Chapter 5 What are They?

Even though my explanation was easy to understand, Fatty still raised a question.

"Oh—" Fatty asked thoughtfully, "What about that dan furnace or the daoist statue thing? I didn't see it."

"I was just giving an example. Maybe there's something else in the central area that we overlooked. Besides, I've never been here before, how would I know the situation?" I replied.

While Fatty and I were talking, the old man in the plain robe in front of us suddenly opened his eyes. Just like the old man in the plain robe we had seen on the other side of the space, his cloudy eyeballs bulged slightly, staring straight at us.

Before long, the people sitting cross-legged behind the old man also opened their eyes one after another, looking at us and the way we came from in the darkness behind us with the same posture and expression. The "pitter-patter" sound became louder and louder, as if many people were walking towards us side by side.

This seemed to be a dangerous signal.

"Hiss, this is not a place to stay for long," Fatty reminded.

If we leave here, where can we go? The exit is currently unknown, so we can only spin around like a fly in a house.

I took Fatty's hand and said, "It's not difficult to verify my guess, follow me."

So, I took Fatty's hand and led everyone to the side of the pile of cross-legged people. After walking for less than a minute, we saw another group of cross-legged people. Like the two groups we had seen before, their formation was arranged in a triangular shape, with an old man in a plain robe sitting in the front.

This time, Fatty and Rou Yi also noticed the subtle differences in the bamboo strips on the old man's bun.

Looking at the bamboo strips, Fatty murmured, "That's really the case. This bamboo strip is not quite the same as the one I saw before..." Afterwards, we walked around the center point in this space for half a circle. I confirmed our current position through the bamboo strips on the old man's head—we finally returned to the starting point where we had escaped earlier.

During the circling action, I counted along the way. There were a total of sixteen such cross-legged arrays. If we count a whole circle, according to its centrally symmetric layout, we only need to double the number of half a circle, then there are a total of thirty-two arrays in the whole circle.

Although we don't know why there are thirty-two such triangular arrays composed of humans here, judging from the overall layout, these people are arranged to sit here for some special purpose.

"Hey, that's not right..."

Relying on his eagle-like vision and amazing observation skills, Fatty was the first to see the changes in these people: "Their mouths, how are they all open at this time?"

Because the light was very dark, we couldn't see the changes in these people's faces except for Fatty. When I squatted down and took a closer look, I realized that their mouths were really open, and the range of their mouths was extremely large, so large that their chins were already dislocated.

But their eyes were still open, except that their eyeballs no longer followed our movements, but stared blankly ahead.

"Strange, what exactly happened just now?"

I rubbed my temples and thought hard, and soon I had a bold idea.

Perhaps the rustling sounds just now were directly related to their opening their mouths.

But I have no direct evidence, these are just guesses.

And I clearly felt that the louder and louder sounds from all directions were gathering towards the central area of the space, and the sound gradually changed from "pitter-patter" to another ear-piercing and sharp sound.

Just as I was pondering, Rou Yi suddenly jumped back more than a meter, pointed at the ground and exclaimed, "Oh! My! God! What is that!"