The Lost Tomb : Sea Of Sands

Chapter 177: Fox

The weather in the valley was very strange. It was hard to tell whether it was sunny or cloudy, but I can't remember, because when I saw the humanoid creature looking at me from across the mountain, I felt as if my whole body had exploded. The light came from behind the opposite mountain, so the place where the humanoid thing was standing was very dark. That, coupled with its posture, made it seem like a human, but I could tell at a glance that it wasn't any sort of posture a human would have.

The most gratifying thing was that I couldn't see that thing's face clearly, but its posture told me that it was staring at me.

My first reaction was that Lin Qizhong was a monster— maybe a fox-spirit or a mandrill [1] or something that ate NanNan long ago. Or maybe Lin Qizhong was really dead too, and now he was just an avatar used to trick curious people into the mountain to feed this thing.

After it tricked me into coming here, it showed its true colors and seemed to be planning something bad for me.

But once I thought about it, I knew it was impossible. I had never seen a fox-spirit before, and I heard that people only saw mandrills in the mountains and forests. This wasn't a remote place, so if there were any mandrills harming people, the People's Liberation Army and local militia would take their rifles and kill a hundred of them.

I heard my classmate say that the wolves in Yinchuan weren't very vicious anymore. There were often a few huskies mixed in when the villagers went to feed their dogs, so they had just assumed that the huskies were someone's missing dogs. It was only later that they realized that they were all wild wolves. Like seagulls on a dock, these wolves knew that eating people wasn't as good as pretending to be dogs. I didn't know whether the local people were joking, or if such a thing had really happened.

In short, most wild animals had given up the idea of fighting against humans, so mandrills shouldn't be any different.

I didn't know what this thing was, or what would happen next, but the way it stared at me made me uncomfortable. I pulled out the dagger that I was carrying.

I couldn't remember how many daggers I had used. This time, it was rare for me to use the modern daggers nicknamed Cold Steel Kukri. I first took a fancy to the same series of machetes, and when I bought them, this dagger was a giveaway. It was a knife used for shaving beard scruff, but I heard that some overseas girls liked to use it to shave their legs.

Whether it was a mandrill or a fox-spirit, if I had my big white-handled machete in hand, then I could even kill an elephant spirit. But Kukri was slightly shorter, so I held it in a reverse grip and confronted that thing.

Within a few minutes, the thing suddenly flashed and disappeared.

But it didn't disappear into thin air, for I knew it had hidden behind a nearby rock at an abnormal speed.

I even got a clear look at its general movements as it hid itself. It looked just like a person, but its posture and movements were very different from those of a human, which made my hair stand on end.

It took about two minutes after the thing had disappeared behind the rock before I realized the problem I was facing.

The only way back was on the opposite side, but the hillside over there was full of rocks, and I had no idea where that thing was hiding now. Was it trying to ambush me?

The main question was, what was it? Was it Lin Qizhong? My gut told me it wasn't. There could be zombies, bewitched corpses, or objects (mostly physical phenomena) in this world, but there couldn't such a thing as a highly intelligent "evil spirit".

So where was Lin Qizhong? Was he killed by that thing?

I had nothing but a dagger with me, and didn't even bring a pair of binoculars, so I couldn't tell whether Lin Qizhong's body was lying behind the rocks.

The emergence of this strange creature in this strange place had changed the basis of all my inferences. I thought everything had just been a plot concocted by humans, but the situation regarding this road wasn't something humans could do. And now there was this thing.

I bent down and slipped behind the nearby bushes. If it had been the me of the past, I would have foolishly stood there wondering what to do, trying to figure out if I should take the initiative or wait. Now, however, my first reaction when the other party caught me off guard was to copy their actions.

I didn't know where it was, but I couldn't let it know where I was either.

I would lose my advantage after dark. In fact, my eyesight would be ineffective as soon as dusk came and the whole mountain was covered in shadows. I had to be prepared to deal with that thing before it got to that point.

Even if it wasn't a monster, it was probably a strange animal. Or a creature I had never seen before.

What I was certain of, however, was that this thing was alive, and living things could die. I wasn't afraid of confronting it head-on, since the Kukri in my hand would definitely be a threat to it. I had fought against the dead before, and since they couldn't die, the only way to stop them was to completely destroy them.

But I needed a level playing field.

Truthfully, if I died here, no one around me would know what happened to me. I would rot here silently, and everything I had struggled with before would all become a joke. It would be just like a soldier aspiring to be a general choking to death on his own nose grime after more than a dozen victories.

I bent over and started using Kukri to cut the grass into hay. Even if the other party wasn't an idiot, it would still be difficult for them to know what I was doing. I could feel it observing me, but the creature's eyesight must not have been very good.

By the time I had collected about three or four piles of hay, it was nearly eight o'clock, and Yinchuan was very dark. I piled the hay under the big tree and lit it.

The flames leaped up, and soon lit the big tree on fire. I stood up and continued collecting things all around, and soon, the whole hillside was on fire.

If anyone in the forest farm saw me doing this, there was a chance they'd kill me on the spot. I knew there weren't many trees here, and the weeds wouldn't burn as well without all the kindling I had deliberately accumulated. I tied some of the branches and rocks together and made them into a strange mixture of hammers and torches. After thinking so hard, this was the magic weapon I had come up with to solve my standoff with that creature.

Once it was dark, I stood in the middle of the fire in an area I had set aside for myself. I could no longer see anything around me, and couldn't hear any movements. All I could hear was the crackling sound of the fire burning things nearby.

The big tree I had burned down suddenly collapsed, and the fire became more intense. At this time, I saw a pair of green eyes flash up out of the darkness along the outer edge of my fire circle. It shouldn't be able to reach me, but the light of the flames made its eyes very bright.

I lifted my fire hammers, lit them, and threw them in that thing's direction, tossing more than a dozen of them in one breath. After the fire hammers landed, sparks flew everywhere, and I finally saw that thing's evil face at close range.

It really was a fox. It was standing upright, and looking at me coldly from outside the ring of fire. Moreover, I could see that it was carrying something on its back. It was truly terrifying. 

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Note:

[1] Characters are "山魈"; Pinyin is "shānxiāo". It can mean either the mandrill monkey, or mountain elf/demon (but not the Western idea of elves. It's a "mischievous, one-legged mountain spirit" kind of elf). Based on what Wu Xie says later, though, I think he's talking about the monkey.