Chapter 38 Enter the Door

I stayed in the dark for a long time, until there wasn’t any more darkness to hide in. When I finally decided to move, I started walking between them. I walked for a long time, but none of them looked up at me. Some were looking around in confusion or at the things in their hands, some were resting with their eyes closed, and others simply fell asleep.

I squeezed the stone in my hand. I didn’t understand what was going on, but I knew that this scene was different from what I had imagined countless times.

The idea to kill them all kept springing to the forefront of my mind. No matter why these people appeared here, I didn’t want such a complicated situation.

I took the stone and went up to a sleeping Wu Xie, looking at him coldly as I lifted the stone up.

He turned over, opened his eyes, and looked at me without a trace of fear. At this time, I suddenly realized where I had seen him before.

He was sleeping wearily on a rock and clutching a bottle of unlabeled liquor in his hand.

This was what I looked like when I returned to Hangzhou. I was lying in front of the shop, facing the West Lake, and drinking liquor as I watched people pass by in front of me like threads woven on a loom. I had no alcohol tolerance at all, and once I woke up, I still felt dizzy despite only having two drinks.

At that time, I felt tired and desperate. Everything had returned to zero.

I lost everything, and gained nothing.

I put down my stone and looked at the Wu Xies around me. They were all moments from my life over the past ten years. Everyone was a reflection of myself.

They were wearing different clothes, had different degrees of vigilance, and were armed with different weapons.

People never have this kind of opportunity to look at themselves so clearly. I climbed onto a big rock and suddenly thought to myself, is this an illusion? Why are so many pieces of my past projected in front of me? Did I unknowingly enter the bronze door, and this luster illuminated by my flashlight is the back of the door?

As I thought this, the lights around me began to go out bit by bit, and the darkness slowly returned, leaving only the glow’s afterimage. Then, I felt something licking my lips.

My consciousness slowly returned, and I realized that I had been sleeping. I could hear someone talking nearby, and when I opened my eyes, I saw a bonfire in front of me and Brother Xiao Man was licking my face.

I didn’t know what Xiao Hua had given him, but his saliva stank. I rolled over, sat up, and saw several bonfires around me.

I was relieved when someone handed me a cup, but when I went to take it, I found that the scars on my hands had been sewn up.

“Huh? When did I fall asleep?” I asked.

Someone poured hot tea into my cup, “You’re not asleep, you’re in shock.”

“Nonsense.” I took a sip of the hot tea. Over the past ten years, I had experienced much harsher environments than the one I was in now. Why would I go into shock here when I didn’t then?

I turned my head, thinking I would see Fatty, Xiao Hua, or someone else. Instead, I saw a man in leather, wearing sunglasses and looking at me with a cup in his hand.

“I haven’t woken up yet, have I?” I took a sip of tea. “Why else would you be here?”

“Yes, you’re hallucinating. You’re going to die soon.” Black Glasses said to me. “The temperature here is very low, and you’re sleeping on a rock. It’s highly unlikely they’ll find you before you die.”

“I won’t die. Why would I be hallucinating about you before I died anyways? ” I asked, looking at Brother Xiao Man.

I suddenly had a bad feeling. I could see hallucinating Black Glasses, but why would I be hallucinating about this smelly dog?

I was keenly aware that I wasn’t awake yet, so I stood up and looked around. In a single glance, I saw Fatty lying dead behind the boulder I had been laying on. His neck was broken, his hands and feet were twisted all out of sorts, and his spine was exposed. One of the monkeys was eating something from his spine.

“When he came down, he slipped off the chain and broke his neck.” Black Glasses came up behind me, hooked his arm around my shoulder, and motioned me to look to the other side.

I turned to see Xiao Hua’s head rolling in a pile of rubble, his body nowhere in sight.

“Take his head and give it to Xiuxiu and see if she’ll still want to be friends with you this time.” Black Glasses said. “He was torn to pieces by a human-faced bird. Your men tried to save him—”

Beside Xiao Hua’s head, Kan Jian was pressed under a stone. His eyeballs had been squeezed out and his brain was flowing out from the empty sockets. “The birds here grabbed the stone and dropped it like a bomb.”

I walked towards them, looking at the bodies of the guys around them, which had all been torn to pieces. Internal organs littered the ground and the smell of blood permeated the air.

No one was alive.

My hands were cold. When I looked at Black Glasses, all he said was, “I told you it might end like this. As long as one person continues moving forward, the people around him will continue to encounter these things.”

I didn’t speak. I might have collapsed if this was ten years earlier, but now I wouldn’t. I had already recognized the impermanence of life.

Black Glasses looked at me: “Not talking? Come on, come with me.”

“Where to?”

Black Glasses pointed up ahead with a flashlight, and I found that the huge bronze door had opened. A gap had appeared between the bronze, but it was slowly closing.

He picked a gun up from the ground, threw it to me, and rushed toward the gap. I checked the bullets, picked up the flashlight from Fatty’s body, and then followed him toward the gap.

As the human-faced birds swooped down toward us, I stuck close behind him and fired the gun. There was one tracer for every ten rounds, and as the light arced through the sky, I took advantage of the chaos and rushed into the gap.

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