Chapter 989: Eye contact
The two looked at each other, picked up their flashlights and rushed to the experimental field. Under the moonlight, the newly cultivated bell-ringing rice was growing without wind, and the crisp sound of the rice ears colliding was mixed with the faint sound of silver bells.
"It's the vibration of the earth veins!" Qi Tongwei pressed his fingertips on the hot soil, and a slight tremor came from his palm. The little fox squatted on the ridge of the field, with its tail wrapped around the "Book of Fansheng". A yellowed rubbing slipped out from between the pages - it was a rune rubbed from the bark of an old locust tree, and at this moment it was exactly the same frequency as the swinging of the rice ears.
Even more bizarrely, the Qingling mark on Liang Lu's face began to heat up, emitting a faint blue light in the darkness. She followed the induction and walked deep into the rice field, and found a dew-like crystal condensed on a rice ear, and inside it were the blurred faces of the miners. "They are sending a message." Liang Lu's voice trembled, "This land has never truly forgotten."
The next morning, the FAO delegation arrived early. The blond and blue-eyed experts shuttled through the fields holding precision instruments. When the soil tester showed the value of "organic matter content 5.1%", the leading doctor took off his glasses and exclaimed: "This is simply a myth in the era of industrialized agriculture!" Qi Tongwei silently opened the account book and pointed to one page - the record in 1999: "The ancient composting method failed for the th time, but unexpectedly cultivated a community of earthworms with super strong resistance to adversity."
"Look at this." Liang Lu led everyone to the sonic cultivation area. The special speakers played the chanting of the Book of Songs, and the vines of the tomato plants automatically twisted into the shape of the Chinese character "和". The botanist of the expedition team pointed the spectrometer at the fruit, and the data jumping on the screen made his pupils shrink suddenly: "The composition of these secondary metabolites... is highly consistent with the ingredients of the vanilla used for ancient sacrifices!"
When the delegation entered the Earth Vein Memorial Hall, the twenty account books displayed in the display cabinet caused a sensation. Some people took pictures page by page, while others gently flipped through them wearing white gloves. A Japanese scholar suddenly choked up and said, "This is not an account book, but an epic of the land." Qi Tongwei stood in front of the replicas of the miners' silver bells, listening to the sound waves of the earth veins that were automatically played in the hall, and suddenly remembered the smile of the woman in green before she disappeared - it turned out that the so-called reconciliation was never a one-sided compromise, but a two-way redemption.
As night fell, the manor held a traditional "Thanksgiving Ceremony". Under the old locust tree, Aunt Wang led the children to sing a newly composed mushroom-picking tune, and the improved solar insect repellent lamp debugged by Zhang Dazhu cast a soft halo on the treetops. Qi Tongwei and Liang Lu stood side by side in front of the monitoring station, watching the light spots of the global ecological network on the screen echoing with the stars in the night sky.
"You said, if we hadn't experienced those things back then..." Liang Lu's words were crushed by the mountain wind. Qi Tongwei took out a silver bell-shaped rice ear from his pocket. This was the first seed of the bell-ringing rice. "Maybe we will never understand," he pinned the rice ear in her hair, "the so-called destiny is nothing more than a puzzle given by the land to mankind, and the answer has always been hidden in the way we treat it."
The mountain breeze blew across the windowsill where twenty account books were piled, making the pages rustle.
Qi Tongwei's fingertips hovered above the latest genetic map. The base pairs similar to the old locust tree totem suddenly twisted and deformed, turning into countless tiny silver bells under the desk lamp, falling down.
"Tong Wei?" Liang Lu's voice was trembling. The green bell mark on her neck suddenly burned without warning, and her shadow reflected on the glass split into two, one in a white dress, the other in a lilac gauze. The alarm at the monitoring station suddenly sounded, and the green ecological network on the screen cracked like a spider web. The light spot of Dongjiang Village was the first to go out, turning into a scarlet vortex.
The little fox pushed open the half-open door, its hair standing on end: "The ground veins are bleeding again!" Its tail swept across the bookshelf, and twenty account books were opened at the same time. The records from 1998 to 2018 were circulating in the air like a revolving lantern. Qi Tongwei was horrified to find that all the words were fading, replaced by dense blood words - "The betrayer shall suffer eternal damnation."
The moment the rainstorm came down, the manor fell into darkness. When the emergency lights came on, everyone saw that the bell-ringing rice in the rice field was growing wildly, and the rice ears twisted into countless pale hands, grabbing towards the old locust tree. Zhang Dazhu's flashlight beam swept across the old mine site, where a brand new stone tablet stood. The tablet was engraved with oracle bone inscriptions, which translated into only one sentence: "Blood for blood, life for life."
"It's Qingyi's curse!" Aunt Wang's Buddhist beads were scattered all over the floor. "The Taoist priest said that the seal can only suppress it temporarily. We should have thought of it earlier..." Before she finished speaking, the old locust tree suddenly groaned in pain. The soul-soothing talisman on the trunk burned to ashes. Two shadows floated out of the tree hole - the woman in white had a haggard face, and the woman in red had fierce eyes. In the middle of them was a woman in green, holding a silver bell, with a sinister smile on her lips.
Qi Tongwei grabbed the sonic exorcist, but found that all the indicator lights on the device were off. Even more bizarre was that the blue bell mark on Liang Lu's face began to bleed, dripping down her cheek to the ground, and every drop of blood bloomed into a blue-gray flower. "I am a prisoner of the earth veins, and also a judge." The voice of the green-clothed woman mixed with the sound of silver bells, shaking everyone's eardrums, "Do you think that writing a few accounts and planting a few acres of land can offset a hundred years of sin?"
The night-scented mushrooms mutated wildly in the rainstorm, and the faces of generations of miners appeared on the caps, shouting in unison: "Give me back my life!" The data screen of the monitoring station suddenly automatically played the dusty surveillance video: twenty years ago, Liang Lu's father directed trucks to dump poisonous mushrooms into the mine; ten years ago, the drill bits of multinational companies dug near the roots of the old locust tree... Every frame of the picture made Qi Tongwei's eyes hurt.
"It turns out that we have never really changed." Liang Lu's voice was drowned in the thunder. She staggered towards the woman in green, and the bloodstains of the green bell mark had spread to her neck. "It was my father's fault back then. I am willing to..." Before she finished speaking, the woman in red suddenly stretched out her claws and pierced her shoulder. When Qi Tongwei pounced over, he only caught a fragment of the dissipated white dress.
The entire manor fell into chaos. The rice fields turned into a quagmire, swallowing up the villagers who tried to escape; the roots of the old locust tree broke out of the ground and entangled the monitoring station building; and in the sky, countless silver bells spun into a huge vortex, crushing the moonlight into blood. The little fox rushed back to Qi Tongwei with blood all over his body, holding a half-burned "Qimin Yaoshu" in his mouth: "Go find... the real answer..."
Qi Tongwei ran wildly in the pouring rain, not even noticing the mud and water that had filled his shoes. When he pushed open the door of the Earth Vein Memorial Hall, he was shocked to find that all the exhibits were bleeding - the miners' silver bells were dripping with black water, the soil samples were oozing pus and blood, and even the twenty account books were constantly oozing dark red liquid.