Chapter 38 Snake Marsh

When the strong feeling of being blocked slowly subsided, I realized why I felt this way.

It was because that memory had been buried deep in my heart, and I hadn’t thought about it for a long time.

But this picture left such a deep impression on my subconscious mind that even though my conscious mind had no idea what to think, my brain was already starting to make deductions and draw some conclusions.

The emergence of those horrific memories and shocking conclusions at the same time caused a huge impact, which made me feel like my mind was tangled in a bunch of knots.

I need to explain very carefully what I remembered and what I deduced.

First of all, this simple picture must be a scene of that huge meteorite I saw when I was at the Snake Marsh Ghost City.

At that time, I looked inside the meteorite and saw a strange woman who was wearing clothes that resembled the ones the Queen of the West was wearing. She took a quick peek at me before disappearing.⁽¹⁾

I could have described it in a more thrilling and concrete manner back then, but now I couldn’t because my memory was all fuzzy.

Very, very few people knew about this matter. In fact, it could be said that only three people knew about it, maybe even less than that.

But it was absolutely impossible for any of these three people to draw the picture in this crack just now, because they wouldn’t be able to get in at all. Even Poker-Face wouldn’t be able to fit. Based on the picture’s location behind the corpse, you would need to somehow bypass the body to draw on the wall behind it. Not only were human arms not long enough to reach that far, but the corpse was so fragile that it would disintegrate at the slightest touch.

So, the person who drew this picture was definitely small, maybe Qi Yu, or something similar to Qi Yu—that thing did have long hair after all.

The conclusion that could be inferred from this information was terrifying.

Since the three of us couldn’t have drawn this picture, but we were the only ones who knew about it, then the person who drew this picture—according to the logic of the Snake Marsh—must be the woman in the meteorite, because other than us, she was the only one who knew about it.

And based on the structural logic of this small crack, the drawing had to have been done by a strange little monster.

So, either the woman told the little monster about it, and the little monster came here to use the drawing to mess with me, or that woman=little monster.

In other words, the woman we saw at that time may have become a small deformed monster.

I didn’t believe that the woman told the little monster about it, and then the little monster recognized me here and decided to mess with me. That was too complicated. Besides, my face had changed over the years, so unless the woman had a photo, how could she describe my appearance to the little monster?

So, I was almost a hundred percent certain that the woman=little monster.

And for the first time, I realized that the fancy ancient clothes the woman was wearing at that time might not have been the clothes of the Queen of the West, but the kind of clothes used for sacrificial offerings.

Was it possible that that woman wasn’t the immortal Queen of the West hidden in meteorite, but a woman who was going to offer herself up as a sacrifice?

Who was she?

My hands were shaking as I started to wonder, is it Chen Wen-Jin? Is it Aunt Wen-Jin?

Why did I come up with this possibility?

Because she was also seriously ill, and their system was closely related to that of the older generation of the Mystic Nine. Was everyone else aware of Granny Huo’s knowledge of Bonism?

They were very determined to go to Tamu-Tuo, so was their purpose related to offering up sacrifices?

The meteorite was full of holes, just like a hornet’s nest, and the holes in this simple drawing clearly indicated that they led to a very deep place.

Tamu-Tuo may not be far from here (of course, I had absolutely no idea where I was anymore).

So, in other words, was it possible that the holes in the meteorite were connected to these crevices?

If so, was it possible that the monster in the small crack just now was Aunt Chen Wen-Jin?

She entered the meteorite to avoid transforming into a blood zombie, or, according to my current reasoning, she wanted to sacrifice herself to cure the effects of the transformation.⁽²⁾

Then, like Qi Yu, she became something else and survived in these crevices this whole time, only to suddenly see me just now?

This was why I felt like I was being suffocated. In those few seconds, all of these thoughts exploded in my mind.

These thoughts made me extremely depressed to the point that I almost vomited. I looked at the crack, and the crack looked back at me. All of my realistic reasoning was denying this inference, because it was too much of a leap, and it felt like an invalid conjecture.

But that picture couldn’t be explained at all. And if my theory was correct, then where on earth was I? What was aboveground? Figuring out my geographical location suddenly became very important. I looked up and thought to myself, fuck, did I crawl to the area below the Qaidam Basin?⁽³⁾ Am I a monster who crawls at the speed of light?

<Chapter 37><Table of Contents><Chapter 39>

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TN Notes:

(1) This is referencing chapter 24 of “Graveyard of a Queen” (pg 127 of the pdf).

(2) Little refresher: in chapter 79 of “Ten Thousand Mountains”, it’s said that Bon gods only like healthy sacrifices so if the sacrifice was sick, the god would cure them first. That’s why Wu Xie thinks Chen Wen-Jin wanted to sacrifice herself.

(3) Last place I have reference to of where they were at was Xinjiang (from chapter 69 of “Ten Thousand Mountains”). Don’t really know where Tamu-Tuo would be but the Qaidam Basin is this whole area on the right so Wu Xie could literally be anywhere in the western region (super helpful, I know lol).

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If you all don’t need these little refresher notes, just lemme know and I’ll stop leaving them. Just thought it might save you all time from opening up all the pdfs and looking for them like I have to do hahaha. Also, seems like this could be the long-haired woman Wu Xie saw in ch 75 of “Ten Thousand Mountains”