Zhang Zhu thought for a while, carried the food box to the place where the footprints disappeared, squatted down, and sure enough, he saw a long and narrow door under the tattered cloth strips under the altar table.
Well, it's like a long and narrow chimney, enough for children to get in and out.
He reached out and touched the wall, and he could also tell that the thing was made of adobe bricks.
First mix the mud and dried grass together, then use molds to mold them into relatively regular pieces of mud bricks, and finally paste a layer of mud on the outside of the built-up mud bricks. The mud wall created in this way is still relatively strong, even if
It can be used for more than ten years despite being exposed to wind and rain.
He no longer had the soul's ability to penetrate walls, so he began to tear down the wall with his bare hands, because even if his bones shrank, he could not get through this small gap.
This Lama Temple was built directly on the mountain on a relatively gentle slope using wood, so there should be a cave or something like that behind the small door.
A passage was opened in twos and twos, and it was not as dark as expected. A very weak warm light from an oil lamp could be seen.
Zhang Zhuoxun saw that on the steps in front of the Buddha statue carved on the mountain wall, there was a small figure sitting on the ground with his side facing the oil lamp. He was really small, so small that when curled up, it was not as big as a ten-pound rice bag.
He just sat there quietly, not even looking back when he heard the movement at the door. He held something like a small sign in his little hand, with something engraved on it bit by bit.
Zhang Zhuxun felt a pain in his heart for no reason, like a needle pricking him, and then more pain spread densely throughout his chest.
He suddenly bent over and squatted down, covering the most painful part of his heart, with a look of confusion on his face.
Unknowingly, a tip of the iceberg in the depths of my mind was melting at an extremely slow speed, and my long-stagnant consciousness finally caught a glimpse of the slightest hint of it.
A small, fuzzy shadow with an unclear face seemed to overlap with the scene at the moment.
The flow of time seemed to have stopped, leaving only the rustling wind and snow outside the house and the flickering candlelight inside.
I don't know how much time passed before Zhang Zhu Xunfang came back to his senses from his chaotic consciousness. He didn't remember everything, but the memories of the previous five cycles were enough for him to understand why he came here.
Naruhito once warned him that if you persist too deeply, you will eventually suffer yourself.
Once you had it, you picked up the process, and you got the result, no matter whether it was good or bad, but later you figured it out and let it go, in the Buddhist words, you return to dust.
The body is a bodhi tree and the mind is a mirror stand.
But if a person has never picked it up, how can he put it down?
Zhang Zhuoxun walked up to the child with the food box and saw that what was engraved in his hand was a longevity tablet soaked in blood.
"Stop carving." Zhang Zhuxun spoke in Han Chinese language. He knew that the child could not understand anything else. "It's useless. That grandma's grandson will die sooner or later."
The child ignored his words and continued with the mechanical movements of his hands. Maybe he didn't hear it at all, or maybe he didn't care if he heard it.
Zhang Zhuxun was used to this. He sighed, put down the food box, took out the disposable cotton swabs and gauze he had prepared with him from his pocket, and reached for the wooden sign in the child's hand with his other hand.
The child's fingers subconsciously clenched, and the wound on his fingertips opened again, and blood seeped out.
Zhang Zhuxun opened it with a little force, took off the blood-stained wooden sign and threw it aside.
The child immediately went to pick it up, but Zhang Zhuxun held him back and said, "I don't want that one. I'll carve a better one for you later."
The child then stopped struggling, as if he had confirmed something from his words. He stood there motionless and did not speak, letting Zhang Zhuxun pull out the wooden thorns stuck in his hands bit by bit and give them to him.
Treat wounds.
The hand Zhang Zhuxun holds in his palm is thin and small. The wrist is so fragile that it can be broken with a gentle pinch. Under the old white sleeves, many old scabbed knife marks can be faintly seen, the deepest and most obvious ones.
The line was scratched directly on the blood vessel.
Zhang Zhuoxun rolled up his sleeve, and as expected, he saw a new blood stain on the upper end of his forearm.
"Don't hurt yourself intentionally like this again." There was no blame in Zhang Zhuxun's tone, as calm as telling a patient to eat and drink on time.
After applying the medicine, he blew on it carefully, and after the medicine had dried, he wrapped it with gauze.
Still not hearing a response, Zhang Zhuxun raised his eyelids and met the child's dark eyes.
Those emotionless eyes stared straight at him, their eyes dull and empty, without any trace of innocence and agility that a three-year-old child should have.
There was not even a ounce of flesh on the nutritionally poor little face. Because of Zhang Zhuxun's words, the entire slender body tensed up, and the dark eyes still made it difficult to read the emotions.
Zhang Zhuoxun sighed, took off his Tibetan robe, wrapped him up like a dough roll, touched the soft white hair on his head, and wrapped his two little feet, which were blue and white from the cold, into the hem of his clothes.
With.
"Let's eat." Zhang Zhuxun held the child and sat on the felt, opened the food box, picked up the beef inside with chopsticks and handed it to his mouth.
The child didn't open his mouth, his eyes blankly blank, not knowing what he was thinking.
"Eat a little bit." Zhang Zhuoxun sighed, "There is only a few ounces of meat on your body, and you are even lighter than when I saw you the previous five times."
This state directly cut him off from the system. He couldn't come up with other better food in the space, so he could only make do with it.
The child was still indifferent to the meat on his lips. He sat softly in Zhang Zhuxun's arms, leaning his head on his neck, silently, and his eyes just stared at the corner of the Buddha statue quietly.
"You can't wait for him." Zhang Zhuxun said this softly.
The child did not respond.
With his chest buzzing and vibrating, Zhang Zhuxun mouthed an even crueler truth, "He will not come back again."
Zhang Zhuxun knew very well in his heart who this child was waiting for. Just like his young self, he was waiting for the same person who would never come back.
The skin on the side of the neck felt a weak airflow, and the child buried his head entirely on Zhang Chuxun's neck.
"And you?"
He heard the child ask this question in a very soft voice.
He heard his own voice telling the child.
"I won't come either."
The air was silent for a long time.
"Together."
The tears in the child's eyes silently rolled down Zhang Chuxun's collar, burning into his heart.
Zhang Zhuxun endured the sourness in his eyes and touched the child's head, "I can't take you away."
"I will be very good."
The child opened his eyes wide and stared at Zhang Zhuxun with clear black and white eyes.
In fact, until a long, long time later, when the child grew up, he still couldn't understand why his father left him here in the first place.
In fact, his memory has always been very good, but he cannot remember many things about his childhood, and he cannot learn anything about his father from other uncles and elders of the same clan.
He held back the anger in his heart and gradually made himself stronger, thinking, since you don't come to me, then I will go to you.
Later he went looking for it, searching all over the mountains and rivers for the sun and the moon, but he found himself covered in scars and muddy.
Search, don't search, is that what it means?
Then his so-called blood father is really cruel.
"It's him who doesn't want you."
Zhang Zhuxun stared into the child's eyes and spoke word by word.
"Don't go looking for him again."
If you don't go to him, you won't live as hard as me.
If you don’t have expectations, you won’t be disappointed.
The child's eyes were unblinking, and the few tears washed his eyes clear. He seemed to be asking why.
"Just forget about him."
Soon, someone will be here to take you away soon.
You are also very fast and will soon become stronger little by little.
It would be great if they could always let you be a simple child.
Zhang Zhuxun raised his hand to cover the child's eyes and held him tightly in his arms. His heart ached so much that he almost curled up into a ball, "Forget about me too."
As the words fell, the surrounding space suddenly began to tremble.
The old scarred face of the Buddha statue on the stone wall above began to shatter, twisting into sinuous and terrifying black cracks. Those cracks grew larger and larger, swallowing up everything around it with its ferocious mouth.
The cracks gradually spread toward Zhang Zhuxun's feet. Large rocks fell down, slates cracked, and the beams and wall pillars outside the door collapsed into the bottomless black abyss below. The sky above his head was also broken.
A huge opening.
The wind howled, the whole world was falling, the owner of the realm gradually woke up, and the realm began to collapse.
Zhang Zhuxun stood up with the child in his arms and looked at everything happening around him quietly, without a trace of confusion in his eyes.
The child turned his face and saw this. His immature face showed the same indifference as Zhang Zhuxun.
Finally, everything around him turned into weightless fragments, floating in the darkness.
Zhang Shuxun lowered his eyes to look at the child in his arms, hugged him tightly for the last time, closed his eyes to cover the unspeakable sadness in his eyes, and said in a low voice, "Goodbye."
He felt the child in his arms dissipate little by little, like the gravel of time. No matter how tight he held it, it would eventually disappear from his fingertips.
All the surrounding debris began to retreat rapidly, as if there was a huge mouth of the abyss in the darkness that sucked them all away.
It had been long enough, and Zhang Zhuxun knew at the beginning of the collapse that he had to wake up this time.
He closed his eyelids and let his whole body relax.
After falling for just a moment, he returned to the human world.
——
In the room, Zhang Hai Xingmao stared at Zhang Chuxun carefully, and found that his face was gradually turning pale, and the more he looked at him, the more something seemed wrong.
Suddenly I reached out and tried it on his forehead. The tentacle was cold, as if it were attached to a stone that had been watered and left outside to freeze for a day and night.
Her expression suddenly changed, and she turned around and said urgently: "Brother, it's over, this kid is in trouble!"
"He seems to have frozen himself to death in the environment!"
Zhang Haixing was panicked and at a loss. She didn't want to kill Bai Ci, at least he couldn't die now.
Zhang Haike didn't feel Zhang Haixun's pulse. When he saw Zhang Haixing's frightened expression, he immediately reacted and asked sternly: "Did you listen to Zhang Haixun's two assistant bells at the same time? Isn't that right?"
Zhang Haixing's expression froze, knowing that he could not keep it secret, so he had no choice but to admit it with a nod and retort in a low voice, "Brother, I really don't know if he will come out. It's clear that he didn't respond to those magic bells when I tried several times before.
"
This time she just stepped up her efforts to enter the country in retaliation. Even if she was trapped inside and couldn't get out for a while, with Bai Ci's mentality of risking death and surviving, he would always come out.
Moreover, Bai Ci has maintained the same posture since entering the country and has not moved at all. Let alone talking in her sleep, she has not even wrinkled her eyebrows. Even if she wants to guide her, she can't do anything.
"You..." Zhang Haike never expected that his sister would act so recklessly at such an urgent moment, and struggled to hold back the curse words on his lips, "Why don't you hurry up and get the blankets and bring the brazier over."
Zhang Haixing hurriedly asked the other Zhang family members who ran out of the next door after hearing the noise to move the heat source into the house.
Zhang Haike knew in his heart that the Qingxin Bell they had on hand was useless against Chaofeng Ling, but now he was treating a dead horse as a living horse, so he held the small bell and jingled it in Zhang Zhuoxun's ear.
Damn it, what on earth did this kid go through in his fantasy world? How could he put himself in such a situation with his kind of mind?
Zhang Zhuxun came out of the illusion, feeling really tired. Just as he was about to take the opportunity to relax for a while, he heard a continuous noise in his ears. He was not in a very good mood at this moment. He just felt extremely irritable.
"Damn it," he said to himself, "it's so noisy. I really want to plug these people's mouths with smelly rags."
"It's so noisy!"
He finally cursed, opened his eyes tiredly, and met the eyes of Zhang Haike who was squatting in front of him.
After catching the indescribable astonishment in the other party's eyes, Zhang Zhuxun looked around and found that everyone was looking at him with blank faces, as if they had collectively experienced some horrific hallucination.
what's the situation?
Zhang Zhuoxun looked at the dozen or so hot braziers surrounding him and raised his eyebrows, "Are you... pretending to be a master?"
"Still refining alchemy? Where is the Bagua furnace?"
Zhang Haike slapped his forehead, put away the silly expression on his face, and smiled, "It's okay, hahaha, it's okay, it's too cold today, we're so hot, oh no, we're so cold."
"Ah, yes, yes."
The other Zhang family members echoed in unison, carrying the brazier with tools and quickly escaping.
Zhang Zhuxun knew that there must be something fishy in it, but he didn't point it out. He just asked: "Where are Wu Xie and that fat man?"
"They have finished the test. Something happened to you just now. In order to avoid affecting them, we moved them to other rooms." Zhang Haike said, "They should wake up after a while."
Zhang Haike winked at Zhang Haixing, who was uneasy at the side. Zhang Haixing glanced at Zhang Chuxun, hesitated to speak, and finally left the room without saying anything.
There were no outsiders in the room anymore. Zhang Zhuxun closed his eyes, rubbed his brows, and asked, "Did she tamper with the bell?"
Zhang Haike nodded, feeling apologetic, "I'm sorry, I didn't expect that she would blatantly attack you in front of me." (End of Chapter)