Chapter 156: 153. Empty Person

153. Empty Person

Li Duojin felt the subterranean yin wind and the eerie whistling; he looked at the bloodless Chen Xiaolin: "You have three choices now: wait for me here, go back to the car immediately, or come down with me."

"Don't leave me alone." Chen Xiaolin chose the third option with almost no hesitation, carrying a hint of pleading, "I want to go down with you."

For Chen Xiaolin, the first two options were like waiting for death; she would have to endure unknown terror in solitude, a feeling she did not want. Although there was much that was strange about Li Duojin, she could at least feel a trace of warmth and security from him.

"Alright." Li Duojin nodded and led Chen Xiaolin to find a path down the crevice.

After some searching, Li Duojin only found a steep slope, nearly at a 70-degree angle; a moment of carelessness would result in a death experience akin to a vertical fall.

Li Duojin had grown up in a mountain sect and was highly experienced in climbing, but Chen Xiaolin was different. As a reporter, testing her endurance for long-distance running or explosive power for sprinting was fine, but rock climbing was truly difficult for her.

Upon discovering the steep and treacherous slope, Li Duojin was also somewhat worried about whether this delicate beauty of a reporter would have the courage to come down with him. If she were too terrified to move, he might be delayed for a long time because of it.

But in reality, Li Duojin was impressed by Chen Xiaolin.

Chen Xiaolin had grown up in a well-off family, but she did not lack backbone or courage; she gritted her teeth, followed, and imitated Li Duojin's movements to descend the slope.

The further down the slope went, the more rugged and steep it became, and there were even many sharp stalagmites scattered on the ground and the cave ceiling. A moment of carelessness could lead to being scratched or pierced by the sharp stones, or being crushed to death by unstable rocks falling from above.

Li Duojin looked back at the path they had come from; the light from the entrance above was faint. He looked at Chen Xiaolin in silence. Having endured the thrill, Chen Xiaolin was much calmer, and she nodded at him.

They both knew at this moment that they had no way back.

Just when the two did not know how much longer they would have to endure the near-vertical slope, they were pleasantly surprised to find that they had reached a relatively gentle slope, no longer needing to worry about their footing or fantasies of falling to their deaths.

Stepping onto the gentler slope, the two felt as steady as if they had stepped onto flat ground.

Chen Xiaolin noticed that the clothes on Li Duojin's back were almost completely worn through, with bloody abrasions and dirt from mud and gravel sticking to his back. She couldn't help but want to touch those wounds, and with some guilt, she said to Li Duojin: "I'm sorry, it's all because you had to look after me along the way that you got hurt."

"It doesn't matter; the pain actually makes me much calmer." Li Duojin smiled slightly at Chen Xiaolin, then rubbed his arms, feeling every tightly contracted pore protruding, and asked in confusion, "Do you feel like the temperature is a bit low here?"

"Mm, it's very cold." Chen Xiaolin nodded and exhaled; the white mist was visible to the naked eye.

The temperature here was at most around ten degrees.

Continuing forward, Li Duojin and Chen Xiaolin felt more and more the weirdness of the spatial structure in this underground area. On the road ahead, gravity and magnetic fields seemed to have shifted, to the point where the two sometimes didn't know if they were walking on a vertical slope that felt like flat ground, or struggling to climb down on flat ground.

The weirdness did not stop there; the environment was also quite peculiar.

As the two walked further, their feet actually stepped into snow. How could there be snow in this place?

Moving along the snowy slope that covered their feet, Li Duojin and Chen Xiaolin endured the invasion of the icy cold; the freezing sensation passed from the soles of their feet through their bodies, heading straight for their brains.

The cold was about to freeze their bodies, but Li Duojin did not lose his reason or ability to think. He suddenly noticed a boulder with a peculiar shape standing on a section of the slope. He shone his flashlight on it and discovered that the side of the black boulder facing them actually revealed reflections of text symbols under the illumination of the light.

This was no ordinary natural boulder; it was clearly a stone tablet!

Li Duojin suppressed the shock in his heart and went closer with Chen Xiaolin to examine the black boulder, carefully reading the remaining text on it.

Between the black boulder, a poem was left: "North wind, sunset, Heavenly Mountain cave, seeking the lonely is like dying for the Jade Lad's bones. Empty people silent without a sound, taking souls and losing wisdom, thousands of corpses..."

"What a familiar poem." Chen Xiaolin murmured.

"It's the poem from the tattered Ye Gong painting in Zheng Yu's villa." Li Duojin recognized at a glance that this poem and the carving were definitely the work of Ye Gong himself. The other party had been here and left his own words on this stone.

Chen Xiaolin suddenly woke up, then looked at the eerie wording between the lines and exclaimed: "What on earth did he see here? What is that 'Empty Person', and why would he encounter thousands of Lost Soul corpses?"

Li Duojin said with a grave expression: "I don't know either, but I suspect there is a high probability that Zheng Yu's madness is inseparable from this poem. He likely discovered something from this complete poem and thus came into contact with some kind of taboo."

In order to seek the truth, the two could only ignore the "warning" left by the mad ancestor on the stone tablet and insisted on walking to the bottom of the ground.

When they reached the bottom, they saw the light above their heads; it was the crevice they had seen on the surface earlier, now about three hundred meters high from them.

Walking in the sunlight, the two did not feel that the cold on their bodies had been resolved in the slightest. They saw the path paved by the sunlight leading to a gloomy, dark cave. They steeled themselves and walked into the pitch-black cave.

Turning on the flashlight mode on their phones, the two looked around, their breathing rapid, their pupils shrinking. They saw strange skeletons that had lost their flesh and skin, bowing their heads, hands crossed over their chests, in a meditative posture, scattered around the cave like merchandise on display shelves.

No, those skeletons were more like believers; they had died in some kind of pious worship ritual, facing a Giant Corpse in the center of the space.

That corpse had its back to Li Duojin and Chen Xiaolin. Its skeleton was three times the size of a normal person's, and its bones grew peculiarly. On the basis of the characteristics of a normal human skeleton, other bones grew irregularly on those ribs, arm bones, and vertebrae, sharp and slender, like sharp spears.

That Giant Corpse was in the same meditative posture as the surrounding believer skeletons, with hands crossed over its chest, only its pair of hands were shockingly large; if one didn't look closely, one might think they were some kind of wings, not hands.

"Ugh!" Chen Xiaolin looked at the Giant Corpse, her eyes blooming with terror, tears and vomit spilling out uncontrollably. She knelt on the ground, nearly driven mad by the scene before her.

It could be seen that the missing Wang Kuishan was currently embracing the Giant Corpse; his body was pierced by the sharp bones, his flesh and blood were melting into the Giant Corpse bit by bit, and the head with the morbid smile he had when he died was pressed tightly against the ribs of the Giant Corpse, his brain swelling and throbbing, just like a heart...