Chapter 48 The Difference Between Water and Water

When I took the puppy figure from him, I realized that this was the Brother Gan Shan I saw in my hallucination. No wonder his behavior seemed so human.

“Did you use this to communicate with me in the hallucination?”

“Yes. In the primitive Bon system, this kind of thing not only needed to be made of human bones, but the bones had to belong to a special person, for example, the skull of a child born of incest,” Black Glasses said. “But after these alchemists discovered this kind of sorcery and researched and dissected it, they began to use clam shells. They said that there are immortal abodes in the Kunlun Mountains, but in fact, they’re just the Mamu Xueduo that keep endlessly appearing here. Based on what I’ve seen so far, they didn’t know how to make Mamu Xueduo completely, but they could modify them. They would make things out of clam shells inside these Mamu Xueduo, constructing one imaginary immortal abode after another.

“Then they became trapped in them and eventually became mummies.”

Black Glasses looked at me and motioned for me to drink the water before saying, “Yes, ordinary people can’t get out. Some people would make it out occasionally, and when they returned to the world, they would tell others that deep in the crevices of the Kunlun Mountains, there was a forbidden place of the gods, where you could meet the ancients, seek longevity, and become an immortal.”

“That’s why people flocked to it later.”

“But Mamu Xueduo, like everything in this world, has a shelf life. The Mamu Xueduo outside would gradually rot and lose their effectiveness, so if you wanted to find the forbidden place of the gods, you had no other choice but to go deeper and deeper. It really makes you wonder. The alchemists also said that after crawling for a year in this dark place, you’ll reach a place of the gods. Regardless of whether your merits are complete or not, after you enter the hallucination, you’ll be trapped, and your physical body will soon die and turn into a mummy in this environment. This kind of situation is very similar to an out-of-body experience, or an immortal technique from the myths. But the ancients in those days—those Bon believers who made Mamu Xueduo here, and those ancient Tibetans—what were they trying to do?”

“Can’t you just tell me the answer?”

“I don’t have an answer. Bonism is very complicated.⁽¹⁾ I’ve read the information, and there are more than two hundred “duo” spells in it. And those are just the ones that still exist. There’s no telling how many more didn’t survive.” He motioned again for me to drink the water, “These are all various forms of witchcraft summed up by ancient religions, without any logic. What we encountered just now, we’re lucky we didn’t die in it. But I don’t know what will happen in the future.”

I finally drank the water, which was still very hot. After taking two sips, I continued coughing, finally realizing what the difference between the real world and the hallucinatory world was.

The water here had more complex layers of flavor than it did in the hallucination.

“This isn’t your filtered urine, is it?”

“There’s none.” He smiled and laughed, which suddenly gave me a bad feeling.

“None what?”

“There’s no filtering,” he said.

I looked at the water cup and suddenly felt like puking. “I’m kidding,” he said. “I put sand in my socks and filtered the water that way.”

I put down the cup, suddenly realizing why I was looking for water in my hallucination. If I drank the water carefully, the nausea should have enabled me to come out of the hallucination, but I was too involved at that time.

“How much effort did you put in? To get me out of it, I mean.” I saw a pile of processed clam shells beside him.

“The essence of this hallucination is to trap yourself using your own nature, so I could only keep adding things to your hallucination to make you realize that the environment was abnormal and illogical. For example, when it comes to this original Mamu Xueduo,” he shined his flashlight on the one-person burial corpse in front of me, “I can clearly see that the inside has a structure similar to Juxian Hall.”

“This is a Juxian Hall made by the alchemists inside, and it’s also the main scene that trapped you. Go and see for yourself. You’ll know how much work I’ve done.”

<Chapter 47><Table of Contents><Chapter 49>

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TN Notes:

(1) Ya don’t fucking say