When Wu Xie and others slowly climbed down, Zhang Haixing was already waiting for them in front of the bronze chain.
"You are too slow."
Zhang Haixing leaned against the stone wall with her arms folded, her tone obviously dissatisfied.
"No hurries."
Wu Xie sat down on the stone platform next to the chain and panted slowly. He looked at the familiar bronze chains in front of him, which were crisscrossed like a spider web, and his expression was in a daze for a moment.
At this moment, he seemed to be thinking a lot in his mind, but also seemed to be thinking nothing at all.
He quickly came to his senses and continued: "It's been thousands of years anyway, and things have always been there, and they can't escape."
Zhang Haixing curled his lips when he heard this and was too lazy to say anything more.
After Fatty and Feng came down, everyone rested for an hour, ate something to replenish their strength, and then grabbed the chains and continued climbing down.
Wu Xie and his party walked through the cracks in the mountains for a total of five days. They changed their gas masks three times and finally saw the bottom of the huge gap within the maximum distance that the fog lights could illuminate.
After climbing down for nearly half an hour, I stepped on solid ground.
Wu Xie looked around. The distance between the two sides of the mountain here was at least as long as a bridge. At the bottom were countless fallen rocks, large and small, uneven. They should have broken down from above when this gap was formed.
gravel.
Looking up from the gap in the chain, you can see many grottoes of different sizes on the mountain walls on both sides. Although you can't see clearly, you can clearly feel that there is something hidden in the shadows inside.
Wu Xie's heart tightened, and he immediately changed his position. After gently reminding everyone to pay attention to safety, he carefully turned on the lamp to shine on the things in the grotto.
The fat man's eyes were sharper than his. After looking at it carefully, he said: "Don't worry, it's not that kind of ghost bird, but there is indeed something in there, and it looks pretty big."
"It's a dead object, probably a statue or something."
Zhang Haixing on the side took out his binoculars to see clearly the true identity of the things in the cave. He couldn't help but wonder: "They look all kinds of strange. They are all carved directly in the cave. The patterns look like...birds...but it's strange, why are these birds...
With two heads?”
"Let me see."
Wu Xie took the telescope from her hand and took a closer look. He found that the black shadows in the grottoes were really carved out of various birds, with all kinds of strange postures, including flying parrots, flapping sparrows, and...
There is an owl standing on a stone with its neck crooked.
It's just that compared to the live birds we see in daily life, the overall shape of these statues is exaggerated and enlarged many times, and the lines of the sculptures are also quite rough.
As he looked at them, Wu Xie suddenly discovered that these bird statues had a common feature.
Although the postures are different and the types are different, as Zhang Haixing said, there are two heads on the top of their necks, one on the left and one on the right, as if they have been mutated by nuclear contamination.
And the extra heads all have a common posture. No matter whether they are on the left or right side of the mountain wall, they all turn their heads very uniformly and look inward at the rocky beach.
It was pitch black there, and the area beyond the reach of the light looked like a dark beast with its huge mouth open.
The fat man also deliberately ran to the mountain wall on one side, grabbed the mountain wall and climbed to the top. He looked closer at the grotto and suddenly exclaimed, "What the hell? Innocent, come and see, the two stars on this upright head."
The eyeballs are blind, as if they were gouged out by someone later."
"It's not like the gems are inlaid here, right?" The fat man thought for a moment, then cursed, "Which bastard got ahead of me and dug out the treasure inside?"
After hearing what he said, Wu Xie quickly ran over, climbed up to one of the grottoes closest to the ground, and used a flashlight to shine on the head of the statue. At a glance, he found that the eye sockets of the bird head facing him were
It was indeed empty.
However, he could tell that the eyes inside were not gouged out later, but that when they first made these statues, the craftsmen did not carve out the sclera and pupils in the eye sockets, but simply and roughly placed them in the eye sockets.
Two rough holes were poked out to serve as eye sockets.
This is too strange. Why are their eyes made like this? Why are these birds made blind?
Is the reason why we don’t give them eyes is that we are afraid that these statues will see something?
Wu Xie felt a chill rise unconsciously in his heart. At this moment, the aperture of the flashlight suddenly flickered a few times, and then slowly dimmed, as if something had suddenly sucked away the light source.
Wu Xie held the switch and pressed it a few times. The light bulb was still flickering. It looked like it was about to run out of power. He would have to crank the small generator to recharge it later.
With this weak brightness, even his fingers could not be seen clearly. Wu Xie simply turned off the flashlight, took out a lighter from his pocket and lit it. Then he held the lighter and tilted his head to look at the other head next to him.
The range that the flame can illuminate is limited, and the light and shadow reflected will also shake with the air flow.
Wu Xie squinted his eyes to take a closer look at the extra head. He found that the carving of this head was the most delicate part of the entire statue. The lines in other places only roughly outlined the outline of the object.
The feathers in this part are almost clear-cut and lifelike. They are stacked one on top like a flower crown tile. They are very regular. However, the shape of the feathers looks a bit strange. It is not a pointed and elongated oval fan-shaped, but a fan-shaped one with a pointed and slender oval.
Thorns shaped like leaves.
The ones near the neck can be said to be short feathers, but the ones closer to the top of the skull actually look more like scales in shape.
Wait, scales?!
In the flash of lightning, Wu Xie suddenly understood something.
It turns out that the extra head is actually a snake head that is twisted and widened from a bird's head. Those complicated and overlapping flake carvings are not feathers at all, but real snake scales.
The eyes on both sides of the snake's head are gray-white balls that bulge outward. They look very similar to the Angong Niuhuang Pills wrapped in wax clothes, but they are slightly larger than those balls.
Wu Xie always felt that this thing had appeared in his memory before, but he couldn't remember the details for a while.
"Innocent!" The fat man called him from the side, "This place is also a snake nest, right? It looks a bit like the Queen Mother Kingdom of the West."
"What are these bastards looking over there?"
The fat man muttered, took a look at the gravel beach, and found nothing unusual, so he tried to poke the white eyeball on the snake's head with his finger.
With this poke, the white ball under his hand suddenly swayed and almost fell out of his eye socket.
"You can still dig those eyeballs out. They turn white and look very penetrating."
The fat man said "Hey" and took one down to take a closer look.
Wu Xie hurriedly reminded him not to move, "These eyes feel very wrong to me, so it's better not to touch them randomly."
Although these bird statues were dead objects, they gave people a very bad feeling, as disturbing as the human-faced birds he had seen in Changbai Mountain.
After hearing Wu Xie's reminder, the fat man had no choice but to give up the idea of picking out a few eyeballs and carrying them in his arms, and climbed down from the grotto. There was nothing interesting to see above, so he called Wu Xie to come down too.
Walking along the stone beach, Wu Xie had been paying attention to these statues. He found that the further he walked, the larger the statues in the cave became, and the birds represented by the carved patterns gradually changed from small birds to eagles.
Birds of prey such as eagles and rocs.
The fat man looked at these statues and smacked his lips, "Although the occasion may be a little wrong, I think the scene here can be described with a very appropriate word."
"What word?" Wu Xie asked.
"A hundred birds are paying homage to the phoenix, oh no, it should be a thousand birds paying homage to the phoenix." Fatty changed the word to describe it.
There are countless grottoes on the mountain walls on both sides.
Wu Xie suddenly turned his head to stare at him, and Zhang Haixing, who had been walking in front, stopped and turned his head to look over.
Seeing everyone looking at him in amazement, the fat man stretched out his hand and swiped around, saying, "There must be hundreds of bird species we saw along the way, and some of them are repeated over and over again."
"The bottom of the entire crack here is like an extremely huge nest of thousands of birds, and there must be many caves extending to the other side of the crack."
"And the most important and strange thing is that their heads are pointing in the same direction, just like primary school students listening in class."
The fat man narrowed his eyes and said in a somewhat erratic tone, "Maybe there is a super big phoenix waiting for us in that direction."