Under the gray sky, in this endless wasteland, hundreds of thousands of soldiers died here in the autumn hundreds of years ago.

Somewhere in this ancient battlefield, there was a large pit about a hundred zhang deep, and in the pit there were dozens of yellow-faced teenagers and children huddled together in groups of two or three, looking numb and hollow ahead.

The pit was littered with tattered armor and spears that had been washed away by the years, piled up on the ash-dusting but incorruptible corpse.

There is always a howling wind in the sky above the ancient battlefield, Zhang stayed up all night listening to this pit, the wind was distant and terrible, as if the countless undead buried in this battlefield turned into evil ghosts and screamed in the wind.

This wind is different from the wind I heard when I was a child guarding the door of my father's house and came home. Far away, the burly man with his unloaded armor and a spear with a black tassel on his shoulder, saw him and strode towards him with a grinning face.

My father was such a sturdy and burly foot soldier of the Beihai Kingdom, but before the enemy army could finish shouting the sentence to run with your mother, he was pierced by a sharp arrow in the throat and fell down like a mountain.

At that time, Zhang was only twelve years old, and his height was obviously almost to his father's chest, but his legs were weak with fright at the moment when he saw his father die in front of his eyes. Until a panicked figure pushed himself and staggered, his face flushed by the firelight with dust and tears, it was his mother, shouting at him anxiously......

After that, Zhang stayed up all night and was slightly stunned, and suddenly couldn't remember.

Strange to say, I thought about it every day and night, but the only thing I could not remember, and those residual pictures and sounds gradually blurred.

Then Zhang's eyes widened all night, and he remembered. It was he who carried the bag with a little dry food and water, and did not dare to listen to the sound of fighting and the burning of houses in his ears, and did not dare to look back at the sea of fire that turned the town and farmland into hell, he just ran forward with tears and as if he had lost his soul.

He ran and ran, and it seemed that it was dark and dim, and he fell down in fear and weariness in the wilderness, and was awakened from his drowsy sleep by the sound of killing, and stood up again, and saw no more of his hometown, but a desolate wilderness, and the gray sky hung over his head.

When he came back to his senses, he saw that an old man with an extremely ugly face and a burly figure that did not look like a mortal was looking at him with a grinning yellow tooth.

Then he fainted again in the old man's carrying himself through the clouds, and when he woke up again, he found himself already here.

I don't know how many times, Zhang stayed up all night thinking that if he died with his parents on that day, maybe it would be the best destination.

It's better than living like a walking corpse in this living hell that has no hope to speak of.

He counted the days with his hands folded every day.

- It's been almost four years.

The old man who captured him at the beginning was a wild cultivator and told them that he was called an old beggar. And he and dozens of other teenagers and children in this big pit were all raised here by him and used as "ingots" for cultivation.

There was nothing in this ancient battlefield, only countless dead people, corpses that did not rot.

I don't know what year a big battle has been fought, but it is estimated that it has been a hundred years, right?

While thinking nonsense, the young man stretched out his pale and thin hands and tore off a gray-blue arm, indiscriminately erased the cloth that had been dried and cracked into pieces wrapped around his arm, and then held it in front of him. He took a deep breath and began to nibble hard and earnestly.

Around him, there were dozens of the same children, both male and female, some of the same age, and a few slightly older than him, and many more of them were twelve or thirteen years old.

The sky darkened, and the cold wind howling in this boundless wasteland became more severe, but fortunately, there was this never-ending wind, and Zhang stayed up all night without hearing the chewing sound and the faint cry mixed in this pit. Those were the sounds that had woken him up in his sleep before. - Not anymore. Except for the occasional appearance of the old beggar on the pit, muttering to himself like a wild beast, and then the horrible eyes lingering over them, and then the huge figure grabbed an ingot, like a ghost, and devoured it in front of them all.

Only then would he feel a trace of fear, but now, even the fear that once trembled in his heart did not know when it would disappear without a trace.

Zhang stayed up late and sometimes couldn't tell whether he was alive or dead.

The old beggar eats ingots in different ways, the young man feels that it all depends on the interest of the old devil, most of the time he likes to open the blood basin and eat their ingots alive, and rarely will be disturbed by the terrible cry, and the big hand covered with abscesses gently plucked the slender neck of the child in his hand. The old beggar like a demon was always very serious when he ate people, and did not make the hair-making whispers that stood on end, but only devoured the fragile flesh and internal organs with his rotten teeth very seriously, and put his head at the end, easily cut off the skull of the ingots with two fingers, and then held it up and sipped it vigorously, while making a ho-ho sound from the depths of his throat.

The number of ingots in the pit is uncertain, at the most there are nearly a hundred children, and at the least, there are only about a dozen. The old beggar appears in a hurry, or throws down some new ingots, or mutters while picking and devouring an ingot, most of the time, two things are done together.

Zhang stayed up all night when the old beggar was taking the ingots, he would look at him seriously in secret, and he found that sometimes the old beggar would have some injuries on his body, and sometimes the ghostly figure of the old beggar would appear faster, and sometimes the rickety figure would reveal a trace of nothingness, like the solid meat eaten every day, which was a kind of breath that should have rotted but had not rotted, but had decayed.

When the old beggar finished eating the ingots, he would not talk to them much, and as soon as his shabby robe was raised, he rose from the ground and disappeared in the whistling wind in an instant.

Then, it was their ingots, which had been a little longer, who stepped forward silently to simply clean up the remaining wreckage mixed with fresh blood and push it to the farthest corner of the wall. After doing this, each child had to pick up pickaxes and other tools of similar shape made from some of the surviving broken armor, chisel through the hard stone walls of the mud, and dig for more food for them with all their strength and effort.

Live like this day in and day out.

Zhang stayed up all night and felt a slight heat coming from his numb body, so he stretched out the fingers of his left hand and pressed them against his abdomen, feeling the depth of the knuckles, he knew that he was full. After a few years, his stomach had long since lost sensation.

He picked up a handful of manuscripts that hung around his waist, which he had spliced together himself with several broken pieces of spear, which was his most important tool. Most of the time, he would be vigilant against the rest of the ingots, mainly the ingots that had survived in this pit for several years like him.

These dead people who have been dead for an unknown number of years are not terrible at all, and the children living in this pit are much more terrible.

In order to survive, people will become the same beings as demons and beasts, or worse.

Zhang has stayed up late and seen it too many times. He always remembered the first time he killed someone, when he trembled and looked at another young man in front of him who was stabbed through the chest with his pickaxe, staring at him, and until he died, the young man's eyes were full of indescribable ferocity and determination, and finally turned into a trace of fleeting remorse and regret. And this boy, for a long time, was his companion who fell asleep side by the wall side by side. It was only because on a certain night when the wind was howling that the boy finally couldn't help but want to occupy the sharpest pickaxe in this pit.

After all, this wasteland was too cold, and the ground was too hard, like stones, and he didn't want to spend so much effort digging up those solid meats.

"If only I had that pickaxe."

After this thought was born, he could no longer suppress it, until he and Zhang stayed up all night and finally discovered that the body of a living person was as fragile as a layer of window paper compared to this cold frozen soil.

He was fourteen years old. If he hadn't miscalculated the day.

Putting the young man's body in the darkest corner of the pit, Zhang stayed up all night to raise the blood-stained pickaxe, and said to everyone who silently surrounded him, in a hoarse voice not like this age: "I say two things, the first thing, don't do such stupid things, unless your broken guy can slaughter me before I slaughter me." The second thing is that everyone is miserable, so ......"

Perhaps because he rarely spoke, the thin young man coughed a few times, "Therefore, no one is allowed to eat hollow meat, even if it has been dead for a long time, and its hair is blue and dark...... But we don't eat us. We are human, not brutes, understand? ”

For a few breaths, the boy responded to the silence hidden in the wind, hung his head, and then he couldn't take it anymore.

With all his strength, he drowned out the whistling wind and shouted like a ghost: "Got it!? ”

It was the first time he had heard everyone respond to him in the same hoarse voice.