The Ming Dynasty began from Sarhu

Chapter 689 Aboriginal People

Shin'emon shook his head impatiently. He was now penniless and had a bleak future, so he didn't care whether he offended the Kyoto official in front of him.

Besides, Muramasa behaved abnormally, looked strange, and talked nonsense.

Muramasa reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper covered with handwriting.

"This is from the villagers,"

Muramasa said, "I don't know the evil deeds of the monks of the mountain. They are the emperor's priests, and we are the shogun's men."

"Take it!"

Shinuemon frowned. It turned out that this minor official was his spy stationed in Kyoto.

"The Shogun must purge these heretics."

"Read it!"

Shinsukeemon took the note reluctantly and read it:

"People believe he is the 'mysterious dweller,' a brother of the great evil deity known as Amaterasu. He emerges from certain caves and fissures when summoned, and wizards have sighted him in Tsushima and Busan, Korea."

Shin'emon looked bewildered and looked at Muramasa in confusion.

Muramasa looked at him quietly: "Do you understand now?"

"Understand what?"

"The Emperor is the culprit!"

"The story you made up is even more fake than what I wrote!"

As he said this, he returned the paper to Muramasa.

"It's all nonsense!"

"Absolutely not!"

Muramasa slammed the table and stood up. "Their spells and rituals have been used for thousands of years."

"What spell?"

Muramasa turned and walked towards the door, his lips bitten until they were bloodless.

"The Kamakura witch is just a puppet. She serves Amaterasu. For three hundred years, wizards have repeatedly prevented the evil god from appearing. Now, the Tatars are attacking, and the evil god is coming again. I'm going to gather more wizards to prevent his comeback... Before I come back, you must never go deep into the secret passage!"

"I still have stories to write, don't worry!"

Shin'emon said this without making any other promises.

Muramasa hurried out the door, then stood on the steps, looking around.

The minor official who had made military achievements in the Battle of Kyushu was walking hurriedly on the street.

Suddenly, a woman came out of the house next door.

She caught a glimpse of Shinsukeemon, her large breasts thrust out, and she suddenly began to scream angrily.

Shin'emon turned to look at his neighbor in surprise.

His head was throbbing with pain. The woman was approaching, shaking her fat fist viciously.

"Why did you frighten my daughter?" she cried, her dark face flushing. "Why did you frighten her with your foolish witchcraft, eh?"

Shinsukeemon licked his lips.

"I'm sorry," he said slowly.

"I'm so sorry. I didn't scare your daughter. I just came from outside... What scared her?"

"Witch—it ran into your house, the old witch of Kamakura—"

The neighbor woman stopped talking and opened her mouth wide.

Her eyes widened, and she made a peculiar gesture with her right hand—pointing at Shin'emon with her index and pinky fingers, while placing her thumb on top of the other two.

"Old witch!"

The woman cursed and hurried away.

Shinsukeemon was left bewildered.

After seeing Muramasa off, he turned and went into the house.

Before leaving, the clerk left him a small bag of gold coins so that he could have some fun.

Shin'emon bought sake, paper, ink, brush and inkstone, and sat at the table while drinking and continued writing, but his mind was a mess, and he wrote and tore up the manuscript paper, and tore it up and wrote again.

Finally, he paced around the room, occasionally rubbing his dry and hot hair with his fingers.

"Why not write about the war in Kyushu?"

However, the atrocities committed by the Tatars in Kyushu probably would not be of interest to customers in Kyoto. If they wrote about it, they might even be invited for tea by spies from the shogunate.

But these crazy thoughts lingered in his mind and could not be shaken off.

Why not go to the tunnel and take another look? If you can see the witch herself, wouldn’t that terrifying story that has been so confusing to tell be easier to complete?
Finally, he went to the "witch room" downstairs.

Shin'emon remained there all afternoon, not writing;

In that dead basement, his headache was no longer so unbearable.

After a while, he fell asleep.

I don't know how long I slept.

The Noh playwright dreamed of the Kamakura witch, a dark figure running wildly through the streets, faster than a horse.

Behind her, a gelatinous monster, as black and shiny as Mount Fuji, squirmed like a caterpillar, chasing and devouring the screaming pedestrians on both sides of the street.

The next moment, Shin'emon was floating in the air, with stars and clouds passing by him.

The octopus-shaped palace was submerged in the sea, and a frozen starlight appeared in the dark surroundings.

The palace is an extremely intricate and confusing maze...

At some point, Shin'emon had entered a tunnel.

The stone tunnel was very narrow, and he had to crawl on his stomach. The damp, mossy stones pressed tightly against his twisting body, and the strong pressure made him scream softly.

He didn't know how far he crawled in the tunnel, and then he crawled through some caves made of stones, and sometimes he crawled through some passages. The corners in those passages made his eyes uncomfortable. In this way, he should have crawled into a basement.

The walls and ceiling of the basement are made of huge granite slabs, with caves leading to the surface between the slabs.

In the center of the basement there is a huge slab of gneiss stone, like an altar.

A spring of water welled up silently between the stone pillars that supported the tabletop, and there was a groove along its outer edge, with some disgusting stain on it, the same as the contents of the bowl under the guise.

From the dark caverns surrounding the cellar came figures—listless figures whose outlines could only be vaguely discerned.

That Mount Fuji caterpillar reappeared.

By the light from the wedge-shaped structures carved into the gneiss slabs, Shin'emon could see that the caterpillar had a huge human face. A zombie-like face, the rotten skull on the forehead had been shattered, and the indentations oozed a foul...

Shin'emon woke up from a nightmare.

A bone-chilling chill surged through his heart, and he found that his clothes were wet, as if they had just been fished out from the bottom of the sea.

It was extremely quiet.

In the dim candlelight, the lizard seemed to start crawling around again.

The new right guards felt surprisingly weak and sat lazily in their chairs without moving.

His strength seemed to have been drained away. The biting cold seemed to have penetrated his brain, but his head no longer ached. His mind was clear—full of expectation, as if waiting for something to happen. A movement nearby caught his eye.

A stone slab on the wall moved. He heard a slight scraping sound and saw a narrow, rectangular black hole gradually widen into a square. Something was curled up in the black hole.

The New Right Guards watched in horror as the thing moved and slowly crawled out.

It looked like a dried corpse.

After an agonizingly long second, the thought suddenly popped into his mind: Kamakura Witch!
It was as thin as a skeleton and its color was the brown-yellow color of Korean paper. It was a skeleton with something like octopus skin covering the bones. When he looked closely, he found that it was a kimono commonly worn by women in the Kamakura period.

It moved gently and crawled forward, its long toenails scraping against the floor, making a harsh sound.

It crawled into the witch's room. In the white light, its expressionless face looked grim, and its eyes flashed with death.

He could see jagged protrusions on its tan, shrunken back.

Shin'emon couldn't move.

Extreme fear seized his mind.

He seemed to be bound by phantom paralysis, like a frog sucked by a snake, facing death, motionless.

There was a swaying figure outside the window. Suddenly, Shinuemon came to his senses and slapped himself madly.

He kept telling himself that this was a dream and he would wake up soon.

However, the mummy in kimono actually stood up.

Its thin frame stood upright as it moved towards the niche, coming to the iron plate in front of it.

The mummy stood there for a while with its back to Shin'emon, and suddenly began to whisper something in a dry voice.

Hearing that sound, Shin'emon should have screamed in fear, but he couldn't make a sound.

The terrible spell continued, and Shin'emon knew that it was the language of another world, a terrible spell from another world.

The spell quickly took effect, and the surrounding floor began to shake like an earthquake.

The iron plate vibrated and began to rise, rising very slowly. The mummy in kimono raised its arms, which were as dark as cannon barrels.

The iron plate was about a foot thick. As it gradually rose above the ground, a faint smell began to fill the room.

It was a sickening, musky smell; the plate continued its inexorable rise, and from its edge a small black finger protruded.

Shinsukeemon immediately remembered a dream in which he had seen a gelatinous black creature rampaging through the streets of Kyoto.

He tried in vain to break free from the paralysis.

The room darkened and a dizziness quietly surrounded him.

The room seemed to be shaking.

The iron still rose; the dry, horrible thing still stood there, with its arms raised, chanting incantations;

The Mount Fuji worm overflowed from the wall and gradually condensed into shape. It was slowly wriggling, following the mummy, and slowly moving towards the ground.

"Ya Butterfly!"

Suddenly, a rough voice interrupted the mummy's spell.

"Yamet butterfly! Stop it from performing the sacrifice!"

Muramasa, a petty official, rushed into the secret passage holding a short ethereal sword.

Muramasa looked like he had been dead for a long time, his face was too pale to look alive, his eyes were blazing with fire, he held a short knife in his hand, pushed Shin'emon aside and ran straight towards the alcove.

The mummy heard the noise and slowly turned around. Its body suddenly expanded several times as if it had taken up water. The bloated body moved towards the running clerk, and its outstretched arms hit the walls on both sides, causing sparks to fly.

Muramasa held a knife in one hand and some kind of implement in the other, and shouted in loud and majestic Japanese:

“Ya, na kadishtu nill gh’ri…stell’bsna kn’aa Nyogtha…k’yarnak phlegethor…”

These strange, mysterious words echoed loudly in the cellar.

The black Fuji Mountain monster suddenly stopped like a small boat hit by huge waves.

Muramasa brandished his katana, like a moth to a flame, and rushed into the belly of the mummy. He stabbed the black mummy with his katana, piercing it in an instant.

The black mass of Mount Fuji stopped.

It hesitated for a breathtaking moment, then quickly retreated. The air was filled with the pungent stench of burning flesh, and Shin'emon saw large chunks of something falling off the black thing, as if it had been eroded by magma.

It retreated like flowing liquid, and some terrible black meat fell off.

As the black flesh fell away, a core mass inside it gradually expanded, like a giant tentacle, tightly grasping the dry, horrible thing and pulling it to the edge of the hole. Another tentacle grabbed the iron plate and easily dragged it to the edge of the hole. As the dry, horrible thing fell into the hole, the iron plate also made a loud thunderous sound and returned to its original position.

"Thank God, it came at the right time."

Muramasa looked at the fallen corpse, leaning on his samurai sword, and said to the writer breathlessly.

Shin'emon opened his mouth and hesitated for a long time, "What kind of monster is this?"

"Amaterasu and his priest, the Kamakura witch. This is one of his true forms. Amaterasu has true forms all over Japan, and there are countless of them..."

At this time, there were messy footsteps outside the door, and Muramasa's companions came in to help.

Shinuemon was surprised and said, "Since you can kill him, why involve me? I'm just a writer."

Before he finished speaking, Muramasa's face turned pale again.

"what happened?"

"It's coming."

Amaterasu climbed up from the cracks in the floor and crawled towards the altar and the two men.

It was a black, stringy, sticky, tree-like thing.

It crawled up and moved over the ground with its hooves, mouth and snake-like arms.

Its head was the zombie face, but this time it was obviously larger than before and was directly stuck to the ceiling.

The black thing leaned over and stared at the two men. As it bent down, Shin'emon heard the clerk's scream.

And the sound of his bones breaking as he died.

(End of this chapter)