Endless Road of Corpse - C66

“Who is Zhou Lingwu?” San Mao turned his head and asked curiously.

Since the investigation into the Zhou brothers were conducted by me and the Taoist priest, San Mao had never participated in it before. Naturally, he did not know who this Zhou Lingwu was, but right now, I obviously did not have the time to explain the ins and outs of the matter.

However, I didn’t have time to think about anything else at the moment. I could only grab hold of Zhou Lingwu and ask him about the situation. I subconsciously turned on the flashlight in my hand and chased after him, ignoring everything else.

After I entered the passageway, I discovered that it was just like a maze. A large number of interconnected passages were intertwined together, and the sides of the passageway were filled with concrete walls. There were no doors or windows at all. The light spots on my flashlight swayed in front of me as Zhou Lingwu and myself, as well as the footsteps of Clan Leader San Mao and the others behind me echoed in the passage, as if there were tens or even a hundred people running at the same time.

At the start, my flashlight would occasionally flash upon his figure, but after a few turns, I had completely lost sight of him. After looking aimlessly for a while, I finally confirmed that I had lost him, and stopped in my tracks.

The walls of this passageway did not look like the internal corridor of a normal building at all, but had no walls or paint, exposing the coarse cement of the embryo. However, it seemed to be a thick, sturdy, and indestructible corridor, with scarlet painted pipes extending from the ceiling. The light bulbs were hanging below the pipes, neatly arranged in a line.

I remembered that the location of the Boeing 777 was below ground level, which meant that the labyrinth was built entirely underground.

I groped around on the nearby wall and found several switchboards. I tried them with my hand, but nothing happened, as if all the electricity in the area except for the egg-shaped building had been cut off.

I looked back. Behind me was the same dark, unlit corridor. I took a few more steps back, and when I couldn’t tell where I was anymore, I couldn’t help but shout,

“San Mao!”

“Hair…” Hair… Hair… “Hair …” A series of echoes resounded from the passage, followed by San Mao’s voice that seemed to have been mixed with the reverberations:

“Source… Source… Source… “Source…”

The voices came from all directions, and I couldn’t tell where they came from. I tried to take a few steps in the right direction, but without exception they were the same corridors.

San Mao was still calling out nonstop, and I tried to reply, but as my voice transmitted back and forth, it eventually became an indistinct buzzing sound. I couldn’t even tell if San Mao and the rest were approaching me or staying far away.

I leaned against the wall and took a few deep breaths, trying to calm myself down. Then, I looked at both sides of the passageway, which was so dark that I couldn’t see the end of it, and thought to myself that this place is not suitable for people to go to the back of the village, and it wouldn’t be easy for them to meet San Mao and the others, it would be better to follow a path to the end, so that they could easily discover it.

With this idea in mind, I calmed myself down a lot. I removed the backpack from my back, took out the Bell’s Survival Knife that I had never used before, and used the back of the blade to carve an arrow on the wall. If San Mao were to accidentally come here, he would know which direction I was headed in. I took out a Snickers rack from my bag and took two bites to replenish my strength. Then I started walking in the direction of the arrow.

The more I walked, the more confused I became. This underground labyrinth didn’t look like a new building at all, most of the pipes were painted mottled, the cement walls had worn off a little, and in many places the corners were thick with moss, as if they had been there for at least several decades.

Could this underground base have existed since long ago? I thought back to what my mother had told me back in the days of the Cultural Revolution. In response to Mao Zedong’s call to “prepare for war, prepare for war,” she had built a large number of dugouts and underground military installations, both official and civilian, and my mother had repeatedly talked about how hard it was for them when they were young, digging dugouts every day to educate me. She had tried to remind me of how difficult it was to live a happy life today.

Most of these subterranean buildings, which were mostly made from the crude imitation of The Underground Warfare, had been abandoned, and there had been a number of brutal cases of children playing in them until the tunnel collapsed and was buried alive. Could this be one of the remnants that was left behind at that time? So why build a modern military base on this ancient underground building? To save money? Or was there some secret buried here?

Finally, after a few minutes, I was blocked by a sturdy concrete wall. To my delight, there was an arrow carved into the wall, pointing to my right, and from the white marks, it seemed to have been carved not long ago.

This must be the mark San Mao left for me to look for him. I became excited and without thinking, I turned and ran in the direction indicated by the arrow. But at this moment, I didn’t notice that I didn’t know when the unceasing shouts from San Mao had stopped hearing.

Being alone in this quiet and dark underground, that kind of mental claustrophobia and terror is something ordinary people can’t imagine. At this moment, I desperately hope to meet someone alive, even if it is the powerless Mao Tou. However, things went against my wishes. After more than ten minutes had passed, I still hadn’t met San Mao and the others.

Just when I was beginning to suspect that San Mao had left that arrow behind, the originally flat walkway suddenly became a flight of stairs, and I lost my balance, falling down like a soldier from the Eighth Route 8 Army that had been shot to death.

I felt as if I’d rolled on the steps for a while, my head knocked a few times, but the key was that the flashlight in my hand also fell out and bounced a few times on the steps. Maybe it was the battery that fell out.

I sat on the floor for a long time before I woke up. When I recovered my senses, my eyes were wide open. My vision was completely dark, without any light, and I couldn’t see anything.

Losing the light source in this kind of absolute darkness also meant that it was hard to move, and all kinds of horrible imaginations started to surface in my mind. I hurriedly shook my head, took a few deep breaths, and thought about where the flashlight fell to.