They said they would go quickly and come back quickly, but no one clamored to head down immediately.
Ruoping first had Du Kang take off his jacket, and the two of them worked together to wring out the water from the clothes. Meanwhile, Qingyi pulled out his phone to check something:
"Hmm, I was just looking up information about air-defense shelters. It's probably best if we wait up here for a bit and let it air out first."
Zhang Shutong simply set an alarm and picked up the flashlight:
"You guys take a break. I'll go check it out first and come right back."
Whether the air-defense shelter was abandoned or not was still up for debate. This kind of underground passage that remained closed for long periods often accumulated harmful gases. He recalled a few methods for detecting them, such as throwing a torch down, or at the very least using a lighter, but they didn't have those resources on hand, so he could only check for himself.
But before he could even move his legs, Du Kang pulled him back:
"Wait up, I'll go. Your hand is injured, so what if you fall down in the dark? Look..."
As he spoke, they shone the flashlight toward the entrance. The rainwater on the stairs had mostly finished draining, leaving behind only a thin layer of yellow mud. In fact, never mind the stairs, even the ground they were currently standing on was very slippery.
Zhang Shutong thought about it and didn't insist on being stubborn:
"Then hold your breath first, and test if there's any wind down there. If anything feels off, come up quickly."
"No problem," Du Kang agreed readily.
Having said that, he took a deep breath. Kids who grew up by the lake all possessed top-tier swimming abilities. Du Kang puffed out his cheeks exaggeratingly and walked slowly down the stairs.
It was better not to speak at a time like this, so Zhang Shutong didn't rush to ask how deep it was below, merely counting the other's steps in his head.
He looked down by the beam of the flashlight. When he had counted roughly ten steps or so, that beam of light suddenly spun around:
"There's wind down here, I can feel it. We shouldn't get poisoned! It's just that the smell is too awful, a real musty odor..."
"I told you to hold your breath," Zhang Shutong said helplessly. "Just come up before talking."
"It really is cold..."
Du Kang came back up while hugging his arms. Before he could finish speaking, he let out a massive sneeze.
"You..." Zhang Shutong was starting to hesitate. "How about we really wait until tomorrow to come back? What if you get a fever?"
"It's fine, it's fine. It's not like you don't know, I still keep the electric fan on when sleeping in autumn," Du Kang sniffled and couldn't help but laugh. "Shutong, you actually have a day like this too. You just finished advising Ruoping and now you're advising me. Then do you still remember what you yourself said when we were advising you last week? It's still the same phrase: we're already here, so if I don't go down to take a look, I probably really won't be able to sleep."
Qingyi said:
"Agreed. Shutong, where did your momentum from last week go? But there's a phrase I need to correct."
He put away his phone and habitually propped up his chin:
"The actual situation is different from what you guys think. What I mean is, we are going to an air-defense shelter rather than a cellar. It might be very, very long inside, so it's probably not a matter of just taking a look and coming right back up."
"Then we'll head down to take a look first and decide later. Anyway, today is just about following our whims," Du Kang possessed a side that was more open-minded than theirs. "The two of you are just too calculating, wanting to make plans in advance for everything. How can there be so many issues? If it's boring, we'll come up immediately, and if it's interesting, we'll walk a few more steps."
Everyone felt those words were correct.
They leaned their umbrellas against the wall and pulled the door of the old house shut.
This time they didn't need to form a single file line because the passage could accommodate two people. Zhang Shutong walked slightly ahead, carefully supporting himself against the wall of the passage. The place his hand touched had a somewhat damp and slippery feel, perhaps moss. Since this kind of thing was present, it meant there was no lack of oxygen... Sure enough, after walking just a few steps, a faint breeze swept across their bodies.
Currently, they were all wet, and once a breeze blew past, it was inevitable to shudder. The surroundings were cold and gloomy, and the rushing sound of rain by their ears finally grew a bit quieter. After walking down a few more steps, it nearly vanished altogether. It was hard to imagine that just a few minutes ago, they had been standing in the middle of a heavy downpour.
The four of them walked very slowly. At this moment, only the sticky sound of shoes stepping into mud water remained.
"Shutong, help me hold the flashlight."
"What are you going to do?" Zhang Shutong saw Du Kang pull out his phone.
"Record a video. Tomorrow I can brag about it at school," he clicked the record button enthusiastically.
"I feel like this is a standard operation in horror movies," Qingyi said unhurriedly. "Usually, the person holding the phone suddenly vanishes, their teammates see things they shouldn't see from the recording, and then they start a chain of reckless rescue attempts... Ah, Ruoping, stop touching my hair."
"Can't you say something nice?"
"The atmosphere is just right."
Zhang Shutong listened to the three of them bickering, but bickering was always better than a silence where only flowing water and footsteps remained. He diverted his attention to observe the walls. The cut surface was rough and not entirely flat; it was hard to distinguish whether it was concrete or stone brick, or perhaps a natural cave carved out.
The echoes of everyone speaking reverberated through the tunnel. Without the flashlight, the surroundings could be described as pitch black. Under these circumstances, people had already lost their judgment of distance, leaving only the tracking of their own steps.
When he had counted roughly twenty steps or so, Ruoping said on the verge of tears:
"Shutong, switch places with him, I can't take it anymore!"
Qingyi had wanted to tell ghost stories the whole time. Ruoping wouldn't let him, so he switched to talking about various common underground creatures, like bats, salamanders, snakes, moles... and then he was rejected.
Zhang Shutong switched places with Qingyi. He performed a very simple subtraction in his head: they had just walked twenty-two steps, and when switching places they backed up two steps, so let's call it twenty steps.
Since it was an air-defense shelter, it was impossible to have stairs the entire way. Once they reached flat ground in a bit, as long as they measured the length of the steps, they could estimate the distance of this underground passage.
"Why do I feel like we're about to reach the end!" Du Kang suddenly shouted.
The three of them were startled by him.
Du Kang currently held his phone in one hand and the flashlight in the other. Because he wanted to record a video, he walked the fastest, stopping every few steps to film the surroundings.
"Reach the end?"
"Yeah," Du Kang turned his body around in puzzlement. "It looks like a wall up ahead, a dead end."
"We've hit the bottom just like this?"
"I also find it strange. Didn't Qingyi just say it was very large below? The air-defense shelter under the school back then wasn't like this either. It should be flat ground right after the stairs, so how is it a dead end?"
"Are you sure it's a wall?" Zhang Shutong asked suddenly.
He instinctively knitted his brows slightly.
No matter how small an air-defense shelter was, it wouldn't consist of only a single flight of stairs.
Or was this not an air-defense shelter at all?
He walked to Du Kang's side and took the flashlight.
Within his field of vision, roughly five meters away, a stone wall stood right before his eyes.
But if it was a dead end, where did the breeze from earlier come from?
Now that the door of the house above was closed, the breeze they felt just now naturally couldn't be the cold wind from the outside world.
Thinking of this, Zhang Shutong shifted the flashlight downward a bit. The standing water beneath the stone wall was very shallow, whereas the mud water flowing down was far more than this. He turned around and held up a finger, signaling the three behind him not to speak for now.
Zhang Shutong listened quietly to the sound of flowing water at his feet for a moment. Since the standing water was going elsewhere, it meant that an even lower spot existed within the air-defense shelter.
He listened for a brief moment and quickly came up with a conjecture.
It turned out this tunnel didn't extend straight down at all; it was more like up ahead... it made a turn?
Zhang Shutong walked up to the stone wall and quickly made an even more surprising discovery, because the end of the tunnel didn't just make one turn, but two!
To be exact, they were like standing at a T-junction, with a passage extending out on both sides.
It seemed the tunnel beneath the iron door was less of an "entrance" and more of a "node."
This place was like a node, forcibly cutting off a complete air-defense shelter.
Zhang Shutong then shone the light toward both sides. It was just a pity that the flashlight was merely an ordinary flashlight with a plastic casing, probably used by a security guard on night shift. He really didn't know how far the visibility of an average flashlight could reach, but he estimated twenty meters was likely.
Yet a distance of twenty meters was still insufficient to see ahead clearly.
Originally, their plan was to come down and take a look, then decide whether to turn back or keep walking based on the situation.
Just now on the stairs, the four of them hadn't failed to launch a discussion about the subsequent situation, but the only thing they hadn't anticipated was—
Two paths actually split open in front of them.
"Then what do we do, left or right?"
Du Kang leaned over:
"Right, does anyone still remember which direction the hospital is in? Should we walk toward that side? Maybe as we walk, we'll look up and find we've entered the hospital directly."
"The basement level of a hospital is usually the morgue."
"Meng Qingyi, stop interrupting!"
"This really can't be said for sure," Qingyi shrugged. "The hospital should be to our south, but this path runs east-west, so I can't say for sure which side can lead through."
Zhang Shutong thought about it:
"I suggest going right."
"Left for men, right for women?"
Zhang Shutong ignored Du Kang's poor joke. He shone the light toward his feet and analyzed:
"The standing water on the left is obviously much deeper. It's highly probable that it's blocked ahead for some reason."
"Then let's just go right." The three agreed one after another.
Next, they turned the flashlight. The path ahead grew even narrower, and the four of them reverted to their original formation. Zhang Shutong followed behind Du Kang, using his phone to illuminate the walls on both sides.
Only upon reaching here could they be considered to have formally entered the air-defense shelter.
Zhang Shutong had never been to a real air-defense shelter, so he wasn't clear on whether there were road signs or similar indications inside. In any case, they hadn't seen any along the way.
Du Kang analyzed that this was to guard against enemy agents. What if the opposite side could understand Chinese? If they understood, wouldn't they completely outflank our military and civilians?
Zhang... Shutong actually felt it made quite a bit of sense.
Right now, he wanted to figure out exactly which air-defense shelter this was—according to the information Qingyi had just looked up, no wonder there were two theories regarding the origin of the air-defense shelters, because during those two periods, two separate ones really had been built.
The one from the War of Resistance was less of an air-defense shelter and more of a tunnel; whereas the one that began construction in the mid-1960s was a proper air-defense shelter.
They weren't even clear on which shelter they were currently inside.
The standing water underfoot had nearly vanished.
The humidity of the air possessed a strange quality that was hard to describe. While it felt cold and gloomy to a person, scraping a finger against the wall revealed a layer of dry dust.
Along with this, they stepped onto a dry road surface.
A few water-stained footprints looked as if they had stepped onto a new continent. No one knew how long it had been since someone last came here. Every step they took kicked up accumulated dust, which floated within the beam of the flashlight.
Zhang Shutong told the three of them to cover their mouths and noses with their damp clothes, stubbornly continuing to examine the walls. Finally, he found a trace of writing on it, but it wasn't the "National Defense Project" he had imagined, but rather "03."
Zhang Shutong froze for a moment.
What did "03" mean?
Was there a third one?
Zhang Shutong carefully observed the surface of the characters again. It was dark red and already somewhat peeling, which fit his imagination quite well. An air-defense work should use large red characters.
But this string of numbers couldn't be identified as to what kind of pigment it was written with. Perhaps paint? Zhang Shutong wasn't about to lean his nose close to smell it.
He called everyone over to take a look:
"What does it mean? Does it mean there's a third one?"
"No," Qingyi popularized the knowledge. "I estimate this refers to the code name of a certain entrance. That old house should be the third entrance to enter the air-defense shelter."
Zhang Shutong nodded, thinking to himself that kids from the city truly hadn't seen as much as kids from the island.
They continued to walk forward. The initial tension and excitement slowly faded away. The further they walked, the more everyone discovered that it really was just an air-defense shelter, and a fairly ordinary one at that, unlike a "restricted area" that was full of infamy.
Not just Zhang Shutong, but the three of them had never heard rumors related to it from childhood to adulthood either. Otherwise, why would they have waited until today? They would have searched all over the island long ago.
Everyone walked scattered within the air-defense shelter. The underground air was murky, inevitably causing tightness in the chest. No one knew who mentioned it first, but they began discussing whether to set foot on the path back.
Zhang Shutong glanced at the time. They had walked for roughly five minutes, and this air-defense shelter seemed to have no end.
Ruoping wanted to go back. Du Kang said that since there was an "03," if they kept walking they might even discover another flight of stairs, which would be "04." He added that they had already walked for so long, so wouldn't it be quite a loss to go back now?
Ruoping was convinced. People were just like that sometimes, getting trapped by sunk costs.
As for Qingyi, Zhang Shutong was still wondering why he hadn't made a sound for a while. Qingyi had circled to his side at some unknown point:
"We should have lit a candle when we came in."
"Oh, I get it. Ghost Blows Out the Light, right? The problem is we don't have a candle."
Qingyi added, "Don't you think we look like we're walking down a tomb passage?"
Zhang Shutong bit the inside of his cheek and said, "Big brother, look, to speak honestly, that's really a bit unlucky."
"Who still remembers that we wanted to eat a discounted fried chicken set meal?" Zhang Shutong let out a sigh. His phone would hop up a bar of signal every now and then, before vanishing again.
Taking advantage of the gaps when a signal arrived, Zhang Shutong would check if there were any new messages. Not long ago, his mom had asked where he was, and he said he was playing together with his best friends and would head back when the rain got a bit lighter, so she probably didn't need to pick him up.
Zhang... Shutong wasn't a particularly cowardly person, but because of Qingyi's words, he re-examined this tunnel, his heart lifting slightly.
Is this, truly, an air-defense shelter?
It seemed that an air-defense shelter was merely their deduction. There certainly were air-defense shelters on the island, but no one had said this particular tunnel was one.
Ever since that "03," he had never seen any new writing again. Zhang Shutong thought further that a dismal environment made it easy to scare oneself. A workload of this scale wasn't something a few thieves in a tomb-robbing novel could dig out.
They walked for another two minutes, and their formation simply broke apart completely. Du Kang continued to record his video, muttering under his breath, possessing the potential to become a streamer in the future; Qingyi continued to popularize useless knowledge to Ruoping. Ruoping also had a temperament that was both cowardly and fond of playing; every time she was scared, she would chase and hit him a few times, but she would still listen the next time.
Zhang Shutong walked at the very rear. Sometimes looking back, they had completely lost visibility of the rear. The endless darkness closely followed his footsteps, making it impossible to see the path they came from clearly at all.
And then.
They couldn't even see the path ahead anymore.
The flashlight went out.
Darkness swallowed everything.