Chapter 40 Black Python Lotus

The next thing I knew, I felt a pain in my eyes that penetrated deep into my brain. It was just like someone had directly grabbed the nerves in my eyes. I squeezed my eyes shut and rushed towards the place where Poker-Face had been standing just now.

I had to reach him quickly because this darkness was the worst state for the three of us to be in.

But when I rushed over and stretched my hands out, all I caught was air. As I immediately started to lose consciousness, the last thing I could feel was my whole body falling into a sea of black cotton.

It was so overpowering that I was barely conscious before I knew it. Then, I completely blacked out.

When I woke up again, the sky was already bright. I got up and found that I wasn’t in the same place I had been last night. Instead, I appeared to be in a forest on top of a hill.

Honestly, this hill could be regarded as a mountain. It looked to be about two or three hundred meters tall and was completely covered in forest. The trees weren’t tall, but most of them were European red pines and Mongolian oaks. Sunshine filtered down through the tops of the tree canopies, and as I looked between the gaps in the trees, I could see low mountains in the distance. I could even see the grassland at the foot of the mountain stretching out as far as the eye could see. The mountain was very steep, and when I stood up, I found that there was only a narrow space to place my feet. Moreover, the ground at the top of the mountain was sloped, so it would be easy to slide down if I wasn’t careful.

This was very common terrain at this latitude.

I turned my head and saw Fatty lying on a bunch of fallen leaves beside me. Poker-Face was leaning against a tree on the side, quietly resting.

It’s dawn?

We’re ok?

I cautiously stood up, grabbing the roots of a nearby tree since the ground was sloped and covered in fallen leaves and mud. Fatty and Poker-Face both opened their eyes.

“What’s going on? What happened to me last night?”

Fatty took out his cell phone and showed me some photos. I saw that the whites of my eyes were showing and I had been tied up.

I suddenly felt a sharp pain in my eyes. As it turned out, the darkness that had suddenly rushed over me at that time was just my own eyeballs rolling into the back of my head.

I rubbed my eyes and found that Poker-Face was covered in mud. “You and I were infected last night,” Fatty said. “Little Brother saved me, but it was too late to save you. So, we carried you all the way here.”

“What’s the situation?” I asked Fatty.

I wanted him to describe what had happened last night, but his face turned pale and he shook his head. It seemed like he couldn’t even muster up the will to shoot off witty remarks like usual. “You’re better off not knowing,” he said.

“You’re no fun. Uncle Three was like this and now you are, too.” I was fuming, but Fatty suddenly got up, grabbed me, and walked to the other side of the mountain.

We had been sitting close to the top of the eastern slope of the mountain so it only took a few steps to reach the ridge. In fact, the western slope was only about three steps away.

The trees were sparse on the western slope, so we could easily see the mountain on the opposite side. Even though that mountain was a dirt mound about the same height as the mountain we were currently on, it was very special because there was an amazing spectacle on the side of it.

This spectacle turned out to be a giant hole in the dirt that was about four or five stories high and surrounded by trees.

“What do you think of this grave robbers’ tunnel?” Fatty asked me.

I could tell at a glance that this was a grave robbers’ tunnel, but it was just too big. Godzilla must’ve been the one to dig it. But the most amazing thing was that there were countless small holes all around this huge hole. There were so many of these small holes, in fact, that they formed a huge “holey” mountain.

I didn’t have trypophobia⁽¹⁾, but I still shuddered when I saw it. There were a lot of trees on the opposite side, but the holes we could see were already very big. I was certain that if we went over there, we’d find a lot of smaller holes hidden under the tree canopies. Did this mountain become a hornet’s nest?

As I continued to look, I realized that all of the holes formed a clear image of a lotus.

Shen Qianjue’s description wasn’t very good, I thought to myself. This thing is different from what she said. It’s certainly uglier and more shocking. How many people have come here in hopes of stealing from this underground palace? What’s going on with this huge grave robbers’ tunnel?

“We’re in front of the underground palace,” Fatty said. “Don’t worry about last night. Let’s just get down to business.”

I looked at him. Although I was really intrigued by this holey mountain, Fatty’s words still upset me. “Are you going to tell me or not?” I asked him. “If you don’t tell me, I won’t support you in the future.”

Fatty continued to hold on to me as he told me to look behind the holey mountain.

When I did, I saw the snow-capped mountain we had seen when we first arrived here. Now that it was much closer, its magnitude was even more spectacular. The snow-capped peaks formed from the central axis behind this earthen “lotus” mountain were all black—I only discovered this now because the mountain had been so far away before—and the mountain’s ridges were very special. One of them looked like a black python that pierced right into the “lotus”.

This wasn’t something that had been carved out; it was just a landform that had coincidentally taken that shape after it had been eroded by water.

“In your opinion, what would make the snow on that mountain turn black?” When Fatty asked me this, I immediately knew what he meant.

Almost every single strange thing we had encountered along the way had been “black”, which meant that there had to be something very strange under that black mountain.

And whatever that strange thing was, everything that had happened here should be related to it.

<Chapter 39><Table of Contents><Chapter 41>

****

TN Notes:

(1) Trypophobia is a fear or disgust of closely-packed holes.

****

FYI, there won’t be an update this weekend. On the bright side, Anna has put “Notes in Rain Village” and “A Thousand Faces” into pdfs for you.