My girlfriend is a Miao demon.

Everyone has regrets in life that are etched in their memory. If I knew that was the last time I saw you, would I want to look at you carefully and remember you, or would I want to hug you tightly and warm you, or would I want to let you go and forget you a second sooner...?

For a long, long time afterward, Xiang Nanfeng repeatedly recalled the moment he parted with Luyao, but he could never remember the details of their last meeting. He only knew that their last encounter was in that eerie, foggy, ancient castle deep within Shounan Mountain, where they argued and struggled over whether or not they should climb the tower. Xiang Nanfeng shook off Luyao's hand; he regretted it so much, so deeply!

He only took two steps forward.

Nomads Go on a Party 2012.01.01 00:48

"I never imagined, I never would have imagined, that a huge hole would appear in the ground of that castle. Yes, I fell in, I fell in all by myself!"

Xiang Nanfeng didn't grab Gui Luyao's hand. In fact, for a moment, he wasn't even sure if Luyao had reached out in time. He only heard heart-wrenching screams coming from the cave entrance, the sound gradually fading from clear to indistinct.

Xiang Nanfeng felt a chill in his heart; he knew it was all over.

In the cramped, enclosed space before him, only the stark white light illuminated a gray streak hurtling upwards. His entire body was, for the first time in history, being drawn by gravity, undergoing a complete and utter freefall.

The fall lasted too long, long enough for him to recall half his life, to remember every second he spent with Luyao, their meeting and their love. But all those memories would eventually turn into agonizing bewilderment amidst the fear. Xiang Nanfeng closed his eyes, silently bidding farewell to the world with boundless regret, resentment, and sorrow.

Suddenly, however, he felt a powerful frictional force begin to generate from his legs, hips, and entire back. His lumbar spine was suddenly subjected to enormous pressure, which almost made him faint, and then he actually fainted completely.

"Where am I? Where am I? Ah!"

After an unknown amount of time, Xiang Nanfeng awoke from his unconsciousness. He was certain that his consciousness had been restored by the intense pain in his entire back and lower back. His back was burning, and his lumbar spine was throbbing with pain.

Did I break my back?

Xiang Nanfeng carefully twisted his waist; it hurt, but it was nothing serious—just a bruise.

The world around him was pitch black, and he realized he couldn't see anything. His memories gradually returned, and he remembered that he had fallen into a hole from the front hall of the castle. So he started calling out for Luyao, but after a long time, only his own deafening echo could be heard; he couldn't hear Luyao's reply at all.

Enclosed, cramped, and dark spaces always make people feel uneasy, but fortunately, Xiang Nanfeng doesn't have claustrophobia.

He first needs to understand his own situation.

It looked like a vertical shaft. Yes, something with a vertical shaft structure. The rapidly rising gray light around him must have been the gray bricks on the inner wall of the shaft as he was in free fall. As for those gray bricks, Xiang Nanfeng touched them with his hand; the ground was rough and surprisingly dry.

Oh, where's all that sticky silt? Could it be...?

"ah."

Suddenly, a sharp pain came from between his fingers, and Xiang Nanfeng felt that his fingers had probably been pierced by something sharp.

It was a headlamp, fragments of a headlamp. Xiang Nanfeng first reached his hand to his head and touched the lampshade; sure enough, the lampshade was long gone, and the bulbs were scattered and broken. He put his fingers in his mouth; the salty, metallic taste of blood completely sobered him up. The shaft he had fallen into, at least in its lower half, was probably shaped like an arc.

The burning pain in my back must be because the enormous friction between my body and the curved inner wall of the shaft at the bottom offset the kinetic energy of free fall, saving my life.

Xiang Nanfeng subconsciously reached out to touch the wound on his back. He tried to turn over, but this time, as soon as he raised his hand, his arm got stuck in the wall bricks in front of his chest.

Good heavens, what kind of shaft is this? It's so narrow!

He quickly tried to feel the walls of the pitch-black shaft with his arms to gauge the width of the space.

Desperate, the shaft was perhaps only half a meter in diameter, or even narrower, barely enough to fit his body. He was now completely stuck inside, unable to move. This reminded him of the infamous 1989 Japanese unsolved case—the body found in a women's toilet urinal:

Naoyuki Sugano, a young employee of a nuclear power company, was found dead, curled up, inside a U-shaped tube beneath a urinal in a women's restroom. The autopsy revealed that Sugano died of hypothermia, but the widest opening of the U-shaped tube was only 36 centimeters, and it was impossible for a normal adult male to squeeze back in by his own strength.

How exactly did Naoyuki Sugano die? Was he a victim of a psychopath or someone who was murdered by a psychopath?

Clearly, if he cannot escape immediately, one day in the future he too will become the protagonist of an unsolved case like Naoyuki Sugano.

After a moment of panic, Xiang Nanfeng began to calmly try to save himself. He used his trembling hands and feet to grope around.

The shaft he fell into had turned into a horizontal alleyway after a curved bend. He couldn't lift his head, let alone turn over, but fortunately, he could still use the strength of his waist and back to move back and forth in the alleyway. Going backward was obviously impossible. Going backward led to the curved shaft, which was the direction he had fallen from. Even if he successfully navigated the curved bend, in such a narrow shaft, he certainly couldn't climb back to the castle's front hall the same way he came.

Therefore, Xiang Nanfeng had no choice but to use the strength of his back and waist to arch forward and move towards the front of his feet, looking for an exit from the alleyway in that direction so that he could escape to safety.

Despite the excruciating pain in his back, Xiang Nanfeng supported himself with his elbows and continued crawling forward. As he crawled, he carefully felt the inner wall of the alleyway with his hands.

This was a straight alleyway of uniform width, paved with blue bricks. These bricks were dry and rough, a stark contrast to the sinkhole castle where Xiang Nanfeng had fallen before. Sweat and blood seeping from his back mingled, clinging to his already damp clothes against his skin.

As he continued crawling, waves of excruciating pain washed over him. He wondered how Gui Luyao was doing, why his cries for help hadn't been answered. Was it because he had fallen too far, or because the building's structure blocked sound waves from traveling upwards, or because Luyao was also in danger?

Xiang Nanfeng was extremely anxious. He dared not think too much and could only curse silently. He cursed whoever wanted to build an ancient castle here and the owner of the castle, hoping to use anger to dilute the fear in his subconscious.

After an unknown amount of time and distance climbed, Xiang Nanfeng suddenly felt an uneven texture on both sides of the alleyway. Clearly, this texture wasn't caused by broken bricks, but rather intentionally created using special molds during the brick-making process. A specially made textured brick? The idiom "Qin bricks and Han tiles" instantly flashed through Xiang Nanfeng's mind.

The phrase "Qin bricks and Han tiles" employs a typical rhetorical device in classical Chinese—intertextuality. It doesn't specifically refer to bricks from the Qin Dynasty and tiles from the Han Dynasty, but rather to bricks and tiles from the Qin and Han periods. The bricks of this era are famous because, whether artificially fired or made of natural stone, the artisans of the time often fired or engraved patterns, characters, or even images on their surfaces. Fired bricks and tiles use relief (positive relief), while engraved stone bricks use intaglio (negative relief).

In the museum, Xiang Nanfeng has seen Han Dynasty portrait bricks with various themes many times. However, due to limited preservation conditions, most of the Qin and Han Dynasty bricks and tiles that have survived more than 2000 years of history to this day are tomb bricks that were buried deep underground when they were first made. Therefore, this has left later generations with an inaccurate but deeply ingrained impression—that places with textured bricks are tomb chambers or tomb passages.

This discovery excited him. He quickly and carefully touched and examined the texture of the blue bricks on both sides of the passageway. These were indeed patterned bricks, completely different from all the previous bare, flat bricks, and the patterns on the bricks seemed to be…

It looks like a circle?

A bumpy, circular ring?

Xiang Nanfeng was no ordinary young man; he spent the first 18 years of his 25 years of life living at the Wangshan City Children's Welfare Institute. Besides orphans like him, that place housed many other children abandoned by their parents because of disabilities, and among them, of course, were blind people. Therefore, Xiang Nanfeng knew Braille.

There is a basic Braille training method called "six dots." It involves touching six raised dots to train blind people to perceive the different structures of words made up of these raised dots.

Xiang Nanfeng had mastered this training method since childhood, so even now, in the pitch-black mysterious tunnel, he could still quickly and accurately interpret and memorize these uneven patterns.

This is a pattern of three interlocking rings. Each ring is composed of small, raised bands, which don't resemble individual dots but rather ears of wheat, tiny diagonal lines, or small parallelograms. Yes, that's the pattern.

As he touched and memorized the patterns, he didn't have time to ponder their meaning. But he soon noticed that since the pattern appeared, the distance between the brick joints had increased, indicating that the size of the individual bricks had grown. At the same time, the pattern started appearing repeatedly after appearing once. This subtle change immediately stirred up great hope in his heart. The blue bricks had patterns on them; did this foreshadow that the exit was not far away?

The southerly wind began to climb faster, and sure enough, shortly afterward, he vaguely felt a wind blowing from beneath his feet:

The wind, that's the wind we haven't heard in so long!

A brick wall blocked the way, but the long-awaited breeze was seeping out from the cracks in the wall.

Xiang Nanfeng realized that the shaft and tunnel he had fallen into were actually ventilation channels for the underground space beneath his feet, and the brick wall blocking his way was none other than a ventilation opening made of blue bricks.

Xiang Nanfeng pulled his right leg to its limit, pressing it against the inner wall of the passageway, and then spread his arms and shoulders wide, wedging them in the center of the passageway. Then, he used all his strength to twist his waist and push forward:

"Bang! Bang! Bang!"

With three loud bangs, he kicked open the brick ventilation shaft, shattering the blue bricks blocking his way.

"It's out! It's out!"

He continued crawling forward, and soon the hard gray brick alleyways on both sides and above disappeared. Apart from the ground, it seemed like there was nothing to feel around him. He lay on the ground, still trying to feel around with his hands, but this time he really couldn't feel anything. Although it was still dark before his eyes, the alleyway that had enveloped his body had completely vanished.

Xiang Nanfeng knew that he had entered a completely new space. This was no longer the misty, cold, and damp ancient castle. But where was he?

Xiang Nanfeng first curled up, then stretched and tried to stand up by touching the wall. If the shaft and passage he had passed through earlier were like the tomb passage of an ancient tomb, then wasn't this stone chamber the tomb chamber where the coffin was placed? He moved slowly in the stone chamber, supporting himself on the wall.

Suddenly, two blue sparks flashed in the center of the dark stone chamber!

"Who! Who's there!"

The extreme fear lurking within the confined space erupted in that instant, transforming into a deafening scream, but just as the scream was about to be uttered, it got stuck in his stiff throat.

Xiang Nanfeng didn't cry out; he didn't dare make a sound. He instinctively pressed himself against the wall, staring dumbfounded at the dark, empty space ahead. At that moment, the spot where the spark had just been struck slowly began to burn, a flame that gradually transformed from a tiny spark into a flickering candlelight.

It turned out to be a red candle that had been quietly lit.

"Who? Who are you?"

The red candle illuminated a bright red cloth, the dazzling light stinging his eyes. For a moment, he thought the cloth was floating in the air. But after blinking and looking more closely, he saw that in the center of the stone chamber stood a bride dressed in a wedding robe, vest, and skirt. The bride held a pipa in her left hand, and her head and face were completely covered by the bright red veil.

Looking further down, the bright red embroidered robe is decorated with auspicious patterns of phoenixes perched on paulownia trees, yet the magnificent attire bears the faint marks of time.

It's a ghost! It must be a ghost!

"Don't come any closer! Don't come any closer!"

Xiang Nanfeng retreated in fear, only to be met by the female ghost who pressed closer and closer.

In the flickering candlelight, he didn't even see the female ghost move before she fell into his arms.

"South Wind, hurry!"

"Luyao? How did you get here? What happened to you? What's with this outfit? And where did you get that pipa?!"

"Stop asking, Nanfeng, just come with me!"

"Where are you going? Have you found the way?"

While Xiang Nanfeng was still in shock, he felt his wrist being gripped painfully.

The pain was unlike the force of a human hand; it felt more like being gripped by a cold, hard object, as if Luyao's hand was wearing a hard glove. Xiang Nanfeng instinctively looked down, only to be met with a horrifying sight. What was gripping her wrist wasn't Luyao's right hand at all; it was clearly a stark white skeleton—the bloody bones of a human right hand!

"what……"

Xiang Nanfeng shouted, but then heard a scream from beneath the veil, the sound clearly belonging to Lu Yao:

"It's here, it's here!"

Xiang Nanfeng struggled with all his might to shake off the hand that was gripping his wrist, and the red cloth covering the ghost bride's head and face was also torn off in the extreme pulling.

Mao Xigu Master 2012.01.01 00:55

"Is that Gui Luyao? Did you see a female ghost or Gui Luyao?"

Nomads Go on a Party 2012.01.01 00:57

"Heh. I've never told anyone about my memories after falling into the shaft. Because when I woke up in the hospital again, I even doubted whether it was real. I thought it was too absurd. I doubted myself countless times. Maybe I never fell into any shaft. Maybe I had already passed out when the copper door collapsed."

Mao Xigu Master 2012.01.01 00:59

"But you remember very clearly that you didn't faint, that you fell into the shaft, that you entered the stone chamber, and that you saw a handless ghost bride with Lu Yao's voice, didn't you? Xiang Nanfeng, what exactly did you see? Was the face under the veil really Gui Lu Yao's?"