Bo was not quite sure what to expect when they had walked into the tunnel. Perhaps piles of offered riches, moldering away in the dust, or maybe hewn and smoothed down walls lined with faded paintings extolling virtuous kings or terrible punishments for the most wicked of humanity. But instead it was an unadorned tunnel illuminated by fungi that grew in cracks near the ground and along the ceiling. The air smelled medicinal and simultaneously held the more noxious scent of burnt things. Leaning heavily against Rui Yifu, he was relying on the man to keep him going forward even if his feet still moved. Bo felt exhausted, as though every drop of vitality had been wrung from his bones and the only thing keeping him upright and capable of holding the small head in his free arm was sheer tenacity.
His eye kept glancing down at her.
He half expected her dark eyes to open back up and glance at him, or for her to sink her teeth back into his arm. But she was just a pale bloodless head, the only remaining color being her hair.
Could he have stopped anything?
He could not even help Li Chunning.
Something cracked underfoot, granting him a distraction from the swirling black miasma of his own thoughts. He cast his eye downwards and saw a small twig in the scant illumination of the fungi.
The tunnel was beginning to descend downwards on a very slight slope, and as they walked Bo noticed a slow change in their surroundings. The glowing fungus was forming streaks buried between the more oddly bulbous parts of the walls. Their light became more scant and yet there was still enough for Bo to make out shapes slumped against the wall or even on the ground. They were people, of all ages and genders as far as he could tell, decay had a strange way of corroding the true identities of the dead. Most of them seemed to be holding small red clay bowls in their shriveled hands or laps.
"Rui..." Bo's voice came out more hoarsely than he thought it would, a dried crackling in his throat making him wince.
"They're not active," Rui Yifu replied as though he knew what Bo was going to say. "They've probably been in this position for centuries, they're unlikely to start getting up now."
"So they're still alive?"
"...No, I don't think so," Rui Yifu said with a pause for thought.
Bo went quiet rather than press forward with more questions and even then he noticed that the bodies were beginning to change. Rather than simply hold cups, as they went further down the path some seemed to have long corroded blades sticking from their chests, pinning them to the wall. The bodies had been there for so long that any blood had long ago dried up or coagulated into a hardened substance where the metal met flesh.
Yet even further down, the bodies had become headless things, their removed skulls sitting in their laps as if carefully placed there. The bulbous parts of the walls split, small thick roots emerging to stick into the neck stumps. Other bodies had been completely subsumed into the roots, with an arm or a foot sticking out from the mess to suggest anyone had ever been there.
"What, why are these bodies here?" Bo asked softly.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Rui Yifu's hand tightening on his wrist, pulling him more firmly against the shark's body. "At one point, human sacrifice was common. In the Ancient Dynasty and in the early years of the Four Kingdoms. Perhaps these people were willing sacrifices to what lays below, or maybe this was a punishment for some unknown crime. Or both," he explained. "Look." He pointed ahead with his somewhat-free hand at the path ahead. It was descending further, this time with actual stairs. The trickle of light from the fungi had vanished and as far as Bo could tell had been replaced with drifting tiny stars that shed a pallid weak light in the darkness.
How much farther down would they need to go? How far had they already descended?
He looked back at the bulbous walls and as if a skin had been removed from his eyes he could make out the textures on it, the smooth yet rippling bark of a tree. Had the roots of the willows outside dug themselves all the way down, seeking the bodies of the dead for sustenance? His thoughts drifted back to the morbid name of the trees, 'bone willows'. Perhaps they weren't named for how they looked after all.
Maybe it was better Zhu'er was not around to see any of this.
When they stepped away from the bodies and fungi onto the stairs, Bo had expected things to get much darker. Somehow the small drifting lights provided enough illumination that he could see each step they went down. He turned his head to Rui Yifu, who was studiously examining the path ahead of them. Then he looked ahead once more. The walls abruptly stopped ten steps down.
What they had stepped into was a massive cavern, one that Bo had trouble wrapping his mind around. It was as though the stairs had suddenly plunged into an infinite abyss that grew steadily beneath the mountain and even the marsh. Even with the drifting lights he could not see where it ended.
There was a sharp gasp. "Bo, look," Rui Yifu gestured again, down over the side of the stairs. He then leaned carefully to allow Bo to glance over the side.
Bo's eye widened.
It had to be very far down. He still could not make out the ground it would be lying upon.
But it was still massive.
It looked roughly like a starved humanoid torso of some sort, with slightly too long arms and its hands vanishing into the darkness. It had no legs, its body warped into a dragon-like long tail that also disappeared further down. Its head, if one could call it that, was a mass of long roots, broken up occasionally by dimly glowing white discs buried into them. Bo felt the weight of the sword at his hip suddenly increase, and his grip on Zhu'er's head tightened. He had seen the body before as a statue outside the mountain.
He recalled something told to him, long ago. That the forms mortals often depict the Divine Siblings in was supposed to be simply like clothes for them, or that it was polite to portray them as humans. That their true forms, as beings who came before humanity, were not human at all.
Bo gazed down at Liu Xie's true form, which laid still and cold so far below, seemed impossible to reconcile with the person who had walked beside them all.
At some point they had started walking again.
But Bo's eye remained on that monstrous form, gradually growing closer and closer with each step.
The closer they got, the easier it was to see that the massive body was made of wood, with long roots emerging from it at random points to dig into the darkened ground, or to trail off and then suddenly climb upwards on nothing to the ground above. It was the same wood that made up the trees above, and that warped the walls of the entry tunnel. It was as still as a statue, and yet the more Bo looked at it, the more his eye began to hurt. The wood seemed to peel back, revealing something else he had no words for.
Even the stairs were not safe from the roots, because soon the two found themselves having to carefully step over torso-thick tendrils and roots the size of his wrist that had millennia to wriggle over the stone. The stairs turned slowly, a slow curl that brought them to ash covered ground and yet another hole. The titanic body loomed over them, and Bo realized he still could not see where it ended. It was partially sunken into the ash that covered the ground in hill sized piles.
The way the body was sprawled upon the ground, with its disc like eyes dully gleaming in the darkness, gave Bo the terrible impression of looking upon a god's corpse.