Passerby: Secret Image of Ancient Scrolls

The whole world was submerged in thick, cold, sunless river silt, and all sounds were sucked away.

It's not silence. It's that the sound itself has died.

The wind is still blowing, but you can't hear the howling; the ice is still cracking, but you can't hear the crisp sound; Old Gu's knees, kneeling on the ice, hit the frozen ground, and the dull thud of bones hitting stones explodes right at your feet, but you feel that the sound is coming from a very, very far away place, through the thick river water and layer after layer of silt, muffled and soft, like someone covering their mouth and crying.

The black mist spread along the spiderweb-like cracks on the ice surface, like ink drops falling into frozen water, moving so slowly it was agonizing, yet it seeped into every nook and cranny.

It washed over the tips of everyone's shoes, over their trouser legs, and over their breath. Wherever it passed, the light beneath the ice gradually dimmed.

It's not that it's getting dark; it's that the light itself is being eaten up by something.

You look at the ice beneath your feet, and at the things beneath it that were originally frozen, blurry, and shapeless, and suddenly you realize—they are moving.

It's not the ice layer that's moving; it's what's inside the ice. Those things that have been frozen for decades, things you thought were long dead or turned into ice shards, are slowly turning over right next to your feet.

Look down, and you'll see another face beneath the ice.

Not just one. There were many. They were stuck beneath the ice, their features blurred like waterlogged paper, their eye sockets sunken into two black holes, all turning toward the living creature on the ice, following the direction of the spreading black mist.

You don't know they're watching you.

No, you know.

You feel your scalp tingling, the hairs on the back of your neck standing on end, and cold sweat trickling down your spine. You dare not lower your head, but you have to.

Because you always feel that the face beneath the ice is a little closer to you.

The black mist in the ice crevice first gathered into tiny, curled-up, childlike figures, and then slowly melted away along the crack.

It didn't dissipate, it melted.

Like a snowman placed in warm water, first the edges become blurred, then the limbs melt, and finally even the outline collapses, turning into a puddle of black water.

The water didn't flow away; it seeped into the ice, into the deeper riverbed, and then reformed from another crack, rising again.

It is forever breaking apart, forever reuniting, forever trapped on this frozen river.

When Lin Jian looked down, she realized that the camera in her arms had long since lost its warmth. The body of the camera was ice-cold, like a piece of iron just pulled out of ice water, but her fingertips were surprisingly hot.

It wasn't the camera's temperature, but her own body temperature. Something was seeping out from between her bones, climbing up her veins, to her palms, to her fingertips, and seeping out from under her nails.

She looked down at her hands.

There was a little bit of dark brown, fine river silt under his fingernails, with a few very fine, bluish-white strands of hair wrapped inside.

She didn't know whose hair it was, and she dared not think about whose hair it was. She rubbed it with her thumb, her nail scraping against her nail, making a faint, dry sound, but the more she rubbed, the more filth appeared, seeping out from under her nails, from the lines on her fingertips, from the pores on the back of her hand, as if it wasn't stuck on, but seeping out from under her skin.

But her hand remained tightly gripping the camera. She hadn't touched the river water, nor the mud. From the moment she stepped onto the ice until now, she had been in the crowd, behind Shen Xun. So where did all this mud come from? And where did all this hair come from?

She looked up abruptly, wanting to call out to Ye Zhuo, but found...

Ye Zhuo was not by her side.

Ye Zhuo stood three steps in front of her, shield held horizontally in front of him, his back ramrod straight.

But she felt Ye Zhuo was very far away.

It felt as far away as if we were separated by an entire river, as far away as if we were standing in a distant windbreak forest, as far away as if we were looking at a faded old photograph.

She opened her mouth to shout, but the sound got stuck in her throat. It wasn't that she couldn't shout; something had swallowed her voice.

She could hear her vocal cords vibrating, her throat moving, and air being forced out of her lungs, hitting her vocal cords. But the sound only reached her own ears, only echoed in her own skull, like being trapped in a sealed jar, muffled, heavy, and shattering at the slightest sound.

Ye Zhuo did not turn around.

The breathing sounds around me started to sound out of place.

She could clearly hear her own breathing, one breath in, one breath out, with a steady rhythm, the air going in and out of her lungs.

But within the gaps in that breath, there were countless lighter, colder breaths rising and falling in sync with her.

She inhaled, and the air followed, the airflow going into her nasal cavity, down her trachea, and filling her lungs.

But the source of that scent wasn't her. As she exhaled, the scent followed her breath—a damp, cold wind carrying the fishy smell of the river—that seeped from between her lips, clung to her cheeks, climbed up to the corners of her eyes, to her temples, and to her scalp.

She inhaled, and the breaths followed.

She held her breath, and the breath pressed against the back of her neck, exhaling cold air into her collar.

She suddenly covered her ears, dug her fingertips into her hair, and pressed them tightly against her ear canals.

The sound of the wind is gone, the sound of breathing is gone, but the sound remains. It's not in the ear, it's in the skull.

It flowed along the blood vessels, crawled along the bone marrow, and echoed softly inside her skull, like someone scraping the bottom of a porcelain bowl with their fingernail, finely, slowly, one stroke after another.

Like the fear that she had kept hidden in her heart for a long time and dared not speak out, it came back to life, had its own breath, had its own heartbeat, and opened its eyes in her mind.

The ice beneath our feet began to soften.

It didn't melt; it was more like the river water had turned into a semi-solidified state.

When you step on the rubber soles, they don't feel hard; instead, they sink in slightly, like stepping into a piece of grease that hasn't completely frozen yet.

When you lift your foot, you can feel the ice surface sucking you down, and countless thin threads are pulled between the sole of your shoe and the ice surface. They are sticky, like syrup, like glue, or like some kind of bodily fluid.

Each time I lifted my foot, it felt as heavy as if it were filled with lead. My trouser legs clung tightly to my calves, as if they were bound by countless cold threads. The more I struggled, the tighter they tightened.

She looked down, but the reflection on the ice wasn't her own.

There is a face beneath the ice.

Not one.

There are many.

They were stacked together, one after another, face to face, eye socket to eye socket, mouth to mouth, like wax figures stuffed into the same mold, their outlines blurred, their features melted, making it impossible to tell who was who.

And her shadow.

Her own shadow stood at the very top of these faces.

Her two feet were pressing on the eye sockets of two faces.

Her shadow is not hers.

She lowered her head, while her shadow raised its head.

Lin Jian suddenly looked up, but there was nothing in front of him.

There was no face, no eyes, and nothing that climbed up the ice.

Only the spreading black mist had already reached above her ankles.

The cold, sticky touch felt like countless half-closed hands gently gripping her bones.

Ye Zhuo's shield was already hanging at his side.

It wasn't that she didn't want to lift it; it was that her arms simply wouldn't obey her commands.

From shoulder blade to fingertips, my entire arm felt like it had been ripped out of its muscles, hanging limply at my side, without even the strength to clench my fist.

The entrenching tool in his fingertips grew heavier and heavier, its head dragging across the ice, leaving a thin white trail.

But she didn't leave.

The blade was moving, and the white marks on the ice were extending, but her feet didn't move.

Something was pulling her head forward, dragging her arm, her shoulder, her whole body, step by step, sliding towards the center of the ice.

She could see that the metal surface of the shield was covered with tiny, bluish-white fingernails.

They weren't hands, they were fingernails. They had no fingers, no palms, just pieces the size of fingernails, like seashells, stuck to the surface of the shield, densely packed, layer upon layer.

They were gently scraping the metal surface, making a tooth-grinding sound that only she could hear.

Squeak, squeak, squeak.

With each sound, a thin white mark appeared on the shield, and a drop of dark red, cold water with a metallic smell seeped from the fingernail.

Her vision began to blur.

It's not that I can't see clearly, it's that what I see has changed.

The ice surface in front of us turned into an endless river, gray and turbid, with broken ice and withered branches floating on the surface.

Lin Jian and Lao Gu's figures bobbed up and down in the waves. Lin Jian was shouting, and Lao Gu was shouting, but she couldn't hear what they were shouting.

The sound was swallowed by the water. She ran forward desperately, the ice beneath her feet turning into river water that rose above her ankles, her calves, and her knees. But she didn't move an inch.

The soles of my shoes were frozen to the ice, my trouser legs were frozen into an ice shell, and I had no feeling in my legs from the knees down.

She looked down and saw nothing below her knees.

It wasn't that they froze off; it was that they never existed. Her legs were empty from the knees down, and her trouser legs swayed lightly in the wind, like two empty sleeves.

She opened her mouth to shout, but her throat was filled with icy water.

It was river water, the same water that splashed up when Xiulian fell into the river thirty years ago—icy cold, murky, and carrying the smell of silt and rust.

The feeling of suffocation crept up her trachea, as if something was drilling into her mouth—wet and slippery, boneless and cold—sliding from the back of her tongue into her esophagus, from her esophagus into her stomach, and from her stomach into her chest cavity.

It wanted to drill into her heart, into her blood vessels, into the cracks in her bones, and hollow her out completely.

The fingernails on the shield grew increasingly dense.

Those fingernails slowly peeled back, like a seashell opening its shell, revealing not flesh underneath, but eyes.

Each one had no whites, no eyelashes, only dark, round pupils, staring at her without blinking.

The soft, rustling sound traveled along the metal surface, exactly like the voice in her heart, gently murmuring:

"You can't protect them. You've never been able to protect anyone."

She heard her grandfather calling her.

The sound drifted from a great distance, from the bottom of the river, from beneath the ice, and from the eyes revealed after the fingernails were peeled back.

"Zhuozhuo, come here to Grandpa." She knew that wasn't her grandfather.

she knows.

But her feet were moving forward, her knees were bending down, and her body was sinking.

The ice cracked beneath her, and river water surged up from the cracks, submerging her waist, her chest, and her chin.

Water filled her eyes, and she couldn't see anything but darkness, coldness, and the unblinking eyes peeking out from behind her fingernails.

Countless gazes fell on her back, pricking her like needles. She wanted to turn around, but found that her neck was already stiff, and she could only let these gazes gnaw at her tense nerves little by little.

The White Impermanence shrank into a tiny black shadow, clinging tightly to Shen Xun's clothes.

She dared not move.

The chaotic instinct was issuing frantic warnings; every inch of the surrounding air was filled with broken, resentful, and decades-long pent-up frustrations.

These unclaimed obsessions are not malevolent; her chaotic power is completely ineffective against them. They have no weight, no shape, no sound, yet you can sense them.

They stick to the skin like wet clothes in winter, cool and sticky, and you can't shake them off no matter what you do.

They seeped into my nostrils, carrying the fishy smell of the river, the putrid smell of the silt, and a faint, almost imperceptible smell like burning paper money.

The obsessions, like fish attracted by the smell of blood, circled around the dark figure, but did not pounce on it. Instead, they gently touched the edge of her shadowy form, again and again.

It wasn't an attack, it was a touch.

Like a drowning person grabbing a piece of driftwood in the water, not trying to drag it down, but simply trying to hold onto something.

Anything is fine.

A piece of wood, a leaf, a ray of light. Even if it's another drowning person.

With each touch, her figure faded a little more.

She could hear countless faint sighs echoing in her ears.

It wasn't something you heard with your ears; it rang directly in your consciousness, like someone gently tapping your temple with their fingertips, tap, tap, tap. These were the remnants of souls she hadn't been able to convert over thousands of years, and even some of her kind who had leaked out of the chaotic rift with her, ultimately trapped by human obsessions and vanished into nothingness.

These ghostly figures were calling her name, calling her "Xie Bi'an," their voices gentle, yet carrying an obsession that could drag people into the abyss.

She could only shrink herself even tighter, gripping Shen Xun's clothes tightly, afraid to open her eyes, afraid to make a sound, her very soul trembling slightly.

The golden light surrounding Shen Xun was gradually dimming.

The pale golden light had barely spilled out when it was enveloped and dissolved by the thick darkness, not even causing a ripple.

He could clearly sense that this overwhelming sense of regret was not malicious, but rather a pure and boundless despair.

They've been trapped here for so long that they've forgotten who they are and why they're here. All that's left is the instinct to "not want to be alone," and the urge to drag all living things into this eternal cold.

His vision began to double.

The ice surface before him transformed into chaotic fissures, with countless shadowy figures wandering in the darkness. The man who had leaped into the depths of the colorful halo was watching him through the stream of light, a smug smile playing on his lips.

His hand, hanging by his side, had a speck of black mist on its fingertips.

The black mist climbed up his fingertips, leaving a bluish-white fingerprint on the back of his hand—it wasn't his.

It was left many years ago, when someone held his hand for the last time. He forgot who that person was.

He only remembered that the hand was cold and light, holding him as if holding the last glimmer of light.

In this silent, slowly tightening suffocation, the deepest vortex is Old Gu.

He stood there, like a frozen stone statue.

The photo he'd carried in his pocket for thirty years, its edges worn white, was burning hot, like a branding iron, searing his flesh through his clothes.

He could hear the soft sound of water coming from the photo, as well as Xiulian's laughter, just like that afternoon thirty years ago when she smiled and said she would take him back to the Greater Khingan Mountains to see the rhododendrons covering the mountains.

That laughter was alive.

It seeped out of the photo, slipped out from the gap in his pocket, climbed up his clothes, and reached his ear, whispering softly, as if Xiulian were standing behind him, tiptoeing, close to his ear, her breath warm and damp.

He looked down and saw that the footprints on the ice had changed.

His footprints were those of a man's rubber shoes, one deep and one shallow, leaving long tracks in the snow.

But now, in every footprint, there is the imprint of a smaller pair of women's cloth shoes, the toes of which are covered in mud, the uppers covered in grass seeds, and the soles of which are the imprints of old-fashioned cloth shoes from thirty years ago.

They were the exact same pairs of shoes she wore when she last saw him thirty years ago.

The footprints followed the direction he came from, extending all the way to the deepest crack in the ice.

His body began to move forward uncontrollably.

With each step, the ice beneath our feet softened a little more, and our trouser legs became wetter.

He could feel something gently pulling his wrist forward. The touch was gentle, without nails or bones, just a thin, cool layer of skin, like when Xiulian held his hand and led him across the shallows by the river, across the waist-high reeds, and across the meadow full of wildflowers at the foot of the Greater Khingan Mountains.

The sound of breathing grew clearer in his ear; it was his familiar scent, etched into his very bones, whispering in his ear, "Old Gu, let's go."

The photo in his pocket was burned even more intensely.

He took it out and stared at it intently. Those areas, worn white by time, now looked as if they had been soaked in river water, so soft and wet that they seemed about to melt away.

In the photo, Xiulian's face is fading little by little, as if it has been soaked in water, blurring her features. The original shallow riverbank background has turned into the dark and cold riverbed. At her feet lies the old rubber shoe he lost when he fell into the water years ago. The shoe is covered with water plants, and the shoelaces are tied in a knot, just like the day he lost it.

In the reflection on the ice, a girl with braided pigtails, wearing faded blue overalls, stood beside him, turning her head to smile at him.

It wasn't the phantom shrouded in malevolent energy at the bottom of the river. It was Xiulian from thirty years ago, the Xiulian who waited for him to get off work under the locust tree, stuffed hot buns into his hands, and secretly put coins into dumplings and placed them in his bowl.

He looked up abruptly, but there was nothing in front of him.

Only the spreading black mist, already above his knees, felt cold and sticky, like countless gentle hands, softly embracing him and carrying him to the bottom of the river.

Just then, all the sounds, all the sensations, all the confusion suddenly stopped.

It didn't gradually dissipate; it was as if it had been instantly severed by an invisible hand.

The misaligned breathing sounds in my ears disappeared, the sticky ice under my feet hardened, the damp, cold sensation on my skin dissipated, and even the black fog that filled the sky and the ground stopped in mid-air, no longer seeping forward an inch.

The entire world was reduced to a single, faint sound.

It wasn't shouted out, nor did it drift over; it arose spontaneously from the depths of everyone's heart, as light as a sigh, yet carrying a crushing weight of grievance and obsession, gently resonating against everyone's eardrums:

"I want to go home."

The moment those words were spoken, the stagnant black mist suddenly began to converge in one direction.

It's not contraction, it's returning to its original position.

Thousands upon thousands of tiny, lingering thoughts, like iron filings attracted by a magnet, slowly converged toward the center of the ice crack, eventually coalescing into a complete, quiet silhouette.

She stood in the center of countless regrets, dressed in old tribal clothing with blurred deer spirit patterns embroidered on the hem of her skirt, her long hair hanging down, her figure slender.

In front of her was a shallow pit, the soil still soft. She was slightly bent over, gently patting the loose soil on the surface of the pit with her hand, her movements gentle and devout, as if she were placing something more important than her life.

Time seemed to freeze at that moment.

After taking the last shot, she slowly straightened up, the dirt clinging to her fingertips hovering in mid-air.

Then, slowly, very slowly, she turned around.

The wind stopped, the chanting ceased, and even the light dimmed.

On the frozen river surface, only her face, which slowly turned around, remained. She was young, quiet, with gentle eyes and a hint of regret hidden in them, a regret that had spanned thirty years.

It's Xiulian.