Chapter 95: A Strange Message

I lunged forward so fast that both my hands barely managed to grab one of Chen Canghai’s. After these recent ordeals, my upper body strength had clearly improved a lot.

But I was panicking. With so many loose stones already falling from the edge, it was obvious that the rock here was unstable and brittle. If I pulled too slowly, the next to fall might be the two of us, so I was desperate to haul Chen Canghai up.

So I shouted at him, “Give me your other hand too! I’ll pull you up!”

However, Chen Canghai turned his gaze toward me and stared blankly for a long moment. He made a few gestures with his free hand dangling in the air, as if trying to convey something, but he made no move to reach up with it.

I couldn’t make sense of his expression. Thinking he hadn’t heard me, I panicked and grabbed his one hand with both of mine, using every ounce of strength I had to pull him up.

“I can’t fucking understand you! Quit gesturing, damn it! This platform’s about to collapse! Whatever you want to say, say it after I’ve pulled you up!” I swore at him.

At first, Chen Canghai didn’t pull himself up at all. I figured maybe his legs couldn’t reach the platform yet. But once I’d managed to drag his upper body over the edge, the weight in my hands suddenly went slack. The next second, the guy pushed off a rock and rolled himself right up.

The momentum sent me stumbling backward several steps, and I landed flat on my butt on the stone platform, covered in dust and looking like a complete mess. Before I could even get back on my feet, Chen Canghai rushed over and yanked me up.

He pointed ahead, and only then did I realize that the stone beneath us couldn’t bear both our weight. It was crumbling fast, falling away into the abyss below. Behind us, the stone wall’s flip-door had already sealed shut, tight as a drum. In front of us stood a series of naturally formed stone pillars.

These pillars were oddly shaped, their tops roughly level with the platform we were on. A quick glance revealed more than a dozen of them, each spaced two or three meters apart. This was probably our only way out.

Chen Canghai stood beside me, slapped his thigh muscles a few times, then took a short running start and leapt without hesitation onto the first pillar. I stood frozen, stunned. Damn it, talk about the tables turning. Just a moment ago it was Chen Canghai in danger, and now it was my turn. I took a few steps forward, but my legs were already going weak.

This wasn’t just a meter or so of distance. It had to be at least two and a half meters! How the hell was I supposed to make that jump?! I couldn’t help but smile bitterly and wish Lu Ayao were here. It might be a little messy, but he’d definitely be able to get me across with that broken whip of his.

The rock beneath my feet was crumbling fast. I figured I had maybe half a minute left before I’d be dead. Chen Canghai had jumped across quickly, but unlike that heartless bastard Hou Jinshan, he didn’t just leave me behind. Instead, he crouched at the edge of the pillar and reached a hand out toward me.

I shouted, “It’s too far! I can’t make that jump!”

Chen Canghai made an exaggerated pulling motion toward me. I guessed he was telling me to jump quickly and that he could catch me on the other side.

The crumbling stone had already reached my heels. Hardening my heart, I took two quick strides and leapt right off the edge of the platform. The tips of my boots barely landed on the rim of the pillar, and just as I lost my balance and began falling backward, Chen Canghai grabbed my collar and yanked me up onto the pillar.

I lay sprawled on the stone, my legs shaking uncontrollably and sweat pouring down my face. Looking back at the platform where I had just been standing, it had completely collapsed into the abyss along with the coffin.

At that moment, I wasn’t particularly worried about whether He Yu and the others would find the mechanism to flip the door back open. These rotating doors usually required interconnected pivots on both sides. Now that the platform behind the door was gone, it was effectively a dead door; missing that corresponding mechanism, it shouldn’t be able to flip open again.

What I did worry about was whether they might just blast the door open with explosives.

Just then, I felt the walkie-talkie clipped to my waist. He Yu had left his behind when we got off the boat because it was too heavy, but Lu Ayao was definitely carrying one. Whether or not I could reach him, I had to try.

I switched on the walkie-talkie and spoke into it. Beside me, Chen Canghai was sitting down, equally exhausted. After a short wait, a response actually came through, but strangely, the sound didn’t seem to originate from He Yu’s side.

The walkie-talkie output a garbled mess of static. Chen Canghai realized something was off, just as I did, and leaned in closer, so I moved the device between us so we could both listen.

“Hello? Han Jian? Is that someone from Han Jian’s team? What’s your situation over there?” I said into the walkie-talkie.

An intermittent voice soon came back: “Shi…”

“Shi”? I wasn’t even sure if that was the right syllable. Signals were notoriously difficult to receive in a place like this, and walkie-talkies were no exception, so the incoming voice was extremely faint, as if the speaker wasn’t talking close to the receiver.

I looked up at Chen Canghai. “What?”

Static crackled from the walkie-talkie again: “Stone… first…”

The static cut off abruptly. Chen Canghai and I looked at each other, completely baffled. The only words I could distinguish from the transmission were “stone” and “first,” but the more I replayed them in my head, the less sense they made as a coherent sentence. In fact, the more I thought about it, the less it sounded like words spoken by a human being.

No human should be able to make a sound like that.

We waited for quite a while, but the walkie-talkie remained silent. I figured no one on the team had heard our message, and whatever we had heard earlier might not have been a human voice anyway; it could have just been the wind. No matter how I turned it over in my head, I couldn’t reach any solid conclusion, so I decided to stop trying to solve our predicament from this angle.

We were inside a massive cavernous space in the mountain, like a naturally formed giant cave. The ceiling was extremely high, far beyond the reach of our small flashlights, and without cold flares, we couldn’t see the top. The solitary stone pillars stretched forward into the gloom, their far end shrouded in pitch blackness.

The pillar beneath our feet was sturdy enough, but the surface area at the top was terribly small. If we fell from here, those jagged, pitted rock walls alone would ensure we didn’t even leave an intact corpse.

These stone pillars looked like a masterpiece of nature, but they felt even more like a paved road stretching deep into the darkness. My instincts told me there had to be something waiting at the end of that dark path.

Chen Canghai pulled out his phone and typed a message for me: “We can’t just wait here. Who knows if that infant corpse followed us through the Turning Gate. I only have one gun and five bullets, so we won’t stand a chance if we run into it. Heading forward might lead to a way out.”

I completely agreed with him. We had no way to contact the outside world, so waiting around was meaningless. If that cursed thing really did show up while we were sitting here, then given its speed and teeth, the two of us would basically be waiting to die.

But when I looked at the stone pillars with their increasingly wide gaps, I felt like dying right then and there. Still, I had no choice but to grit my teeth and jump. I swallowed hard and said, “You’ve got better jumping power than me. You jump over first, and I’ll follow.”

Chen Canghai turned back to eyeball the distance to the next pillar. Suddenly, I remembered something and quickly grabbed him. “When I pulled you up onto the platform earlier, you made a few hand gestures I didn’t understand. Did you have something to say?”

Chen Canghai paused, probably not expecting me to have such a good memory. But after a moment’s thought, he shook his head at me, turned back around, and resumed gauging the distance with his eyes.

I sat down and propped my face in my hands, feeling a bit annoyed. Fine, if he didn’t want to tell me, then whatever. This Chen guy clearly had much better skills anyway, so I should focus on mentally preparing myself first. I had no idea what was wrong with this damn place, but it felt like it was deliberately trying to torment me. If it wasn’t rock climbing, it was jumping across pillars. I hated it.

Thank goodness I hadn’t fallen in here alone. If I were by myself, I’d be in huge trouble.