Chapter 66: Underground Network

  An hour later, Balza's eyelids twitched slightly. "Finally awake." I narrowed my eyes and slapped him with a palm, no courtesy at all, who made him do the same to me before.

  "Ah! Don't kill me!" Balza shouted, suddenly opening his eyes wide, and upon seeing my face, he became even more frightened, backing away repeatedly.

  "Don't come any closer! Don't kill me!" Balza's face turned pale, his complexion ashen.

  I took a puff of smoke, and due to the intense 'drag', my face was creased with layer upon layer of wrinkles. I coughed a few times, and in a low voice said: "You're awake now, tell me, what did you dream about?"

  Balza was still in a state of shock, constantly looking around and immediately checking his hands and feet. Finding nothing missing, he let out a long sigh: "This dream is too realistic!"

  "Was it a dream that I was going to kill you?" I asked with interest, just looking at his reaction, couldn't help but deny him. Balza nodded, but refused to say the details, I secretly thought that this 'bastard' must have betrayed me in his dream and was avenged by me as a vengeful spirit.

  Just as Barza was dazed, I took a simple walk around the surrounding area of about 100 meters and found that there were not many forget-me-nots scattered here. If this is a kind of mineral deposit, it's possible that there are veins of forget-me-nots here.

  "The matter of the forget-me-nots is of great importance, and just one would be enough for Lao Taijian and Sheng Li to risk their lives searching for. If they knew that the forget-me-nots were under my feet and had become worthless, I don't know if they would vomit blood and die." I maliciously gloated, picked up a few fist-sized forget-me-nots and put them in my backpack, couldn't take any more, it was too heavy.

  Balza came to himself, his rough face turned towards me, rubbing the back of his head and said: "I seem to remember that it was you who hit me before I fainted, didn't I get it wrong?"

  "Fool, how could I possibly hit you? You're still not awake yet." I smiled and scolded shamelessly, suddenly pretending to be surprised, "What's under your feet? Ah~ what a huge piece of dog head gold!"

  "Where? Where!" Balza looked down and searched.

  Bang!

  A pebble was thrown down and Balza's eyes rolled back once again as he fell to the ground with a thud.

  "Sorry about that, brother, thanks for taking the hit. I'm gonna go test something out." I threw at Balzer was the same piece of Forgetting Stone I had thrown at him before.

  ……

  An hour later, Balzac woke up on schedule and said as soon as he opened his mouth: "Huh, why did I have the same dream again?"

  "Ah, look, Tian Wenliang has come to save us!" I exclaimed, waving my hands towards the woods.

  "Where is it?"

  Bang!

  Barza fainted again.

  Looking at the three big bumps on the back of his head, I feel that if he wakes up again, he will strangle me to death.

  "Whatever, Oniichan said that dying for the sake of uncovering secrets isn't death, it's devotion." I let out a small "ah", calmly lifting my leg, as various thoughts flashed through my mind. So, it seems that the same block of Forgetting Stone carries the same dream, rather than the random hallucinations I thought before. If the dreams are fixed, then where do they originate from? Still assuming the premise of fixed dreams, both Balza's and my dreams were centered around ourselves, in an unfamiliar environment, with people around us becoming murderous demons. So, would the source of these dreams be our subconscious fear of unknown people? To me, Balza, Cai Lingchen, Xu Erniang, and those others are no different from strangers, after all, I'm always on guard against them."

  "Huh, no! Tian Wenliang's Forget Stone is supposed to make people forget what happened before, that is, the Forgetting Stone. But the stone in my hand can make people dream, could it be another variety, Nightmare Stone!" A flash of inspiration struck me, and I thought of this possibility - could I have mixed up the Forget Stone? They look the same, but their effects are vastly different.

  So thinking about it, the stone that was snatched away from Lao Taiping by Liu Huang, could it be not a Forgetfulness Stone but something similar?

  Although there is a mess in my mind, I have also solved some puzzles. The Communist Party said that practice is the sole criterion for testing truth.

  Comrade Bai Laoshu Ba Erzha, your contributions will never be forgotten!

  "Hmm, what kind of bad dream did this 'mixed' ball have, why is it drooling, and still smiling so obscenely? Ugh, below...". My face turned strange, wasn't it a nightmare? Seeing this 'mixed' person becoming more and more unbearable, I secretly made up my mind that I couldn't let this guy continue any further. He must have encountered an extremely formidable seductress, like the nine-tailed fox spirit or some other kind of female demon.

  "As a good brother, how can I just watch you die... die happily... Am I still human?" I asked myself with a guilty conscience.

  Slap... I swung my arm and slapped him with a series of ear slaps that could have killed him.

  It took a whole minute for Balza, who had swollen to the size of a pig's head, to slowly come to with a 'colorful' glint in his eye, and then he lazily opened his mouth wide.

  "Second sister, don't go~" As soon as Barza's words came out of his mouth, he immediately realized he had misspoken and quickly covered it up. A second later, he rubbed his pig-headed face and said to me in a serious tone: "Second sister, you're really going to die, just like that... Don't look at me like that, really, don't look anymore."

  I smiled and turned my face away, if Balzac hadn't been hurt in his dream, then this stone should be called the 'Spring Dream Stone'. Thinking of this, I casually hid the stone in a separate pocket of my backpack, leaving it for further study later.

  Just as I hesitated to try another stone, in case I encountered a beautiful dream stone, wouldn't it be great. In the clear night color, about one kilometer away from the mountain road, a straight red smoke rose slowly.

  "Red is the signal for emergency rescue. Someone has encountered danger and is seeking our help!" My face and Balza's changed color, no time to hesitate anymore, we packed up our things and rushed towards the source of the signal under the starry sky.

  Pistols and daggers were hidden at the waist and in boots, but the deep mountains and forests were filled with wolf howls. To be on the safe side, we hung our submachine guns on our backs. Each of us carried an adventure flashlight, with several illuminating grenades and fluorescent "sticks" in our pockets, just in case. I had to admire Tian Wenliang's thoughtful preparation of equipment.

  The two of us wove in and out of the thicket, each looking out for the other. The wild forest was extremely difficult to navigate, with no concept of a path, especially with the hard roots of the large trees protruding from the mud, making them natural stumbling blocks. Moreover, it seemed like there had been heavy rain here a few days ago, and the mud was extremely slippery, often looking like piles of fallen leaves that would turn into a muddy pit as soon as you stepped on them. If you fell in, you'd be done for.

  I thought of a trick, broke two branches about half the height of a person, "pulled" off the leaves to make a wooden stick, and tied it to the assault rifle. This way, a simple probe was made, which can be used for close-range exploration and far-range self-defense with a gun. To be honest, neither of us had any extreme survival experience.

  Barza's two-meter-tall figure was quite conspicuous in this godforsaken place, and with the "fat" big backpack, he was a bit out of breath after walking for half an hour.

  "Ouch, it hurts so much!" I suddenly felt a sharp pain and subconsciously lifted my left foot. A black-backed, red-bellied snake with a pointed head and diamond-shaped eyes was biting my big toe. The 'fat' snake body began to wrap around my ankle, the smooth and icy sensation making my nerves twitch, and a chill ran straight up to my head.

  "It's a poisonous snake!" Barza, being an assassin, quickly grabbed the seven-inch long snake and with a swift motion, crushed its bones. The sound of cracking bones filled the air as the snake was instantly killed. "Quickly, there is antivenom in the bag, I don't know if it will work for this venom."

  "It doesn't matter, I'm fine, this poison won't kill me yet." I covered the wound, a deep snake bite mark.

  I saw him violently shaking for a few times, the blood and gas rushed up causing the toxin to quickly flow towards his heart, yet he didn't have any reaction at all, only then did he put down his guard.

  He flung the huge venomous snake far away.

  "This snake came out of nowhere, I was being very careful and didn't notice it at all." I poked the ground with a stick, and before long, the stick suddenly sank into the ground with a thud.

  There is a "hole" here.

  "The snake's den." I lay on the ground, shining my flashlight over, and found a palm-wide crevice, over ten centimeters long. There were many fallen leaves on top, and under the dim light of night, it was pitch black, no wonder I hadn't discovered it before.

  "This isn't a round snake 'hole', but the venomous snake must have climbed up from here to bite me." I didn't pay much attention to the crack, but Balzar also found this kind of fissure two meters away.

  This made me curious, so I tried poking inside with a stick, but it couldn't reach the bottom. I didn't believe it, so I poked around some more with a pointed object, and suddenly, the stick still couldn't touch anything. This could only mean one thing: below was a hollow space!

  I exchanged a glance with Balza and we both nodded: "Dig!"

  Took out the entrenching shovel from the bag and started digging, one shovel down saw an empty 'cave', dug again, not long after, we finally saw the original appearance of the ground.

  This is a circular tunnel that can accommodate one person to pass through. The previous crack was the opening at the top center of the tunnel, or it can be said to be an air vent.

  This discovery left me stunned, and it was clear that the tunnel was man-made. I jumped down into the tunnel and took a look around, the road was very irregular, twisting and turning to avoid tree roots, which also made it impossible to see more than ten meters ahead.

  Ba Er Zha also jumped in, driven by strong curiosity, we moved forward in the direction of the signal smoke based on intuition, and started to grope in the 'tide' wet 'dark' tunnel.

  Underfoot was a layer of stagnant water, very slippery, and from time to time small insects crawled over it. Fortunately, the two of us old men were not afraid of this kind of suffering. If it had been Cai Lingchen or Cai Lingyu, those two little girls would have been in trouble.

  Not long after, the tunnel branched out into many forks, some of which even led underground. With a belly full of doubts, we walked for a while longer, and the tunnel's forks became more and more numerous, exceeding our imagination, like a huge underground labyrinth, all the tunnels intertwined together, complex and confusing.

  I don't know how large the underground tunnel is, but in my impression, it can be compared to the military's tunnel warfare. We walked for a while and couldn't go any further, the tunnel was dead, the trees were alive, and the entrance of the tunnel in front of us was blocked by the wildly growing roots of the surrounding trees.

  "We need to head up to the surface, can't waste any more time. We still have to rush to the distress signal." I said, and immediately started digging a path to the surface with Balza at a relatively weak spot.

  The earth in the center of our heads came down with one scoop, and when we worked together to dig to one side, a heavy object on the ground fell down with a thud.

  "Uniforms are personal!" My pupils constricted.

  After the corpse fell, all I heard was a rustling sound, and more than ten 'fat' headed big eared mountain rats abandoned the skeleton of the corpse, their eyes glowing green as they pounced towards us.

  I kicked them one by one and sent them flying. Balza stabbed them one by one, gutting them.

  We walked up to the body, and on the faded military cap, the Nationalist Party emblem was barely recognizable. We were solemn, and gave a military salute to our senior comrade.

  The person in front of him had no flesh left, only a tattered military uniform and a skeletal frame that barely maintained its human shape.

  To confirm the identity of this soldier who died in a foreign land, we searched everything valuable on his body. As a result, all paper documents were rotten. On the contrary, a sheepskin scroll hidden in his ribs was intact.

  "I don't know if he swallowed the sheepskin or put it in his 'chest'." Barza said, opening the sheepskin.

  The sheepskin was only one inch in size, with many dense and disorderly black lines woven together on it, of which solid lines accounted for only about a third, the rest were scribbled dotted lines, most of which had obvious correction marks.

  What makes me feel eerie is that these black lines formed a vague centipede pattern. At the heart of the centipede, a small person was drawn.

  "This can't be a coincidence." I thought to myself with a shiver, recalling another terrifying experience from the depths of my memory.

  Balza suddenly hummed, flipping the sheepskin back and forth, staring at it for a moment before looking up at the ground above his head, then suddenly spoke: "Although I'm not very sure, but the pattern drawn on this sheepskin... is likely to be a tunnel network diagram."

  I pointed at the small figure in the pattern, furrowing my brow: "This location, it can't be where that statue we're looking for is, right?"