After chasing for more than an hour, the road was already very difficult to walk, and it was even difficult to call it a road, almost completely a path cleared by a firewood knife, and there were dangerous dark cliffs, hidden slopes, and the Cao team they all marked them with white cloth strips. Pen Fun Pavilion wWw. ｂiquge。 infoWhen I climbed a ridge and looked down the slope, I could see that Jiao Er and the others had opened a distance of more than a mile from me.

I cheered up and chased forward for a while, and suddenly found that there was a fork in the road in front of me, and both sides of the fork were marked, what does this mean? Both roads can be taken? Which one did the Cao team take? It was useless to think too much, so I chose a relatively open and gentle road and walked on.

After about a mile of travel, on a relatively open gentle slope, I found traces of a campfire, which also had the marks left by Cao's team. It seems that this is the camp site of the college students the next day, but it seems that the distance that the college students advanced the next day is not long, we walked their day's journey in about two hours, and at our speed, we will be able to catch up with those college students before dark tomorrow and at noon the day after tomorrow at the latest.

But after walking forward for a while, I suddenly found a big "dead end" written in white chalk on a big tree, looking at the handwriting, it seems to be the handwriting of the Cao team, but why is it a dead end? Do the college students also turn back from here? But under the big tree, there is a rare path that extends into the depths of the forest. But out of trust in the Cao team, I still firmly turned back, but at this time, I noticed that the pigeons in the cage were restless and fluttering in the cage.

Returning to the fork in the road that had been marked just now, I walked down the other road, before leaving, in order to let Jiao Er and them not go back, I deliberately left a note, pressed it with a stone, and put it under the mark left by the Cao team.

On the next part of the road, I encountered another bonfire and the traces of camping, at this time, I also noticed a little strange, the distance that the college students advance every day is too short, several campsites are separated by two or three miles at most, the only possibility of this situation is that the college students get lost and have to turn back and forth.

About a mile ahead, a fork in the road reappeared, and the same two roads were marked, and I couldn't help but curse in my heart, this Cao team logo is not clearly marked, and let me do multiple-choice questions, which is too irresponsible for the comrades behind me. I looked at my watch, it was already past three o'clock, and according to our previous agreement, the Cao team should stop searching, wait for the rear team to follow up, and look for a place to camp. I sat down, drank some water, and rested.

Not long after I sat down, I heard the sound of broken branches in the bushes, and I stood up, and it turned out to be Xiao Cai, a policeman from the front team, who got out of the woods. Xiao Cai is twenty-four or five years old, not tall, very strong, a comrade from the local police station who supports us, usually does not talk much, and it can be seen that he is a steady and pragmatic person. He also saw me, and hurriedly asked, "What about the others?" I told him, about two miles behind, I would come up first to see how the Cao team was doing.

Xiao Cai smiled wryly at me and shook his head, looking not very emotional, I asked him, "I see along the way, you have found three traces of college students camping, should be very close to them?" Xiao Cai sat down next to me, took out a cigarette, handed me one, and lit it for himself.

"Often, we've found not just three campsites along the way, we've found seven. When he said this, it was obvious that Xiao Cai was also very confused. "In total, we walked about thirty miles today, which means that those college students only walk four miles a day, which is too incomprehensible, isn't it? And they have only been missing for six days today, how can there be seven camping sites? And our last camping site, according to Zhang Orion's opinion, was at least twenty days ago. "Maybe it wasn't those college students who left it behind?" I tried to explain this unreasonable fact that they found out to the Cao team. "It's impossible, those college students are very unprofessional, they are outrageously stupid, and they are still insisting on it every day, I can see it. Team Cao and they have already stopped, waiting for everyone to go over to meet, afraid that you will follow the wrong road sign, so they asked me to come down to pick you up. ”

I took a twig and scratched the ground from memory at the camping site I had passed before. I looked at the graphics on the ground and said, "Let's go more than a mile west, and if we can find a new campsite, then I know what the college students are doing." Hopefully, though, my guess is wrong. ”

We didn't wait for Jiao Er's rear team to follow, and headed west, which may have been the biggest mistake of this search and rescue, but at the time, it became very important to verify my guess, and it may still be the case if we choose again. Xiao Cai dragged a firewood knife out, and along the faintly visible path, the two of us kept moving forward. The mountain road about this mile is full of deep ditches and dense forests, and it took us an hour to open the road while walking, and drill out of this forest, there is a small Pingba, and the traces of a bonfire appear in front of us, Xiao Cai squatted on the ground to check the traces of camping, nodded to me, and looked confused.

"Chang, as you judged, this route is a big spiral, with a regular movement, not according to the terrain and the original road. Did the college students hit the wall?"

I drew a map on the ground with a tree branch again, took out the compass and compared it, and said to Xiao Cai slowly: "I have never seen such a ghost hitting the wall, but at least I can be sure that the college students are being swayed by something, taking such a route, or they are hiding from something." But we have to rush back to inform the Cao team, if we can't find it, not only can't we find the college students, but we will probably not be able to get out. ”

Xiao Cai and I turned back along the same path, at this time the sun was gradually sinking in the west, the shadows of the tall trees were projected down, the whole forest seemed solemn and quiet, the temperature was rapidly dropping, and a layer of mist had begun to rise slowly in the middle of the mountain, like a pot of boiling water rising water vapor, seemingly ethereal, sinister inside.

We found the place marked by the Cao team, but the speed of the fog rising far exceeded our imagination, the road ahead was soon hidden in the thick fog, and the nearby trees were also difficult to distinguish, turning into a gray patch, we did not dare to go further, and the fog below had also filled up, and it was unrealistic to go to the rear team to meet Jiao Er, so we had to wait in place.

To be honest, the psychological pressure caused by the fog is very huge, sometimes you don't know what is watching you in the fog, what is hiding in the fog, and what is laying a trap and trap for you without you knowing it at all, and the anxiety of the unknown undoubtedly magnifies the fear, and finally makes people fall into collapse. Fortunately, I was well prepared for this, so I asked Xiao Cai to collect some firewood, grass and branches from the neighborhood with me, light a bonfire first, and slowly wait for the fog to dissipate.

Xiao Cai had also recovered from the shock when the fog first rose, he sat down next to me and asked, "Chang, what else can we do but wait here? This fog will not disperse all night, are we not going to wait here for the night?"

"Just wait, there is a chance that you will get lost if you go out rashly, and we can't figure out how to crack the ghost market in the fog, I think Team Cao and Jiao Er will definitely stop in place, light a bonfire, and wait for the fog to dissipate, unless we can judge their exact location, there may be a turnaround." "I re-perfected the location map of the ground with a wooden stick. Xiao Cai stood up thoughtfully and circled around a few trees behind us.

While we were busy with each other, a crisp pigeon's whistle pierced the fog, and the two little pigeons in the pigeon cage at my feet suddenly straightened up, shook their wings excitedly, and began to cooing again. We hurriedly raised our heads to look at the sky, but we could not distinguish in the fog, and we could only hear the pigeon's whistle passing over our heads, heading north, and the sound became quieter and quieter.

I know that Jiao Er's pigeons have set off, and Jiao Er is trying to get in touch with Team Cao, and I guess there may be trouble on his side. I looked at the excited pigeons in the cage and an idea sparked in my head, one that shocked me but made sense.

Before, about the fog in the mountains, the ghost market in the fog, I think more from the perspective of a special natural phenomenon, Director Ding and Cao Team even think that it is a more realistic mirage, I think it seems to be a kind of space-time distortion caused by geomagnetic anomalies, which is a bit similar to Xuanmen, but what is recorded in Chang Zu's notes, especially Zhang Lihu's statement that people who enter the town are harmed by greed, cannot be explained by Xuanmen, after all, time-space disorder is not selective, there is no individual difference. That's what I've been figuring out all along.

But if all this is not a natural phenomenon, if this fog, this illusion of this town, if it is a life form that we do not know, then many doubts will be solved. In the record in the genealogy, I have never figured out the meaning of the sentence "Chiyou Dojo, Chaos Ancient and Modern", but now that I think about it, I seem to understand a little.

The word chaos, I used to think that it was a description of a state, a kind of realm of nothingness, but I know the chaos beast, one of the four evil beasts of Chiyou, and I have always regarded it as an ancient myth. The Chaos Beast "Classic of Mountains and Seas", "Classic of the West Sea", "Collected Memories" and even "Year of the Bamboo Secretary" are described, formless and sexless, lifeless and dead, devouring people's souls with illusions, but no one has ever seen its true body, the so-called "one beast swallows ten thousand soldiers, and dies without a trace". After Chiyou's death, the Chaos Beast disappeared, but no one ever saw it for what it really was, and it didn't leave any written description. Later, when the Western Han Dynasty was founded, when Dong Zhongshu respected Confucianism, he wantonly tampered with the ancient chronicles and chronicles, respected the Yellow Emperor as orthodox, and Chiyou naturally became an evil barbarian, and the records about the Chaos Beast were either deleted or burned, and finally disappeared in the long river of history.

Then if the fog, the town, and the illusions in that town were all Chaos Beasts, everything would have a reasonable explanation. The Chaos Beast cannibalism is not a cannibal body, but feeds on the essence of a person, and it imprisons people with illusions, and the people inside become walking corpses, their minds are manipulated, and the flesh after eating the essence must be piled up somewhere in the mountains. The Chaos Beast has existed in this way for thousands of years, but its unique way of behaving is no longer recognized, and it is known to the locals as the Ghost City. (To be continued.) )