Zong Hang was worried about two things: guarding the tunnel to prevent Ding Panling from rushing in, while also concerned about Yi Sa’s situation. Seeing her pry open the membrane and peer inside, he couldn’t help asking: “Yi Sa, what’s inside?”
What was inside – even Yi Sa couldn’t quite explain.
The space before them was a hexagonal prism similar to a honeycomb cell, over two meters in each dimension, like a small room. The “walls” were all translucent thick soft membranes – through them, one could vaguely see that there were likely more such “small rooms.”
From the “ceiling” hung purple-red clusters, at first glance like large bunches of grapes, but up close each “grape” was more like a mulberry, its surface densely covered with granular protrusions.
These were completely different from the spores they’d seen before. Yi Sa was almost out of breath as she carefully stepped inside, then turned back to beckon to Zong Hang: “Come in, Ding Panling probably won’t dare confront us here.”
Really? Zong Hang quickly lowered his gun and followed her inside.
He was also puzzled by what he saw: “Why are these so different from those scorched spores outside?”
Yi Sa said: “Maybe these are the real deal, and those outside were just pawns sacrificed to protect the king – no pain in burning them.”
She gestured for him to look at the stalks holding the grape-like clusters: “Notice anything different?”
The stalks were blackish-brown, about thumb-thick. Zong Hang hesitantly reached out to touch one – he used to be quite particular about viruses and bacteria, but now, having crawled through chunks of Taisui’s flesh and handled the thick, slimy membrane, being inside Taisui’s belly already, he was past caring about such things.
Upon contact, he quickly withdrew his hand and shook it vigorously.
Yi Sa asked him: “How would you describe it?”
“Soft,” Zong Hang frowned, as if just describing the texture made him nauseous, “slimy, seems like a tube, same material as the membrane you just cut open, but no idea what’s inside.”
After speaking, he wiped his fingers repeatedly on his pants, though his clothes weren’t much cleaner – the more he wiped, the stickier it got.
Yi Sa didn’t touch these things, instead slashing open the membrane beside her with her dagger and stepping through. She must have stepped on something because she cried out “Ai-you!” and stumbled sideways.
Zong Hang rushed forward to help her, but Yi Sa had good balance and steadied herself after swaying briefly. When she looked down, her expression was very unpleasant.
What happened? Zong Hang was worried but only realized after entering himself.
This room had the same structure as the previous one, with similar clusters hanging from the ceiling, but both the stalks and the hanging “grapes” were blackish-brown, so dark they were almost glossy. More terrifying were the scattered bones of various lengths on the floor.
What Yi Sa had stepped on appeared to be a skull.
Zong Hang swallowed hard, chills running up his arm. Yi Sa seemed less affected, crouching down to poke at the bone pile with her dagger, saying: “These look like animal bones, this one is human…”
Zong Hang had just started to breathe easier at the first part of her sentence, but his breath caught in his throat again at the second part.
Yi Sa gestured for Zong Hang to look at the skull she had stepped on: “Look at this.”
Zong Hang forced himself to look: “What about it?”
“This skull is larger than normal.”
It did seem so. Zong Hang suddenly thought of Jiang Jun’s huge deformed head: “Like Jiang Jun?”
Yi Sa nodded, and to confirm her theory, she walked to another membrane wall, slashed it from top to bottom, and entered again.
Zong Hang followed, now familiar with the process. It felt like walking through a maze, reminiscent of an animated show called “Magic Cube Building” he’d watched as a child, with rooms connected one after another.
In this room, the stalks were also blackish-brown, but the hanging clusters were more translucent and jade-colored, without granular protrusions, even quite smooth. Looking closely, one could see dense spores floating up and down in the mucus within each grain. When touched, fine wrinkles like radiating lines appeared on the surface.
Yi Sa murmured: “Water grapes.”
Zong Hang half-understood: “Huh? Weren’t only people from the three families called ‘water grapes’?”
He clearly remembered Ding Yudie’s signature, “thousands of water grapes, but the flower butterfly looks best,” because it was so catchy.
Yi Sa stared at the clusters: “Yes, grapes don’t grow underwater, but why are people from the three families called water grapes?”
Zong Hang’s throat went dry as he looked at the clusters, then at her: “You’re not suggesting the three families came from this, are you?”
Yi Sa pointed at the stalks: “You haven’t seen the ancestor tablets of the three families, but I have. I was made to worship them as a child, and later as a water ghost, I worshipped them countless times. That blackish-brown is the same color as the ancestor tablets.”
Ancestor tablets? Zong Hang couldn’t quite follow: in his understanding, ancestor tablets were hard, like wood, but these stalks were soft…
Yi Sa said: “We previously suspected the ancestor tablet was Taisui’s brain, but what if it isn’t? What if the ancestor tablet is a living thing? What if Taisui is just the legendary fungus with strong regenerative abilities, nothing more? We came to the drifting cave, saw Taisui, and assumed it was behind everything, but what if it wasn’t? What if even Taisui is just a puppet of the ancestor tablet?”
This series of “what ifs” confused Zong Hang. After a long pause, he asked: “How did you come up with all this?”
“Simple,” Yi Sa pointed around them, “the spores and these are two different things. How can one species produce two different types?”
“Taisui is a slime mold complex that reproduces through spores. What Uncle Panling burned was Taisui’s pure offspring, which the ancestor tablet considered dispensable pawns to sacrifice. But what’s in here, wrapped in these spore sacs, are the real ‘them.'”
Yi Sa paused to catch her breath, also considering which thread to pull to unravel this.
“There are three things in this cave: ancestor tablets, Taisui, and breathing soil. The ancestor tablet controls everything, and the breathing soil is self-growing energy matter that receives its commands like a puppet.”
Zong Hang was starting to understand: “Like just now, when it ordered the breathing soil to attack you, and it moved?”
Yi Sa nodded.
The group from ’96 that perished shortly after entering the cave might have faced such a large-scale attack – following the ancestor’s words, they happily came here thinking they’d found some treasure, unlikely to have brought any proper weapons.
With hundreds of breathing soil tendrils lying in wait, death would come in the blink of an eye.
“Is Taisui also a puppet?”
Yi Sa thought for a moment, correcting herself: “It might not even be that much. It’s just a creature that grows here, and because of the nourishment from the breathing soil, it grew enormous and became many times more powerful, then was used by the ancestor tablet for experiments.”
Experiments?
Zong Hang’s mind stirred, remembering the membrane rooms they’d passed through, with their hanging clusters of different colors – purple-red, blackish-brown, and watergrape color – indeed like different stages of an experiment.
He was starting to understand: “Maybe Taisui never wanted to leave at all. It’s affected by water quality, temperature, and terrain – it would die faster if it left. The one that wants to leave is the ancestor tablet?”
Yi Sa remained silent, but her expression said it all.
Zong Hang thought of the soft-covered booklet: Right, with Taisui’s natural lifespan, it could live for thousands or tens of thousands of years here; but once removed from this environment and taken to the polluted outside world, even when helping recently deceased people revive, it couldn’t last long – three years, five years, at most like Yi Xiao, only about twenty years. So it wasn’t Taisui wanting them to die, but rather they were already dead, and Taisui helped them hang on a bit longer.
Looking at it this way, Taisui seemed like a generous elder, a silent benefactor, and he had just been enthusiastically wielding his flamethrower, wanting to burn it to a crisp…
Zong Hang felt a wave of guilt.
Yi Sa said: “This also explains why this cave needs ground doors, needs to vent impurities, needs air exchange. Taisui has always grown steadily underground, preferring anaerobic environments, disliking ‘disturbing the soil above Taisui’s head’ – we can breathe inside it, which means the fresh air is supplied for here, the ancestor tablet needs it, or more precisely, the combination of ancestor tablet and Taisui spores needs it.”
Zong Hang was starting to piece things together: “When you say experiments, you mean the ancestor tablet trying to combine with the spores, which means the ancestor tablet alone can’t do much…”
Yi Sa nodded: “The ancestor tablet seems to have strong control, consciousness, and intelligence, but aside from that, it can’t do much on its own. Like those three pieces taken out by the ancestor, they’re just ancestral tablets, like connection relay stations. Their only function is to help the ancestor tablets here control water ghosts when pressed against their foreheads underwater, and even then only for an hour or two… It and Taisui are like the ‘bei’ in ‘langbeiweijian’ – you understand?”
He did understand this idiom: ‘bei’ has the brains and can strategize but can’t live or act independently, and must rely on the wolf’s support to work together.
Yi Sa said: “Actually, our previous deductions were quite close, we just got the main culprit wrong. This drifting cave is like a cage, the ancestor tablet is attached to Taisui and can’t leave either, until it discovered Taisui was entering a period of decline.”
The spores began to appear – this was Taisui’s cycle, and also the ancestor tablet’s hope.
Zong Hang looked up at the water grape-colored clusters overhead: “If the color depth represents the degree of integration, is this the lightest?”
Yi Sa also looked up: “The initial integration probably only reached this level. The ancestors of the three families could only be grafted with this type. Remember the scene on the ceramic pot in the ancestral hall showing the ancestors kneeling before the drifting cave? And in the legends passed down by the three families, the ancestors lived very long lives, all over a hundred years?”
He did remember, but Zong Hang was puzzled: “What does this tell us?”
“It suggests the ancestors might not have been revived, dead people. They naturally had long lifespans, and after being grafted, lived even longer. That’s why they worshipped what was inside as divine, and the term ‘water grapes’ might have originated from this. They were instructed to take out three ancestor tablets, essentially carrying communication tools connected to the drifting cave – but they never knew the truth from beginning to end. The ancestors were also kept in the dark.”
Zong Hang understood: “So the mutations were caused by the ancestor tablet? The ancestors of the three families barely mutated because what they were grafted with was mainly Taisui, with minimal ancestor tablet content?”
Yi Sa’s heart was pounding as she quickly continued: “But the ancestor tablet soon discovered that with living people being grafted and a low degree of integration with Taisui, even using those three tablets, it could only influence consciousness briefly without complete control, at most creating informants. This wasn’t what it wanted, so later it struck decisively because dead people were much easier to control than living ones.”
Zong Hang drew in a sharp breath.
No wonder in ’96, so many people met with disaster. And by ’96, considerable time had passed since the beginning – the integration between ancestor tablets and spores should have been more advanced, so when that group was lured in for “reforging,” what they were grafted with was naturally an upgraded version.
What I hadn’t anticipated was that this time there were accidents: setting aside those who died, even the survivors showed all sorts of bizarre conditions – some like Yi Sa only had blood vessel bursts as rejection reactions with their minds almost unaffected, while others like Jiang Jun had completely deformed brains.
His thoughts were somewhat jumbled: “But even so, Jiang Jun still opened the Golden Soup Cave at the bottom of Poyang Lake.”
Yi Sa said: “Yes after it completed integration with the spores, only Taisui’s remains were left here, nothing worth staying for. It needed a new experiment site to study exactly what kind of person it wanted – Jiang Jun wasn’t perfect yet, because someone like him would only be locked up as a monster. He still lacked a normal appearance. Perhaps the ancestor tablet’s brain with a human appearance would be perfect.”
Zong Hang suddenly thought of something: “So is this integration complete? Could it have already started on Jiang Jun’s side?”
Yi Sa looked around: “We just need to check these membrane rooms. If they’re all full, it probably hasn’t started yet.”
Speaking of this, she couldn’t help looking back toward where they came from: “Uncle Panling and the others, why hasn’t there been any sound from them?”
Now that she mentioned it, Zong Hang found it strange too.
Just earlier, Ding Panling had made such a big fuss about burning them to death, why was there suddenly no sound? Letting them walk freely through these membrane rooms.
The two cautiously made their way back through the tunnel, using their flamethrowers to clear the path.
The water hadn’t risen much more, only flooding half the tunnel. As soon as Yi Sa surfaced, she saw a grotesquely deformed corpse floating nearby, nearly crying out in shock.
The face was unrecognizable, but judging by the clothing, it was probably someone from the three families. Looking around, there were several other charred bodies.
Zong Hang suddenly nudged her and pointed in a direction.
Following his gesture, she saw Ding Panling sitting on a protruding rock by the cavern wall. His fuel tank and flamethrower had been removed and set aside. Next to him lay two people bound together like zongzi – the still unconscious Ding Yudie and Yi Yunqiao.
It seemed quite a lot had happened outside while they were in the membrane rooms.
Yi Sa didn’t dare move rashly, but Ding Panling looked up at her and said: “Sasa, it’s me.”