The raging wind seemed to suddenly erupt in fury, tearing open a massive eye of wind the instant the group leaped onto the altar. With the force of a whale swallowing its prey, it swept down from the sky, engulfing the entire altar in its eye.
The enormous wind surged wildly, forming a colossal tornado that reached the heavens and the earth. The ground throughout Death Valley seemed to tremble, and beneath the surface, a terrifying rumble, like a thousand horses galloping, echoed.
Within this wildly spinning and churning tornado, tens of thousands, millions, even more indescribable, grotesque forms seemed to be reveling, screaming and dancing wildly, desperately trying to break free of the wind. However, the surface of the wind was like a protective membrane, desperately and relentlessly binding these monstrous creatures, preventing them from breaching this final barrier.
A thick, dark gray wind enveloped the entire area within a hundred miles of the altar, yet a faint red light managed to pierce through this dense, dark gray wind.
The red light shone brightly, as dazzling as blood, flickering in the wind, gradually becoming clearer, revealing eerie and terrifying ghostly symbols.
These were the ghostly symbols on the altar's rock walls, which, against the backdrop of the swirling wind, seemed to come alive, twisting and floating on the rock face. Gradually, they seemed to detach from the rock face, swept into the wind by the gale, swirling and churning, mixing with the thick, dark gray wind, adding streaks of crimson.
A series of sounds, like a membrane tearing, began to ring out continuously; these streaks of crimson were like incredibly sharp scalpels, coldly and ruthlessly slicing through the fragile skin of the victim.
From within the tornado column echoed the shrill laughter of ten thousand ghosts, a piercing, ear-piercing sound like a thousand sharp needles stabbing out of the wind, gleaming coldly, as if about to unleash a barrage of arrows in all directions, a dazzling fireworks display for the impending feast of demons and ghosts.
At the eye of this colossal tornado, thirteen figures, now part of the painting, stood on a cold altar. Their
skeletal forms, visible through their skin, were shifting from pitch black to blood red, making them appear as if they were thirteen bloodied figures, their flesh mangled and struggling on the brink of death.
There was no wind at the top of the altar; the tornado column circled it, forming a dome-shaped space above, allowing the figures to remain securely atop the altar. However, the howling wind and the piercing screams of the demons threatened to shatter their eardrums and pierce their eardrums, making them wish they could die instantly to escape the torment of this terrifying sound.
"Try destroying it with weapons!" Ke Xun roared amidst the howling wind and ghostly cries.
He wasn't giving up; he wanted to try one more time. Everyone had chosen to climb the altar with a last glimmer of hope—to find a slim chance of survival, or perhaps the key to ending the entire event.
Li Xiaochun gritted his teeth, grabbed his gun, and fired wildly into the wind. The others followed suit, firing submachine guns and pistols in all directions. Mu Yiran and Zhu Haowen ignited the gasoline and oxygen cylinders they had brought, throwing some into the wind and others onto the altar. Ke Xun removed the battery from his cell phone, detonated it, and kicked it into the wind.
Even after everyone's guns were empty, the tornado remained unaffected, continuing to grow and tear at the wind membrane. The howls of the demons, amplified a billion times, relentlessly created a maddening noise.
"There's no way…" Wei Dong slumped down, throwing down his empty gun. "This time, there really is no way."
The people in the painting looked at each other, panting and trembling.
No one moved; no one could muster the courage to face death first.
"It's almost too late…" Wu You murmured, tears welling in her eyes as she looked at the wind bodies. "They're coming out soon… that wind membrane is about to give way… it can't hold on… sob sob sob…"
"Can I go down?" Luo Yu desperately wiped away his unstoppable tears. "It doesn't matter where I die anyway, can I die in my G-Wagon?"
Ke Xun frowned deeply, his gaze sweeping over the faces of his companions. Although all their faces were soaked in blood-red ghostly runes, he could still discern the sorrow and despair on each face.
Ke Xun didn't want to see such expressions. He couldn't bear it. Every midnight when he woke up crying from his dreams, he would see a face with such an expression in the reflection of his glass window.
The agonizing pain that had finally begun to fade, a pain once so familiar and intense, returned in an instant. His beloved family member, now his closest companion, was facing loss once more, enduring heartache once more. He was filled with sorrow and anger, despair and bewilderment.
A sudden chill ran down his face.
He raised his hand to touch it; it was tears, long since unfamiliar, now seemingly beyond his control, falling incessantly.
"Ke Xun..." Mu Yiran's voice rang out beside him.
Ke Xun turned to look at him; Mu Yiran's eyes, filled with sorrow and heartache, were fixed on him.
"That's it…" Ke Xun smiled, tears sliding down his lips. "Then I'll go first, Yi Ran, just like me in the other timeline of 'The Journey'… I can't lose to that guy, right? I…"
"No, Ke Xun, no." Mu Yi Ran grabbed him, unusually losing his composure, his eyes revealing a stubbornness and urgency unlike his usual self. "Wait a little longer—it's not the last moment yet—let me think about it again—let me find another way—"
"Okay." Ke Xun returned the hand and grasped his. "You think, I'll wait."
Mu Yi Ran's pupils darted back and forth with his urgent emotions, as if desperately searching for a clue as thin as a hair, almost invisible.
"You know, I have a suspicion," Mu Yi Ran's speech was faster than ever before. "I've always felt that there's something strange about Death Valley. I've had a vague suspicion since the night we entered the valley.
"Remember the shot Hao Wen fired in the wind?" What we heard were many gunshots. At the time, we thought they were echoes from the valley, but—
"Do you remember the thirteen black figures we saw in the wind when we entered the valley? I once said that perhaps they were reflections of the previous groups of people who entered the painting, or perhaps they were reflections of ourselves—I've always doubted that.
"If the thirteen black figures were ourselves, then what version of ourselves did we see when we entered the valley? Those thirteen black figures were walking, and now that I think about it, they seemed to be carrying something on their backs. They were walking towards the altar, so—it's very possible that what we saw then was us today, us walking towards the altar a moment ago.
"If that's the case, then the series of gunshots we heard when we entered the valley weren't echoes of Haowen's shot, but—"
"The sound of us firing shots into the wind just now?!" Ke Xun's tearful eyes widened in astonishment.
"No," Mu Yiran shook his head slightly, "We fired at the wind for a long time. I think it was more like the shots Xiaochun fired when he had an emotional breakdown under the altar. After you pinned him down, I looked towards the road we came in through the valley and seemed to see a flash of car headlights, but it flashed too fast. I'm not sure if I saw it wrong. If I didn't see it wrong, then that light was most likely us driving in this direction when we entered the valley."
"That's too bizarre," Zhu Haowen's voice suddenly interrupted. He was standing not far away and walked up to the two of them. "According to you, 'that group' of us should already be under the altar. What they see is the altar surrounded by the tornado column, but we didn't see that when we came."
"I think the spacetime here is chaotic and intertwined," Mu Yiran seemed calmer than before, her speech slowing slightly as she looked at her companions gathering around her. "Every segment of spacetime intersects and flashes back here, so what we see are fragments of scenes flashing by on a chaotic timeline. Even Xiaochun's gunshot and our figures didn't appear sequentially in the correct timeline.
"Of course, if we need a convincing basis for this claim, the best proof is that after Ke Xun and I first ascended the altar, we traveled through an entire night to arrive before you.
"We speculated on two possibilities at the time: one was that we traveled through spacetime, and the other was that our memories of that period were erased. Now it seems that the first speculation is more likely.
"Because if the demonic power on the altar could erase our memories to this extent, it would have erased all of our memories by now, preventing us from sacrificing ourselves to become the seal."
"Yiran is right," Ke Xun nodded urgently. "The spacetime here is chaotic, chaotic!" "Remember Schrödinger's Cat? It hinted at the superposition of parallel universes and multi-dimensional, multi-spacetime. And this Death Valley is a human scene during the day, but a non-human scene at night—isn't that a kind of spacetime distortion?"
"Yes, yes, why, why is it distorted?" Everyone was anxious and bewildered; at such a critical moment, their thinking ability had already died.
"Perhaps it's because of the power of the ghost script, perhaps it's because of the abnormally strong underground magnetic field, perhaps it's the effect of the inexplicably huge tornadoes every night..." Mu Yiran thought quickly. "Haowen, do you understand 'matter field'?"
Zhu Haowen's eyes flickered: "It's matter and the field it forms, as well as energy and the field it forms. Ghost script is a kind of energy that can form an energy field, or a matter field. The magnetic permeability of the matter field determines the speed of light; where the matter field is strong, the speed of light is slow, and where the matter field is weak, the speed of light is fast. Simply put—an uneven matter field can cause spacetime to curve!"
"That's it!" "Ke Xun clenched his fist tightly. "This place has an extremely powerful energy field like the Ghost Script, and an extremely strong magnetic field underground!"
"Moreover," Zhu Haowen continued, "the Geophysical Society's research has confirmed that tornadoes can disrupt the Earth's magnetic field! The vortex of a tornado generates a low magnetic pressure region, causing a sudden change in the strength of the Earth's surface magnetic field—tornadoes occur every night in Death Valley, growing larger each night. In addition, there is an unevenly distributed extremely strong magnetic field beneath the valley's surface. Every time the wind rises or moves, it causes the material field generated by the interaction of the Ghost Script, the tornadoes, and the underground magnetic field to cause spacetime distortion and curvature!"
"—So? —So?" Several people asked urgently, even pleadingly.