Chapter 54 Everyone is Dead

After Fatty went up, I heard various sounds—him coughing and the dragging of various things—which lasted for more than ten minutes.

I finally got impatient waiting below and anxiously asked, “What’s the matter? What’s the situation? How are they?”

I was feeling very uneasy. My heart had clenched when I heard that the old woman and Little Brother were both there, but then Fatty told me that I might not be able to accept it.

Could I really not accept it? No, I didn’t think so. When I first entered the ancient building, I told myself very clearly that I would probably face some death—in fact, I already had a kind of premonition. On a larger level, I had been building their deaths up in my mind since the beginning so that I could face reality if it turned out to be the case. But the process still wasn’t particularly comfortable.

I called several more times before Fatty leaned over the edge of the hole and said to me, “Come on up.”

You can just say that they’re all dead, I said to myself. It’s not that hard. What’s the matter with you? Why do I have to go and see for myself?

I reached for Fatty, grabbed the edge of the burnt coffin, and scrambled to climb up.

The space above was a very small mezzanine, about 1.23 meters high and full of people from Granny Huo’s team.

There was an indescribable smell filling the whole area, the stench of excrement and urine almost indistinguishable from that of rot.

I covered my nose and mouth and saw numerous traces of dried liquid on the ground that must have flowed from the places where these people were lying. It had dried on the wooden floor, leaving crimson marks.

Fatty kept coughing and said to me, “They’re basically all dead.”

I looked around, finding it difficult to identify these people in the dark. The first person I recognized was Granny Huo, because her characteristics were very obvious. I climbed over to her and found that she had been dead for quite a long time. Her eyes had become cloudy and turned an amber color, her mouth was very wide open, and her facial expression looked very restless.

I sighed. She must have died rather unwillingly. Truthfully, I had no feelings for Granny Huo, but she was an elder after all. I couldn’t restrain my sadness when I saw someone I knew become a corpse.

I continued looking around and saw several faces that I knew, but their bodies were all stiff now. After their deaths, excrement and urine had flowed everywhere, and these normally all-powerful players had now turned into this. It was a bit ugly.

“Where’s Little Brother?” My heart sank completely and I knew that everything was over. Although it was different from what Ghost had said and they seemed to have found a place to escape the alkaline fog, the result was still the same.

Surprisingly enough, I didn’t feel sad at all. But I could feel a very strong emotion ready to rush out at any time, surpassing all other feelings. It was called “collapse”. I forcefully suppressed it, not knowing whether my ability to escape from reality had improved to a certain degree or whether my mind just couldn’t accept such information and chose to bypass it.

Fatty used a flashlight to illuminate the corner where a pile of clothes was laying and said to me, “Don’t look at it yet. Let’s see if there’s anything valuable here first. It stinks.”

I secretly scolded in my heart, could you be more ruthless? Little Brother is dead, and all you care about is the fucking stench. After thinking about it, I went over and tore open the pile of clothes, immediately seeing Little Brother’s shrunken face.

I froze, my whole body suddenly going rigid and my mind blanking out.

I couldn’t describe the desolation in my heart and suddenly didn’t know what to do.

Dead?

You’ve got to be kidding me.

Is he really dead? Hey, what kind of international joke is this?

“Wake up. Let’s go home.” I patted his face, suddenly finding it all very funny. I turned to Fatty and laughed. “Look at Little Brother.”

“I know,” Fatty said in a low voice.

Then, my hands began to shake uncontrollably. When I looked at them, I found that even though there wasn’t any sadness in my heart and my consciousness didn’t react, my body still instinctively felt despair.

He’s really fucking sitting there, I said to myself. He’s really fucking dead. Poker-Face is really fucking dead!

There was still such a thing in this world… Poker-Face was unexpectedly mortal.

The Zhang family’s ancient building was really amazing. I had always felt that Ghost was just an alarmist, but now I only felt like the sky was spinning.

Poker-Face was a walking miracle, so his death suddenly made me feel that the whole world had become extremely real and cruel. Couldn’t all miracles be eternal in this world? Or was there no such thing as a miracle, and everything was a coincidence that had finally ended?

After a long time, I began to feel a touch of sadness. My instincts were pushing down my collapsing emotions, but there were still all kinds of uncomfortable feelings leaking from the “pressure cooker” of emotions. I knew that I couldn’t let my emotions go. If I felt that sadness, I may just die here, too.

The feelings in my heart were very strange. It wasn’t only sadness, but I didn’t know if others would be able to understand my complicated mood.

First, there was despair. Then, there was disbelief at what I was seeing in front of my eyes. My mind was blank for a long time, and all kinds of emotions came out.

I always wondered how I would feel if Poker-Face died. I thought I might be extremely sad or maybe a little numb since I had built up the idea of their deaths in my mind so much in order to bear it. But now that I had really encountered it, my mood was so strange that I couldn’t handle it by myself.

After this, I was in a bind, unsure whether I should be sad or pretend to be calm and endure the pain. Finally, the former gradually gained the upper hand and I couldn’t do anything besides stare at his body blankly.

But just when I felt the tears about to flow down, I suddenly saw Poker-Face’s hand move and scratch the floor!

“What are you doing?” Fatty shouted. “Stop looking and come help me!”

My tears still fell because of inertia, but the feeling in my heart was extremely complicated. I turned to Fatty and stammered, “His, his, his corpse just moved!”

“Shit, if Little Brother can move his corpse, then he’d be an amazing zombie,” Fatty said. “The King of the Zombies, even. Stop your fucking bullshit and hurry up.”

“He, he, he really moved!” I said as countless thoughts immediately raced through my mind. If Little Brother really became a zombie, what should I do? Were we going to rob a tomb with a zombie? In that case, it wasn’t a grave robbery, but a diplomatic activity.

Fatty gave me a strange look and asked, “What happened?” He started to come over, but another body on the side also moved before he could even take a few steps.

Fatty wasn’t afraid and came straight to my side. I pointed to the corpse he had just bypassed and stammered, “That body moved too! Isn’t this a room of corpses? They’re all moving.”

“What corpses? Some of these people are still alive,” Fatty said.

“Alive?” I couldn’t understand. 

“I didn’t say all of them were dead!” Fatty said angrily. “Many people are alive, but things aren’t looking so good. You have to look around quickly to see if there’s anything useful—water, medicine, etc. All those still alive need some water.”

It was only at that moment that I realized that this was what he had meant just now. “You didn’t say that earlier. You scared me to death!” I scolded him. 

“I’m not like you. Your mind is on life and death, but my mind is focused on saving a few people,” Fatty said. “Little Brother’s pulse was still stable when I checked it just now but some of them are definitely on the brink of death. We have to hurry with palliative care (1) and then rescue them.”

I took another look at Poker-face and saw that his face was so pale that he looked like the bodies around him. I went up and touched his neck, finding that he really did have a pulse.

It wasn’t strong, however, and his physical condition was obviously very bad.

In a flash, all of my emotions receded like the ebb of the tide. My whole body softened, my vision went black, and I almost fainted. You son of a bitch, I thought to myself. You scared the shit out of me. 

Fatty patted me on the hand again to get my attention, “Save the others first. Little Brother is fine, don’t patronize him. These people were raised by parents.”

Fatty was right. Under such circumstances, it also went against my own principles to save Little Brother instead of the others.

I took a deep breath, let go of the tiredness caused by my drastic mood changes, and quickly calmed myself down.

I walked over to the other people and dug out their canteens—the water had changed a little after being kept for too long. We put some disinfectant in it, found those who still had a pulse and body temperature, and got them to drink the water one by one. They were almost unconscious, and their bodies had weakened so much that some were just like corpses.

“What caused this? Was it poisoning?” I asked Fatty.

He tore open their collars and moved their hair aside, revealing the festered skin underneath.

“Take a look. Many of the cracks here are filled with cloth strips and oil wax, basically sealing the place. Although there was very little fog, it’s still highly toxic. If you stay here too long, you’ll slowly inhale a lot and still get poisoned,” Fatty said. “You’ll die in a second when you fall into potassium cyanide, so it’s the same when you inhale it—this is the reason.”

“You don’t have the education to know about potassium cyanide,” I said.

“Of course I know what it is. Anyone who’s read detective stories knows,” Fatty argued. “Potassium cyanide and Huo Yuanjia are my idols.”

“What about these people?” I asked. “Do you think they have anything here we can use as medicine?”

“If there was, they would’ve already used it. But have you noticed that none of them are wearing gas masks? It seems they’re useless against this type of poisonous gas.”

I found it strange—generally, people who had gas masks would wear them even if it was useless because of the psychological comfort they provided. I saw several gas masks scattered around, but I couldn’t figure out what the situation had been like at that time.

“It was like this when you came up?” I asked. Fatty nodded.

When I thought about it, I felt that something was off and said, “You’re wrong. They must’ve been wearing gas masks before, but someone found this place and checked their faces to see who died. That person probably took off the masks.”

Fatty nodded, “It makes sense, but who was it?”

I thought for a moment and figured that the most likely scenario was that their opinions had diverged. The team was divided into two—one led by Poker-Face and the other by Granny Huo. Then, Granny Huo’s team met with some danger and Poker-Face came to rescue them. When he arrived, he found that she was dead and that he was also trapped.

As a result, the people here were in two different states: dead or on their last breath. Poker-Face must have been poisoned after he came in, but the poisonous fog should’ve dispersed, so he removed the gas masks to see who they were.

I figured this was the most likely scenario given the current situation. But when I thought about it, I realized that I was wrong—it was also possible that Qiu Dekao’s people came in and found this place.

I remembered that Little Brother’s blade was in Qiu Dekao’s hand and he had said that one of the guys brought it out. It seemed possible that the guy could’ve been here. But even if he wasn’t, someone must have taken the blade from here and handed it to him.

I remembered that guy’s horrible appearance and the way he looked at me. I still found it strange since no one knew what that look really meant, but it wasn’t like I could figure it now.

We searched around the secret room and found a hidden door to get out. This must have been a compartment for stacking some regular sacrificial objects. After I opened the door, I found that the outer room was full of things. There were all kinds of strange blue-and-white porcelain jars, but the most valuable thing wasn’t the porcelain itself; it was the rolled-up calligraphy and paintings inside of them. All of these things were randomly piled up outside of the secret room.

I could see at a glance why there was such a hidden room and why Granny Huo had come up here. It was a studio full of all kinds of precious calligraphy and paintings that could never be preserved if they were soaked in strong alkali fog. At that time, the Yangshi Lei who designed the Zhang family’s ancient building must have specially created this small sealed room to protect the calligraphy and paintings.

Granny Huo must have looked at Yangshi Lei’s design drawings before she found the room.

As expected of a master. If it weren’t for this move, they probably would’ve melted completely by now and I would’ve only seen a lot of bones covered in dried meat. At that time, I could only determine which pile belonged to Poker-Face by looking at the length of the finger bones.

<Chapter 53> <Table of Contents><Chapter 55>

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TN Notes:

(1) Palliative care is focused on providing relief from the symptoms and stress of illness. It’s not first aid but it’s not hospice either.

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Updated 4/24/2021