Chapter 193
Chapter 193
“The people building the railway paid each family a little money afterward, and that was the end of it.”
Zhao Jixian picked up the cup of tea Qin Ying had left untouched and took a sip.
“Even if some of the families knew something was wrong, well… someone had bribed the local thugs to block their doors all day, every day.”
“No matter how furious they were, they had no choice but to swallow it.”
Qin Ying jotted a few lines in her notebook.
To be fair, the practice of Foundation Sacrifice was hardly rare. When the Zhuhai Bridge was built, a warlord had openly plied young boys and girls with alcohol, tied them to the pilings, and sunk them into the sea.
But fifty-odd Able-bodied Adults at once? Was there really any need to make it so massive?
Perhaps sensing her doubts, Zhao Jixian looked furtively from side to side. “I’m just repeating what I’ve heard. Please don’t print my full name in the newspaper.”
As someone who worked on the railway, he naturally knew more of the inside story. Lowering his voice, he continued, “They say that when it was being built, the foreigners were…”
“Ahem. Our foreign engineer friends.”
“Those foreign friends didn’t know our taboos. They made no offerings to Heaven or the gods and just blasted away. Who would’ve thought they’d blow open something enormous deep inside the mountain?”
“It was encased in black stone and looked like a civet, but supposedly it had an exceptionally long white tail.”
“The blast sent broken bones and flesh flying everywhere. Its neck was left dangling in one long strip, and its brains splattered everywhere.”
“But those foolish foreigners insisted it was some rare animal. They even had people gather up the remains to make some kind of specimen.”
“Then things started going wrong.”
“They’d collected the remains of the dead White Civet, hadn’t they?”
“Overnight, its hide, flesh, and bones all rotted into soup and vanished.”
Zhao Jixian’s tale was so gruesome that Feng Meiyu tucked in her neck with a shiver.
Qin Ying wrote in her notebook: Civet-shaped, white-tailed, mountain-dwelling.
Feng Meiyu pressed him. “It really vanished?”
Zhao Jixian replied irritably, “That’s what I heard.”
He continued, “After that civet was killed in the blast, things around Qingzhai Tunnel stopped being peaceful.”
“A lot of people started seeing ghost lanterns light up for no reason, with an extremely long-necked shadow standing beneath them.”
“Some bold, curious souls went closer for a look. When they came back, they acted like they’d lost their souls, and within seven days, they’d die of fright in their own homes.”
The shadows themselves were not the truly frightening part. The truly frightening part was how construction on Qingzhai Tunnel slowed to a crawl from then on.
There would be a landslide one day and a sudden localized downpour the next. In short, every time work began, something went wrong.
In the end, even the chief engineer in charge had to admit that something supernatural was afoot, so he found a local consultant.
Consultant was a generous term. The man was more like a White-Fan Shiye whose job was to come up with schemes.
The White-Fan Shiye was highly learned, but he was no decent man.
Black-hearted, rotten to the core, and utterly unscrupulous.
Eager to ingratiate himself with the foreigners, he pored through books until he finally came up with an idea: Foundation Sacrifice!
They would use human sacrifices to appease the vengeful spirit of the White Civet killed in the blast.
Human sacrifices. Human sacrifices. But where were they to find the humans? Naturally, they tricked people from the nearby mountain villages.
Under the pretense of recruiting workers, they lured in around a hundred people.
The original plan was to bury all hundred or so of them inside. The local Shiye had no qualms about it, but the foreigners were afraid the incident would become too big to contain.
In the end, they compromised and took only half.
They chose an auspicious date and claimed work was about to begin, luring all those Able-bodied Adults into the tunnel, which was not even half finished.
Then they detonated the explosives buried beneath the living victims’ feet.
Rock and human bodies alike were blasted to pieces, smearing flesh and blood evenly across the cavern walls.
Only much later did they notify the families of the deaths. Then they spent some money to quietly settle the whole affair.
A chill ran down Qin Ying’s spine as she listened.
No one knew whether the Foundation Sacrifice had really worked, but construction progressed much more smoothly afterward.
Before long, they broke through Qingzhai Tunnel and completed the railway line.
At this point, Qin Ying could no longer hold back. “Then what’s behind the recent trouble?”
“Have the Long-Necked Shadows appeared again?”
To her surprise, the answer was not what she had expected.
“It’s far more than that.”
“Apart from the Long-Necked Shadows reappearing, a lot of other strange things have been happening.”
“But the most terrifying…” Zhao Jixian and Feng Meiyu exchanged a glance, fear surfacing in both their eyes.
“The most terrifying part is that all sorts of bizarre things happen when the train passes through Qingzhai Tunnel.”
“Someone will be dozing peacefully in their seat, then suddenly see a person pushing a cart through the carriage. The cart is covered in all sorts of colorful things.”
“Others will be sound asleep, only for someone to suddenly appear beside them, yelling and screaming.”
“And once, one of our train attendants was pouring hot water when the face of the person in front of them suddenly changed.”
“They say those Ghost Shadow apparitions are all dressed in the strangest clothes.”
At that point, Zhao Jixian seemed to recall something from the rumors and gave Qin Ying a sidelong look.
Qin Ying had no time to pay attention to him. Her mind was reeling from the flood of information.
Combined with what Third Aunt Xu had told her, did that mean two trains from different times overlapped while passing through Qingzhai Tunnel?
Had a few lucky souls on both sides accidentally wandered into the other train’s time and space at some point?
Then what did that make her?
The thought made Qin Ying bite her lower lip.
While she was lost in her worries, Zhao Jixian stared at her fair profile beneath the kerosene lamp and felt his skin crawl.
Just as he was reassuring himself that things couldn’t possibly be that uncanny, the train suddenly lurched.
It had started moving again.
Zhao Jixian’s heart skipped a beat. Qingzhai Tunnel was just ahead.
He looked at Qin Ying’s face under the kerosene lamp again. Somehow, she seemed far too pale.
He forced out a dry chuckle. Surely not, right?
She looked just like a living person. She didn’t match the rumors either.
Just as he was thinking of slipping away, the Thunderbird, which had been pecking at a compressed biscuit on the fold-down table, suddenly gave a cry from deep in its throat.
The Thunderbird had many different calls. When happy, it chirped like a little chick, but when it encountered an enemy, it let out a powerful, piercing whistle.
The palm-sized blue bird spread its wings and circled the compartment.
Qin Ying’s expression changed. Zhao Jixian, already on edge, nearly had his heart leap out of his mouth.
Only Feng Meiyu, who knew nothing of what was going on, craned her neck to watch the Thunderbird.
Qin Ying rose to her feet, and the Thunderbird landed on her shoulder.
She listened intently, then asked, “Is there some kind of noise outside the window?”
As she spoke, the train blew its whistle and entered the tunnel.
The long whistle was amplified by the tunnel into an immense, droning roar that drowned out her voice.
Perched on Qin Ying’s right shoulder, the Thunderbird raised the blue feathers behind its crest until they stood on end, then cried toward the window.
Qin Ying reached out and pulled the curtain open a crack.
The next second, every hair on all three of them stood on end.
A deathly pale face was pressed against the window outside, squashed flat against the glass.