Daomu Biji: Restart

I didn’t know whether this idea of looking at things out of the corner of my eye was also inspiration given to me by someone else, but when I looked, I didn’t see anything in the shrine. I did, however, notice that something was wrong with the area around us.

I stood up and used my peripheral vision to scan our surroundings, finding that a lot of dark, black things had vaguely gathered in the darkness around us. I couldn’t see the edges of these black things with my peripheral vision, but I could sense their existence. In fact, the densest cluster of them was in the direction of Jin Wantang's body.

In the darkness, something seemed to be coveting his corpse.

I remembered that strange idea I had before where I felt as if the people who died in this place couldn’t leave, even as souls.

But I could see that these black things surrounded us very neatly, with the bronze piece clearly in the center of their encirclement.

When I picked up the bronze piece and took a few steps forward, I found that the black things over there also retreated a few steps back.

As I walked left and right, I became almost certain that this bronze piece had the power to disperse these black things and keep a ten-meter-wide buffer around it.

But this power seemed to diminish the farther the bronze piece moved away from the corpses on one side.

In other words, when I moved the bronze to one side of the area where the corpses were, the power it held on the other side weakened. These corpses were like amplifiers.

Once I told the other two what I had discovered, the three of us approached each other and tried to leave while carrying the bronze piece. But as it turned out, its powers became weaker and weaker, and I found that it weighed almost nothing when I moved it. It was only when Poker-Face held the bronze piece that the dispelling force worked a little bit, but the area was only a little more than two meters wide.

In other words, the radiation range of this stone may be as wide as ten meters so long as it remained in the center of this geometric area that the corpses had formed. But if we held onto it, the range would be reduced to about two meters.

"What the hell are those black things you’re seeing?" Fatty asked me.

I shook my head. I didn’t know, but they were definitely real. I just wasn’t sure if they were a physical manifestation of the heavenly gift.

Or maybe they were all just an illusion. After all, we had been under a lot of pressure in such a dark environment for too long.

The three of us were silent as we looked at the darkness hovering on the periphery. At present, we couldn’t move forward or backward, so I knew in my heart that there was only one choice now.

"Let me try it," I said again.

"Why don't I try it?" Fatty argued.

"You’re too heavy. If you receive the heavenly gift and Little Brother knocks you out, I won’t be able to drag you back."

Poker-Face was an even worse option, so that left only me.

I looked at the bronze piece. I didn’t know if it gave me that burst of inspiration just now, but if it really was warning me, then I figured it might be trying to save us.

If it didn’t give me that burst of inspiration, however, then that meant that the heavenly gift gave it to me. And if that were true, then maybe there really was something good about the heavenly gift. Either way, it wouldn’t hurt to test it out.

"Mr. Naïve,” Fatty said to me, “this is actually the only way. If this method doesn't work, we’ll just have to go out and automatically receive the heavenly gift. When that happens, all we can do is hope that we’ll break free again in the future. In short, we can't starve to death here, so it’s better to have the three of us go together."

In this case, the three of us may become strangers who will never know each other again in this lifetime.

I normally wouldn’t agree based on our previous experience—I figured that three people meant that there were at least three opportunities, which shouldn’t be used all at once—but when Fatty said this, I quickly nodded in agreement.

This was because I had found a bug—if I moved the bronze piece away, the two of them would be screwed. So, this so-called "experiment" only meant that my thoughts were a little confused under such extreme anxiety.

As the three of us packed our things, Fatty glanced at Jin Wantang and then put the corpse on his back.

I felt that something here was interested in his corpse, so we should take it with us.

"Old Jin, let's keep going,” Fatty said. “Be sure not to start smelling too quickly."

The three of us looked at each other again. I gave the bronze piece to Poker-Face and then we huddled together and began walking out of the area.

I was using my peripheral vision to keep a lookout as we left without any hesitation or sentimentality. I immediately felt the darkness around me closing in only one meter away.

One step, two steps, three steps….

We had gone about sixty or seventy meters, but it was like our flashlight beams were tightly compressed as they tried to illuminate the area in front of us. There was a black fog all around us, but we hadn’t received the heavenly gift yet. At least, I didn’t think so.

But many details around me began to disappear, and I slowly felt as if the three of us were walking in a pure black one-dimensional world.

****

First of all, THANK YOU for the outpouring of love and support despite what the dickwad said. I’m glad everyone’s been enjoying the DMBJ rollercoaster we’ve been on ?. Since no one is banging down the door to take this project over, I'll keep on trucking. Can't abandon you lovely darlings (ﾉ´ з `)ノ. Second of all, Yvette has translated the WaEr Rice Fest Vlog for you all here (it seemed kind of weird to make a whole post for 1 youtube link so I just stuck it here. Idk how she worked such sorcery, but it’s alllllll her work so give her lots of love as always).