radicalducati Chapter 452 The Mine!?
Chapter 452 The Mine!?
Before the morning mist had completely dissipated, Nie Lingfeng had already led Chen Duo to the gate of the iron foundry. Liu San leaned against an old wooden stake inside the gate, clutching an iron rod he had dug out from a corner of the factory. Seeing him arrive, he slung the iron rod over his shoulder, muttered "Let's go," and turned to lead the way down the mountain road behind the town.
Liu San's spirits were much better than yesterday. After washing his face, most of the grime that had accumulated on his forehead for days was gone, revealing skin that still had the sallow color of long-term malnutrition, but the unfocused look in his eyes had become more concentrated. His steps were also much steadyer; when walking on the mountain path, he would occasionally stop to use his iron rod to push aside the drooping branches of the bushes ahead, turn back to wait for Nie Lingfeng and Chen Duo to catch up before continuing.
"I used to walk this road every day," he said, parting a layer of vines. His voice was clearer than yesterday. "The miners would set off from town every morning, walk forty minutes to the mine entrance to change shifts, and then walk another forty minutes back after work. I've been walking this road for over twenty years; I could find it with my eyes closed."
Chen Duo walked two steps behind him, her gaze mainly fixed on the ground—the dirt roads, compacted by shoes and tire tracks, meandered through the grass, the shrubs on either side having lost most of their leaves since winter began, leaving only thin, intertwined bare branches, like fine lines drawn with a hard pen on white paper. Occasionally, her gaze would rise to sweep across the hillsides on either side, then quickly fall back down. Xiao Yun was with Lu Linglong today, and she walked with lighter steps than usual, her hands empty.
The mountain path Liu San had described wound its way through the trees a few times before starting uphill. The slope wasn't steep, but the distance was longer than they had estimated when they walked from town the day before. By the time they reached the mine entrance, it was completely bright outside. Sunlight streamed up from behind the eastern ridge, casting a long, slanted shadow on the pile of rubble surrounding the entrance.
The entrance to the mine was blocked off with thick wooden stakes and barbed wire, but most of the barbed wire's anchor points had loosened, and a gap had been torn in the lower right corner, large enough for a person to bend down and crawl through. Several strands of dark-colored fabric hung from the broken ends of the wire at the edge of the gap, indicating that someone had crawled through here not long ago; the marks left by the fabric scraping against the wire were still fresh.
"Has someone gone in?" Nie Lingfeng squatted down and glanced at the strand of fiber, rubbing it with his fingers.
"It could be other survivors from town." Liu San stood a few steps behind him, gripping the iron rod tightly in his hand, the veins on the back of his hand taut. "After the accident, some people tried to hide in the mine. It's deep and dark inside, so it's not easy for those things to find you if you crawl in. But later—"
"What happened next?"
"Later, someone said that there were those things deep inside the mine too," Liu San said in a low voice, as if afraid of being heard in the darkness of the cave. "Several people who hid inside never came out again."
Nie Lingfeng tossed the slivers of fiber he'd plucked from his fingertips into the pile of rubble at his feet, stood up, pulled the powerful flashlight from its pouch at his waist, and turned it on. As the beam of light pierced the cave entrance, it cut a narrow, dust-laden path through the darkness, the light falling on a rough rock wall covered in a thin layer of dark gray moss.
"You all wait outside. I'll go in and check."
"Brother Lingfeng—" Chen Duo took half a step forward.
"I'll be back soon." Nie Lingfeng's tone didn't sound like he was discussing it. He shone the beam of his flashlight further inside, squeezed through the gap in the barbed wire, and his boots sank into the loose soil and rubble inside the hole, making a muffled, soft scraping sound.
Chen Duo didn't go any further. She stood outside the cave entrance, her shoulder leaning against the wooden stake, her gaze fixed on the figure whose beam of light from the flashlight was gradually penetrating deeper into the cave. Her fingers hung at her sides, her thumb gently pressing the first joint of her index finger—the posture looked relaxed, but the small patch of skin pressed by her fingertip had already turned white.
The beam of the flashlight moved forward through the mine tunnel, and Nie Lingfeng's figure became a moving dark outline in the light, getting smaller and smaller, until it turned into a side passage, where the light was cut off by the corner of the rock wall.
The mine shaft was wider than he had imagined. The main tunnel was nearly two meters wide and high enough for an adult to walk upright. The excavation marks on the walls were old; in some places, the chisel marks had been blurred by time and moisture, with only rows of neat chisel marks visible in certain dry depressions—remnants of early mining methods. Later, with the introduction of mechanical mining, some sections of the tunnel were widened, and traces of explosives and drill bit marks could be seen on the cross-sections. The old and new mining methods alternated on the rock walls, like an old book turned over by people from different eras, each page bearing different handwriting.
There was a persistent, slightly damp chill in the air, flowing along the ground at ankle height. As he went deeper, something heavier began to mix into that damp chill—metallic. It wasn't the acidic rusty smell of pig iron, but a dry, crisp, slightly sandy undertone, smelling like the scent of rain-washed ore drying in a well-ventilated place.
The fork in the road appeared about a hundred meters down the mine shaft. The left passage was narrower than the right, with the rock strata above pressing down even lower. Nie Lingfeng bent down and leaned in a few steps, the beam of his flashlight sweeping across the rock wall, casting a dark reflection. He withdrew the beam and shone it on the wall of the left passage—the rock strata there differed from the grayish-brown of the main passage, exhibiting a deeper and finer texture, with a fine metallic sheen on the surface, appearing dark silver, slowly brightening and dimming under the flashlight beam, like fragments of stars embedded in stone.
He walked about two hundred steps along this side path. Here, the tunnel suddenly rose to a higher elevation, forming an irregular dome-shaped space, like a giant hand carving out a natural palace deep within the rock strata. The highest point of the dome was about six meters above the ground, and water droplets slowly condensed and dripped from the edge of the rock wall, falling onto the scattered piles of ore on the ground with a rhythmic, almost pendulum-like ticking sound.
The surface color of those ore piles was completely different from what he had seen in the main tunnel. Most of the ore was rusty or dark brown, with coarse impurities and numerous pores. But in the center-left part of this domed space, there was a small pile of ore with an unusual, uniform dark blue sheen on its surface—like the surface of deep water illuminated by moonlight, calm and luminous.