There was no time to explain. Brother Xiao Man rushed to the tree like a crazy thing, and hit the trunk with his huge body, barking at whatever was in the tree.
The villager was scared to death, and didn't know what was going on, so he asked us what to do. At this moment, the shadow suddenly disappeared from the tree, and the sound of rustling leaves could be heard everywhere in the canopy above.
I had pulled out my Kukri as soon as I had gotten off the mule, and was ready to fight. Brother Xiao Man was barking and listening to the movements in the tree canopy to try and find that thing's location.
"What's a hei feizi?" I asked Che Zhong as I took a deep breath and brandished my knife to defend myself. To my knowledge, I had never heard these words before.
Unexpectedly, Che Zhong's fear had reached its limit, and he suddenly turned and drove his mule, fleeing back to the village.
He escaped very quickly. The villager was shocked, and I didn't know what to do. Even when he met the Longzhi, Che Zhong didn't have this kind of cowardly reaction. What was going on? I also panicked in this moment.
Morale was very important on the battlefield, so it made sense that you would be defeated when your solders lost their morale.
I could only follow his lead, so I turned around and ran back, leaving the villager far behind. Fortunately, we weren't far from the village, so I arrived quickly. When I saw Che Zhong getting off the mule, he was still looking around fearfully, as if he were afraid the shadow would suddenly appear.
Was it necessary for me to panic? As I rushed to his side, he said, "Hei feizi isn't a thing, it's a person. Your grandfather must have told you about it." Just as he said that, the roof tiles on a nearby house rattled. Brother Xiao Man rushed back to us, and bared his teeth at the roof.
Che Zhong was so frightened, he fell on the ground. He then said to me, "Get in the house! Get in the house now!"
It was the middle of the night, and everyone was asleep. Plus, people in the mountains locked their doors at night, because they feared that wild animals would break in. It was too difficult to enter the house.
I was just about to refute, when suddenly, a black shadow flashed behind Che Zhong. The black shadow instantly wrapped around him, and he fell into the nearby bushes. Brother Xiao Man didn't have time to react either. He turned around to look for it, but found nothing in the bushes.
I was drenched in cold sweat as I rushed over. I had clearly seen that it was a person.
It was at this time that I finally realized that I had heard of hei feizi before, but my grandfather and I used the Changsha dialect while talking, so we usually called it yanlaoshu feizi. It was actually a bat; well, not a real bat, but something like it.
This was something my grandfather had deduced from strange traces he had discovered long ago. When they were young, the long-time grave robbers who went down into the tombs always felt that there was something following them wherever they went. This formed a saying among the older generation of grave robbers that they were monitored by the heavens, and the thing that monitored them was a human-shaped black thing. That was why it was called a hei feizi or a yanlaoshu feizi [1]. Someone would occasionally get a good look at the shadow, which was fleeting and very strange. My grandfather depended on dogs to find tombs since they had a better sense of smell, and could hear better than people. That was why he was the first person to feel that this thing really existed, and even found traces of it. But my grandfather didn't tell me that it was actually a human being.
Off to the side, Brother Xiao Man finally discovered a clue and started running towards the bamboo forest on the other side. I reflexively followed after him, and rushed all the way into the bamboo forest. The moonlight was completely hidden behind clouds, so the inside was dark. All I could see were two dog eyes rapidly moving forward like a wolf.
After two more steps, I began bumping into bamboo as thick as a bowl, which hurt really bad. As a result, I could only move forward by reaching out with my hands, and the dog soon left me behind.
I stopped to catch my breath and told myself that I had to cultivate a better relationship with this dog, because his attitude really wasn't helping me much.
As soon as I turned around, I saw a black shadow hanging upside down on the bamboo less than three or four meters away from my face.
I was so scared that I fell to the ground. I saw the black shadow climb slowly from the bamboo to the ground in a move that no human could do. He came to an area where the moonlight was shining, and I saw a severely burned human face and tattered clothes.
It was Bao Sa. He wasn't dead.
It was simply a miracle. I thought it was absolutely impossible for anyone to survive that kind of situation at that time. His upper body was almost rotten, his skin was one raw, open wound, and his neck had a few bites from Young Che.
"We can talk it out." I could see that it was a human, so even if he was a terrible person, we could still start the negotiation process. In this world, there was nothing that couldn't be discussed.
Bao Sa didn't answer, but slowly crawled towards me. His behavior was very strange, and seemed almost exactly like how a snake would move. I raised my knife face up the instant he pounced on me, and the edge cut into his mouth. He wasn't afraid of it at all, and pressed me to the ground. Then, his whole body began to coil around my torso with a softness no human could emulate, and in an instant, I found myself trapped like an octopus.
I pushed the knife hard, and it cut both sides of his mouth open. At this time, I saw that his eyes were cloudy.
He was dead; this was a corpse.
Then I saw scales flashing in the throat wound that Young Che had made when he bit him.
When I withdrew my knife, the corpse's head drooped, and I slashed at the wounds Young Che had bitten, getting a reaction. The blood gushed out as soon as the knife connected, and I grabbed the whistle hanging around my neck, and blew it wildly. At the same time, I thrust the knife into Bao Sa's waist, and yanked it up hard. Numerous black-haired snakes rolled out of the wound, and I kept waving my knife and hacking the snakes to death one by one in an extremely inconvenient manner.
At the same time, a snake head emerged from Bao Sa's mouth and began stretching into my mouth like a thick black hairy tongue.
I turned my face and immediately snapped my mouth shut, but it instantly pasted its whole body onto my face. My nose was full of mucus, and I couldn't breathe. I reflexively opened my mouth, and it instantly went down my throat.
That kind of feeling was nothing like a gastroscope. The snake's body was covered in black hair, and it emitted a stench of corpses and internal organs. It was absolutely disgusting. The huge body went straight down my throat, and twisted in my esophagus like crazy.
I immediately gagged, but it blocked all the gaps, so all the filth in my stomach got stuck in my respiratory tract. I choked as the acid reflux entered my lungs, and in that moment, my scalp felt numb, and I thought I was going to die. My only choice was to reach up with my knife in a reverse grip, and aim it at my face, not caring about whether I would hurt myself or not.
Blood spurted randomly, and I didn't know whether it was my own or the snake's. I heard a dog barking, meaning that Brother Xiao Man had finally found me. I felt the thing in my throat forcefully pulled out.
The feeling was too horrible. As that thing was pulled out, my vomit also came spraying out. I coughed desperately, and saw Brother Xiao Man biting the snake's seven inches [2] and shaking hard. He then tossed the snake aside, came up, bit Bao Sa's body that was coiled around me, and started shredding it. All the snakes inside the body darted out, coiled around Brother Xiao Man, and bit down without hesitation. Brother Xiao Man was surprised, and turned to bite the snakes on his body and flung them away. Then, I saw the villager from before appear with the other villagers, all holding shovels and sickles. A large flashlight shone on me, and countless weapons swept towards my head.
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Notes:
[1] "Hei feizi" means something like "black flying thing" and "yanlaoshu feizi" means something like "flying cave rat thing".
[2] Hit the snake 7 inches below its head is a Chinese proverb. They say the heart lies at that spot.
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The Lost Tomb : Sea Of Sands 2
AdventureThis is the continuation from the Sea of Sands. This novel is a sequel of the Lost Tomb Series and where the Tomb of the Sea (2018) drama was adapted. Grave Robbers' Chronicles (Sea Of Sands) Original work by Xu Lei English Translation: MereBear226...