Chapter 100: The Lone Lamp

【Face?】

Kup stepped back a few paces, leaning against Kraft, and gazed intently. Peter stood at the edge of the light, with a deep, lightless expanse behind him where the torchlight could not reach.

Seeing that Yin Feng was safe, William held the torch and walked back to the front of the group. The red-yellow circle of light expanded forward, approaching the distance where that thing had appeared.

He took the page hammer from his waist, gripped it in his hand, stepped back half a pace to assume a stance, and shifted to the side to make room for Kraft to react.

This was an arrangement made long ago. As a novice, no one expected him to provide much direct help; once something happened, the one who must and could only react immediately was the trained main force.

He believed Kraft knew what had happened and would certainly react, yet behind the thin shirt still came the chill of sweat-soaked fabric and the night wind blowing.

The night curtain receded like water at a ship's bow. The torch illuminated the space behind Peter: a gray-yellow earthen road no different from before, with sand and stones exposed inch by inch from the darkness like a receding tidal beach.

The largest thing was merely a fragment of rock; there was no broad, flat face, nor any retreating onlooker. The taut spirit found nothing, like one side in a standoff suddenly releasing force; the strength painstakingly mustered was wasted in vain, squandered on something that didn't matter.

Kup stepped forward and kicked that rock fragment away. The stone, not deeply embedded in the ground, was easily flipped up, rolled a few times on the road, and vanished at the boundary between light and dark.

A faint, barely perceptible chuckle lingered in his ears, sounding somewhat similar to the sly, contemptuous mockery of a dock employer. He felt a vague, unconscious anger, his gaze sweeping over everyone present, each face either stern or still shaken by fright.

That voice dissipated, and the face-like apparition that had appeared alongside it lacked sufficient detail to be recorded, making one question whether one's senses had erred. One could not even confirm whether it was truly a face or a laugh; it only sparked a fleeting association, drawing on impressions from memory to fill in the gaps.

It was so close there was no distance, nearer than the ear itself; saying it was blown into the ear canal was insufficient to describe it, yet the nearest person, Peter, still stood with his back turned, dazed.

William spoke quietly with this guide, then pulled him forward, the torch in his hand burning brightly. The sailors returned to the rear of the group. Kraft helped Yin Feng up, brushed the dust from her cloak, and it seemed no one noticed anything amiss.

The circle of light moved toward Kup. William held the torch aloft, bringing him into the center of the glow. This sole safeguard failed to make him feel secure; a sense of isolation with nowhere to settle rose up, as if he were cut off from the others, alone in a realm infinitely close yet utterly distinct.

This feeling was stronger than those illusions of sight and sound, even to the point of being clearly discernible, like mistakenly taking a wrong turn at a fork in the road and, upon turning around, finding oneself far separated from one's companions.

The road beneath his feet was the same as before, yet it truly possessed a subtle, indescribable difference; at that "fork," a transformation from familiar to unfamiliar had occurred.

But the mountain path had no other forks. William and Peter were walking past him, looking hesitantly at his tightly clenched hammer handle. The approaching distance conflicted with the intuitive sense of being pushed away; subjective feeling seemed severed from sight and sound.

He became more vigilant than ever before. A sense of crisis forced memory to dig up similar experiences buried deep within, to deal with the threat.

In his life as a hired hand, Kup had never realized he possessed such rich experiences capable of analogizing the bizarre perceptions of the present moment.

No, there was one.

Completely unrelated matters were linked to it. It should have been waking up from bed, the folds of the comfortable sheets no different from when he fell asleep; in his hand was not a hammer handle, but half his fortune—a single, whole silver coin.

A window resembling the one before sleep, from which light flowed for no reason, just as a face-like shape had surfaced in an empty darkness.

A homesick sorrow, even greater than standing at the stern of the Bingshan watching Wendeng Port vanish on the horizon. Not a single sign had hinted that he had left the place he was accustomed to; only at some moment did a profound grief and panic arise, as if heading toward an utterly unknown land, filling his heart, a chest full of sour, stinging pain, and... fear.

Fear that everything had already shifted toward the unfamiliar, and that one would only notice halfway through, by which time it was too late.

Then something occurred that defied cognition: something broke through a window from the height of an attic, or a voice like mockery and derision invaded his ears.

"No, no, no, it shouldn't be like this." Fingers gripping the weapon rubbed against the binding straps; his arm tensed and trembled. That was probably the same thing. He vaguely grasped the meaning of this feeling—though he still did not understand its deeper significance, he knew only that he had moved away from the familiar place and was drawing near to them.

A laugh-like sound pressed against his eardrum, probing deeper, scratching the inside of his skull. This time he heard it clearly; it came from the front of the group, from the path ahead that William's torchlight had not yet illuminated.

His breathing quickened. His arm tried to swing the weapon, smashing at something, scattering invisible claws and fangs about to close in, yet it overlapped with that past experience in memory. He could not make the movement, was firmly seized; the powerful force of that hand beneath the black sleeve crushed his flesh and bone until it ached.

"Kup, look here!" The hand gripping him added a bit more force; a dull pain dug into the area below his collarbone. His palm was forced to release, and the page hammer fell to the ground, kicking up a cloud of dust.

His vision refocused. Kraft stood before him, gripping his right shoulder, immobilizing the entire shoulder joint.

His right hand was actually raised high, about to bring the page hammer down; his heel had retreated to the edge of the mountain path, and beyond that lay a steep slope and rocky cliff.

The others watched him tensely. Hindered by the weapon he had been holding aloft, they dared not approach to rescue him. Only when Kraft disarmed him did they cautiously step forward and pull him back from the edge onto the mountain path.

"I..." Kup, realizing something might have happened, hurriedly tried to explain, wanting to recount his ordeal.

"Walking too long at night easily causes hysteria. From now on, follow me." An unfounded judgment cut off the explanation, blocking the unfinished second half of his sentence. Behind the others' backs, Kraft made a "I know" mouth shape.

He let go, picked up the page hammer, gripped it near the hammerhead, and held the handle out before Kup.

Kup hurried to take back his weapon. The hand handing over the handle did not let go; after confirming he was conscious, he added, "Try to remember: do not use weapons blindly, nor act rashly."

His fingers loosened, and the page hammer returned to Kup's hand.

The group continued along the mountain path. After the road twisted several times, it finally began to descend, winding in a zigzag toward the valley.

When they estimated they were near the bottom, a faint flame appeared at the end of the slope.

A peculiarly shaped ceramic lamp, molded in a supporting posture, was placed before rocks of two different colors, filled with lamp oil.

The vertical cross-section of the rock was illuminated by the flame. The upper part was the common yellow-brown stone found on mountain roads; the lower part continued with another, completely opposite gray-white rock mass, sharply divided into two distinct sections.

Winding bands were painted upon it with some red-black mineral pigment, connected by countless segments. At the bottom they coiled, so densely packed that individual parts were hard to distinguish. Simple stick-figure-like patterns were piled inside the bands, moving or crawling chaotically in all four directions.

At the head of the bands, or possibly the tail, they tilted upward. The segments ended there, blooming into an open structure between a valve and a calyx, situated exactly on the boundary line between the two differently colored sections.

The little human figures inside those bands seemed to have found an exit here, released into the yellow-brown void. Their limbs were rendered only with rough, extremely simple lines, or even omitted entirely, while the general head-and-face portion was especially prominent, depicted with exaggerated proportions.

The artist fully utilized the upper space to paint these disproportioned figures, even incorporating the facial features on each face. The painting skill was average, yet each had its own characteristics.

Kup only saw the patterns clearly when he approached the stone surface. Perhaps limited by painting tools, to accommodate more content one had to spread out the area; those faces were all painted somewhat plump, not very three-dimensional, thus appearing broad and flat.

The road curved around the rock. Stone-walled, earth-floored houses clustered on both sides. No flicker of light came from the high, small windows; the village was in deep sleep.