Chapter 468: Xiao Hua's Phone Secret

Fatty was right; it was a cell phone.

We crawled inside. It was a stone slab tunnel, with walls made of stone slabs hewn from mountain rock, forming a square passage.

Inside, I could sit up straight, while Fatty felt a bit cramped. We reached the spot where the light had appeared earlier and discovered a crack between the stone slabs.

The slabs in front and behind were tightly sealed, only here there was a gap. I don't know why – perhaps it had something to do with the mechanism operating here.

The light was indeed from a cell phone, which had fallen into the crack between the slabs.

I recognized it at a glance – it was Xiao Hua's phone.

"Awesome. They've been here too," Fatty said.

"Not necessarily," I said. "Look at the width of this crack." I gestured with my hands – the crack was much narrower than the phone. "The phone couldn't have fallen in from here."

"Then why is it down there?"

I said, "This crack probably can shift. The phone was brought here from somewhere else by the movement of the mechanism."

I had seen such mechanisms in Xisha and knew that if operated properly, they were not impossible.

"Then how do we get it out?" Fatty said. "My hand is too fat – how about you give it a try?"

I rolled up my sleeve, spat on my hand a few times, and forcefully stuck my hand into the crack. Halfway in, I realized I was an idiot – my palm could go in, but my arm wouldn't fit, so I couldn't reach the phone.

"Got any tools? Let's get rough," Fatty said. I remembered the iron spikes the ghost figure had given us and pulled them out. Fatty inserted one into the crack, prying and twisting forcefully until the spike bent, but still no luck.

"Forget it," Fatty said. "This phone isn't worth much anyway. At worst, I'll buy him a new one. The model looks old too – we'll get him something like a cast-iron skillet."

I thought to myself, there's no such brand of phone. Just then, the phone in the crack lit up again, flashed a few times, and went dark.

"What's going on? Is there a signal in this cave?"

"No, that's the low battery warning – the phone is almost out of power," I said. "The flip cover isn't closed, so it's draining power."

Flip cover not closed? After saying that, my mind stirred. That meant the phone wasn't accidentally dropped by Xiao Hua.

Because with a flip phone, the cover opens so wide; it couldn't have been flipped open by rock friction.

So then, Xiao Hua must have opened the phone at that time. But there's no signal here – why would he open it? There's no need to make a call or send a text here.

"No, we still have to get it," I said. "I think something's off."

Fatty sighed and said, "You're just paranoid."

I ignored him, took out all the equipment the ghost figure had given us, and started smashing the crack.

After half an hour of hard smashing, we finally broke a gap in the crack just wide enough for the phone to pass through.

Fatty used a piece of wire as chopsticks and carefully coaxed the phone up from the crack.

The phone was very worn. I blew off the dust, pressed the power button, and immediately saw an unsent text message on the screen.

"Open the phone's memory; it contains everything we've been through."

"What does that mean?" Fatty asked, puzzled. "What's he playing at?"

"Let's watch the video," I said. The phone had 10% battery left – it should last until I finish watching.

I immediately navigated to the phone's video gallery.

Inside there were three files. The first was over 40 seconds long. When I opened it, I immediately saw Xiao Hua's face. Behind him was Panzi, smoking. Xiao Hua was saying something to someone off-screen, but the microphone was too far away to hear clearly. After a few sentences, he turned his head toward the camera and said, "Third Uncle, I don't know if something happened to you too, but we've run into big trouble."

Xiao Hua looked especially amusing because he was too far from the lens. Panzi behind him was lighting him with a flashlight, making his face look very eerie.

He caught his breath, looked around, and then said, "From the looks of it, we'll probably die in here. We're now preparing to try a risky method.

We've only been in this cave for half an hour when something went wrong. Many places on the map Fatty indicated have already collapsed – we can't get through. Now we're at our wit's end."

As he spoke, Xiao Hua's camera panned to the surrounding walls, with Panzi providing light. I saw the walls – the shot flashed by, but you could still see that there were no shadows on the stone walls there.

The camera turned back, and Xiao Hua said, "There's nothing inside these walls. We struck them and found they're completely solid. Obviously, someone discovered that Fatty could get out through here and sealed all the passages.

The camera panned behind Panzi, revealing a deep, bottomless crack in the rocks. "Both ends have been sealed shut. We don't know what accident happened. It's now 7:12—" As he finished, the camera suddenly shook wildly, then cut to Panzi, who was breathing heavily as he said to Xiao Hua, "Stop recording – there's no time."

"We have to keep a record, or we'll have died for nothing," Xiao Hua's voice said off-screen.

Fatty frowned. The camera turned back to Xiao Hua: "Alright, now I'm going to show you something. Lights."

The camera began adjusting, zooming in and out. The beam of the flashlight on the stone wall widened, then pushed forward. We suddenly saw that the stone wall wasn't without shadows—it just didn't have that many shadows.

On the stone wall illuminated by the flashlight, we saw a huge black shadow. It wasn't clear on the phone recording, but we could still make out its size.

It was at least as tall as four people. One wall couldn't even contain it; almost the entire top and both sides of the cave wall were enveloped by this black shadow.

We could clearly distinguish that this enormous shadow had very long arms and legs, extending far out like silk ribbons.

"This thing moves very fast. It started appearing about half an hour after we were trapped here. At this rate, it will emerge from the rock in ten-odd minutes.

This thing is clearly a different breed. We're planning to strike first and see if we can kill it before it fully comes out.

But we don't know what it is exactly, so it's hard to tell whether it's good or bad luck." Xiao Hua continued, "Whoever you are, if you see a shadow like this somewhere, you must be careful."

After he finished, we heard Panzi yell, "The rock is cracking! Everyone get ready!" The camera shook, then went black.

Out of habit, I thought my phone had malfunctioned. I shook it, only to realize the video had ended.

Soon the screen lit up again, returning to the video selection screen.

I looked at Fatty, and Fatty looked at me. For a long time, we didn't speak.

"Do you think they'll be okay?"

"Xiao Hua recorded this video four hours ago. Whether they're okay or not, there's nothing we can do now."

Fatty said, "It seems there are two different varieties of Miluotuo in this stone wall. Besides the most common human-shaped ones, there's also an extremely large one, like the one we just saw."

"Will we be okay?" I suddenly felt uneasy, remembering that the ghost shadow person had told us we couldn't stay in one place too long.

We had already been in this place for quite a while, but the surroundings were all solid stone slabs, so it should be relatively safe here.

Just now, we saw such a huge shadow outside.

"I don't know, but we'd better move forward quickly," Fatty said. Instinctively, he shone his flashlight behind us.

In an instant, we were all stunned. Fatty's flashlight beam landed at the entrance. We saw a strange object poking out from the edge of the entrance.