Daomu Biji: Restart

His body was starting to dry out and became lighter and lighter.

Fatty didn’t ask me what was going on since we barely spoke to each other at this point. I did, however, have a hunch that bacteria couldn’t multiply on a large scale in this dragon vein, so living creatures probably always became mummified corpses when they died here.

Two weeks later, we finally came to a place full of rubbish.

Among the piles of stones in this area were all kinds of bones, rubbish, sky iron⁽¹⁾, and ribbons that had all been piled into a mound. We had been moving along mindlessly for a long time now, but it wasn’t like I ever understood why this was happening anyways.

After resting for a few hours, a light suddenly appeared above our heads.

It was sunlight.

When we looked up, we saw that there was a hole to the outside world set at an extremely high place. The sunlight was shining down from that hole, creating a Tyndall effect.

As a beam of light enveloped the three of us, I realized that I hadn’t seen the sun for a long time now. We all remained silent, but Fatty held up his hands and knelt deeply.

This was what so-called miracles were like, when people felt that there was a god. In other words, they were suddenly saved from the burden of that extreme pain they had experienced.

The sunlight was really restrained in this place—there was only a small sliver of it—but if it weren’t for my firm heart, I might have started crying immediately.

As the sunshine swept away the surrounding darkness, I found that this place appeared to be a kind of living area. These bones seemed to be leftovers, so someone probably lived here. I could even see a small area on a flat stone that was draped in human skin, which seemed to be a bed.

Not only did we see a lot of blackened blood nearby, but Fatty noticed a lot of bullets mixed in with the blood that was by the bedside. The bullets had probably been dug out of that thing’s body, which meant that it was badly injured but didn't die.

This was where Qi Yu lived, but he wasn’t here.

"Where did this food come from?" Fatty asked while looking up above his head. I figured he really wanted to go outside.

I looked down at the bones on the ground, many of which were human bones. I picked one up and found that it had knife marks on it. After looking closely, I noticed that almost every bone had these kinds of marks on them.

"There may be a sky burial platform on the other side of this hole," I said to them. "The bodies probably roll down occasionally." This kind of knife mark had been made with a sky burial knife.

Since this was an iconic area and I was familiar with Xiao Hua's usual thought process, I knew he'd definitely leave us a message here.

I told Fatty and Poker-Face to look for any hints Xiao Hua might have left for us. After searching carefully in the crevices of the surrounding rocks, Fatty soon found something and pulled me towards him.

The three of us had been staying very close to each other—it had become habit by now—so he easily pulled me over. As soon as he did, a mass of things fell directly from above, hitting the place where I had been standing just seconds before.

I turned my head and saw that it was a fresh corpse. We looked up and immediately began to dodge as more body parts fell from the sky.

As these corpses tumbled all around us, I quickly noticed that the ones stuck to the rocks quickly dried out. I immediately used my peripheral vision to see what was going on.

****

TN Notes:

(1) Sky iron was mentioned back in Part 3: “Looking for the Dead in the Sea of Lights” chapter 18. Old Bing and the gang dug some up and followed a “sky iron road” to that lotus tomb.