Dragon Vein Storyteller

Chapter 12 Bridge of Helplessness

"This bridge... has become petrified." I straightened up, my voice involuntarily lowering. "The wood was buried in the underground river, and it didn't rot for thousands of years. Instead, it was gradually permeated by the minerals in the water, replacing the wood entirely with petrified stone. This isn't rotten wood; it's petrified wood."

"How many years would that take?" Sanjin asked.

"How would I know?" I shook my head. "This youngest one, with its jade-like appearance, could easily be worth hundreds or even thousands!"

Feng the Cripple limped onto the bridge, glanced into the river, and suddenly cursed, "Something's wrong!"

His face changed drastically, and his lame leg trembled slightly on the bridgehead. I leaned closer and held the torch out to the river. The water was as black as ink, and the torchlight couldn't penetrate it at all, only reflecting a few blurry images of us. But the reflections were wrong... We were clearly looking down at the water, yet the faces in the reflections were all looking upwards, as if there was a row of people underwater, staring straight up at us across the surface.

My heart skipped a beat.

I blinked and looked again. I blinked, but the "me" in the reflection didn't. Still looking up, motionless.

A chill ran down my spine, and I blinked again. The reflection remained still. It just tilted its head back, as if waiting for me to look at it.

Then, the corners of its mouth curled up slightly.

It looks like a smile.

"Don't look into the water!" I snapped, shoving the chick's head down. He hadn't seen it yet, didn't know what I was afraid of, but I wouldn't give him a chance to see. Some things, once seen, are unforgettable.

Baldy Liao and Sanjin quickly looked away. Crippled Feng didn't move, squinting as he glanced at the river again before slowly turning his gaze back, his face even more somber than before. He had seen it, but he said nothing.

I looked down at the bridge again. The bridge's curvature was wrong; it wasn't flat, nor was it a simple arch. Instead, it undulated slightly, like a snake that had been stretched straight but not completely straightened, with a final curve remaining along its spine. The direction of the water flow under the bridge was also wrong... Normally, river water flows parallel to the bridge, but this river's water drew an arc around the bridge, as if it had been deliberately guided to flow under the bridge and then back, forming a closed loop.

Wooden bridge, black water, dead end.

My heart skipped a beat.

"This bridge is a feng shui formation." I swallowed hard, my voice cracking. "It's a water formation in the Five Elements. The bridge is wood, the river is water, water nourishes wood, and wood overcomes earth... The bridge is built on earth, and wood overcomes earth, which means the earth's energy is sealed off. Once you cross this bridge, the earth's energy is completely cut off, the earth's veins are blocked, and the life force of the living will be gone."

I paused, then said, word by word, "In other words, from a feng shui perspective, crossing this bridge means you're already dead."

As soon as the words were spoken, the river surface suddenly bulged upwards from below, as if something enormous was turning over underwater. The bulging water overflowed the riverbank and flooded the flower bushes on the other side. The petals, wet with water droplets, suddenly brightened for a moment, then quickly dimmed, as if the river had swallowed their light.

"Brother..." The little chick suddenly reached out and grabbed my sleeve.

His small hands were icy cold, his knuckles gripping my sleeve so tightly they wrinkled it. His teeth chattered, and he could barely speak, his voice carrying a heavy fear that a nine-year-old shouldn't have: "Brother, they... they're laughing in the water..."

He pointed to the river under the bridge.

I looked down following his finger.

The river was still dark and murky, but those eerie blue phosphorescent lights were slowly drifting across the surface, illuminating a small patch of water. It was on that illuminated patch that I saw the group of people.

Their bodies were completely submerged in the water, only their heads were visible. Heads were tilted back, faces upwards, mouths slightly open, bobbing in the water like corpses that had been submerged for countless years. Their eyes were open, only the whites of their eyes visible, their pupils rolled back. The torchlight swept across the water, illuminating the face of one of them.

It was that burly man.

His facial features were still the same, but the skin on his neck...

No. It's not skin.

His neck, from his collarbone up to his ears, was covered with a fine, silvery-gray substance. It wasn't applied or glued on; it grew from within his skin. Patches, neatly arranged, with slightly upturned edges, and a moist sheen.

Scales.

The group of people had scales growing on their necks, arms, and faces. They were soaking in the river, their bodies being pushed and swayed by the current, the skin on their wrists shimmering underwater, revealing even more scales beneath their wrist bones. A viscous, transparent liquid seeped between the scales, stretching into thin threads that floated on the surface, gleaming coldly.

In the fleeting moment the torchlight swept across us, I saw the burly man's lifeless eyelids suddenly twitch. Then, his head slowly turned towards us in a posture completely contrary to human joint angles… His neck twisted into three folds underwater, the scales squeezed up, revealing the pink flesh beneath. The sound of his neck joints grinding together was faint and fragmented, like someone picking at a handful of dry corn kernels.

I just watched them, feeling completely cold inside.

From the Infant Spirit Tower to the Earth Dragon to the Tai Sui, I thought I had encountered the most evil things from the depths of the earth each time. But with every turn, what lay ahead crushed the previous terrors into dust.

Tai Sui is not food at all. It is a medicinal ingredient.

First, they feed the human flesh until the person goes mad, then they soak the human bones until they soften, and finally, in this River of Oblivion, the person grows a body covered in scales. This river is the pool where people are pickled.

Once their scales are fully grown, they will no longer be human; they will be creatures raised in this White Emperor City, whose purpose is unknown.

A very faint sound suddenly came from the bridge.

jingle.

Ring. Ring.

The sound came from the middle of the bridge. Several bronze trees stood on the bridge, not very tall, only about waist-high, with branches extending haphazardly from the trunks, each branch adorned with a bronze bell. The bells were strangely shaped, not round, but flat, like two pieces of bronze joined together, their edges sharp enough to cut. Phosphorescent light flickered among the bells, occasionally striking one and producing a very soft, delicate sound, like countless mouths chuckling.

I raised the torch and shone it upwards.

The trunk of the bronze tree was covered with inscriptions. They weren't Chinese characters, nor were they seal script; they were symbols I'd never seen before. The strokes were twisted and crooked, not like human writing, but more like the slime left by some kind of mollusc that crawled across the tree, gleaming with a bluish-green light in the firelight.

"I've got it." I glanced back at the darkness, then at the group of scaly figures swimming in the water below the bridge, my voice barely audible. "One step across this bridge means death. One step back means survival. But we..."

I didn't finish speaking.

Because I don't know if we have any other options.

The road we came by was blocked by a landslide. The underground dragon is still waiting outside. Besides this bridge, this Bridge of Helplessness that only leads in and never out, where else can we go? We are alive, but to survive, we have to walk on the bridge of the dead. This is probably the most vicious joke in the underground world... It sets the path to life on the path to death, leaving you to choose whether to die standing still or walk and die on the bridge.

I stepped onto the bridge.

The moment my foot touched the jade-like wooden plank, a hissing sound and a plume of white smoke rose from beneath my foot. The phosphorescent flames floating on the bridge, like venomous snakes whose tails had been stepped on, leaped up from the cracks in the wood, burning fiercely against the sole of my shoe. The white smoke wasn't hot; it was cold, like an ice dagger slicing upwards from my ankle, making me gasp in pain. Immediately afterward, the bronze bells in the middle of the bridge began to shake wildly… ding-a-ling… a dense, torrential tinkling, like countless mouths screaming simultaneously. My mind went blank, my vision blurred, the world spun, my stomach churned, and I almost vomited.