Mountains and seas can be flat

When Fang Zheng was thinking about the fracture of the corner of Si, Si was trying his best to throw Fang Zheng off.

In order to escape from the sinkhole, Si ran for several miles and got into a cave at the foot of the mountain.The caves here are full of air holes, dripping water in the depths, and are integrated with the undulating mountains of the forest. The dissolution of the groundwater over the years has formed the caves with various cave landscapes, full of stalagmites, stalactites, stone mantles, and stone flowers.If there are landscape lights to search for photos, a map of karst landforms, a natural five-star tourist attraction.

It's a pity that in the darkness of the cave, Fang Zheng only felt a "bang" hit the wall, and continued to hit the wall with a "bang" in another direction.His back and the back of his hands were worn out from hitting the stone wall, his body was bruised and purple, and he was sore, but he still clenched his horns tightly.No matter how frantically it hits, it won't let go.

Fang Zheng knew that the herbivorous rhino has a weakness. Although its skin is rough and thick, the skin between the folds is very fragile.The epidermis of the carotid artery below the neck is its cover door, which is tender and thin.Fang Zheng remembered that his father said that the skin of a wild rhinoceros is very rough and hard to chew, but as long as it bites the opponent's neck to the third part, the rhinoceros can only be slaughtered.

Does Si also have this weakness?He can only gamble.

The head bumped around like crazy, but it still couldn't get rid of Xia Zheng.Its head is thick and fleshy, and it is not afraid of thumping noises.But Fang Zheng suffered a lot, and there was almost no good ground all over his body.Fang Zheng wanted to roll over under Si's neck several times, and use the bone fork in his arms to stab the tender flesh between its folds, but the head of Si was too big, even if he spread his hands, he still couldn't reach it.And if you can't hit it with one blow, you will definitely be trampled into flesh under your feet by this ferocious beast.

Fang Zheng gritted his teeth and endured for a while, feeling that the bones were either smashed or smashed, and he couldn't hold on anymore.Blocked by a stone wall in front of him, he saw the right moment and jumped down, slamming onto Si's neck.This place is very close to its open mouth, and Fang Zheng is almost fainted by the stench.The ferocious beast probably didn't expect the small thing that couldn't be thrown off its back to be brought to its mouth suddenly, and it was stunned for a moment, as if thinking about how to eat it.Fang Zheng immediately burrowed into the soft and wrinkled flesh under its neck like a loach, and stabbed hard at the tender skin deep in the gap with the bone fork prepared in his hand.

Even with the most tender skin, Fang Zheng's strength was not too small compared to ordinary people, and the sharpened small bone dart barely pierced a small hole.Si felt a coldness in the vulnerable place, and suddenly contracted the flesh, and even stuck the bone fork.Fang Zheng couldn't pull it out.

Everything happened in a blink of an eye, and Si's strong pair of front hooves stomped hard on Fang Zheng.Fang Zheng's back was the stone wall and he couldn't retreat, so he could only roll to hide under it.This is quite risky. After it retracts its front hooves, Fang Zheng is equivalent to facing the random trampling of its four hooves.However, while Fang Zheng was rolling, he pinched the bone fork on its neck and pulled it out. He was not strong enough to pull out the bone fork. He wanted to use the rolling momentum to borrow strength—a very risky bet: bet The wound there was instantly fatal.

With a "poof", Fang Zheng finally pulled out the bone fork that was blocked at the opening of the blood vessel in its neck, borrowing the force of the rolling.While his hands were splashed with heat, Fang Zheng hugged his head and closed his eyes to meet the big hoof under his belly that kicked straight at the door. As long as the hoof hits the back of his head, there is no doubt that the human skull will be shattered.Fang Zheng felt a heavy weight on the top of his head, but he didn't feel the shattering pain he imagined.He opened his eyes to the sound of gurgling sticky water: the dangerous big hoof did step on top of his head, but he lost his strength at the last moment and just fell down by inertia.Because Fang Zheng was protecting his head, it was only as if he had been hit by a heavy object.Fang Zheng's eyes were filled with gold stars, but he was still within the tolerance range.

——He won the bet, the epidermis that was stabbed just now covered the most fragile arteries and large blood vessels under the neck. After pulling out the bone fork, it immediately spurted out a large amount of blood like a small water pump, splashing three to four feet on the stone wall in front of him. high.Si, who suddenly lost a large amount of blood, was unable to move at the same time, and fell to the ground like a hill collapsing.Fang Zheng was just between its belly and the pile of meat surrounded by its four hooves, otherwise the several tons of weight, even dead meat, would have crushed Fang Zheng.

In this way, he single-handedly killed...a ferocious carnivorous beast with a height of two people.

At this moment, Fang Zheng was covered in blood all over his body. He struggled to push away a hoof covering his head. His whole body seemed to have been washed in a pool of blood. There were a lot of bruises and pain on his body. Fang Zheng finally breathed a sigh of relief. , and fell down with black eyes.

However, it only took about a moment to lose consciousness, and Fang Zheng immediately forced himself to wake up again.His hands and feet were numb and he couldn't move. He only felt a little sensation in one arm, so he propped himself on the ground with his elbows and crawled slowly. This was the way to keep his body moving.All his dry food and water had dropped, and there was nothing on his body except tattered clothes.So Fang Zheng went to the bloody aorta wound, bit the smelly wound, and forced himself to suck the scalding blood.

——Si's skin is too hard to take the flesh.He had exhausted too much energy and had to drink water. The blood of the beast was very viscous and contained a lot of blood protein, but the smell of raw blood was disgusting.Fang Zheng swallowed a few mouthfuls and tried not to spit it out. He only drank a few mouthfuls. He didn't dare to use unhygienic things, as long as it was enough to maintain his heat for a period of time, and then struggled to crawl away.

He supported himself on the ground and crawled out a bloodstain. Although his whole body was in unbearable pain, his stomach was warm enough, and the temperature of the blood gradually poured into his paralyzed hands and feet.For a while, Fang Zheng felt a burning in his stomach, and then along the blood vessels to the whole body, his whole body was warm.He also regained consciousness in his hands and feet.

Fang Zheng could only crawl away with one hand at first, but now he can stand up while supporting the stone wall. He gritted his teeth and walked to the beast's head, and cut the root of the broken horn of the beast's head with the small bone dart that made great achievements. Flesh.But the flesh on Si's head was too thick and hard to cut at all.He originally wanted to dig out the severed horn, but although the root was broken, there was still about two feet buried under the scalp.Now I had to give up and go outside.

He was brought to this karst cave by Si just now, and he couldn't remember where he came from. He only remembered that the inside was intricate, like a labyrinth.The stone walls are sticky and slippery, and groundwater seeps everywhere.Only occasional gaps in the cave walls are illuminated by skylight.

The cave in which Si's body lay was a dead end, like a hole in a beehive.The huge underground river system has scoured for tens of millions of years, creating this huge crypt. Some of it is underground, some are in the mountains, and some are connected to the holes under the swamp.Fang Zheng just walked a few hundred meters casually, passing through what seemed to be the largest underground water pipeline system in the city, and he didn't know where it led.

If you walk around, you won't be able to get out for 100 years.

Fang Zheng found an underground stream, and he was overjoyed to wash away the blood foam on his body in the water, while thinking about whether he could find his way along the flowing water.However, when he walked along the creek for a few tens of meters, he found that the creek was just a small tributary of a huge spider web-like underground river system. In the cave, countless intertwined and scattered underground streams are distributed vertically and horizontally—even three-dimensionally. This cave is not flat, some parts are in the mountain, with different high and low exits, it can hold more than a dozen trains...

Fang Zheng was tired and in pain, and had almost lost consciousness. He only warned himself not to stop walking, but it seemed that his mind had stopped spinning.He vaguely saw that the broken horn of Si was growing bigger and bigger like Monkey King's golden cudgel, until it was as thick as the Dinghaishen needle, piercing through the whole cave, and he left the dark underground, rising higher and higher... …He rose into the air and wanted to take a good look at the whole picture of this huge karst cave group, but found that the bottom was not a natural landscape, but his father took him to the Palace Museum to play when he was a child:

"Father, why did the Forbidden City design nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine and a half rooms?"

"Because the [-] palaces are lived by the gods in the sky, the emperors on the ground can't pass through them, so they have to reduce them by half."

"Is there really a halving time?"

"Yes, it is said to be on the east side of Wenyuan Pavilion."

"Then how many palaces are there in the Forbidden City?"

"8728 rooms, but the Forbidden City palace is constantly being repaired, and this number is only a temporary statistics..."

When Fang Zheng was young, he wanted to find the "Hedgehog Immortal" in the Forbidden City (that is, the hedgehog, which lives in the grass of the Forbidden City and is a symbol of auspiciousness), and also wanted to visit every room...

Fang Zheng woke up with a jerk, and fell asleep standing by the dark cave wall. There was nothing around him, only the gurgling sound of the stream. He wiped his eyes, forced himself not to think about the dream, and washed his face to recover. wide awake.

Fang Zheng still couldn't find a sign that could tell the direction.At first, he followed the traces made by Si's impact on the cave wall, but the traces became blurred after wading through a few streams.Fang Zheng placed his hope in the traces and clues in the stream, but found a strange thing: there was no moss, no fish, or even plankton in the water.

This cave is too quiet.There are circulation gaps everywhere here, and it stands to reason that both ground creatures and underground creatures can live on.The swamp where Fangzheng and the others hunted just now is only a few square miles inhabited by creatures such as snakes, scorpions, waterfowl, and zebra-tailed antelope, and the biological level is quite dense.This is also in line with Fang Zheng's perception of this primitive tribe in the wild.

But there is still no trace of such a huge area of ​​underground caves after walking for a long time.Fang Zheng worried for a moment that there was a particularly terrifying and huge end predator living here, but he didn't smell any peculiar smell or see any biological traces, whether it was feces, blood, blood or food reserves. On the contrary, It's also very clean... I have to describe it, Fang Zheng thought in confusion: It's like a super invisible vacuum cleaner working continuously, wiping every inch of the cave wall clean.

At first, Fang Zheng was worried that the smell of Si's corpse would attract other predators, so he avoided it as soon as possible.However, after wandering around in the underground cave without a clue, Fang Zheng decided to go back there again, so that he could drink the blood of the dead when he was hungry.

But when Fang Zheng followed his memory and walked back to the place where Si's corpse was, his eyeballs were about to fall out——

The corpse of the beast as huge as a hill was gone, completely gone, blood, hair, leather... not a single trace was left.

If it wasn't for the half-truncated horn falling on the ground alone, Fang Zheng wouldn't dare to confirm that this is the place where he killed the beast just now.

The blood spurted from the carotid artery just now splashed on the wall of the cave several feet high, and it has disappeared at this moment.

Fang Zheng picked up the truncated horn tremblingly, his hands trembling.He kept telling himself to calm down.But right now he couldn't calmly think about what was going on.Any scientific explanation seems to be untenable, unless a bunch of cleaning staff with complete tools, with floating devices, suddenly appeared here, and disappeared into the air immediately after cleaning.It was clearly a funny scene to imagine, but Fang Zheng couldn't laugh at all.

The simplest and crudest assumption is that it was eaten by some ferocious beast, but what kind of predator also licked off the blood on the rock wall, no matter how clean it is, there will be traces in the crevices of the stone, right?No, even the cracks in the stones are clean.

What was even more frightening was that when Fang Zheng turned his head and wanted to escape from the cave, he found that its entrance had disappeared.He couldn't believe his eyes. The cave was not big, only two or three meters deep. As soon as he walked in, the entrance was right behind him, but it evaporated silently out of thin air.

Fang Zheng pinched himself hard, and squatted down trembling.He felt that this was more terrifying than seeing Si and snakes, at least they were enemies with physical bodies.This kind of thing right now... He has not believed in the existence of gods, demons and ghosts in this world until now, but at this moment his knees softened, and he couldn't help praying in his heart: Spare me, spare my life...

He is not afraid of the tangible, but the invisible and the unknown.

When his head hit the ground, Fang Zheng suddenly felt something was wrong—the skin on his forehead was sensitive, and the touch was a little soft and elastic.Almost subconsciously, Fang Zheng grabbed the truncated corner and stabbed it hard into the ground—the black ground suddenly wrinkled into a small depression, but it was very tough, and it tightened after a few inches of depression.Fang Zheng raised his hand again, and the depression became flat again.He hastily moved a few inches away and re-tie it down, the same dent and smoothness after relaxation, like a gigantic, well-maintained, smooth black skin.

Fang Zheng suppressed the shock in his heart, grabbed the broken horn and poked around in the cave. Almost the entire cave wall was covered with black elastic material, which was the same color as the cave wall, stretched silently, and sealed the entrance. It stopped, but when Fang Zhengzheng stuck the broken corner in the direction of the entrance, he felt that the back was empty.This layer of material is about an inch thick, and it is so elastic that it cannot be pierced by obtuse angles.

Fang Zheng felt relieved. Although this thing was very weird, it was better than the explanation of ghosts and gods, which made him feel more at ease.He took out the bone fork to cut, the smooth touch of the bottom of his hand seemed to be cutting flesh.Fang Zheng thought about a lot of explanations for a moment, but it wasn't until the bone fork cut the skin a little bit, there was no bleeding, no liquid, and inside were dense folds and spores like blinds, he didn't realize what it was. something.

If the guess is correct, this thing is bacteria.

Fungi are not plants. They do not absorb oxygen through photosynthesis, but absorb surrounding organic matter as food through decay.Its hyphae can divide ten thousand times.This is why the si disappeared completely. The fungus has no legs and feet, but when it absorbs such a big beast, the speed of active fission and reproduction is faster than that of creatures with feet.

Moreover, Fang Zheng remembered that this kind of fungus was also mentioned in the Shan Hai Jing. It exists, but it is called "shirou".In other ancient literature and popular terms, a certain black organic fungus with a huge body, buried in the ground without seeing the sun, and occasionally "running away with long legs" is also called——

Tai Sui.

Tai Sui is called "jurou" in "Shan Hai Jing Tu Zan" and "soil meat" in "Compendium of Materia Medica". The common point is that there are spores in the epidermis, which is elastic, black fungus that looks like meat but not flesh , is the King of Ganoderma lucidum in the mountains.

Of course, there was another kind of "Tai Sui" in ancient China, which was the "Sui" star (Jupiter), which was regarded as a disaster star by the ancients.Some people confuse it with it, thinking that the "Underground Tai Sui" is a harbinger of "Tai Sui in the sky", and if you dig it, you will suffer disaster, so there is a saying of "offending Tai Sui".

The ancient Chinese were superstitious, digging up a huge ganoderma lucidum as a mountain delicacy, advocating that eating it can lead to immortality.But on the other hand, this kind of Ganoderma lucidum often grows for thousands of years and has precious medicinal properties, which can strengthen the body and prolong life.

Fang Zheng was in a mixed mood: he had also seen the legendary thousand-year-old Ganoderma lucidum in old photos, which was said to have been accidentally discovered by villagers picking ginseng in the Northeast.Judging by the volume of living fungi covering the entire cave, this is more than a thousand-year-old Ganoderma lucidum—the fungus has existed for hundreds of millions of years. Organic matter, gradually growing to an unimaginable size.

No wonder the whole cave is so clean, Tai Sui's mycelial cell level, of course it can decompose the organic matter visible to the naked eye.

Fang Zheng retreated a little uneasy, but he couldn't relax in the face of such a big fungus.He groped around and found that the cave was completely surrounded by Tai Sui, without any gaps.Tai Sui's epidermis is huge, and in the folds of the cut cortex, it feels smooth and sticky to the touch, and mycelium is also hidden under the epidermis.Presumably, he is still alive, and the secretion has not been triggered.

Fungi don't have strong teeth, no sharp edges, and judging by his sobriety, the spores are not poisonous.But its skin is smooth, tough and airtight, and it is anaerobic.After a long time, he will definitely be suffocated inside, and then the fungus will slowly decompose his body.

Fang Zheng cut its skin fiercely with a bone fork, trying to widen the freshly cut wound.However, the bone fork had been cut in the skin before, and after being used repeatedly, it made a "squeaky" sound and broke, leaving only a gap the size of a baby's palm.

Fang Zheng only had the horn at hand, and Tai Sui hadn't disintegrated. Fang Zheng thought, there might be something in the horn that it couldn't absorb, it was so hard, if the wound was enlarged, he could poke the horn in and pierce through Tai Sui's body. The epidermis escapes.So Fang Zheng did not hesitate to use the strongest part of the human body - teeth.

He started eating this Tai Sui.

The author has something to say:

Crunch and crisp!