Paintings of Terror

Qin Ci was already so hot that he was about to collapse, the world he lived in was getting hotter and hotter, and the density of the air was changing due to the heat, which made the scene in his eyes distorted and deformed, as if the air was also burning.

Qin Ci looked at the sea of ​​flames on the other side of the cliff, and there was a huge figure in the flames, which was seriously distorted and deformed with the change of air in the fire, and even broke his waist at one point.

When Zhu Haowen hurried back, he held a box in his hand: "Old Qin, the other side is already lit, we have nowhere to go."

Qin Ci looked away, feeling more and more that he might have had an outrageous and terrifying hallucination just now.

Qin Ci turned his eyes to Zhu Haowen, and his voice became hoarse due to thirst: "I only found a few charred conch shells and mussel shells, as well as some sea fish and unnamed sea creatures, all of which were roasted into pieces. If it's done, it can be used as our food temporarily. Haowen'er, what's in your box?"

Zhu Haowen put the box on the dry and slightly warm ground: "It's very light in my hand, I didn't open it at the time, I thought about going back and looking at it together."

Qin Ci smiled bitterly: "You hope that this thing is like Aladdin's magic lamp, and when it is turned on, a monster like smoke will appear, to satisfy our desire to escape from the sea of ​​suffering."

Zhu Haowen remained expressionless in the heat: "I'm afraid I'm just an empty box."

So, the two put the box carved with ancient patterns on the ground in the middle, and Zhu Haowen lifted the lid. The gesture was like lifting the lid of a crab that he didn't like to eat very much.

The box was indeed empty.

But this "empty" is only relative to the physical space. If calculated in decibels, this box can be said to be quite "full".

As soon as the lid was opened, both of them heard the voice in the box, which roared and filled the whole world.

That is the sound of the ocean, the waves are rough, and they hit thousands of miles.

Qin Ci closed the lid of the box, and the sound stopped instantly, as if the stop button was pressed on a certain video.

Zhu Haowen tried to open the lid of the box again.

The sound of the huge waves reappeared, and when it was closed, the sound disappeared.

"I didn't expect that what I got was a music box." Zhu Haowen said expressionlessly.

"This..." Qin Ci found that Zhu Haowen's metaphor here is impeccable, "This music box actually has the same meaning as the shells and sea fish I picked up. They are all things from the sea. I don't think we will Finding these things for no reason must have something to do with the sea."

Zhu Haowen: "It is to explain that our situation is 'dire water'."

"Di——" a loud time chime sounded, which was very clear in the hot and unbearable world, as if the electricity suddenly cut off in the dog days of the night, and the air conditioner made such a sad "beep—" before it stopped running.

The two of them were obviously familiar with the voice, and they knew it without looking at the phone: "Two hours have passed."

Zhu Haowen: "No progress."

It would be a lie to say that there is no rush, but the two men tried their best to maintain their composure.

Qin Ci looked at the direction he was staring at just now, the steep cliff, and the endless sea of ​​flames ahead, which was daunting.

The two of them were forced to stop when they came here at the beginning, and then explored from two small roads separately. As a result, Qin Ci found some seafood, and Zhu Haowen found a music box.

"Hao Wen'er, I saw a, a person in that place just now." Qin Ci felt that he hadn't expressed enough to understand, so he pointed to the front of the cliff: "The back of a person, that person is bald and tall. .”

"You mean, there is someone on the other side of the sea of ​​fire, in the fire?" Zhu Haowen asked seriously, without any doubt that Qin Ci was dazzled by the heat.

"Yes, it is in the fire. It is not so much a real person as an image, so I can see it so clearly." Qin Ci stared at that direction, and gradually frowned, "It appeared again , that person appeared again!"

Zhu Haowen also looked in that direction, and didn't make a sound for a while.

"Hao Wen'er, did you see it too?"

Zhu Haowen looked carefully for a while: "What you saw was the back of a person?"

"Yes, with their backs to us, bald, wearing a robe, as if waving..." Qin Ci looked at it with difficulty, "That, looks like a hand but doesn't look like a hand."

"It's a severed hand." It was Zhu Haowen who spoke.

"You saw it too?!" Qin Ci suddenly realized that the man's hand was very strange, but it was actually because a part was missing.

Zhu Haowen: "Are you sure you saw a back?"

"It's a back view. It's getting clearer and clearer. I can see the back of his head."

Zhu Haowen frowned slightly: "What I saw was the front."

"Huh?" Qin Ci felt that he was taken aback by Zhu Haowen's words. To be honest, that strange back view was already very strange. What would Zhu Haowen see from the front?

Zhu Haowen stared at the things in the firelight, and met the longing eyes of the other party: "I think the front and the back you see are the same person, no, it's not a person, it's just like a person."

"What's that?" Qin Ci felt that all this was very weird. Why did two people see the front and back of the same thing?Obviously, he and Haowen looked at it from the same direction.

"It's a monkey," Zhu Haowen felt that his statement was inappropriate. "It's a giant ape, a giant ape on fire, with a bare head and no hands, but he seems to want to express something to us, and even humbles us a little bit. It means begging."

Qin Ci still can't figure out why two people see the front and back of a monkey at the same time, but obviously there won't be an immediate answer, and now he can only find other clues: "About this kind of monkey in the fire, what is the old custom?" Is there a saying? In my impression, it seems that only in the Year of the Monkey, people will draw monkeys on New Year paintings."

Zhu Haowen looked at the giant ape in the flames, heard Qin Ci's voice in his ears, and couldn't help admiring his companion's calmness at the moment: "Old Qin really has you, you still remember the New Year pictures now."

"Aren't we entering New Year pictures? What we're looking for are fragments of New Year picture boards." In Qin Ci's view, these thoughts of his are due.

Zhu Haowen also associated the monkey in the fire with the old folklore: "I heard that in some places, Monkey King is worshipped. This can't be Monkey King...it doesn't look like..."

"It's also possible that this monkey has a bald head, isn't Monkey King a monk?" Qin Ci said.

"I used to play a computer game about the 28 constellations. It seems that there is a constellation called the fire monkey in it. It should be related to fire and monkeys." Zhu Haowen felt strange. He actually remembered playing it several years ago. An inconspicuous character in the past games, probably because these three words reminded me of Big Mouth Monkey.

"It's true that you said that. When I was studying acupuncture, a Chinese doctor mentioned that the acupuncture points on the human body are related to the 28 stars in the sky. There is indeed a fire monkey in it." Qin Ci also remembered.

"Aren't you a Western medicine doctor?" Zhu Haowen felt that he had strayed a bit.

"There is nothing wrong with learning more about medical knowledge," Qin Ci followed Zhu Haowen to a question, and soon returned to reality. The back of the monkey in the fire was still there, waving its severed hand, as if greeting the two People go with it.

"It seems a little anxious." Zhu Haowen also stared at the monkey in his eyes. "It's about to kneel down to us. I don't know what it wants to pray to us."

What the two of them have now, except those sea fish and clam shells, is this box that can emit the sound of the sea.

"Does it want this box?" Qin Ci picked up the box and showed it to the monkey.

The monkey was a little excited and waved his hand.

Zhu Haowen said: "I don't think this is what it wants. It has been begging hard just now. If it gets what it wants, it should calm down instead of being anxious like this."

"Okay, let's try something else." Qin Ci picked up another sea fish, but this time the monkey didn't move.

"This fish is of no use to us, we still have some, so let's throw it to it." Zhu Haowen said.

So, this sea fish that had been roasted into dried fish was thrown into the sea of ​​fire by Qin Ci. Although it looked far away, it happened to reach the monkey.

"It ate the fish." Zhu Haowen watched the monkey chewing the dried sea fish, "Let's give it another one."

Just like that, almost all of the burnt seafood that Qin Ci picked up along the way were thrown into the fire monkey's mouth.

When Qin Ci picked up the last object, Zhu Haowen interrupted him to throw the object first: "What is this thing? It looks like an octopus but it doesn't look like it, and it doesn't look like a shell. It's too ugly."

"I happened to know this thing because it can be used as medicine." Qin Ci said, "It was called turtle feet in ancient times, and its scientific name is turtle feet. It should belong to a kind of arthropod, because this thing is not easy to dig, so the yield is not high."

Zhu Haowen listened to Qin Ci's words, but his eyes were attracted by the fire monkey, because the fire monkey was much shorter than before. If you look carefully, it is actually kneeling.

"It turns out that this tortoise foot is what it wants most." Zhu Haowen said, picked up a somewhat disgusting tortoise foot, and threw it at the fire monkey.

The fire monkey hurriedly held it with both hands, but couldn't get up, and continued to kneel down.

In this way, Zhu Haowen threw away four tortoise feet in a row, and then the fire monkey stood up, opened his arms, and two hands grew out of the sleeves.

These tortoise feet made the fire monkey give birth to its hands.

"This monkey is dressed and behaved like a monk," Zhu Haowen said.

"Is there any legend about the monkey monk in the fire?" Qin Ci realized that he could only think of Monkey King on the Flame Mountain.

"This monk loves seafood so much, he must not have been born in a fire, and he must not be a true vegetarian monk. Since the turtle feet can become his hands, or even his feet, it shows that monkeys and turtles have some relationship." Zhu Haowen analyzed.

"A monkey in the water." Qin Ci repeated this sentence, "Is it a water monkey?"

"What it is?"

"I read a paper on genetics when I was in college, which quoted a scientist's point of view, saying that human beings originated from water apes, and as time went by, they gradually divided into two branches, one went to land, Gradually evolved into anthropoid apes; the other branch continued to stay in the water, and I don’t know what it evolved into, it was probably a water ape or something.” Qin Ci tried hard to recall the content of that paper, “I remember when we I am very interested in this statement, and a classmate said that there are traces of this kind of water ape, and it was also recorded in ancient times, and it seems to be called the sea monk."

At this time, the ape in the fire began to jump up, seemed very excited and anxious, and kept beckoning the two of them to come over.

"The action it made seems to make us jump off a cliff and into a sea of ​​flames." Zhu Haowen thinks this proposal is a bit absurd.