Old-time musicians

"Is there such a big bend when we came here?" The two girls were startled.

Fan Ning could ask this question, which means that at least he doesn't think so.

[I hope readers will remember our domain name Taiwan Novel Network →𝙩𝙬𝙠𝙖𝙣.𝙘𝙤𝙢]

He immediately turned on the flashlight, and the light only illuminated the nearest twenty stone steps of the corridor.

These steps are not as steep as stairs. They are wide and the height difference between each step is not big. It can be seen that they are still going down and gradually disappear into the deep darkness after turning.

Qiong thought for a while and said: "It should be about the same. In such dim light, who can see it accurately?"

Fan Ning's eyes flashed, holding a crowbar in one hand and a flashlight in the other, he took another step forward.

"Maybe... it was there before?" The two followed, and Xilan also spoke tentatively, "Remember when we came here? First it was a straight flat land, then it was uphill and turned... This means that it was gradually turning, and the amplitude was getting bigger and bigger..."

"Reasonable explanation." Joan nodded, twisted her shoulders to adjust the position of the backpack, and continued calmly, "Carlon, you are walking in the opposite direction now, and you are at the maximum amplitude at the beginning, so compared with when you came here, you may feel that it has become more curved, right, this is not a thing..."

She closed her mouth as she spoke.

At this moment, the area illuminated by the flashlight in Fanning's hand only had a dozen steps!

He walked forward a few more steps, and then the visible steps... there were only four or five steps left.

Anyone with a discerning eye could see this situation... It's not just a bigger curve than before? If it was a corridor when we came here before, it's more like a spiral staircase now.

"This...are we still going forward?" Joan's voice was soft and trembling. "Carlon, as someone who often goes to explore urban ruins, to be honest...those places are mostly scary mentally. As long as you don't casually browse the hidden knowledge carrier or perform unfamiliar secret rituals, there is no real danger...but I'm really a little scared now. What is the situation of your art gallery? If the existence of this underground building is announced, it will definitely become the first urban legend of Uvlansel..."

"If we don't go forward, should we go back?" Fanning glanced at the darkness behind him, "The empty hall is only that big. We don't know how many times we have gone around. There is only one door, unless you smash the hall window and get out of the mud outside the window."

"Keep going forward, everyone be careful, I'll lead the way, Joan will be in the middle, and Xilan will be watching from behind."

Compared to the situation of the route deviation in front of him, Fanning was actually most worried about the glimpse of the witness "True Word Viper" just now.

After being swept by His gaze, I always felt that something inexplicably triggered, but I couldn't say it.

Several people raised their vigilance. Xilan looked at the "Alert Record" again, then loaded the pistol on his waist, and June also held a curse seal. Everyone began to slowly walk down the spiral staircase.

The turning range became larger and larger, and the radius of the spiral staircase became narrower and narrower.

I thought it would take a long time, but the spiral staircase reached the bottom in less than half a minute.

"Another door like this." Fan Ning felt inexplicably creepy when he saw the spherical protrusions on both sides of the double-open door. After hesitating for a while, he still handed the crowbar through the crack of the door and pulled it hard.

Dust was raised, the door opened, and a hall appeared.

The flashlight slightly illuminated the ground behind the threshold, and the three people stepped in one after another.

Fan Ning's first feeling was that this place... was almost like an unfinished building.

This hall is almost the same shape and area as the one above, but there is not only nothing worth noting here, but also no heptagonal floor tiles, hanging candlesticks and windows. It is just a bare underground space with only chaotic soil, sand and broken bricks underfoot.

Joan felt a little less depressed at this time. She tried to adjust the atmosphere and curled her lips and said, "Carlon, your secret underground building is too shabby. Don't mention any powerful ritual objects or other extraordinary items. There is not even a piece of paper. I don't know what to take if I want to bring some adventure souvenirs. How about we pick up a brick and put it in our backpack..."

Fanning ignored her and quickly turned off the flashlight after briefly sweeping around the wall.

With the previous experience, he just wanted to take a general look at the situation, so he naturally wouldn't look for anything carefully. The two girls didn't make the move to stick the lantern to the wall to observe.

But just this brief sweep, Joan, who was watching along, was stunned.

Xilan even walked closer to Fanning and whispered, "Carolan, was my vision blurred just now? Why do I feel... my head is full of question marks now..."

"You are not blurred." Fanning's tone was puzzled, "It's not in your head, but the walls are indeed full of question marks."

These inexplicable scenes just now made him feel confused and irritated, but fortunately he turned off the flashlight in time.

"When did the punctuation mark of question mark appear?" Joan asked a question that was very imaginative, but it didn't seem to be irrelevant when you think about it carefully.

Hilan listed them all: "It was invented by the Janus people of the Western Continent... It comes from the word 'problem' in the ancient Janus language, but this prefix existed in their earlier Gemini language family. At first, it was an abbreviation of the first two letters, and later it became one up and one down, and the second letter became a subscript... Even if we start counting from the evolution to what we see now, it has been at least 1,400 years..."

The two girls seemed to want to continue to discuss or study something in depth, but Fanning grabbed one of them and quickly stopped them.

"Leave here, it feels like this place is not right compared to the hall above, retreat behind the door first."

In Fanning's brief impression of the lighting, the walls of this hall were a bleak white, and there were question marks everywhere like children's graffiti. The color of the question marks was not a strong contrasting color like red or black, but a gray that was only slightly darker than the background board.

In addition to this large area of ​​question marks, there are also some faint traces of light colors on the wall. Just from the impression of that one glance, Fanning felt a little confused. The lost and quiet emotions were turning his inspiration into a contradiction of excitement and withering - the latter brought revelation, and there might also be some symbols of the Lord of Witness on it.

...For example, "watching death" and "flow"?

There are also some strange but inexplicable adjectives, such as the source of weird powers, the words of endless rage, or the abyss of insatiable desire...

It's better not to confirm the strange intuition under the ups and downs of inspiration.

Don't stay here, Fanning can't guarantee that he will come up to see it the next moment.

Several people quickly left this more weird hall, and then Fanning turned on the flashlight again.

"Where is the spiral staircase?" He was completely dumbfounded.

Just like when we first came here: a slowly curved corridor, gentle steps extending downwards, generally neat bricks and stones with occasional looseness, supporting porches distributed every few meters...

"... Carlon." Joan was silent for a few seconds and then called him, "Finally you have encountered the normal scene you want to see, right?"

"... I want to see something normal, yes... but not like this... Do you think it's normal now?"

A dull creaking sound sounded, and Fanning stretched out his arms and pressed the double doors behind that connected to the weird hall hard.

He was already a little dazed by this series of inexplicable things. He blocked the back first, so that if something incomprehensible came out, there might be some sound warning.

"Let's go, be careful." Fanning took the lead to open the way, "Although this corridor now looks exactly the same as when we came, I don't expect to go back to the original place, let's try where we can go first."

The stench became strong again, and after ten minutes or so, he found that he had guessed wrong.

Two meters away from him was a half-fallen door with a very serious erosion. The U-shaped escalator railing opposite the deep well outside the door was clearly visible.

"I'm really back? Damn..." Fanning looked at the two girls beside him one by one.

Because he just had a vague rebellious mentality of "why do I always predict the situation wrong", so he deliberately expected that he could not go back, but he was wrong again.

What is this? Could it be that only one of the two halls is real and the other is an illusion?

"Carlon, why does this deep well feel not as dark as before?" Xilan asked.

"Maybe it's because I stayed in the dark for too long, and my pupils gradually adjusted and adapted." Joan said, "When I visited various remote places in Uvlansel at night before, I also felt that the longer time passed, the better my condition was, and the clearer I could see..."

No... Fanning slowly cast his eyes to the side of the escalator opposite.

There was a candlestick with a similar "anthropomorphic" decorative pattern built in the gap between the bricks and stones.

But... there was no candle.

An idea flashed through Fanning's mind. He took a few steps forward, held the door sill with his hand, stuck his head out of the door, and looked up.

About six or seven meters above the deep well, the burning tallow candle was emitting a dim light!

And the rope used before was still tied to the escalator at one end and fixed on the opposite side at the other end. In his vision at this moment, it was like a black line above the deep well.

...It's really a ghost.

A few minutes later, the three of them returned to the state of climbing the escalator.

Xilan climbed up and checked. The door that the three of them had entered before was indeed six or seven meters high. Half of it was hooked off by Fanning with a crowbar, and it became the same as the door below.

Joan asked, "Carlon, when we went in from the top, did you see the door below?"

Fanning shook his head: "No, the candlelight can't illuminate that far."

"But you shone the flashlight down."

"...The time was too short. I just looked to see if I was almost at the bottom. I really didn't pay attention...In fact, we didn't even find the door above until you reminded us."

"Okay..."

Shiran said, "It's obvious that the passage inside is changing. So it's hard to say whether the door on the wall of the well has changed..."

She glanced at the candlesticks with completely different styles built on the stone bricks of the well wall again.

"But in this case, at least it means that there are indeed two floors of halls just now." Fanning made a decision, "Let's go down and take a look."

The three climbed down again.

The stench flowed in the air, but the atmosphere became quiet temporarily. This time, after a long time, Fanning counted to 1,600 escalators, which was more than 800 meters deep, and finally found the third candlestick at hand and the third door of similar style.

"This distribution is too irregular..." Qiong said, "Why is it that the first two doors are only six or seven meters apart, but this door... we went down a full five hundred meters more?"

"Whatever." Sheeran asked a question he had asked before, "Let's go in and take a look, or... keep facing down?"

"If you can't go down, don't go down..." Qiong said quickly, "It's already too deep. I feel depressed just thinking about it... We all came in just now. Maybe the source of the stench comes from here. ?”

"No, let's go down first and try again." Fan Ning tilted his ears.

"Why?" Joan asked subconsciously.

"I thought I heard the sound of running water."

"Hey, it's true." Xilan also heard it.

"So, go down and take a look first. I suspect it's not far from the bottom. Come back up later."

When everyone descended to a depth of nearly a thousand meters in the deep well, they really reached the bottom.

The escalator ends here. It seems to be an irregularly shaped cave. It is not large in size and is close to the living room of the Xilan family villa.

The temperature was extremely cold, the stench was extremely strong, and several people were shivering a little from the cold.

The light shone in a circle, and everyone found many dense holes all around, which should be naturally formed cracks. They are very narrow, and people either can't get in, or they can't go two meters inside. The sound of running water seems to come from these. Coming from behind the crack.

"Underground river? A polluted underground river?" This was the first guess in several people's minds.

The worrying environmental level of Ufranser and the existence of such polluted water source areas are not surprising.

Fan Ning got close to a crack and shined the flashlight inside. The intricate rock pores were illuminated white and shiny. There were small cracks in the middle of the big cracks, and it was hard to see why.

Maybe the source of this stink really comes from the underground river.

It is still worthy of further study, but this can be considered a preliminary progress.

Several people were about to sit on the ground and relax their numb limbs. Sheeran said: "Look, there is another door here."

Where she illuminated the cave, the originally uneven stone surface was wiped out by artificial traces to create a flat area with a door-shaped pattern on it.

"This...is fake...it must have been painted on." Fan Ning stretched out his hand and pressed it. It was just a stone.

The pattern is not a line outline, but a solid filling. The material seems to be a mixture of some kind of mineral powder and pigment. Under the illumination of the flashlight, a crystal-like blue-purple halo flows out.

"It's strange. What does it mean to draw a door here?" Xilan also looked around, "Is there any mechanism?"

Joan looked at it in surprise for a while and then said: "I may know this style. It's called the 'Dome Door'."

"The door of the dome?" Fan Ning looked at her in surprise, "How do you know, the fragments in your memory? Is this the door of Huita? How come the door of Huita appears here?"

"Don't get excited...it's just a style, a symbol, not a real dome door."

Seeing that the other two people were looking at her, Qiong slowly explained: "I read it in the literature, and it has nothing to do with my own memories. ...Well, the knowledge about the existence of this door may not be as secretive as yours." It is as high as imagined, not even as high as the 'Gate of Broken Keys' or 'Gate of Seven Lights'. It has been mentioned in many occult literature - as a rumored concept or an idealized concept, just like Many folk myths and religions always mention concepts such as 'Death' and 'Heaven'...and these documents agree that there is no key to the 'Dome Door'..."

"Isn't it highly secretive? Is it often mentioned as a concept?"

Fan Ning stared at its clear blue-purple texture: "...So, this is a basic door of Huita, but is it the 'Gate of Broken Keys' or the 'Gate of Seven Lights' that has a higher status?...But, What do you mean it doesn't have a key?"

"No, you understand the opposite..." Joan shook her head back and forth.

“…the Gate of the Dome is considered the highest point a mortal creature can reach in the Tower of Light.”