Chapter 19 Epiphany

Speaking of Fatty and Yun Cai, I didn’t talk to him much about it and he wasn’t willing to talk either. It wasn’t because he was afraid to, he just didn’t want to. When comparing me and Chen Pi Ah Si to them, there really was no comparison. But I was under tremendous pressure at this time so my brain was racing. When I first faced this riddle, I thought it was absolutely impossible to find something in common, but then I immediately found a common point.

This point wasn’t nonsensical or the product of unconstrained thinking.

That bullet must’ve been the one in Yun Cai’s body. The Yun Cai here had given Fatty something that had been in her body, which held special meaning to Fatty, but I didn’t know what it was.

I had also taken something out of Chen Pi Ah Si’s body at that time.⁽¹⁾

Fatty didn’t take the bullet out of Yun Cai’s body after she died, but I had no clue how her body had been disposed of in the end so I had to operate under the assumption that it had originally been in Yun Cai’s body and then handed over to Fatty here.

If the person who appeared just now really was Chen Pi Ah Si, did that mean that this sutra was originally in his body and it was something very important to me? Did I not search thoroughly enough when I took that other object out back then?

Was this idea pure nonsense or not? I could no longer tell, but it seemed very reasonable to me at the moment.

At that time, in addition to the thing I found in Chen Pi Ah Si’s body, there must have been other things that I should have seen, but didn’t.

Leaving aside the scientific aspects, why did the corpse beneath Changbai Mountain regain consciousness, appear here, and give me the thing hidden in its body? In any case, that was the only similarity with Fatty and Yun Cai that I could think of: the object was inside and had never been given.

I looked at the crevice again, but there was still no movement. “Grandpa Si?” I tried calling out.

The other side seemed empty, so I picked up the Sanskrit-like sutra again. If it was hidden in Grandpa Si’s body and I should have seen it, what was it?

I looked each word over carefully, and was once again certain that I couldn’t understand it at all. I took a deep breath and began looking for information outside of the book, such as the paper and the fragmented pages.

As I looked at the fragmented paper, I suddenly realized that it looked very similar to the black stone veins around the edge of that huge black spot I saw before entering the crevice.

I reassembled the fragmented paper and found that all the ragged edges made up that black, sun-like spot.

They were exactly the same.

What does this mean? I shouted at the crevice, feeling utterly confused and unable to calm down at all. What’s going on? What is this?!!!

Then, another thought popped into my head.

These thoughts appeared in my mind one by one like epiphanies. I used to think that they were all my own, but now I found that they weren’t.

These thoughts weren’t mine, but someone putting them in my head.

What were they trying to make me do?

Someone told me to come here and then told me to go to the deepest place here. Then, something brought me into the depths of this crevice, wanting to see me.

I broke out in a cold sweat as I realized that these were all hints from some mysterious thing that was trying to tell me something.

This sutra, the pattern of that black sun-like spot on it, and the strange monster on the other side of the rock wall were all telling me something.

But it seemed like it couldn’t come out and say it, or at least it was unable to. All it could do was keep giving me hints and flashes of inspiration.

Suddenly coming to a realization, I touched my pocket and felt my whole body break out in a cold sweat again.

The bronze meteorite in my pocket was gone! I had lost that thing’s protection! I was under the power of the heavenly gift!

It must have disappeared when I was dragged down just now. Was it stuck somewhere in the rock layers above?

I had never been so scared in my life. Since I wasn’t worried about physical attacks anymore, did it want to start launching mental attacks now?

It kept shifting tactics and giving me flashes of inspiration. As I was lost in thought, I suddenly saw that dead, branch-like hand stretch out from the stone crevice again.

“Come on. If you take my hand, you can get out of here. I’ll take you to a place,” the accented voice said. “Be sure to memorize the sutra.”

<Chapter 18><Table of Contents><Chapter 20>

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TN Notes:

(1) This is reference to “Ten Years Later” Chapter 31 when Wu Xie smashed Chen Pi’s zombie face in and pulled a key out of his nasal cavity.