Today's Xianmen elegant pig slaughter

Today is not a good day.

Nan Fuguang thought of the folk stories he had read before, in which the righteous protagonists went on adventures in unknown areas or fought against enemies. In order to develop the next plot, they would sometimes accidentally touch some mechanisms that they should not touch, or they could not wait to fight with huge monsters in towns and markets...
The storybook inevitably tells the story of the Three Realms collapsing and the Six Paths being destroyed.

Nan Fuguang once felt that such a plot development was natural, even a bit cliché.

Just like the real dragon and the divine phoenix trying to rescue the Shatuo Sky-Splitting Tree, the protagonist of the story is always busy saving a dilapidated world.

But now she suddenly realized that when these clichés were projected into reality, what terrifying details were hidden under the stereotyped description of "the tattered common people" set for the protagonist -
People running for their lives, helpless and helpless;
collapsed adobe houses;
In the battle with the monster, the monster was repelled by the protagonist with one blow, and the monster fell down, and had no time to dodge and was simply crushed into a meat pie by A, B, C, and D;
Above the dust, there may be devastation everywhere, and lying everywhere are the common people who originally lived in obscurity, not too well but not too badly.

Just like the day when Little Mushroom watched his father disappear into thin air and escape from the mine in panic, his father turned into a fox and then died.
look.
In the above story, the father did not even have a name. He was later given the code name "Little Mushroom's father". Nan Fuguang still doesn't know his real name.
But of course he had a name.
He also has a son named "Duoduo", who is waiting for him to come home in the closed environment of the Dayi Mine where there is no end in sight day after day.

Under the sun, the hot summer sunlight is scorching and overbearing, but the temperature of the light not only brings unrealistic dizziness, but also does not dispel the coldness of the blood in the body.

Nan Fuguang was shaking uncontrollably, even though the sun was scorching, he felt as if he was in the coldest days of winter.

She held the time converter tightly in one hand and the two-way mirror tightly in the other, her fingertips turning white.

Unable to move any further, her heavy body almost fell on the empty mine cart beside her, and she slid down and sat down softly.
My mind was filled with the peculiar dull sound of a sharp weapon scraping flesh, and the songs that the miners sang before they died.

She couldn't stand it anymore.

My chest was swollen and aching, and even breathing was as difficult as an old sail struggling to survive in windless weather...
Tears welled up and blurred her vision, soon bursting from her eye sockets and merging with the sweat on her face, forming a series of messy water-stained grooves.

She let out a low sob and began to hate Yan Jian'an for not taking her away from here, hated the butcher for being so stupid as to be abducted to the Dayi Mine, and hated herself. After all, she was the culprit for all that she hated.

At the same time, Nan Fuguang clearly realized that she was lucky——

She has a time-turner.

If she didn't have this thing, from now on until she fell into the Avici Hell, every day, every hour, every moment, she would be immersed in endless self-blame and fear...
She will never get over it.

The sobbing gradually turned into crying.

……

Inside the mine tunnel, the man's dark eyes were immersed in the dim light, and he was in a state of confusion between wakefulness and sleep, unable to distinguish between yin and yang.

At first he didn't realize what was happening.

This time when Nan Fuguang used the time converter, it was not under the butcher's nose, and he was not directly involved in this matter, so for him, the result now is that he has always existed in this timeline and has been walking on the mine wall.

There was just a strange moment of detachment and suspension.

Looking around at the familiar mine wall around him, there was nothing different from before, including the swaying mining lamp in his hand, there was nothing wrong either -

This is as it should be.

But the faint crying sounds in the two-way mirror hanging at his waist gradually turned into howling of collapse, which made him quickly realize that there were many things wrong.

Anyway, he had already known the practical use of the miner's lamp, so it didn't matter whether he had it or not. The butcher placed the miner's lamp next to the railway track and sat on the ground casually.

He didn't say anything, nor did he take the initiative to talk. He just sat there quietly as if he still had tens of thousands of years to waste, staring at the traces of damage left by someone's mine cart in the dark corner of the mine tunnel. He didn't even ask the person in the two-way mirror to cry more quietly or move his finger to press the mute button which he knew was there.

He just sat there.

It is so quiet that even breathing makes no sound, but its presence is very strong.

Until Nan Fuguang cried until she was exhausted, she finally regained a little sanity in extreme regret and fear. Her wailing turned into sobbing, and the entire mine was filled with the sound of her crazy sniffling.

She doesn't cry often.

Even if Yan Ji'an accepted Lu Sang as his disciple and slapped Nan Fuguang in the face in front of everyone, causing her to be laughed at; even if "Three Realms Gossip" had people asking Yun Tian every now and then whether the cuckoo that usurped the magpie's nest had died to make way for the Divine Phoenix; even if she was tempted to cancel her Taoist Companion Contract with him for the first time...
She never shed a tear.

Raising her hand to wipe her face in embarrassment, the eldest sister of the Yuntian Sect who was hiding under the mine cart finally lifted her head from the wet cloth on her knees.

“You can start asking questions now.”

She spoke in a muffled voice, her tone full of a morbid fragility that said, "But if you ask the wrong question, I might collapse again."

The butcher, who had been sitting motionless until now and almost like a statue, stretched out one of his long legs in relaxation when he heard this.

"You used a time-turner?"

It is a question, but also a declarative sentence.

"Yes." Nan Fuguang said, "I used it."

On the other side of the two-way mirror, the butcher had turned off the miner's lamp and it was reassuringly dark. Nan Fuguang didn't have to worry about her seeing the expression on his face, which made her feel somewhat relaxed.

"What happened? Did I do something wrong after entering the Central Mining District?" the butcher asked. "Am I dead?"

He was calm and composed as if he was asking someone else's questions.

"No, you didn't do anything wrong, and you didn't die."
You are not dead.
But all but you are dead.

Speaking of this, there is another matter that Nan Fuguang has to examine again.

After the last time time was reversed, standing at the entrance of the mine, she once asked the butcher whether he witnessed her death with his own eyes. The butcher obviously hesitated at the time, and then casually skipped the topic.

Before seeing the eyes of the monster in the mining area, Nan Fuguang naturally thought that it was slapped to death or sat on by some kind of its clone. After all, it looked like it had such strength.
In the above situation, the death is not a pretty sight, so it is completely understandable that the butcher couldn't bear to tell her.

But now it seems that the flash in his eyes at that time had nothing to do with "can't bear it". The truth was more cruel and crazy than she had imagined, enough to make people shudder.

"Pig-killer."

"what?"

"I'll ask you again." Nan Fuguang paused, her voice still hoarse from crying, her throat dry and uncomfortable, she swallowed with some difficulty, "Did you see how I died in the mine last time? I think--"
She took a deep breath.
"I committed suicide, didn't I?"

The mine tunnel suddenly fell into silence.

The overwhelming fear she felt in the two-way mirror was still vivid in her mind, like the wind from an extremely cold land that penetrated into her bones, chilling her flesh and bones to the point of stinging pain... It was exactly the same feeling she had felt in the mine before she died.

The silence began to make her wonder whether she should listen to the answer. However, she could not turn back. She heard the butcher's voice ring out clearly among the surrounding noises: "Yes."

Nan Fuguang pursed his lips.

"The situation was quite urgent at the time. I was running back with you, and you looked back. I don't know what you saw, but you broke free from me, took out a dagger from your bag, slit your own throat, and stabbed the dagger into your chest."
The butcher paused, as if he had tried not to recall how high Nan Fuguang's blood had splattered...
The top of the mine tunnel was splashed with fresh, hot blood.
"What did you see when you looked back?"

one eye.

Nan Fuguang twisted his fingers, a little hesitant whether to tell him that everything matched.

Youyin told her that there is a saying in the mine that you should never look back no matter what. The origin of this saying is probably because they are afraid that they will see the eyes, and if they see the eyes, they will lose their minds and then commit suicide.

This probably applies to miners regardless of whether they are monks or not.

So it’s better for the butcher not to know. Some people have obsessive-compulsive disorder. The more they are forbidden to do something, the more they want to do it. Nan Fuguang is not sure if he is that kind of person.
Anyway, she felt very much like it.

"What I saw is not important. What is important is that you don't enter the main mining area."
Nan Fuguang took a deep breath and reminded him implicitly, "I'm not suitable, and now it seems that you are not suitable either."

The monster might have become dangerous because it hated the monks, but the bloody experience proved that its expression of liking someone was not commendable...
It does follow the behavioral norms of creatures in nature and wants to be patted on the head by the person it likes.
When it was so excited that it forgot itself, it didn't care how big it was, that people couldn't touch its head even if they stood on tiptoe, or that it had a huge eye on its head.
And that eye is even more outrageous than the description in the legend that whoever a snake demon looks at turns to stone. It does not kill people, but makes everyone who sees its eyes fall into madness and collapse happily and joyfully, and then decisively kills itself.

Fortunately, the butcher never gets too hung up on important moments.

He didn't ask what happened in the previous timeline, nor was he curious about his own ending in the previous timeline. Now that Nan Fuguang asked him not to go in again, he agreed without hesitation.

And then I really didn’t get in.

The man just pushed the mine cart and waited at the fork closest to the central area of ​​the mine. While waiting, he leaned against the mine wall in a daze and was too lazy to even ask Nan Fuguang "what do you mean by inappropriate". He seemed to be - completely - not interested in these things.

This time, it was still the little mushroom Duoduo who came to greet him. Duoduo, who was still alive and well in this timeline, curiously said a few words to Nan Fuguang in the two-sided mirror. Then the child was probably afraid that the mine tunnel would be too dark without a miner's lamp, so he didn't stay for too long. He turned around and ran back to the mining area. After a while, he brought out a cart full of black cracked ore with a few miners.

When the miners heard that these truckloads of ore were delivered for Nan Fuguang, they had no complaints at all.
In this timeline, once you actively talk to them and tell them that Nan Fuguang is a monk and it might be dangerous to enter the mine, they will suddenly realize.
The miners were very grateful to her for "sacrificing her own interests for the sake of justice" and razing the filthy land of the Dayi Mine. She even changed some rules in the mining area on her own, allowing them to talk freely with the miners in the transportation area.

One miner said that he had not been able to talk to his wife for three years since he entered the mining area. She was about to run away with a wild man from the transport area next door...
Now, the king has returned with force, and this time, he must take back everything that belongs to him.

There were sporadic laughters all around.

Outside the mine, the gloom in Nan Fuguang's heart was slightly dispelled - her mind finally stopped frantically trying to identify these smiling people in front of her, who chopped off whose head, who twisted whose neck, whose brains exploded on the mine wall, and who kept singing incomprehensible songs in dialect before dying.

Fortunately they are all still alive.

……

Before the afternoon, the butcher handed in six carts of ore intact.

From beginning to end, all he did was stand in front of the gate of the mining area waiting for his fellow miners to "offer" him "tribute". The only damage he suffered was a small cut left by his right index finger rubbing against a piece of iron sheet that was raised up on the mine cart when he was pushing the mine cart.

Nan Fuguang felt that this person was taking advantage of her.

She was responsible for working hard to please her fellow miners, while he was responsible for enjoying himself.

The guardian finished counting the miners' workload that day quickly and drew two circles on the register reluctantly. The guardian, who had no idea what happened in other timelines, glanced at Nan Fuguang, whose hair was messy like a crazy woman and whose eyelids were swollen like a goldfish, sitting across the wooden table. He said in a sarcastic tone, "You're lucky to have survived."

Nan Fuguang didn't have the energy to refute him. She had used the time converter twice in one day. Now the fox only had three tails left, and she had no idea how to get out alive.

——If you can survive with a bug, it can be considered “good luck”.

Today's setting sun was overly red, as if it was bloodthirsty, and the clouds in the sky looked as if they were burned through. In such a bleak and lonely atmosphere, Nan Fuguang casually pushed open the door of an adobe house and stepped in. Not hearing any sound of people following behind her, she turned around, holding the door.

The butcher stood at the foot of the stairs a few steps away, with his arms folded and his brows relaxed: "What?"

Nan Fuguang had an expression as if he wanted to say something but hesitated.

Half of her face was hidden in the shadows, the corners of her lips drooped slightly, the corners of her eyes were red, and she sniffed quickly… Although she was over a hundred years old, she was still considered a young girl in the world of immortal cultivation. Now her youthful facial features were sagging, and she looked really pitiful.

Zida knew her, and she was always shouting and killing. The butcher had certainly never seen her like this... Even at this moment she still looked like she had a silent aura: if he dared to turn around and walk away, she would tear the door off the wall.

The butcher: "A question - do you think there is no such thing as intimacy between men and women?"

Nan Fuguang: "Do you think of me as a woman?"

Butcher: “…”

Nan Fuguang made way for a person to enter the house, picked at the sawdust on the door, and muttered, "So don't worry about such details. We obviously don't even have a species."

When the butcher entered the house, she immediately closed the door like the kind of person who tricked the pig in to be slaughtered, and explained today's task: she had experienced too much today and would most likely have a nightmare tonight. She hoped that someone could wake her up in time when she was deeply trapped in the nightmare.

The butcher agreed with great pleasure.

And praised her for finally not being full of unrealistic fantasies, thinking that the end of the nightmare could depend on the person who was standing outside the wall at this moment and actually doing nothing.

……

Nan Fuguang really had a dream that night.

The first thing that surrounded her in her dream was, as expected, the unknown whispers she heard in the mining center today. At first, it was as if many different people or even creatures were talking around her. Then, the whispers were mixed with the songs that the miners sang before they died...
Those chaotic sounds didn't originally blend together.
In the dream, they strangely synchronized with each other and gradually merged into a unified melody. Nan Fuguang could not understand any of the meaning, but those chants and whispers finally jumped, as if they were integrated into the five senses, pushing open the tightly closed scroll -
A huge ship sailing on the sea.

Unlike the twelve-winged boat that crossed the unclean sea, this boat looked much older. Every time a wave hit the side of the boat, it would groan like a rotten wood about to fall apart...
The entire ship was hung with white silk cloth, which fluttered in the sea breeze, creating an eerie atmosphere.
When the sea fog became thick and white, the white cloth disappeared into the fog, the sun hid in the clouds, and everything became dim.

Apart from the creaking sound of the boat itself, the waves themselves were silent and eerily quiet.

A huge, colorful, intricately shaped bird chirped and landed on the mast.

It seemed as if this ship and the giant bird were the only living things in the world, and the rest had all turned black and white and died.

A moment——
The sea came alive again.

At first, there were just regular waves. The left side of the ship was still calm, but on the right side there seemed to be an obvious watershed. The color of the sea suddenly darkened, from azure blue to dark blue, and gradually turned into complete black, as if an abyss appeared out of nowhere on the seabed.

Then some balls of light appeared in the sky. They were roughly in the shape of humans, with limbs, and even different heights, weights and body shapes. The only thing in common was that their heads were balls of light without any facial features, and in the center of the light balls was black ashes when the flames burned out.

The man in the middle was tall and slender, with a white robe fluttering in the air. If he had a face like Hengyue Xingchen, he could be considered a Taoist immortal. He held a sword in one hand, and the edge of the light ball was shining;
The person on his left hand side was a little petite, with long hair submerged in the light. The huge bird-like wings behind him were also wrapped in the halo, and every flap of the wings would cause the sea waves to surge.
Further to the right is an old man with a hunched back. His image reminds me of a portrait of an ancestor hanging in the ancestral hall of Wuwei Sect, the largest sect of the Immortal Alliance, in Miyue Mountain. His name is Duan Yu, and he is the ancestor of Duan Congyi, the current leader of the Immortal Alliance...

There were about twelve people in the light group, lined up in a row in the air, and their appearance could not be seen. However, the sunlight disappeared afterwards, which was enough to show that this arrival was not an auspicious sign.

There was a commotion on the deck of the huge ship with white silk fluttering. People seemed to be running around in panic, as if they were extremely terrified of the people who appeared. Some of them cursed "liar", "we can't survive", "this is a sacrifice", and hopelessly looked for any shelter to hide in...
Some simply jumped into the sea.
But those who jumped into the sea didn't have a good ending either.
The huge monster hidden in the depths of the ocean finally showed up. When it splashed out from the waves, it looked like a mountain that was soaked by a footbath overturned by the gods.

This metaphor is too strange, but it is indeed like this. It is a big black mass. When someone jumps off the boat and falls into the strong wind and huge waves, he will be swallowed into the huge mouth of the abyss.

The deep sea and the giant beast, the light and the darkness...
Even the people who were watching this catastrophe felt depressed and suffocated, as if they were completely shrouded in the shadow of death.

The people on the ship had no way to escape, and everyone was terrified. The swaying huge ship truly became a small boat in the sea, and the mast made a terrible sound as if it was about to break.

A man who was almost powerless compared to the crew members who jumped into the sea climbed up the mast and held the mast with one hand. In the strong wind and the splashing water of the waves, he could not open his eyes and just shouted to the sky: "Deception!"

Watching all this from a third person perspective, this guy looks familiar.

But Nan Fuguang couldn't remember who he was or where she had seen him.

She was not allowed to recall too much, as the whole absurd dream had some frightening changes -
The clouds and mist were parted, and a huge hand descended from the sky!

The big hand seemed to dislike the thick sea fog and waved it casually, and a few gusts of wind blew the sea fog away;
He casually passed through the light ball floating in the air. One of the people in the light ball seemed to turn his head back in surprise, but the big hand did not care about his existence. With a light flick, the team that was originally lined up in a row in the air was thrown into chaos.
The big hand passed through them and landed on the sea surface. It used the back of its hand to separate the giant sea monster that was almost covering the ship, and held up the entire giant ancient ship with one hand...

Soon, the sea returned to calm.

Nan Fuguang saw that the right index finger of that hand had a shallow scar caused by a sharp object, and there was blood wet on the scar, which showed that it had been scratched just now.

……

Nan Fuguang opened her eyes, and the giant hand in her dream was right under her nose...
Just removed from her nose.

The butcher rubbed his thumb and index finger calmly. This unabashed provocative action made Nan Fuguang realize who the so-called "suffocation" and "shadow of death" in the dream came from.

Apparently someone was trying to suffocate her by pinching her nose in her sleep.

"You're having a nightmare." The butcher said calmly, "No matter how hard I try, you won't wake up."

"So you just want to suffocate me?"

Nan Fuguang turned over and sat up with a gloomy face, his throat still hoarse from sleepiness, but fortunately the previous fatigue had been gone a lot, and his eyes were no longer swollen into slits like before going to bed.

As soon as she got out of bed, the butcher quickly took the seat she had vacated, muttering "At least I'm not dead", and lay down on the bed, closing his eyes impatiently. It was obvious that he had not slept again last night, and he looked like he had no intention of going out again today.

While Nan Fuguang was washing up, he was thinking about how to persuade his fellow miners in the mining area to donate another six carts of Black Cracked Sky Ore to them. At this time, the butcher yawned, turned over, and said without warning: "There is something for you on the table."

Nan Fuguang: “?”

Who would be crazy enough to give her anything while she was in the Big Sun Mine?
With a question mark on her face, she stretched her head to take a look, and sure enough, she saw a bright red flower in full bloom on the tattered wooden table in the middle of the room.

Next to the red flower was a piece of paper with black letters reading "From Monk Nan Fuguang, Room 6, Row 3, Da Ri Mine Mining Area."

Nan Fuguang picked it up without knowing why, and found a red flower with a pill falling out of its stamen.

Nan Fuguang: “…”
Nan Fuguang: “…………”
Nan Fuguang: “………………”

The pill looked very familiar, so familiar that she had seen an absentee worker die after taking it.

What?
Invite her to commit suicide?

Pinching the red flower between two fingers, Nan Fuguang looked outside and saw that it was getting dark. It was obviously past the 3pm hour, so he decisively kicked the door and walked out.

Butcher: “…”

Duan Nan was knocked down by Nan Fuguang the first moment he fell from the sky. The white-haired boy who was pressed against the wall had a rare expression of speechlessness on his expressionless face. His white eyelashes trembled slightly, and he listened calmly to Nan Fuguang asking in his ear, what is this?
He glanced at the red flower in her hand and said, "Congratulations."

Nan Fuguang: “?”

Duan Nan: "You can go out now."

Nan Fuguang: “!”

(End of this chapter)