Chapter 27 Three People, One Battle

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[TN Note: There’s a song clip at the beginning of the chapter in the raws. Link here if you want to listen to it while you read.]

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When I looked at those carefully painted figures, I could feel what my intentions were when I had been painting them—it was a kind of fear. I was worried about my future self. I couldn’t understand what mood I was in when I was painting, but I realized that in addition to the information I wanted to relay, I also wanted to express an emotion. This emotion was one of being shocked after suddenly solving a mystery.

I suddenly realized that Black Glasses didn’t sacrifice himself as early as I had originally thought. I didn’t know what happened, but based on my current speculation, he must have been affected by the heavenly gift after he entered the crevice, and only after a great deal of perseverance was he finally able to rid himself of the effects. Like me, he must have found some way to escape the heavenly gift’s power and woke up.

But at that time, he had to keep going, so he continued moving forward until he reached the place where he could enact the sacrifice. Then, he must have put on that fancy costume and performed that dance with a mocking attitude, all while facing that huge black shadow slowly appearing out of the darkness alone. As the sacrifice was about to be completed, he gripped the explosives tightly in hand, ready to face the ancient god in a way that left him unsure of whether he would succeed or not. At this time, Xiao Hua heard the scripture repeating on the satellite phone and guessed that Black Glasses had started the sacrificial ritual and it was well under way.

So, Xiao Hua found an ancient corpse on a high platform close to where he was standing, removed its clothes, painted patterns on the clothes using the pigment from the rocks here, put them on, and then started his own sacrificial ritual. Poker-Face, who was lying in ambush in the dark and hiding his presence, began to recite the sacrificial scripture. Xiao Hua jumped onto the high platform and started dancing, all of his movements extremely standard. This gorgeous and standard dance immediately interrupted Black Glasses’ sacrifice, luring the ancient god away from Black Glasses in the distance and bringing it closer to Xiao Hua.

I could almost imagine the scene at that time: Black Glasses was mockingly watching that huge wave of dark shadows rushing right towards him, thinking that he could finally meet his own end, but he didn’t anticipate that Xie Yuchen would start a gorgeous dance in the distance. Just when Black Glasses was about to die, that huge wave actually started to slowly recede. At the same time, over on Xie Yuchen’s side, countless black soft-bodied creatures like slugs rose from the crevices in the rocks, looked at this incomplete sacrifice, and then curiously moved towards him in a cluster.

As for Poker-Face, who was still hiding in the dark, all of his tattoos had reached their limit and were on full display. But it was only when the ancient god got closer to Xie Yuchen that it finally felt his presence.

It suddenly saw Poker-Face appear behind Xie Yuchen with his hands cut open, but this was something the ancient god couldn’t recognize. That little human, like an even older monster, was now holding his hands up to the black waves all around, forcing them back one by one.

I imagined that if some consciousness was off to the side, watching that moment, then its eyes must be spinning. After all, the monster was approaching from all sides, Black Glasses was spinning with a big smile on his face, Xie Yuchen was spinning with his eyes closed, and Poker-Face’s cold eyes were also spinning.

I felt a strong sense of excitement welling up within me, as if my blood were boiling. As expected, in the end, only the strong could fight such a battle. But because the sacrifices on both sides were interrupted, the ancient god was completely enraged. This was the only reason all three of them survived even though they were severely injured.

Like me, all three were dragged underground by the ancient god, but the sacrifice wasn’t completed so the ancient god couldn’t devour them. As a result, it could only drag them deep into the rock strata. Throughout this process, the men on both sides caused heavy damage to the ancient god—Black Glasses and Xiao Hua detonated their grenades at the same time, while Poker-Face’s blood burned the ancient god. This allowed Xiao Hua and Poker-Face to escape the ancient god’s control earlier than Black Glasses, and also explained why Black Glasses was dragged deeper underground.

I looked at the ancient god I painted and found that it was a huge creature shaped like an ancient sea lily.⁽¹⁾ All throughout the rock crevices here, there were many crevices and passages that had been made by it in advance. Its body was like countless pipes that joined together to form a huge bouquet of lilies, which were full of bugs. As I looked at that figure, I finally began to understand what this ancient god really was.

When the herdsman saw me sweating all over after examining the murals, he said to me, “Every time you tell me that I must tell the new you a message: you can only move forward. Up to now, all your memories are irrelevant. Even if your life is broken into pieces, you must keep moving forward with your fragmented memories.”

I immediately understood what this meant. Up to now, what I had craved the most were those beautiful and unrestrained memories of my past. Originally, even if I were to die right now, those things would have belonged to me, but this adventure made it so that they no longer belonged to me. My enemy could take everything away, which gave rise to huge feelings of despair and fear, but even so, I couldn’t back down. Even if I received the heavenly gift a thousand or ten thousand times, I would still think of them and keep going, continuing my search for them so that I could drag them out of this abyss.

This was my battle.

Compared with what was buried deep in the bottom of my heart, what I was about to face and what had happened in the past were all insignificant foam.⁽²⁾

<Chapter 26><Table of Contents><Chapter 28>

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TN Notes:

(1) Crinoids (aka sea lilies) are marine animals that live in both shallow water and the deep ocean and resemble a plant or a tree. Crinoids that are attached to the sea bottom by a stalk in their adult form are commonly called sea lilies, while the unstalked forms are called feather stars or comatulids. I included some pics of fossilized ones too:

(2) This sentence is taken from Chinese netizens’ interpretation of Chai Jing’s interpretation of the last few lines from Mikhail Yur’yevich Lermontov’s poem “The Sail”. English version of the poem here (the google Russian-to-English translation and general googling around didn’t really match the netizens’ interpretation exactly but whatev, it’s an interpretation). Someone did a discussion on the poem in Chinese here if you wanna know how I connected that poem to what NPSS has.