The Tomb That Buried Humanity

For something like that, the village chief would not even make a special trip to the authorities to report it.

When he submitted the village’s population and household records to the headman the following year, all he had to do was cross the names of the dead off the register. That was the end of it.

In the end, a straw mat and a pit of earth became the final resting place of his grandparents.

After that, his uncle and aunt never had another child. They treated Tong Jialiang as their own.

Then, one day, they suddenly received word from their older cousin, along with the supplies he had sent to help support the household.

His cousin said he had found a good master—a fine young master.

He also said that his young master had given him a name: Baojian. From then on, that was what he would be called.

Tong Jialiang remembered how, that day, his uncle and aunt shut themselves in their room and held the things Baojian had sent while they wept for a long, long time.

After that, his uncle and aunt worked hard in the fields every day, while Baojian occasionally sent them aid. Their life was still poor by any measure, but the three of them all felt that these were the best days they had ever known.

As long as they could go on like this, perhaps their lives would remain so peaceful forever.

It seemed that ever since his grandparents had disappeared, their days had only grown better and better.

As for the occasional bullies and louts he encountered outside, and the times they pushed him around—that was merely a little seasoning in an otherwise peaceful life.

Even the finest spring days had their cloudy spells, after all.

So long as he was not forced to live forever in a hopeless, bone-chilling winter, what did any of that matter?

That was what Tong Jialiang once believed.

Until the day he spent the night in that small mountain settlement, nearly cut off from the outside world, and was captured along with its villagers and taken to the abyssal mine.

That strange mine, and those stones that could turn people into creatures neither human nor ghost, were like an invisible hand. In an instant, they dragged him back to the edge of that cliff on that long-ago night.

Not long after they had all been forced into the mine and ordered to dig those stones, they discovered that something was wrong with them.

The older villagers who were working alongside Tong Jialiang immediately made the younger children stop. They gathered the children together and moved them as far away from the stones as possible. Then they took off their own clothes and wrapped the children tightly in their arms.

They hoped that, this way, the children might avoid being harmed by the poisonous stones as much as possible.

As for themselves, they dug with all their might, striving to mine just a little more in hopes of satisfying the immortals outside and earning their freedom before it was too late—so that they could get the children out alive.

But they dug and dug.

They never received the words they were waiting for: You can come out now.

Instead, their bodies began to rot, and their organs began to slip free of them.

What awaited them was the terror of watching their own intestines spill from their anuses before death.

It was the breakdown that came from watching their skin peel away piece by piece, leaving them as true masses of raw flesh, stripped of all skin.

Even the children they had protected so carefully developed horrifying symptoms of their own, to varying degrees.

Only Tong Jialiang’s symptoms were the mildest.

Only his expression remained the most numb and vacant, making him appear the calmest of them all.

Everyone around him, adults and children alike, broke down in the face of that hellish spectacle. They sobbed, screamed, and wailed.

Blood from every person pooled across the ground, and people lay helplessly in it, drowning in despair.

Later, one after another, they all died.

What no one knew was that many of them had chosen death for themselves.

Tong Jialiang still remembered the first person to beg for it. He was an elderly man who cradled one of his own fallen eyeballs in his hands and dragged along the intestines that had spilled from his body as he crawled forward, trembling, begging someone to give him a quick death.

He was so weak that he no longer even had the strength to take his own life.

But everyone else had fallen into a frenzy of collapse and delirium. No one could hear his plea—or perhaps no one wanted to hear it.

In the end, he turned his despairing gaze toward Tong Jialiang.

After all, at the time, Tong Jialiang appeared to be the calmest and most normal of them all. He seemed the most likely to agree.

Faced with the old man’s desperate plea for death, Tong Jialiang felt as though another person had taken control of his body.

That person manipulated his limbs, picked up the iron pickaxe they had been using to mine, and raised it high above the old man.

Seeing this, the old man seemed to have finally received the release he had longed for. With an expression of relief, he closed his eyes.

The pickaxe came down hard.

The old man’s hot, salty blood mixed with tears and ran into Tong Jialiang’s mouth.

The people around them, already broken and deranged, showed no fear when they saw what he had done.

They became excited.

One by one, they dragged their feeble bodies toward him, crawling awkwardly and desperately, begging him to give them the same release.

They wanted to die while they still looked like human beings.

They did not want to die as things that were neither human nor ghost.

For a moment, that mine became hell brought into the mortal world.

It was a tomb where humanity itself had been buried.

Though Tong Jialiang kept his mouth tightly shut, though he clenched his teeth until they hurt, he could not stop the warm, salty taste of blood from seeping in.

He knew there had never been another person.

From beginning to end, the one who swung the pickaxe like an executioner and slaughtered them all had been him.

Later—

Later, he had intended to end his own life as well.

But whenever he thought of his uncle and aunt, whenever he remembered the resolve he had made at the edge of that cliff, the pickaxe in his hands would falter. He could not bring it down on himself with the same decisiveness he had shown when ending the lives of others.

Tong Jialiang thought that he was truly filthy.

He could bring himself to kill others, but not himself.

He still wanted to live…

“Ah Liang!”

A voice came from the entrance of the mine—the entrance that the so-called immortals had sealed shut.

The voice was so familiar.

It seemed to be telling him that he was saved.

But who could have known that, to him, this was the one voice he had least wanted to hear at that moment?

In that instant, Tong Jialiang’s thoughts became a tangled mess, twisting chaotically through his mind. It was as though a fire had ignited in his heart and was burning wildly.

Something seemed to be shattering soundlessly.

It had only been moments ago that he had killed them all…

Why couldn’t that voice have come sooner?

Why couldn’t it have waited until after he had died too?

Why did it have to come when he was the only one left—when he was the only one whose hands were stained with the blood of them all?

In the end, it was still because he was powerless…

If only he had possessed the strength to save them.

If only he had been able to take them all out of that place.

If only he had possessed the power to stop them when they were captured…

Why were there so many things in this world that lay beyond his ability to change?

Why, when he had clearly been reaching out with all his strength—as though he were about to touch the light, as though he had already touched it—was it all still useless?

There was always a hand desperately dragging him downward.

He had tried to break free.

But why was he so weak?

Why could he never tear himself loose?