Climbing the rocky platform was a gamble with their lives on the line; it was either all of them dying or they would survive by sheer luck. But everyone knew in their hearts that the probability of death was far greater than the probability of survival. After all, every painting they had ever traversed had been a struggle for survival, a brush with death.
With their lives at stake, no one immediately responded to Shao Ling's words, falling into silence and agonizing indecision.
"Let's call it a day," Qin Ci broke the oppressive atmosphere. "Why don't we all go back to our tents and think about what to do?"
The night passed without a word, and a sleepless night ensued.
The next morning, despite their heavy hearts, Li Xiaochun and the girls diligently prepared breakfast for everyone. Everyone ate something, more or less, but the taste of the food was something no one could truly discern anymore.
"Let's make a decision," Shao Ling said, clearly having also been up all night, his face more haggard than ever before. "The bone patterns on our faces and bodies are more pronounced than yesterday, have you noticed?"
The group exchanged glances. Sure enough, what were just faint bone patterns yesterday were now clear gray lines showing through their skin, and as time went on, the color would likely deepen until it turned completely black.
"There's no time," Shao Ling said.
"Decision…decid what?" Luo Tan asked, unwilling to face reality.
"Whether or not to climb the rock platform." Shao Ling left him with no hope.
Luo Tan buried his face in his knees, holding his head in his hands. After a long while, he sobbed, "I don't want to die…"
"If you don't climb the rock platform, you'll likely die anyway," Shao Ling reminded him. "If you climb the rock platform, you might survive."
"I don't know, I don't know…" Luo Tan sobbed.
"Don't force him…" Qin Ci sighed. "Perhaps we should try our best to think of other ways."
"I think there's no other way." Shao Ling had long since lost his usual composure and spoke bluntly, no longer caring about the feelings of others. "Either sit and wait to die, or climb the rock platform and seek a way to survive."
"But we can't be sure that staying down there will lead to death, nor can we be sure that climbing the rock platform will really lead to survival, can we?" Wu You said, her eyes red.
"Stop deceiving yourself," Shao Ling looked at her expressionlessly. "Staying down there will definitely lead to death. The evidence is the increasingly stronger and more numerous tornado columns every night, and the increasingly obvious bone structure on our bodies. You don't really think that once the bone structure is fully revealed, we can continue to live in this inhuman, ghostly state, do you? What's the point?"
Wu You was speechless, biting her lip and tears falling.
"So you mean, you want to climb the rock platform?" Li Xiaochun looked at Shao Ling.
Shao Ling rubbed his face, took a breath, and said, "Yes, this is my choice. I don't want to sit idly by and wait to die. I believe there must be a way to solve this on the rock platform, just like every painting we've entered. Every time we were on the verge of despair, we found a way out of the predicament. I believe this time will be the same, and I believe we can successfully solve it, just like every time before."
Li Xiaochun looked at him, his gaze shifting, as if he were engaged in a fierce internal struggle and weighing of options. After a long while, he finally said, "I've only entered one painting, so I don't have the experiences and mental journey of you veteran members
. To be honest, I still feel the whole thing is incredibly unreal… Just consider me a daring fool, I also choose to climb the rock platform." "What about you?" Shao Ling looked at the others who hadn't spoken.
Ke Xun glanced at Mu Yiran, and seeing him nod slightly, said, "Yiran and I also choose to climb."
"Count me in," Fang Fei said.
Wei Dong's gaze was somewhat dazed: "Really… isn't there any other way?"
Everyone looked at him, and no one spoke.
Wei Dong closed his eyes, his lips trembling as he said, "Okay... I'll climb too..."
Reaching the rock platform was now inevitable, and before lunch, the thirteen members finally reached an agreement.
"We'll tie one end of the climbing rope to the car, throw the other end over the rock platform, and then we'll pull ourselves up from the other end," Ke Xun planned tonight's ascent. "Everyone needs to cooperate using the rope to pull up those with weaker stamina and Sister Cen, wheelchair and all. Besides that, we need to bring equipment: guns, entrenching tools, spare ropes. Does anyone else have anything to add?"
"I want to bring my butcher's knife, just in case," Li Xiaochun said. "I'm more skilled with that than with a gun."
"Me too..." Wei Dong pulled a utility knife from his pocket. "I'll bring this."
"I also brought a scalpel," Qin Ci said with a slightly self-deprecating smile.
"Let's take a can of gasoline up," Mu Yiran said. "We might need it."
"We can take the remaining oxygen cylinders too," Zhu Haowen said. "They can be used as explosives, though they won't be very powerful."
The group added a few more items, preparing everything they would need for the night.
"What do we do next… just sit here and wait to die?" Wu You asked listlessly.
No one answered for a moment, each staring blankly at the ground before them.
After a long while, Zhu Haowen spoke up: "We came out here with the mind to die, didn't we? Who didn't make arrangements for their own funeral before leaving? Regret and hesitation are useless now. It's no different from being inside a painting. No matter how much you regret or fear, you're already in the painting. You'll never get out until you unravel the final truth. So now, the only thing we can do is grit our teeth and continue. Fear and procrastination are pointless."
"Haowen is right," Qin Ci said calmly. "What we should do now is calm ourselves down as soon as possible. The calmer we are, the greater our chances will be. I brought some pre-operative sedatives. If anyone needs one, I can give them an injection before climbing the rock platform."
Luo Yu raised his hand, his voice thick with nasal congestion, "Brother Qin, please prepare one for me, otherwise I might not be able to hold on..."
Qin Ci nodded and patted him on the shoulder.
For the rest of the time, everyone just sat in the large tent, spending what might be the last afternoon of their lives, filled with countless thoughts and feelings.
"I really regret it," Wu You said, her voice choked with sobs, her head resting on her knees. "I regret not being more filial to my parents."
"I… I regret it a little too," Gu Qingqing said wistfully. "This bookworm of mine missed so much of the scenery beyond books."
"The night before I left, I wrote a suicide note that was over ten pages long," Wei Dong said with a dejected smile. "I thought I had written down everything I wanted to say, but now I feel like I still have so much left unsaid. I… I really wish I could have another chance to add these words at the end. I wrote too little, far from enough…"
"It's not too late to write it now," Yue Cen said gently. "I think you can put it in the car. Someone will find it eventually."
"Oh, okay." Wei Dong coughed to cover his nasal voice and got up to get paper and pen.
"I think we should record the entire cause and effect of the In-Painting Incident, as well as all our speculations," Ke Xun suddenly said. "If we unfortunately die, these records might be left to a group of In-Painting participants several years later. When they, like us, have progressed to the final step of the incident and arrived at this place, these records might help them avoid some detours."
"But, wouldn't any information that would leak the In-Painting Incident be blocked by the Painting Push? And we would also suffer a backlash," Luo Jing said.
"The reason for the blocking and backlash is that the In-Painting participants want to leak the information to outsiders," Ke Xun calmly analyzed. "But what we want to pass on is to the next group of In-Painting participants. As fellow In-Painting participants, the information will not be blocked.
"This Valley of Death has always been sparsely populated. If we hide the information even more discreetly, in places that only In-Painting participants would look for, we won't have to worry about the original content being blocked because it was seen by outsiders."
"As for the backlash, if we die, the backlash is irrelevant. If we survive, it proves we successfully stopped the forces behind the painting, and naturally we won't suffer any backlash."
"Xiao Ke makes a good point," Hua Jiqiu said. "I also agree to record the whole event for future generations."
Everyone agreed, and Shao Ling picked up paper and pen, about to start writing, when Ke Xun said, "I think we should use several different methods to record it. After all, the next group of people might be a hundred years from now. I don't know if it will be preserved if it's written on paper. We should use more methods, which means more layers of protection." "
I have a USB drive with me. I can save an electronic version on the USB drive," Zhu Haowen said.
"We can also burn a CD," Mu Yiran said. "I have a CD in my car that can be repeatedly erased and burned, and this laptop has a CD burner."
"You brought something like that?" Ke Xun asked in surprise.
"There's a DVD player in the car. This disc was originally a music disc," Mu Yiran explained. "And as long as it's not exposed to extreme weather or environments, a disc can last for two or even three hundred years."
"Great," Ke Xun said. "Then I'll make another copy on my phone, and leave the charger and phone for future generations, so that this kind of phone won't be an antique a hundred years from now."
So everyone divided up the tasks and organized the entire incident and all the clues, recording them on paper, USB drives, discs, and phones.
The next step was to find a place where they wouldn't be easily discovered by outsiders, but would be easily found by the next group of people entering the scene to hide these items.
"Why don't we put it under those rocks over there?" Mu Yiran pointed to a low-lying area of rocks not far away. "After we were led here by the illusion of the human figure, we searched this area during the day. I think that when some of the people who entered the painting come here in the future, they will do the same and search the surrounding area."
The low-lying rocks were just ordinary stones, scattered sparsely on the cold, hard ground, very inconspicuous. Everyone had checked this place when they first arrived, looking it over from top to bottom. Outsiders wouldn't bother to search for such ordinary stones.
They went over and picked out a relatively large and conspicuous rock. Ke Xun and Li Xiaochun used entrenching tools to hold the rock at the base, trying to pry it up, then dig a hole underneath, put the object in, and then cover it with the rock. After
the two of them pried hard for a while, they finally loosened the rock. Wei Dong and Luo Yi quickly came to help, and the four of them lifted the rock to the side.
Ke Xun picked up the shovel again and started digging. After seven or eight scoops, he suddenly heard a "clang," as if the shovel had struck something hard.
Ke Xun and the others exchanged glances, and for a moment they held their breath and fell silent. Ke Xun carefully brushed away the soil he had shoveled away, and slowly, a stone box about the size of a brick was revealed beneath the soil.
Everyone was surprised. Ke Xun bent down and picked up the box. The box wasn't locked; the gap between the lid and the body was sealed with something that looked like wax. Ke Xun was about to pry the lid off with his hands when Hua Jiqiu stopped him and took the box from him. "Let me do it. Be careful not to damage the things inside if you don't open it properly." He then turned to Wei Dong, "Xiao Wei, can I borrow your utility knife?"
Hua Jiqiu took the box aside to deal with it, and everyone followed to watch. Ke Xun was about to go over to see as well when he noticed that there seemed to be something else in the pit he had dug earlier. He exclaimed "Huh!" and squatted down, carefully brushing away the loose soil with his hands. He pulled out a bottle made of some kind of metal.
Continuing to dig deeper, he found porcelain bottles, pottery jars, wooden boxes, and even bamboo slips.
"What's going on?" Ke Xun asked, holding up the items and showing them to Mu Yiran, completely bewildered. "Did we accidentally rob a tomb?"
"No," Shao Ling said, taking the porcelain vase and wooden box and examining them. "The patterns on these two items are clearly from different eras. The porcelain vase is crudely made, a cheap item, but this wooden box is made of black sandalwood. Black sandalwood is a very precious wood, extremely resistant to decay. So you see, it's still basically intact, even the carved patterns are almost undamaged. If this was a burial item, it's very strange to have these two things in the same place. It's like putting cheap goods and high-end luxury items in the same jewelry box."
"Then how come all these strange things are in the same pit?" Ke Xun asked, puzzled.
"I have a guess," Mu Yiran said.
Author's Note:
My darlings, the recent chapters, and possibly a few more to come, contain a lot of analysis and reasoning. Some of you might find it a bit overwhelming. However, I've been thinking that if the final truth of the events depicted in the paintings is revealed too easily by the participants, then the groundwork laid by the thirteen paintings will feel like a grand undertaking followed by a light touch, making it feel top-heavy and anticlimactic.
As you can see, this story leans towards a mystery-solving style. Almost every story unfolds through the participants' complex and thoughtful process of unraveling the mystery. If the final resolution of the entire event is less difficult and profound than a single painting, it won't be able to support the grand framework built from thirteen paintings.
Therefore, in the final resolution, the participants will go through repeated evidence presentation, verification, and debate, gradually approaching the truth. Thus, reasoning, debate, and the complexities and repeated deliberations will occupy a significant portion. Xingyue feels that if the main mystery that runs throughout the entire story were easily guessed and the truth revealed immediately, it wouldn't feel realistic, and the ending would seem too rushed and irresponsible.
Therefore, Xingyue is here to give everyone a heads-up: there will be several more chapters of analysis and reasoning later on. For those of you who are worried about getting a headache from reading so much, if you find reading a few chapters a day too grueling, feel free to save them up and go bald all at once (hey!).
However, if Xingyue writes quickly enough, the last few chapters of the main story might be released on the same day, so those of you who want to save up some chapters shouldn't be away for too long!
Have a great weekend, muah!