Chapter Fifty-Six: Foot

Even though I wasn’t looking, my mind was filled with those pale shadows. At first, they had only seemed strange to me, but now, they floated inside my head, drifting through the terrifying images conjured by my imagination. This kind of fear, lurking in the recesses of thought, was the most torturous of all. After only a short distance up the stairs, sweat was already pouring down my face.

Just as I couldn’t help but want to look up, my forehead suddenly banged into Fatty’s back. The impact made me stagger, and I almost tumbled down the steps.

“Why did you stop so suddenly without saying anything?” I steadied myself and immediately shouted.

After I spoke, Fatty didn’t answer for quite a while. He stood there stiffly for a long moment before mumbling, “No, I—I just needed to catch my breath.”

“Tch, aren’t you supposed to be the expert here? How come your stamina’s worse than mine?” I thought to myself, with that kind of state, how can you claim to lead?

But Fatty said nothing more and continued upwards. Taking advantage of the pause, I sneaked a glance above and immediately saw that the white shadows still hovered around the steps, suspended at the same height as before. But now, I noticed they were growing denser and swaying more violently.

I quickly lowered my head again. “Don’t look at anything, don’t think about anything, just keep climbing, keep climbing…” I kept admonishing myself, tensing my body and resolving not to look up anymore. I fixed my gaze on Fatty’s big feet ahead of me.

At first, I managed to focus, but after a while, I noticed something odd about Fatty’s steps. Instead of climbing steadily, he would pause every few paces, and sometimes he even shifted sideways.

I glanced up at his back and saw that at some point, his shirt had become completely soaked through.

“Damn it, are your kidneys giving out?” I couldn’t help asking.

“Nonsense, when have I ever been weak…” Fatty retorted as usual, but there was something off in his tone, a distractedness that made me uneasy.

I gave him a pat. “If you’re really that tired, let’s take a break. If you suddenly faint, there’s no way I’ll be able to catch you.”

“I’m fine,” Fatty replied curtly and moved on.

A sense of wrongness gripped me. Fatty’s acting different—his manner now is nothing like when he spoke back in the chamber below.

“Is there something you’re not telling me?” Maybe it was the accumulated suspicion of this whole journey, but I began to wonder if Fatty was hiding something from me.

His next actions only confirmed my doubts.

He didn’t answer, just kept shuffling forward, moving painfully slow. I started to suspect—could something be wrong with him? On impulse, I reached out and grabbed his arm.

“What are you up to? If you’ve got something to say, just spit it out.” I couldn’t help remembering Tan Wei—the way he talked big but had a guilty conscience.

But when Fatty turned around, I was startled. His face was deathly pale, huge beads of sweat on his brow, his lips trembling ever so slightly. In that moment, what I saw was… fear.

After a moment’s daze, I wondered, had the bastard suddenly come down with a fever? “What’s wrong with you?”

Fatty averted his gaze, struggling to suppress his ragged breathing. After a few seconds, he looked back at me. “I didn’t want to freak you out, but—damn it, just look in front of me and you’ll see.”

The staircase wasn’t wide; Fatty and I walked single file, and the surrounding darkness was total. With Fatty’s burly frame blocking the way, I couldn’t see what lay ahead of him at all.

Prompted by his words, I peered over his shoulder. All I could see was the torch in Fatty’s hand, its light barely reaching five meters ahead. Beyond the steps, there was nothing.

“What am I supposed to be looking at?” I stared up the staircase for a long time, but saw nothing unusual.

Fatty shifted to the side and raised the torch higher. “Look further up.”

I glanced at him—his face was still etched with terror, but I did as he said, craning my neck to peer up at the higher steps.

With the torch now illuminating two more steps above, my eyes landed on something that made my heart leap into my throat. I stumbled back several steps in fright—if Fatty hadn’t grabbed me, I’d have tumbled right back down the passage.

I stared at Fatty in horror, unable to utter a word.

At the very edge of the torchlight, I had seen a pair of human calves. They stood on the staircase, heels facing us, motionless, as if someone was standing in the darkness ahead, silently waiting.

To see a living person standing like that in a place like this—such rotten luck would be hard to repeat in a lifetime. More than that…it was eerily quiet. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I’d never have believed there could be someone standing less than five meters away from us.

Fatty shook his head at me, then lowered his voice. “Just come up a little further with me and you’ll understand.”

By now, I was seriously considering retreating. But since Fatty insisted, he must have noticed something more.

So, squeezing in beside him, I moved up as he lifted the torch. Instantly, I saw those legs again, and my body tensed in fright.

I had just stepped back at least four or five paces—by rights, I shouldn’t be able to see those legs now. Yet there they were, still four or five meters away, which meant—it was moving. I finally understood what Fatty wanted me to notice.

Fatty pushed me gently forward, and I could feel his hand trembling. Still, he’d seen it before and managed to hold his nerve; his composure exceeded mine by far.

We took one step forward, and immediately, the figure above moved its right foot up a step. We climbed higher, and it did the same with its left. I froze, paralyzed with fear, while those legs returned to their stance, standing together as if even time had ground to a halt.

This was a kind of fear almost impossible to endure. If we could see the whole of that figure—even if it was a corpse or a ghost—we might not be so terrified. But what we witnessed was so uncanny, it felt as though a scene from a Zhou Dedong novel had come to life.

We stood still, locked in a standoff with whatever was above. It didn’t move, and neither did Fatty or I.

After a moment, Fatty said, “That thing has been ahead of us for at least ten minutes, always keeping the same distance. I think we’d best catch it—who knows what it might do if we let it go.”

It took me a while to process this. “How? Every time we move, it moves. And—and we don’t even know what’s above those two legs.”

Fatty frowned. “Damn it, if push comes to shove, I’ll just rush it. I don’t believe it can move that fast.”

But I felt uneasy. “Let’s wait and see.”

Fatty’s patience was clearly at its limit—his face betrayed a trace of anxiety. “We can’t just keep staring at it. Sooner or later, we’ll have to go up. Might as well risk it now.”

He was right—there was no point in waiting. But just as I was weighing my options, I suddenly realized that the cuffs of those pants looked familiar… gray and grubby, with a pair of green work shoes—damn, where had I seen that before?

Suddenly, a flash of realization struck me like lightning. “Shit!” I exclaimed, remembering—but I could hardly believe it.

“That’s how Qin Feng and his crew dressed,” I whispered, unable to suppress my excitement.

“Qin Feng?” Fatty had no idea what I meant.

I took a closer look, and now I was certain—the pants and shoes were identical to those worn by my second uncle’s team.

After explaining to Fatty, I said, “If you could fall from the main chamber into this place, then the route Qin Feng’s group took might lead here too.”

Fatty thought for a moment. “That’s not the main point. Even if it is one of them, he’s acting too strange. We need to make a move and figure out what’s going on.”

Fear gnawed at me. If that person really was from Qin Feng’s group, then something must have happened to them. In this situation, Fatty and I had no choice but to take the initiative.