Chapter 39 Secrets in Xiao Hua’s Phone

Fatty was right, it was a cell phone.

We crawled in and found that it was a tunnel surrounded by stone slabs. The rock had been structured in such a way as to form a square passage.

I could just barely sit upright inside, but Fatty was a little cramped. When we came to the place where the light source was shining just now, we found a crack in the stone.

The slabs before and after it were tightly connected, and only the slabs here had gaps in them. I didn’t know why, but I figured it was probably related to the mechanism’s operation here. It turned out that the light really was emitting from a phone that had fallen into a crack in the stone slabs.

I recognized it at a glance. Indeed, this was Xiao Hua’s phone.

“That’s great, they’ve been here,” Fatty said.

“Not necessarily. Look at the width of this gap.” I gestured with my hand. The gap was much narrower than the phone. “It couldn’t have fallen from here.”

“Then why is it down there?”

“This gap should be able to move,” I said. “The phone was brought from some other place because the mechanism moved.” I had seen this kind of thing in Xisha and knew that it wasn’t impossible as long as it worked properly.

“Then how do we get it out?” Fatty asked. “I have fat hands, so why don’t you try it?”

I rolled up my sleeve, spit on my hand, and reached into the gap. I knew I had made a stupid choice halfway through since my palm could go down but my arm couldn’t. I couldn’t reach the phone at all.

“Do we have any tools? Let’s use force.” Fatty said. I remembered the iron pick Ghost had given us earlier and pulled it out. Fatty inserted it into the gap, yanked it hard, and broke off a chunk of rock. But the iron pick was bent now and we still couldn’t get the phone out.

“Forget it,” Fatty said. “It’s not like it’s valuable. At most, I’ll buy him another one since this style looks old. We’ll send him a frying pan as a present, too.”

This brand is still on the market, I thought to myself. At this time, the phone in the gap lit up again, flashed a few times, and then went out.

“What’s going on? Is there any signal in this tunnel?”

“No, this is the phone’s battery power warning. It’s running out of power,” I said. “The cover isn’t closed, so it consumes a little power.”

Wait, why isn’t the cover closed? My heart thumped, and I couldn’t help thinking that Xiao Hua wouldn’t have accidentally dropped it since the cover was opened so wide. The impact from the fall wouldn’t have opened it like that.

So, Xiao Hua must have opened his phone at that time. But there wasn’t a signal in this place, so why would he bother to turn it on? There was no need to call or text here.

“No, I still have to get it,” I said. “I think there’s a problem.”

Fatty sighed and said, “You’re just being paranoid.” I ignored him, dug out all the equipment Ghost had given us, and began smashing the gap open. After smashing hard for half an hour, I finally opened a gap big enough for the phone to pass through. Fatty used some iron wire as chopsticks and picked it out carefully.

It was battered and covered in dust, so I blew the dust off, turned it on, and saw a text message waiting to be sent.

“Open the phone’s memory. Everything we’ve experienced is there.”

“What does this mean?” Fatty wondered. “What’s he playing at?”

“Watch the video,” I said. The phone still had ten percent power left, so it would probably last until I finished watching it. 

I immediately opened the phone’s video app and saw a video in the library. I pressed it and immediately saw Xiao Hua’s face. Pan Zi was behind him smoking. Xiao Hua said something to the people on the opposite side, but the microphone was too far away to hear clearly. After saying a few words, he turned his head to the camera and said, “Master Three, I don’t know if something has happened to you, but we’re in big trouble.”

Xiao Hua looked completely ridiculous since he was too close to the camera and Pan Zi was behind him lighting him up with a flashlight, which made his face very dark. He was gasping for breath and looked around before saying, “Based on the current situation, we’re likely to die here, so we’re ready to take a risky approach. The accident happened only half an hour after we entered the cave. Many places on Fatty’s map have collapsed and there’s no way to get through. There’s nothing we can do now.”

As Xiao Hua moved the camera to the surrounding walls, Pan Zi illuminated them. The camera moved over the walls very quickly, but I could still see that there weren’t any shadows in the wall.

When the camera turned back, Xiao Hua continued, “There’s nothing in the wall here. We smashed it and found that the inside was sealed firmly. Obviously, someone found that Fatty could get out of here and closed all the passages.”

The camera turned to a bottomless rock crevice behind Pan Zi, “Both sides of the crevice are sealed off. We don’t know what happened. It’s 7:12 now.” After that, the camera suddenly shook and turned to a gasping Pan Zi, who said to Xiao Hua, “Stop recording. There’s no time.”

“There must be a record, or we’ll die for nothing.” I heard Xiao Hua’s voice say.

Fatty frowned as the camera turned back to Xiao Hua, “Ok, now let me show you something. Light!”

The lens began to adjust and the distance shrank. The aperture of light next to the wall enlarged and then the lens moved forward. We immediately saw that it wasn’t that there weren’t any shadows on the wall, there just weren’t that many of them.

A huge shadow appeared in the flashlight’s beam. It wasn’t clear on the phone’s camera, but we could still determine its size.

At the very least, it was more than four people tall, and one wall simply couldn’t accommodate it. Almost the entire top of the cave and the walls on both sides were surrounded by this dark shadow. It had very long hands and feet that extended far like a ribbon.

“This thing travels very fast. It started to appear about half an hour after we were trapped here. At this speed, it will come out of the rock in little more than ten minutes. At first glance, this thing is of another breed. We’re ready to attack it first, so before it comes out, we’ll see if we can kill it. But I don’t know what it is, so it’s hard to predict what will happen.” Xiao Hua continued, “Whoever sees this, if you come to a place where you can see this shadow, be careful.”

After he spoke, Pan Zi gave a loud roar, “The rock is cracked, everyone get ready!” The camera shook and then it went dark.

I thought there was something wrong with the phone and shook it, only to find that the video was finished. Soon, the screen lit up again and went back to the video selection screen.

Fatty and I silently looked at each other for a long time.

“Do you think something happened to them?”

“Xiao Hua recorded this video four hours ago. Whether they’re ok or not, there’s nothing we can do for them now,” Fatty said. “It seems that there are two kinds of miluotuo in this rock wall. In addition to the most common human form, there’s another kind that is especially huge like the one we saw just now.”

“Will we be alright?” I suddenly felt uneasy, remembering that Ghost had told us not to stay in one place for too long. We had been here for a long time, but there was real stone slate all around so we were probably relatively safe here.

“I don’t know, but it’s better to move forward quickly,” Fatty said while subconsciously shining the flashlight behind him.

We both instantly froze. Fatty’s flashlight lit up the place where we had come in just now, and we saw a strange thing sticking out from the edge of the entrance.

<Chapter 38> <Table of Contents><Chapter 40>

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Updated 3/7/2021