??Chapter 103: 102. Torii, Corridor_1
Chapter 103: 102. Torii, Corridor_1
It had just turned night, and a thin twilight enveloped the bamboo forest, quiet and secluded.
A babbling brook andered from the depth of the forest, beneath the dim and swaying tree shadows, sothing unseen seed to be peering into the world of humans. Insect chirps and the calls of so unknown creatures composed the main lody of the woods, but at tis, silence would engulf everything.
Lu Ban looked up at the night sky, shrouded in a faint mist, barely any constellations were visible, just a few stars stubbornly twinkling.
The moon was hidden behind deeper clouds, and Lu Ban couldn’t even tell if the moon of this world was round.
On the island, a festival was underway, with a street filled with lanterns. Roadside vendors were selling candied apples, scooping goldfish, and masks. The mysterious music echoed through the streets, yet the players were invisible.
Lu Ban moved through the crowd, brushing past many n and won dressed in kimonos. The joy was all theirs; he had nothing.
However, Lu Ban noticed that aside from the blissfully rry artists, the eyes of the children and young girls, and the elderly, who appeared like locals, all held a kind of indifference, as if their poor acting to fit the atmosphere couldn’t make up for their essential apathy.
He arrived at the end of the street, where a path extended into the bamboo forest, obviously leading up the mountain.
The He Island Shrine seed to be closed at night, with no one going up or down the mountain.
Lu Ban saw Red Leaf standing under a red torii gate at the mountain’s base.
She still wore a kimono with an arrow-feather pattern, a navy-blue long skirt, and boots, but with a fox mask hung beside her head, adding a touch of purity.
“The bamboo forest is dangerous at night, especially now,” she said.
Upon seeing Lu Ban, Red Leaf did not exchange pleasantries but instead turned and began climbing the mountain, her lantern casting an unsettling, dim light on the path.
The path up the mountain was rather bumpy, with sparse bamboo groves on the sides, silent and still.
“Strange, why is there no sound in the bamboo forest?”
It was supposed to be the height of sumr on the island, yet there was not a sound in the woods. As the festival street receded into the distance, the entire world fell into silence.
“Don’t step into the shadows; stay in the light of the lantern,” Red Leaf warned, lifting the lantern slightly higher.
Lu Ban saw the bamboo thickening around them.
It reminded him of the grassland outside the Abandoned Capital, where grasses and plants grew wild with life.
He couldn’t help feeling a bit of affection.
When they reached halfway up the mountain, they saw a series of torii gates.
These structures, said to connect two worlds, ford tunnels down the path ahead, casting even more shadows on the road.
Stepping through the torii gates, Lu Ban thought he heard a sound behind him.
Turning around, he caught a glimpse of a red skirt and white socks disappearing atop wooden clogs in the dark shadows.
“Was that…”
Unable to resist, Lu Ban stopped in his tracks as Red Leaf’s light moved slightly farther away from him.
His pant leg seed to be pulled by sothing, and he looked down.
A pale hand withdrew back into the shadows.
The darkness around him seed to deepen.
Music reached his ears.
The shamisen, the shakuhachi, and the plaintive music characteristic of He Dao mingled with murmurs like a chant.
“…pray to the gods, in this life today, a body of sorrow, dreams already departed…”
It felt like a whisper in his ear, and as the murmurs faded, Lu Ban quickly turned around.
But only darkness surrounded him.
In Lu Ban’s view, only the path beneath his feet remained, along with the torii gates on the road. He could only see as far as his outstretched hand; beyond that was utter silence and darkness.
“Red Leaf?”
Lu Ban tried calling out, but even his voice seed to be absorbed by the darkness, eting no reply.
He looked around, only to roughly make out the direction uphill.
Beyond the darkness that shrouded the road, he had no clue what might exist.
“Anyway, I should still be alive, right?”
Lu Ban climbed upward, the bird shrines coming into and out of his field of vision. They seed to be splattered with filth, but Lu Ban didn’t know what it was or how it got there.
In the endless darkness and silence, Lu Ban walked about three hundred heartbeats, yet found himself still between the bird shrines.
“Could it be ‘Ghost Hitting the Wall’ again?”
Thinking this, Lu Ban crouched down, picked up a Stone, and made a pentagram mark on one of the bird shrines, then continued forward.
With each step, as the darkness lit up due to the proximity, Lu Ban tensed up, fearing that sothing strange might run out from the shadows.
It was like walking at night as a child, with pitch darkness beyond the streetlights, every step taken with extre caution, afraid that sothing hideous and horrifying would suddenly appear on the road.
He had planned to continue for another three hundred heartbeats, but when he counted to two hundred and thirty-three, Lu Ban stopped in his tracks.
On a bird shrine nearby, he spotted the pentagram mark he had just left.
And beneath that pentagram was another mark.
It was a symbol that seed hastily drawn, yet was filled with an eerie sense.
“…Is there soone else on this path who has found my mark, is it Red Leaf? Or is it sothing else… ” Lu Ban pondered. He thought for a bit and decided to walk downhill.
As he turned to step down, the view ahead lit up, and Lu Ban saw a person standing beside the bird shrine in front.
That person was wearing a red and white witch costu, immaculately clean; black hair cascaded down the back; a pale face, which reminded Lu Ban of the Pure Glass Doll hanging in the sky during the day.
She stared at Lu Ban, seemingly with a deep resentnt in her eyes.
“Did you bring
here?”
Lu Ban stopped and asked.
The other person did not utter a word, just slowly stepped back twice and disappeared into the darkness.
Lu Ban did not rashly leave this path full of bird shrines. Although it seed to loop endlessly, walking out did not seem to be a good choice.
He continued to walk another hundred or more heartbeats downhill.
Then he saw what appeared to be a mark on one of the bird shrines beside him.
It was his own pentagram.
However, the position where Lu Ban had originally marked the pentagram was supposed to face the downhill path, but now, this pentagram was facing uphill.
“Have the bird shrines changed, or is all this an illusion?”
Lu Ban took a step forward and looked at the back of the bird shrine.
On the mottled, peeling red paint were blood-curdling scratches. These were not the marks of claws, but rather seed to have been made by a human hand scraping over and over. Underneath the peeling red paint was an even darker shade of blood!
One could imagine that perhaps a shrine maiden truly lost her way on this path, experiencing this repetitive cycle over and over until her sanity collapsed and she completely lost her mind, scratching at these bird shrines with her fingers until she finally left the path, never to return.
The darkness around beca thicker, the midsumr night’s temperature made Lu Ban sweat profusely. The sweat soaked his clothes and stuck to his skin, which was quite unpleasant.
Lu Ban suppressed his wandering thoughts and walked a few more steps forward.
Suddenly, he felt sothing unusual under his foot, as if he had stepped on a hard, protruding object. It definitely wasn’t a stone but rather sothing with a curvature and a brittle texture.
Lu Ban looked down.
There was a mask.
*
A new month beckons, seeking monthly votes and recomndations!
Reviews
All reviews (0)