The smoke is curling, and the fragrance is wafting from a hundred miles.

Dusk shrouded the smoke and water and the riverbank, and the boats anchored on the shore one by one. There is a small wharf on the shore, and behind the wharf is an open space with a few huts for the market, where the fishermen exchange their harvest for vegetables, fruits, and other fresh knick-knacks brought by the vendors.

Jiyuan is looking around here with great excitement. The cries of every vendor and the coming and going of every artisan made this newborn feel fresh. The format of the fence, the shape of the house, the different faces of the people, even the grass on the ground, three-leaf or four-leafed, thorny or toothed, all these new things can make it stop and observe.

After Gu Chuan said goodbye to the boatman, he was not annoyed when he looked at it like this, but only teased:

"Are you going to stay here? I'm going inside. ”

"Don't...... Wait for me! ”

Extremely far away, he hurriedly caught up with Gu Chuan's pace, and reluctantly bid farewell to the market by the dock. One after the other, the two walked along the white gravel path to the depths of the town.

New things followed, and it soon left the market behind and began to observe every white pebble in its path with great interest. At the same time, it didn't forget to ask:

"Where are we going? Mr. ”

"I'm going to see His Majesty here and see what he or she is like."

In this small town, completely strange and without a familiar face, young people walked slowly.

On the side of the stone road, there are bamboo bushes that Gu Chuan has only seen in the depths of the mountains in the past. The tall green bamboo and the newly grown bamboo shoots are close to each other, and the dense bamboo leaves shade the afterglow of the setting sun and carry the dew after the rain. A little further on, there are more small green-tiled houses with fences, most of which have gardens. Gardens are often filled with colorful flowers. White butterflies flutter among the flowers. There was an incessant chirping of insects all around, and the young man looked sideways and saw the little insect from the netherworld again.

The owner of the house swept out a large area of insect corpses on the edge of this flower garden, and thought that this was what the boatman called the insect plague. The people here should be using medicine to control the insect plague.

There were no special guards in the town, only one or two territorial-minded old men stood at the gate of the courtyard and asked loudly:

"Where are you two strangers going?"

The young man beckoned and replied:

"Sir, we are going to the bottom of the tower to see the master of this room."

The old man's voice was loud:

"Everyone is about to go to bed, if you are in a hurry, you have to go quickly!"

The young man smiled a little and said:

"Okay."

But he hadn't gone a few dozen steps when he heard the sound of animal guards screaming from the side of the fence. It took a while for Jiyuan to slip back behind the young man and poke him in the back. The young man didn't react, so it poked again. Gu Chuan turned his head at this time. Ji Yuan opened his hands and showed a crimson autumn flower in his hand.

This is what it picked on the side of the road, and it feels that the darker the flower, the more beautiful it is, because the world is light.

It earnestly says:

"Well, for you, sir."

Don't be sad anymore.

It thought to itself.

The young man patted it on the head, but did not accept the flower, but continued to walk, and said with a smile:

"It's so good, why did you take it off?"

Extremely far away staring at the glass eyes, it was suddenly confused by this question, and as soon as it was confused, it was extremely relaxed. The little gear machine in the hat of its head opened the glass eye, took the opportunity to steal the flowers, and shouted at the assistant that it was bad, and hurriedly lifted its hat.

At that time, the evening breeze was blowing slowly from the river, causing the brim of the hat to flutter. In order to avoid the extreme distance, the pinion machine threw the flower out. As soon as the flowers were blown by the wind, they flew over the fence and could not be found again.

Jiyuan looked in the direction where the flower had disappeared, and it shoved the pinion machine back into the box.

The young man rejoiced, and he said:

"Wouldn't it be nice to pick another one?"

"No, it's definitely not going to work." Jiyuan said frustratedly, "Pick another one, it's not this little flower that I saw at a glance." ”

"But you don't want to take it off, do you?"

The frustrated Jiyuan was extremely unconvinced by this, and it couldn't help but raise the bar and say:

"What if, just in case, this flower also wants to float to the unknown distance, but it's a flower, so it can't move, so it found me!"

The young man continued to walk forward, the magnificent sunset staining his shoulders red.

He said:

"You've got a good idea."

Further on, the stone path became a stone paved road, and at the end of the stone path was the bottom of the stone tower, which was surrounded by a fence. He gazed at the stone tower, and remembered a cry on the bank of the river that had been flowing on the water not long ago:

"Look! That's Sunset City's Sundial Tower! ”

In the evening, when there was no time, he tightened the lion's skin on his body.

Seeing his expression from afar, he asked:

"Sir, are you familiar with this place?"

He said:

"It's the first time I've approached this place, I've been familiar with its past a few times before, but I'm never familiar with its present."

The land around the sundial may have also been a watershed or a large river. Today, the river has shifted slightly, leaving only the water-eroded rocks and a deep grotto. The sundial tower is on the edge of the grotto, and the rock that has been hewn out of the ground is full of traces of the groove-shaped shape of the ropes that humans once tied to the stone.

The raised stone is gray, and the grooves contain the sunlight, and the gold is shining. The fence was designed to prevent people from falling into the grotto, and many fine-leaved anchovies grew on the sides of the fence, which concealed the traces of the stones.

There is a two-storey hut next to the fence. On the upper floor, there is a flat round bell made of direct blows from ore. On the lower floor lived an old man with a red nose dressed in coarse cloth.

The old man looked at Gu Chuan and cautiously shouted at him:

"Good young man, what's your name, I haven't seen you, what are you doing here?"

He replied:

"I'm a foreigner, and I want to meet His Majesty here, and I want to ask him about the way around here."

There was still some time before the clouds covered the day, and the old man came out with a lamp, and said that he wanted to show the way for you two strangers, and said:

"Okay! His Majesty will be delighted. ”

"Why are you happy?"

"His Majesty has said that he is not from here, and he is also from a distant place to come here. He said there must be many more wandering in the wilderness. ”

"Oh?"

"Don't look at our peace here." The old man said, "Actually, many of us have come here from far away, and the road we have traveled may not be as short as yours. It's a great place with lots of water and grass, isn't it? If you live comfortably, you will settle down. If you stay, I'll call you some good boys and help you build a house. ”

"It depends, haha, maybe there will be this opportunity."

The young man saw that the old man's hands were almost non-existent, while the nails of the people outside were plump. He remembered that Sunset City, where he had lived as a teenager, had many people who claimed that their ancestors had wandered from elsewhere.

They walked down the path of the grotto around the stone tower. Suddenly, several powerful young men were digging into the rock wall in the grotto. The cold rocks are hidden by many small stones with snowflake textures.

Several young men put the stones away and put them in baskets. The basket is carried to it by a cable rigging device fixed to the edge of the stone. From these traces, it is clear that the grotto was a mine of the town long ago. From here, the inhabitants quarried stone to build houses that were more solid than wood, and paved suitable roads.

The old man looked at these people and frowned:

"You're still digging, how long are you going to dig?"

"We're going to have a big funeral in our village." The leader of the young people said, "We are afraid that there will not be enough people to die." ”

"Hurry up, when I come out, I'm going to chase people."

The old man settled down with great vigour, and then continued to the depths with the two silent strangers. After a while, the young man asked:

"What are you going to do with this stone?"

The old man replied casually:

"That's what red and white are going to do."

Red and white things are weddings and funerals, two things that most people will experience in their lives.

There are wooden supports in the grotto, which are also traces from the quarry period. Because the top of the grotto is wide, there are a few wisps of twilight that can spill into the soil underneath. The seeds of the plants were carried into the depths by the wind, and the grass and flowers grew in the depths of the grotto, and a few trees were moved, like the garden of a mansion in the middle of the earth.

Birds chirped at the edge of the trees, and crimson buds attracted distant glances. Between the two trees is the dwelling of the crown, which is close to the sundial.

The old man entered the door respectfully, and said what he meant, and then he turned out and said to Gu Chuan:

"Oh, stranger, His Majesty is inside, you go in, I'll wait for you here."

The young man was not afraid, and he stepped into the house with him from afar.

The room was eerily quiet and dark. The sky guard is not clean, but has silk woven by glowworms, and the glow silk is coiled on the ceiling into a large undulating patch, like a silver-blue sea of stars. There were tables on all sides, and on each of them there was a candle lamp, which burned bright red.

It was not like a human dwelling, but like a tomb buried in the ground, and the platforms were some kind of altar.

The young man looked around, and saw that the central altar was in the shape of a large solid chest, on which was the head of a beast. The skin of the head is already extraordinarily loose, and it is already drooping and old. But its surface has no bloodstains, no annoying flies, no corpse spots, and its color is almost close to that of a living body, as if it were alive.

The dim red light illuminated the facial features of the head, and it slowly opened a pair of black eyes that seemed to be embedded in the glass of the day after tomorrow, looked at the visitor calmly, and spoke heartily:

"Welcome to Sunset City, where the people here are rumored to be 'crowned'."

The young man looked at it in amazement. He took a few steps forward and saw that there was a hole in the platform under the head of the head, and most of its body was in the platform.

"That's what you look like."

The young man muttered.

This would have been utterly disrespectful to the ears of strangers.

But the head did not mean to blame, but said lightly:

"I'm very old and seriously ill, so now I can only live in this medicine jar for a while longer, and I have to rely on others to take care of me, and I am indeed a useless person."

The protruding meridians on the surface of the body do show that it is not in very good condition.

Gu Chuan asked him bluntly:

"Were you born with a pig's skin pig's head, or were you made like this?"

He thought to himself that if he didn't cooperate, he would spend a while searching its mind, and he had to figure everything out.

As a result, he calmly asked:

"Have you ever seen someone like me who became like this?"

The rhetorical question also contains its answer.

"I've never seen you like this...... Human. But I've seen another form of people. They look like people, but the flesh, internal organs, eyes, or skin in the interior are not actually human, but are sewn together and become human-like. ”

The head seemed a little unhappy, frowned, and said:

"Who did such an inhumane thing...... I thought my experience was horrible. ”

Its countenance did not seem to be fake, and the young man asked:

"Have you ever heard of the name Xuanniao?"

"Xuanniao...... Is this some kind of exotic animal? I haven't heard the name. ”

Judging from the detection of the Psychic Language, the head did not lie.

The young man was a little hesitant.

He said:

"You can tell me about it, and maybe I can remember some traces too."

The young man looked at it hesitantly, and said:

"Well, let me tell you one thing, this thing may have happened in the past, it has been forgotten by you, it may also happen in the future, it is what you will do in the future."

Rather than annoyed, he smiled, content to be able to listen to other people's stories and pass the time of his death.

So the young man began to talk about the sunset city that he had seen, which was far more magnificent and splendid than the present small village, about his life after coming to the city from the village, and about the gifts he had done in every possible way to establish a good relationship with the crown of that city, and then there was the encounter between him and Hatsuyun, the cruel experiments of those people, the truth about Chuyun and the various foreign objects buried in her body, and their escape.

Then he talked a little about the different people he encountered.

After hearing this story, he said:

"I see, you have a colorful past, and under the crown of this past, you think it's me, don't you?"

Gu Chuan said:

"I'm not sure."

He grinned, revealing his pure human flesh and blood:

"But are you really guessing that this could happen in the future, and that we are in some kind of sunset city that you remember as unbuilt past?"

The young man was silent, his idea guessed.

"But have you ever thought to you, traveler, that all the things in your memory are only things of the past, and that the present situation, even if it is slightly similar to the past, should prevail in the present?"

"Now?"

"Memory is a very fallible thing!"

"No way, I'm not mistaken."

The young man said categorically.

"Haha, okay, you can't be mistaken. But if you want to look for traces of memory from the present, isn't that putting the cart before the horse? ”

The head is not bothered at all:

"Well, now, don't think of time as an infinite whole that encompasses all living things and all matter, but only look at your own time. There's no doubt that all of this happened in the past for you, right? And a lot of your hopes can also be boiled down to one thing, you want to get back to Sunset City, you want to find your friends and companions, and prove that you have seen the world, right? ”

Gu Chuan did not respond.

In the face of silence, Yu Shou is still calm:

"And then let's imagine that, in fact, for every traveler, the world that the traveler can see is actually very small, right? It's just one side of the eye. In this square inch, people can only see very few things. And outside of that, everything that happens is hard to fathom, everything is changing. ”

He continued:

"Suppose what you say is true, there was or will be a city here that is far more magnificent than our town. And you may not be more than half the size of a 'generation' when you leave and return. But isn't half the time enough for a city to disappear and rebuild completely? It goes without saying that you haven't seen similar people, but even if they are similar people, do they have to be connected? This is also not exactly known, right? For example, now I'm setting out again, and someone like me kills me, saying that he's got his skin changed, he has new bones, he's got some memory, but he's forgotten a lot, and he's come here and tell people that he's been here and that his dearest is dead...... Actually, it's hard to tell, right? Or if someone in the town secretly kills me, then don't you suspect that all the people in the town may be crowned? After all, there's plenty of time to make it possible. ”

The glow of the zenith shone slowly, playing tricks on the glowworm far behind the young man's back.

The young man remembered a truth he had only recently realized.

"The wanderer will be forgotten by time."

"That's an interesting remark."

For the first time, the head looked with interest and earnestness at the stranger, whom he did not know:

"The time of the past is unattainable, the time of the future is illusory, isn't the only thing that can be confirmed is the present? Speaking of which, I think of what you mean when you talk about the second sunrise on the occasion of the Netherworld and the Qiongqiu? ”

The young man suddenly woke up.

The concept of sunrise does not exist in this world, because the sun never sets, let alone rises after setting. I've seen this scene, only the Death or Life Signal and the group that have crossed the Netherworld.

This is knowledge that only people who have inhabited the world on the surface of the sphere have.

He said:

"It's a sign that marks the beginning of a new period, like a cloud that obscures the sun and then disperses."

"So is it now that the clouds have obscured the sun for the second time and are about to disperse again? Even though everything is similar, it's actually what you call the 'second day'? ”

He said calmly.

"I once pushed the cobblestone down from a semicircular track, and I found that the cobblestone seemed to have some kind of mysterious truth, always returning to the point where it was infinitely close to its original height, and if the slope was slowed down a little longer, the cobblestone would still return infinitely closer to its original height. The same is true of the clouds in the sky, if you look closely, the clouds cannot stretch indefinitely, just like stones that are limited to slow change in a certain world, so as long as you continue to move, you will definitely encounter a situation that is very similar to that of a certain day in the past, right? But it's not the same day anymore. Later, I thought that maybe the universe is like this...... It's just a big stone, or a cloud in a limited number of heavens and earth. ”

"I know what you're thinking."

Gu Chuan replied calmly:

"I'm kind of wondering how you got to be like this now, you have so many ideas, you've been thinking about it all yourself, right?"

Looking, he was a little embarrassed, and he said:

"It's a long story. Have the townspeople ever told you that I used to be a homeless wanderer? ”

"They said it."

He said:

"There's a reason in it. My hometown is a water-scarce country, and I've been looking for water. People from out of town used to call me ......"

"Finding the ...... Water"

The young man muttered.

But he knew that the person in front of him was by no means the water he remembered. Even if there was a little connection, he never remembered Gu Chuan.

Yu Shou was not surprised, his experience was not as good as Gu Chuan's crossing the netherworld, but he had also seen the sun rise in the east and set in the west. He said lightly:

"Yes, Seeking Water is my name outside. It took me a lot of work to get here. I set myself a mission to find a place where there was plenty of water and grass, and when I found it, I decided to go back and report it. It's just a canyon where the sun shines in the sky, and the sky has changed by then. I don't know if my tribe has been annexed by a larger tribe, or maybe it's just a change of leader, because my parents are gone, and I don't know anyone anymore, but I remember language, music, and symbols. And I myself was reduced to a prisoner. At that time, the witch priests of the new tribe considered my actions sinful and demanded that they condemn me to death and reduce me to slavery. ”

The head of the book omits the irrelevant part of the punishment:

"Later, fortunately, the tribe was attacked from the outside world, and they set up a monster that could fly in the sky, and killed the leader of the time with a long stick that breathed fire. I escaped with a few other explorers and came here to take root. ”

Gu Chuan was silent for a long time.

The faint and leisurely smile of the head is neither like a human nor like a person, but like an immortal who sucks wind and drinks dew, and has been far away from the world. It said indifferently:

"And then now, and now it's been a long time. Sometimes, I feel like time is very illusory, maybe my world is really only the size of a room...... The outside world doesn't really exist. After all, the world that people can see is only between this square inch. People can't fully understand the changes in this square inch, let alone the vast universe beyond this square inch. Maybe...... You were just created by God to remind me of the fact that the world is big. Isn't that uncertain? ”

After speaking, he saw the young man's face and knew that the young man did not agree with him, so he called out. The old man with the red nose opened the door and said:

"Stranger, have you finished speaking! It's time! ”

Gu Chuan pulled up the extreme distance that was still carefree to catch insects, and under the leadership of the old man, walked out of the grotto along the original road.

As a result, after walking for a while, a faint bell rang from the room. When the old man heard the bell, he realized that something was wrong, and immediately screamed, said goodbye hurriedly, and ran back to the room where the head was.

Young people speculate that the end of the day is approaching.

After a while, the old man began to ring the bell, and many villagers began to gather in the grotto.

He didn't care, he just walked to the edge of the sundial tower on his own.

The terrain of the grottoes is slightly higher than that of the villages and towns. From here, you can see the sunset and the water at sunset. The crimson clouds float leisurely in the water, as if the surface of the water reflects another world.

The sunset on the second day was exactly the same as the sunset on the first day. But he may not see Chuanmu, He'an, and Shantao again.

When he set off, he didn't know.

Everything he knew in the past was gone, and only strangers still lived here.

Far away tugged at the hem of his shirt again, and the young man looked sideways at him.

It cautiously asked:

"Are you sad again?"

The young man said:

"Not really, I'm just wondering if we should go south?"

Jiyuan asked ignorantly:

"If you don't go south, where else can you go?"

At that time, clouds swell up on the water, gradually obscuring the setting sun. The people who had gathered for the sake of the head were dispersed. The old man with the red nose hid in the house wiping his tears, and when he saw the young man walking in the darkness in the direction of the sundial, he reminded loudly:

"Be careful, don't fall into the grotto!"

The young man laughed:

"It won't fall with the flow, but it must be walked by itself."

Before he could finish speaking, he spread the transparent wings behind him, and flew into the air with his right hand, and soon came to the sundial tower. Its surface is a substance that has been accumulated for thousands of years, and foreign seeds have fallen into the dust, and flowers have grown.

"See you again."

With that, the young man stretched out his left hand and easily cut through the rock on the surface of the sundial, all the way inward, until it touched the edge of the glass that was harder than the rock.

Without reservation, he pushed in, and the glass made a sound of damage.

The sound alarmed the old man with the red nose, and he ran out of the house with the lamp in astonishment, but there was no longer any visible figure of the two strangers, only a conspicuous hole in the sundial tower.

The hole revealed something translucent that he had never seen before.

The old man forgot his grief for a moment, and trotted all the way to the bottom of the sundial tower, and accidentally stepped on the broken glass and pricked the blood. He picked up the glass with a curse, and stared through the glass into the dark sky, thinking that he had found the strangest substance in the world.