Chapter 60 Departure

Poker-Face just continued to lay there, so Fatty gave him a sedative and he soon fell asleep.

Looking at his appearance, I suddenly felt choked up and uncomfortable.

He must have come out of that hole while we were sleeping, but what had happened to put him in such a state?

I looked at the meteorite overhead, but there didn’t seem to be any changes—the black-blue surface was as ugly as ever, and those numerous eye-like holes still made me feel like I was suffocating.

Damn it, what the hell happened in there?

Feeling very depressed, I suddenly started to wonder if this was all just some elaborate prank.

“There’s no time.” What did this mean? It sounded like something was about to happen soon, and there was nothing we could do to prepare for it. Was that something going to happen here?

Our surroundings were as quiet as space, and we couldn’t see anything since none of the miner’s lamps were turned on. This meant that if something really was going to happen, we had no way of knowing it.

Fatty suddenly sighed and said, “He must have received a great shock. He’s not responding to any outside stimuli—he listens, but can’t hear, and looks, but can’t see. It’s like all of his senses have shut down. Something similar happened to a friend of mine. The doctor said it was like his brain was stuck on the last moment he experienced.”

I didn’t say a word. While I didn’t know what kind of person Poker-Face was, I could definitely guarantee that his mental fortitude was very high. When someone was on that level, it was very difficult to shock them to such an extent, which meant that whatever happened inside this meteorite must have been more terrifying than anything we could comprehend.

But I really couldn’t imagine what might have frightened a cool-headed person like him to the point of collapse. I was sure it couldn’t have been a monster—after all, even I wasn’t afraid of corpses—but even if there was a terrifying monster inside, it definitely wouldn’t have scared him to this extent. So, whatever he saw must have been an extremely strange situation.

At this time, I suddenly thought of Chen Wen-Jin—where was she now? Had she also gone crazy and couldn’t get out? If that were true, then I had to go in. Even if I fell a thousand times, I would climb inside that meteorite and take her out—I simply couldn’t leave her in there.

Just thinking about it gave me goose bumps, so I quickly stood up again, walked over to the hole, turned on a lamp, and shined it up into the dark depths. I had done this so many times over the past few days that it had almost become habit by now. Casually sweeping the light around the hole, I took a quick look up and then walked back towards Fatty and Poker-Face.

But after taking a few steps, I suddenly froze as I realized that something was wrong. This time, the hole hadn’t been pitch-black—there was something inside of it!

Scalp tingling, I immediately went back and took a look, only to find that there really was something inside the hole!

I almost cried out in shock, but managed to restrain myself before quickly calling Fatty over. At the same, I turned the lamp to its brightest setting and pointed the beam up—about twenty or thirty meters away from the opening, I could see a pale face peering out from the darkness.

Thinking it was Chen Wen-Jin, I immediately felt overjoyed, but then I looked at that face again and suddenly felt cold all over—it was deathly pale, eerily expressionless, and the eyes were sunk deep into its sockets. But the thing that really creeped me out was that this was a face I had never seen before.

My back immediately broke out in a cold sweat, Who is this person?

Fatty, seeing that my expression was off, came over to take a look and also froze. Then he immediately reached for his gun, but I quickly stopped him. The movement caused the light to flicker, and when I looked back up again, the face had disappeared, leaving only the dark tunnel behind.

Fatty and I looked at each other, both sweating like crazy. After a long moment of silence, I eventually asked, “You saw that just now, right?”

He nodded, and I suddenly noticed that his face looked a little green, as if he was scared to death.

This matter went far beyond my scope of understanding. How could there possibly be a stranger in this meteorite? Were people living inside of it? Were the descendants of the Queen of the West’s people still alive and living in it?

No, that was too absurd. My thoughts suddenly turned to Chen Wen-Jin again and I almost gasped—had she already started transforming into one of those creatures, and what we saw just now was her face after the mutation?

I looked at Fatty and wanted to ask if he thought that face showed any resemblance to Chen Wen-Jin’s just now, but then I noticed that he still looked a little green and he was still staring at the hole—clearly, he hadn’t recovered yet.

Fatty wasn’t the type to be easily scared, so I found his behavior kind of odd. When I asked him what was wrong, he turned to me and said, “You didn’t recognize that person?”

I was taken aback, “Recognize them? Do you know who that person is?”

Fatty pointed behind us, and when I turned around, I saw the female corpse sitting on the throne. Fatty shined the miner’s lamp on the female corpse’s face, and the flickering light produced a shadowy effect that suddenly made her face seem very sinister.

As soon as I saw it, I immediately understood. This shocking realization not only left me feeling faint, but also sent a chill through my heart.

My God, the face we saw just now was very similar to this corpse’s face!

What was going on? That face we saw in the meteorite just now… was it the Queen of the West?

Was this corpse actually just a shell, and the real Queen of the West was still alive at the center of this huge rock?

Impossible. How could that be? How could someone from a thousand years ago still be alive? Even if she didn’t die of old age, she would have definitely starved to death in this place.

Maybe it was a hallucination? I was so mentally exhausted right now that I suddenly didn’t know whether to trust my own senses or not. “This meteorite is making us crazy,” I said to Fatty. “Maybe that face just now really was Chen Wen-Jin, but the light and shadows made it look like this female corpse.”

Fatty paused, “Then why didn’t she come out?”

I fell silent, not knowing what to say. Fatty continued anyways, “It would be one thing if you saw wrong, but it’s rare for two people to make such a mistake at the same time.”

After that, the two of us were on pins and needles. Just as I was thinking that there was no way we could stay in this place any longer, Fatty said to me, “Young Wu, this place is getting weirder and weirder. When do you plan on leaving?”

“What do you mean? Chen Wen-Jin hasn’t come out yet.” Suddenly noticing the look on his face, I asked, “Why are you so scared? It’s not like you at all.”

“That’s only a small part of it. The main thing is that we’re almost out of food. I was actually going to talk to you about it today. If you refused to leave tomorrow, I was planning on taking you out of here even if I had to knock you out first. If we wait any longer, we’ll starve to death here. There’s almost nothing left to eat.”

“Can’t we hold out for a few more days?” I asked.

“I’ve already calculated it,” Fatty said. “The remaining food will only last us for two days, which is barely enough time to find a way out of here. But now that we have to take Little Brother into account, we simply have no other choice. Even if we can reach the surface safely, we’ll be starving as we make our way through the rainforest. Now that the water has mostly receded, the whole terrain will be swampland, which will be extremely difficult to cross. If you insist on waiting, we’ll start starving tomorrow. After two days of this, we won’t even have the strength to get out of here. If we don’t leave now, we’ll die here.”

I looked at the hole again and shook my head, “No. We can’t leave her.”

Fatty patted me on the shoulder and said, “I know you’re a soft-hearted person, so I’ve already thought it all out. We’ll leave all the food here and try to find a way outside. We’ll go hungry, but if we can return to your uncle’s camp, we should be able to replenish our supplies. And to be honest, I buried a pack of compressed biscuits every time we stopped to rest. As long as we go the right way, we can still get out of here. I think it’s unlikely Boss Lady will come out, so it’s better to do this instead of wait for her to come out and see us dying of hunger. Besides, with all those strange things in this meteorite, I think…”

I knew what Fatty wanted to say, so I waved my hand to stop him. Although he spoke in a calm tone, his words were firm and resolute, with no room to refute them. I could only imagine how much he had been holding back this whole time.

“And even if you’re willing to die, Little Brother might not feel the same way. At least this way, we’ll be able to save one of them.”

I looked at Poker-Face and immediately gave in. Yes, I had been adamant about not leaving anyone behind, but now I realized that being stubborn might end up inadvertently causing Poker-Face’s death too. Moreover, Fatty’s plan did sound reasonable. This might be the only way for us to survive, I thought to myself. I looked at the hole again before sighing and asking him, “But which way should we go?”

“If we go back the same way we came and follow the waterway, we’ll definitely find another outlet,” Fatty replied. “Then we can follow that to the reservoirs and find another way out.”

“What if there isn’t one?”

Fatty, ecstatic to see that I finally agreed, immediately began gathering our things, “We can’t worry about that now. We can only leave it up to fate. But there should be a way out; otherwise, Black Glasses would’ve come back long ago.”

Fatty moved very quickly. Within an hour, we had packed up our equipment, left all our rations, wrote a note, and then he was urging me to get moving.

But I still couldn’t give up without one last attempt—I looked at the hole a few more times and shouted for good measure before finally turning around and leaving.

Poker-Face was still in a daze, so we helped support him as we quickly returned to the lake full of pottery shards. Just as I was starting to wonder which direction Black Glasses and the others went, Fatty suddenly stopped and shined his miner’s lamp into the water, revealing a deep pit that hadn’t been there before.

It looked exactly the same as those other deep pits we saw, but we were certain this particular pit hadn’t been there when we first came here. In fact, it almost looked like something had dug its way out of the bottom of the lake.

Suddenly having a bad feeling, I urged Fatty to get moving, but he refused to budge. When I asked what he was doing, he said, “Didn’t you see that flash of light by the edge of the pit just now?”

<Chapter 59><Table of Contents><Chapter 61>

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Ahhhhh I didn’t make the connection when I first read the books but I was wondering a few chapters ago if those pits were from the giant snake. Looks like I might be right…. And can we also appreciate the fact that Wu Xie would have totally died if not for Fatty knocking some sense into him about leaving? He should be nicer to Fatty in the future, but I know he won’t haha