Chapter 49 Keep Crawling

When I went up to the back of the “duo”, I found that the human skin had been pulled away to reveal the contents inside, just like a shadow puppet stage.

With all those pavilions and kiosks, the inside looked like a Kunlun fairyland, and there was even a crack running down the middle, which contained layers upon layers of immortals. It was exactly the same as what I saw in Juxian Hall. And since everything was made using the nacre from clam shells, the flashlight’s beam looked especially magnificent. These were all old objects that must’ve been thousands of years old by now.

But in my hallucination, I felt that that place was very depressing, which had me wondering if there was something wrong with my personality.

In this Kunlun fairyland, Black Glasses made a watch out of clam shells, put it on one of the immortals’ bodies, and stuffed it in a certain place. His purpose was very simple: make me feel the absurdity of that reality.

But all I ended up doing was rationalizing it to myself.

“Have I been affected by the heavenly gift?”

“No, your stuff’s been with you the whole time. When I found you, you were still holding onto it,” Black Glasses said. “In your hallucination, you rationalized the confusion caused by the numerous hallucinations as you having been affected by the heavenly gift. You always have a flash of inspiration, which has helped you solve problems before, but Mamu Xueduo took advantage of your cleverness, so you ended up falling deeper and deeper into your own theory. The so-called situation of drinking water numerous times and constantly receiving the heavenly gift was actually a result of Mamu giving you evidence to prove the theory you came up with.”

“So, you kept confusing my logic.”

“Yes.”

“What’s this?” I saw a few small figures inside that looked like Poker-Face and Xiao Hua. The Xiao Hua figure was wearing ancient clothes and dancing.

“This is me telling you what happened outside. The two of them interrupted the sacrificial ritual, and I survived, but we need you. You can’t be trapped in a hallucination. By the way, your sacrifice was also interrupted, and now the two of us are in a place that’s a bit… awkward,” he said. “This place is part of an area where the sacrifices stay when the ritual is unsuccessful. Granted, this is just my own theory, but it’s a very troublesome place.”

“Where are they?”

“They’re far away from us,” Black Glasses said. “By the way, I used my cell phone to record you while you were hallucinating. You can post it to your WeChat Moments later. It’s very impressive.”

When Black Glasses handed me his phone, I turned it on and immediately saw the video file. In the video, I was covered in blood and sitting in front of that Mamu Xueduo with my eyes full of secretions as I kept chanting something. Overall, it was a very ugly sight.

Then, I started humming.

“What am I doing?”

“I don’t know, but from your words I could get a rough idea of what you were saying,” he replied. “Sometimes you even revealed your thoughts aloud.”

I kept watching, thinking that I would merely look like a deranged person, but the me in the video was quite scary since I spoke so softly that it seemed like I was talking to myself.

“We can talk about the details when we’re done. You should get some rest, but we need to get out of here first,” Black Glasses said. “The situation won’t be too good since they saved us, so we need to meet up with them.”

“Have you heard from Fatty and the others?”

Black Glasses shook his head, “With this thing here, they’ll be caught sooner or later.”

I heaved a big sigh and moved my body. It was extremely sore, but I knew that I would actually recover faster now that I was moving.

I had gone too long without moving.

I still had a lot of questions I wanted to ask him, but he was right; I had been lingering in that hallucination for too long.

When I got up, he shined his flashlight on an exit off to one side and said, “I did some exploring. Next, we’ll have to keep crawling.”

“I was crawling in that hallucination for weeks.”

“You weren’t, but now you really do have to crawl for a few weeks,” Black Glasses said. “These side paths go deep underground, and there will be more Xueduo along the way. The ancient Tibetans should have reached the deepest point back then, so the Xueduo along the way are meant to prevent outsiders from entering. We should be in a huge cavity right now. It must have collapsed at some point, causing all the rubble to pile up and compress together, which left many gaps. I figure there was originally a huge relic in this cavity. It may even be the place where Wei Molongren⁽¹⁾ was located.”

“Was this relic the thing Hitler was looking for?”

“I don’t know, you’d have to ask him.”

Wei Molongren was the center of the universe in the Bon religion, the place where the altar city of the Bon gods was located.

“Do you have any proof?”

I followed him into the cave and began crawling. “If you keep crawling,” he said, “you’ll see some stones that have been processed by people. We’ll definitely see them in a bit, so you can touch them then and see for yourself.”

“Ok, but I have another question. What exactly was that herdsman?”

“That thing may be Mamu since it used your own nature to trap you. I kept trying various ways to get you to hear my voice, but once you made it to Juxian Hall, you still went back. What, were you unable to let him go?”

“No,” I replied. In fact, at the last moment when I left the hallucination, I felt an extremely strange thing behind me. It felt very evil, but at the same time, it also felt very lonely.

This kind of loneliness wasn’t the type that made you feel pity, but instead gave me an extremely ominous feeling.

<Chapter 48><Table of Contents><Chapter 50>

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TN Notes:

(1) Seph and I weren’t finding much but it’s another Bon religion reference. Wei Molongren appears to be a place name, transliterated from Tibetan. According to Baidu and this article, Wei Molongren was located in the west and occupied one-third of the world. Its land was in the shape of eight lotus flowers, and its sky was in the shape of a wheel with 8 shafts. A mountain shaped like nine stacked swastikas overlooked the entire land of Wei Molongren. The top of this mountain was shaped like a whole crystal boulder, and at the foot were four rivers flowing in four different directions.