survive. I sighed as I looked at the hole, and then asked him, “But now how should we get back?”

The fat man said, “We’ll go back the same way we came, then follow the river wall. We’ll definitely find another water outlet and be able to get back into the water storage project, and then we’ll definitely find the exit.”

“What if there isn’t one?”

“We can’t worry about that now.” The fat man was overjoyed when he saw that I had agreed, and immediately began to pack. ”We can only leave it to fate, but there should be one, otherwise the blind man would have returned long ago.”

The fat man was quick. An hour later, we packed up our equipment, left all our food, wrote a note, and then he urged me to start back the way we came.

I still couldn’t let go, so I looked around a few times, shouted a few times at the cave entrance, and then turned and left.

Muyoubing was in a daze, and we helped him back to the place where we had come from, which was full of pottery shards. At this time, I was wondering which direction the black blind people had gone. Suddenly, the fat man stopped and shone the miner’s lamp into the water. I found that in this place full of pottery shards, there was a deep pit that had not been there before.

It was the same as the pit we saw before, but we were sure that this pit did not exist when we came here. It seemed to have been bulged out by something.

I felt something was wrong and urged the fat man to hurry up, but he didn’t move. I asked him why, and he said, “Didn’t you see something just flash on the wall of the pit?”