musicians of old

Chapter 174 The Highest Point (4K [-]-in-[-])

"Is there such a big bend when you come here?" The two girls were taken aback.

The fact that Fanning can ask this question shows that at least he doesn't think so.

He immediately turned on the flashlight, and the light only illuminated the twenty or so stone steps closest to the corridor.

These steps are not as steep as stairs, they are wide, and the height difference between each step is not too big. It can be seen that they are still descending, and gradually disappear into the deep darkness after turning around.

Joan thought for a while and said, "It's about the same. Who can see accurately in such a dim light?"

Fanning's eyes flickered, he held a crowbar in one hand and a flashlight in the other, and took another step forward.

"Maybe...before?" The two followed, and Hiran also tentatively said, "Do you still remember when we came? First it was a straight line of flat land, and then it went uphill and turned... This means that it was gradually turning, and getting bigger and bigger..."

"A reasonable explanation." Joan nodded, twisted her shoulders to adjust the position of the backpack, and continued calmly, "Caroun, you are walking in the opposite direction now, and you are at the maximum range from the beginning. So when you compare it with it, you may think it has become more curved, right, it's not a big deal..."

As she spoke, she closed her mouth.

At this moment, the area illuminated by the flashlight in Fan Ning's hand has only a dozen or so steps!

A few more steps forward, and then visible steps... four or five steps left.

This situation can be seen by anyone with a discerning eye... How can it be that the bend is bigger than before?If it was a corridor when I came here before, it is more or less called a spiral staircase now.

"Is... still going forward?" Joan's voice was soft and trembling, "Caroun, as a person who often explores the ruins of cities, to be honest... most of those places are mentally scary, as long as you don't casually browse There is no real danger in concealing the carrier or performing unfamiliar secret rituals... But I am really a little scared now, what is the situation in your art gallery? If the existence of this underground building is announced, it will definitely become Ufu Lancel's first urban legend..."

"Don't go forward, why don't you go back?" Fan Ning glanced at the dark place behind him, "The empty hall is only that big, we don't know how many times we have gone around, this is the only door, unless You smashed the hall windows and got out of the dirt outside the windows."

"Go ahead, everyone be careful, I will lead the way, Joan is in the middle, Hiran is looking behind her back."

Compared with the current situation where the route has been deviated, Fan Ning is actually most worried about the glimpse of the Lord of the Witness, "The Boa of the Word of Truth".

After being swept by His gaze, I always felt that some inexplicable trigger was touched, but I couldn't say it.

Several people raised their sense of alertness. Sheeran glanced at the "Vigilance Record" again, and then loaded the pistol on his waist. Joan also held a curse mark, and everyone began to walk slowly towards the bottom of the spiral staircase.

The turning range is getting bigger and bigger, and the radius of the spiral staircase is getting narrower and narrower.

I thought it was a long time, but it turned out that the spiral staircase bottomed out in less than half a minute.

"It's another door like this." When Fan Ning saw the bulbous protrusions on both sides of the double door, he felt inexplicably creepy. After hesitating for a while, he still passed the crowbar through the crack of the door, and then pulled hard. .

Dust kicked up, the door opened, a hall.

The flashlight briefly shone on the ground behind the threshold, and the three stepped in one after another.

Fan Ning's first impression was that this place...it's almost like an unfinished building.

This hall has almost the same shape and area as the one above, but there is not only nothing worth noting here, but there are no heptagonal floor tiles, hanging candlesticks, and windows. It is a bare underground space with only chaotic Dirt, sand and broken bricks.

At this time, Joan felt a little less depressed, and she tried to adjust the atmosphere, curled her lips and said, "Caroun, this secret underground building in your house is too shabby, don't mention any powerful ritual vessels or other extraordinary items hidden in it. , I don’t even have a piece of paper, and I don’t know what to bring if I want to bring some adventure souvenirs, why don’t we pick up a brick and put it in the backpack...”

Fanning ignored her, and the flashlight flicked briefly around the wall before quickly turning off.

Lessons learned from the past, he only wanted to take a general look at the situation, and naturally he would not look for anything in detail, and the two girls did not stick the lantern to the wall to observe.

But it was just this short sweep, and Joan, who was watching with him, froze in place.

Sheeran approached Fanning even more, and asked in a low voice: "Caroun, was my eyes dazzled just now? How do I feel... Now my head is full of question marks..."

"You're blind." Fanning's tone was full of doubts. "It's not in your mind, but on the wall. The wall is indeed full of question marks."

These inexplicable scenes just now made him feel confused and irritable, but luckily he turned off the flashlight in time.

"When did the punctuation mark of the question mark come into being?" Joan threw out a strange idea, but it seems that it is not a far-fetched problem after careful consideration.

Hiran is familiar with the number of treasures: "It was invented by the Yanus people in the Western Continent... It comes from the word 'problem' in the ancient Janus language, but this prefix existed in their earlier Geminian language family. It was originally the first two The abbreviation of the first letter was changed into one up and one down, and the second letter became a subscript...Even if it has evolved into what we see now, it has been at least [-] years..."

The two girls seemed to want to continue discussing or researching something in depth, but Fan Ning grabbed the other with one hand and hurriedly stopped them.

"Leaving here, I feel that this place is worse than the hall above, so go back behind the door first."

In Fanning’s short-lived impression of the lighting, the walls of this hall are a piece of dismal white, and there are question marks everywhere like children’s graffiti. The color of the question marks is not a strong contrasting color such as red or black, but only a little darker than the background board. Ash.

In addition to the large question mark, there are also some faint traces of light color on the wall. Just by the impression of that one glance, Fan Ning felt a little bit at a loss, and the mood of loss and calm is turning his inspiration into excitement and withering. The contradictory body of - the latter brings revelation, and there may also be some symbols of the Lord of Witness on it.

…For example, "Watching Death" and "Flow"?
There are also some unfamiliar but inexplicable adjectives, such as the source of strange power and chaos, the words of boundless rage, or the ravine of insatiable desire...

Don't confirm the strange intuition under the ups and downs of inspiration.

Don't stay here, Fan Ning can't guarantee whether he will come to watch the next moment.

Several people quickly left this even weirder hall, and then Fanning turned on the flashlight again.

"Where's the spiral staircase?" He was completely dumbfounded.

It’s the same as when we first came here: a slowly arcing corridor, gentle steps extending downwards, overall orderliness with occasional loose bricks and stones, and supporting porches distributed a few meters apart…

"...Callon." Joan called out after a few seconds of silence, "Finally you've encountered the normal scene you want to see, right?"

"...I want to see something normal...but not this way...Do you think it's normal now?"

There was a dull creaking sound, Fan Ning stretched out his arms, and pushed in the double door leading to the weird hall behind.

He was already a little dazed by this series of inexplicable things, so he blocked the back first, so that if something incomprehensible came out, there might be a sound warning.

"Let's go, be careful." Fan Ning led the way, "Although this corridor looks exactly the same as when we came here, I don't expect to be able to return to the same place, let's try where I can go first."

The stench became stronger again, and after about ten minutes, he realized that he had guessed wrong.

Two meters away, there was a door that was half-lost and severely corroded. The railing of the U-shaped escalator opposite the deep well outside the door was impressively visible.

"Really come back? Damn..." Fan Ning exchanged glances with the two girls beside him one by one.

Because he just vaguely had a rebellious mentality of "why always predict the wrong situation", so he deliberately made the expectation that he would not go back. Unexpectedly, he was wrong again.

what is this?Could it be that only one of the two halls is real, and the other is an illusion?

"Caron, why does this deep well feel less dark than before?" Sheeran asked.

"It may be that people's pupils have gradually adjusted to adapt to staying in the dark for too long." Joan said, "When I visited various remote places in Uvransel the night before, I also felt that the longer the time passed, the better my condition was. The more clearly you can see..."

No... Fanning slowly turned his gaze to the side of the opposite escalator.

There is a candlestick built in the cracks of the masonry with similar "anthropomorphic" decorative patterns.

But... no candles.

A thought flashed in Fanning's mind. He took a few steps forward, held the threshold with his hands, and stuck his head out of the door, poking upwards.

At a height of about six or seven meters above the deep well, burning tallow candles were emitting a dim light!
And the rope that was used before was still tied at one end to the escalator and fixed at the other end. In my field of vision at this moment, it was like a black thread above the deep well.

…hell.

A few minutes later, the three returned to climbing the escalator.

Sheeran climbed up to check it. The height of six or seven meters was indeed the door that the three of them entered before. Half of it was hooked off by Fanning with a crowbar, and it became the same as the door below.

Joan asked, "Callon, did you see the door below when we went in from above?"

Fanning shook his head: "No, the candle can't shine that far."

"But you shone it down with a flashlight."

"...The time was too short. At that time, I was just checking to see if it was close to the end. I really didn't pay attention...In fact, we only discovered the door above after you reminded us."

"All right…"

Sheeran said: "It is obvious that the passage inside is changing. So the door on the wall of the well may have changed..."

She glanced again at the candlesticks of completely different styles built on the stone bricks of the well wall.

"However, if this is the case, at least it means that there were indeed two floors of halls just now." Fan Ning made a decision, "Go ahead and have a look."

The three climbed down again.

The stench flowed in the air, but the atmosphere temporarily became quiet. After a long time this time, Fan Ning counted [-] escalators, which was more than [-] meters deep, and finally found the third candlestick at hand. , and a third door of similar style.

"This distribution is too irregular..." Joan said, "Why are the two doors in front only separated by six or seven meters, and this door... we have an extra five hundred meters?"

"Whatever." Sheeran asked a question that had been raised before, "Go in and have a look, or...continue down?"

"If you can't go down, don't go down..." Joan said quickly, "It's too deep, I feel depressed when I think about it... We all entered the door just now, maybe the source of the stench is here. ?”

"No, let's go down and try again." Fanning tilted his ears.

"Why?" Joan asked subconsciously.

"I seem to hear the sound of running water."

"Hey, yes." Sheeran heard it too.

"So, let's go down and have a look first. I suspect that this place is not far from the bottom, and I will come up later."

When everyone descended into the deep well nearly a thousand meters deep, they really came to the bottom.

The escalator ends here, and here is what seems to be an irregularly shaped cave, small in size, close to the living room of the Xilan family villa.

The temperature was extremely cold, and the smell was extremely strong. Several people shivered a little from the cold.

The light illuminated a circle, and everyone found many densely packed holes around them. They should be natural cracks. They are so narrow that people either can't get in, or they can't walk two meters inside. The sound of running water seems to come from these cracks. came out after the crack.

"Underground river? Polluted underground river?" This was the first guess in several people's minds.

It is not surprising that such a worrying environmental level and the existence of such a polluted water source area in Uvransel.

Fan Ning leaned towards a crack, and turned the flashlight in. The intricate pores of the rock were illuminated white and shiny, and there were small cracks in the middle of the big cracks, and it was impossible to see why.

Maybe the source of the smell is really from the underground river.

It's still worth looking into further, but it's a first step.

A few people were about to sit on the ground and relax their numb limbs. Sheeran said, "Look, there is another door here."

At the place where she illuminated, the originally uneven stone surface of the cave was wiped out by artificial marks to create a flat area, with a door-shaped pattern on it.

"It's... fake... painted on it." Fan Ning stretched out his hand and pressed it, and it was just a stone.

The pattern is not a line outline, but a solid filling. The material seems to be a mixture of some kind of ore powder and pigment. Under the illumination of the flashlight, a crystal-like blue-purple halo flows out of the entire surface.

"It's strange, what does it mean to draw a door here?" Hiran was also looking around, "Is there any mechanism?"

Joan looked at it in amazement for a while and said, "I may recognize this style, it's called the 'Gate of the Vault'."

"Dome of the Vault?" Fan Ning looked at her in surprise, "How do you know, fragments of memory? Could this be a door of the Hui Tower? How could the door of the Hui Tower appear here?"

"Don't get excited... This is just a pattern, a symbolic meaning, and it's not a real vault door."

Seeing that the other two people were looking at her, Joan explained slowly: "I read it in the literature, and it has nothing to do with my own memories... Well, the knowledge about the existence of this door may not be as secret as yours. It is as high as imagined, not even as good as the "Gate of Broken Keys" or "Gate of Seven Lights". It has been mentioned in many esoteric literature—as a rumored concept or an idealized concept, just like Many folk myths and religions always refer to concepts such as 'Death' and 'Heaven'... and these documents agree that there is no key to the 'Dome of the Vault'..."

"The degree of secrecy is not high? It is often mentioned as a concept?"

Fan Ning stared at its blue-purple clear texture: "...So, this is a basic door of Hui Tower, but is the 'Gate of Broken Keys' or the 'Gate of Seven Lights' a higher personality? ...But, What do you mean it doesn't have a key?"

"No, you got it wrong..." Joan shook her head back and forth.

"...the gate of the dome is considered to be the highest point that mortal creatures can reach in the Hui Tower."

　Thanks for August 8th, young8R, Mr. Bai wants to go to bed early, I am just a person passing through the world, the monthly ticket of book friend tail number 9~
　　
　
(End of this chapter)