Qin Ci was nearly exhausted from the heat. The world he was in was getting hotter and hotter, and the air density was changing due to the heat, causing the scenery in his eyes to distort and warp, as if the air itself was burning.
Qin Ci stared at the sea of fire on the other side of the cliff. In the flames, he could vaguely make out a huge human figure, which was severely distorted and warped with the changes in the air around the fire, and at one point even its waist seemed to be broken .
When Zhu Haowen rushed back, he was carrying a box in his hands: "Old Qin, the other side is already ablaze. We have nowhere to go."
Qin Ci looked away, increasingly feeling that he might have just had a bizarre and terrifying hallucination.
Qin Ci turned to Zhu Haowen, his voice hoarse with thirst: "I only found a few charred conch and clam shells, some sea fish and other sea creatures I can't name, all dried out. They can serve as our temporary food. Haowen, what's in this box?"
Zhu Haowen placed the box on the dry, slightly warm ground: "It feels very light. I didn't open it then, thinking we'd look at it together when we got back."
Qin Ci gave a wry smile: "You hope this thing is like Aladdin's lamp, that opening it will summon a smoky demon to grant us our wish to escape this sea of suffering, right?"
Zhu Haowen maintained his expressionless face despite the heat: "I'm afraid it's an empty box."
So, the two placed the box, carved with ancient patterns, on the ground in the middle, and Zhu Haowen lifted the lid, his gesture like lifting the shell of a crab he didn't particularly like.
The box was indeed empty.
But this "emptiness" was only relative to the actual space; if measured in decibels, the box was quite "full."
The moment the lid was opened, both of them heard a sound from inside the box, a sound that seemed to roar and fill the entire world.
It was the sound of the ocean, surging waves that seemed to reach for miles.
Qin Ci closed the lid, and the sound stopped instantly, like a video being paused.
Zhu Haowen tried opening the lid again.
The sound of towering waves returned; closing it again, the sound vanished.
"I didn't expect what I got was just a music box," Zhu Haowen said expressionlessly.
"This…" Qin Ci found Zhu Haowen's analogy to be impeccable in this context. "This music box is actually similar to the seashells and fish I found; they all come from the sea. I don't think we found these things for no reason; it must be related to the sea."
Zhu Haowen: "Is it to illustrate our dire situation?"
A loud beep—"—was exceptionally clear in the unbearably hot world, like the mournful beep of an air conditioner before it stopped working on a sweltering summer night when the power suddenly went out.
The two men were clearly familiar with this sound; they knew without even looking at their phones: "Two hours have passed."
Zhu Haowen: "No progress."
It would be a lie to say they weren't anxious, but both men tried their best to remain calm.
Qin Ci looked in the direction he had been staring at—a steep cliff, beyond which lay an endless sea of fire, a sight that made one hesitate to proceed.
It was here that the two men were forced to stop, and then they split up to explore two separate paths. Qin Ci found some seafood, while Zhu Haowen found a music box.
"Haowen, I just saw someone over there." Qin Ci felt he hadn't explained himself clearly enough, so he pointed to the front of the cliff: "A person's back, the person was bald and had a burly build."
"You mean, on the other side of the sea of fire, inside the fire, there's someone?" Zhu Haowen asked earnestly, not doubting that Qin Ci was seeing things because of the heat.
"Yes, it's inside the fire. Rather than a real person, it's more like an image, which is why I could see it so clearly." Qin Ci's eyes were fixed on that direction, his brows gradually furrowing. "It's appeared again, that person has appeared again!"
Zhu Haowen also looked in that direction, falling silent for a moment.
"Haowen, you saw it too?"
Zhu Haowen looked carefully for a while: "You saw a person's back?"
"Yes, facing away from us, bald, wearing a robe, it looked like he was waving…" Qin Ci looked with difficulty, "That, it looks like a hand but it doesn't look like a hand."
"It's a severed hand." It was Zhu Haowen who spoke.
"You saw it too?!" Qin Ci suddenly realized that the person's hand was strange because it was missing a part.
Zhu Haowen: "Are you sure you saw a back view?"
"It was a back view, and it's getting clearer. I can see the back of his head."
Zhu Haowen frowned slightly: "I saw the front."
"Huh?" Qin Ci was startled by Zhu Haowen's words. To be honest, that strange back view already seemed quite eerie. What would the front view look like? Zhu Haowen
stared at the thing in the firelight, meeting the other's eager gaze: "I think this front view and the back view you saw are the same person. No, it's not a person, it just looks like a person."
"Then what is it?" Qin Ci found everything very strange. Why could two people see the same thing from both sides? Even though he and Haowen were looking from the same direction.
"It's a monkey," Zhu Haowen felt his description was inappropriate. "It's a giant ape, a fire-breathing giant ape, bald-headed, without hands, but it seems to be trying to express something to us, even somewhat humbly begging."
Qin Ci still couldn't understand why the two of them could see both sides of the same monkey at the same time, but obviously there wouldn't be an immediate answer. Now they could only try other clues: "Are there any New Year's customs related to this kind of monkey in the fire? In my memory, it seems that people only paint monkeys in New Year's pictures during the Year of the Monkey."
Zhu Haowen looked at the giant ape in the firelight, listening to Qin Ci's voice, and couldn't help but admire his companion's composure: "Old Qin, you're really something, you still remember New Year's pictures at this moment."
"Aren't we entering a New Year's picture area? What we're looking for are fragments of New Year's picture woodblocks." In Qin Ci's view, these thoughts of his were perfectly reasonable.
Zhu Haowen also connected the monkey in the fire to New Year's customs: "I heard that some places worship Sun Wukong, could this be Sun Wukong...? It doesn't seem like it..."
"That's possible, this monkey is bald, and Sun Wukong was a monk," Qin Ci said.
"I used to play a computer game about the Twenty-Eight Mansions, and there was a mansion called Zi Huo Hou, which should be related to fire and monkeys." Zhu Haowen found it strange that he remembered a seemingly insignificant character from a game he played several years ago, probably because those three words reminded him of the big-mouthed monkey.
"You're right, when I was studying acupuncture, a traditional Chinese medicine doctor mentioned that acupoints on the human body are related to the Twenty-Eight Mansions in the sky, and there is indeed a Zi Huo Hou among them." Qin Ci also remembered.
"Aren't you a Western medicine doctor?" Zhu Haowen felt he had gone off-topic.
"It's never a bad thing to learn more about medicine," Qin Ci said, digressing a bit after Zhu Haowen, before quickly returning to reality. The monkey's silhouette in the fire was still there, waving its severed hand, seemingly beckoning the two of them to follow it.
"It seems a bit anxious," Zhu Haowen said, staring at the monkey in his eyes. "It's almost kneeling before us; I wonder what it wants to beg for."
All they had, besides the fish and shellfish, was this box that could emit the sound of the ocean.
"Does it want this box?" Qin Ci picked up the box to show the monkey.
The monkey was agitated, waving its paws.
Zhu Haowen said, "I don't think that's what it wants. It's been begging so desperately; if it got what it wanted, it should calm down, not be moving around so anxiously."
"Okay, let's try something else." Qin Ci picked up another fish, but this time the monkey didn't move.
"This fish is useless to us either; we have plenty more. Let's just throw it to it," Zhu Haowen said.
So, the fish, now roasted into dried fish, was tossed by Qin Ci into the fire. Although it looked far away, it somehow reached the monkey.
"It ate the fish." Zhu Haowen watched the monkey chewing on dried sea fish. "Let's give it something else."
And so, almost every piece of burnt seafood Qin Ci had collected along the way was thrown into the fire monkey's mouth.
When Qin Ci picked up the last item, Zhu Haowen interrupted him, "What is this? It looks like an octopus but not quite, like a seashell but not quite either, it's so ugly."
"I happen to know about this because it can be used in medicine," Qin Ci said. "In ancient times it was called turtle foot, scientifically known as *Trichoderma purpureus*, and it should belong to a type of arthropod. Because it's difficult to harvest, the yield is low."
Zhu Haowen listened to Qin Ci's words, but his eyes were drawn to the fire monkey, which was much shorter than before. Upon closer inspection, it was actually kneeling.
"So this turtle foot is what it really wants." Zhu Haowen said, picking up a somewhat disgusting-looking turtle foot and tossing it to the fire monkey.
The fire monkey quickly caught it with both hands, but didn't get up, continuing to kneel.
In this way, Zhu Haowen threw four turtle feet in succession, and only then did the fire monkey stand up, spread its arms, and hands miraculously sprouted from its sleeves.
These turtle feet had given the fire monkey hands.
"This monkey's appearance and demeanor are just like a monk," Zhu Haowen said.
"Are there any legends about monkeys and monks in the fire?" Qin Ci found that he could only think of Sun Wukong from the Flaming Mountain.
"This monk loves to eat seafood so much, he definitely wasn't born in fire, and he's definitely not a true vegetarian monk. Since these turtle feet can turn into his hands, and even feet, it means that monkeys and sea turtles have some connection," Zhu Haowen analyzed.
"A monkey in the water," Qin Ci repeated. "Is it an aquatic ape?"
"What is that?"
"I read a paper on genetics in college, which cited a scientist's view that humans originated from aquatic apes. Over time, they gradually split into two branches. One branch went to land and gradually evolved into apes; the other branch remained in the water, and I don't know what they evolved into, probably still aquatic apes or something." Qin Ci tried hard to recall the contents of that paper. "I remember we were all very interested in this theory at the time. One classmate said that there were traces of this aquatic ape, and it was recorded in ancient times. I think it was called a sea monk."
At this moment, the ape in the fire began to jump, seemingly very excited and anxious, constantly waving to the two of them.
"Its actions seem to be telling us to jump off the cliff and into the sea of fire." Zhu Haowen thought the suggestion was absurd.