Chapter 10: Sealed Stronghold (2)

"Go away! All of you, go away." I shouted at them, there was no way I would let them succeed.
"Hu Zhenghao, what's wrong with you?" someone asked me with concern.
Before I could answer, a more distant voice suddenly interjected: "How's the situation downstairs?"
"We found Hu Zhenghao, but we haven't found the other three yet. Hu Zhenghao's mental state is a bit agitated, we'll bring him up shortly." One of the people in front of me turned to report upstairs.
At this moment, my emotions finally stabilized. I looked them over; they had shadows, there was also light in front of me. None of this seemed like a false illusion created by evil spirits. Most likely, I had gone crazy... If being crazy could stop the fear, maybe that wouldn't be a bad thing.
I sobbed helplessly, looking at the few people in front of me and asked, "Is it really you? Are you real?"
"Of course we're real." The one speaking was a friend I was quite familiar with in the military. His name was Sun Mingyang.
Sun Mingyang touched his own chin, then patted his legs and said, "Ghosts don't have chins and legs, right? Look at me, I've got everything."
"Y-you... how are you here?" I asked him, still uncertain.
Sun Mingyang squatted down as if coaxing a child and spoke to me: "You guys have been missing for two days and we couldn't contact you, so we directly redeployed and came over to look for you. Later, we discovered your car was parked just outside the camp. The commander feared something might have happened to you, so he immediately sent people to search the entire camp. That's how I found you here."
Hearing his words, I cried even more miserably. "It's really you..."
I tightly hugged Sun Mingyang, crying with sorrow, afraid he would disappear from my sight again.
Sun Mingyang patted my back and said to me, "Let's go, we're going upstairs."
"Okay." I nodded, letting Sun Mingyang lead me toward the light source. It was a spotlight they had shone from above; the light was extremely dazzling, illuminating the dim basement as bright as day.
Under the light's projection, I looked around the surroundings. This was just an ordinary basement, with a long corridor and several wards on both sides. There was no pool of blood that Xiao Hei and I had stepped in, no chanting in the surroundings, and certainly no mysteriously appearing another corridor.\Although the scene before me seemed ordinary and unremarkable, I knew that the things I experienced with Xiao Hei, A Ming, and Jian Zai were definitely not illusions.\ Sun Mingyang helped support me as we reached the end of the corridor. I saw a staircase leading upward—this staircase appeared again, though we couldn't find it earlier.\ Stepping on the stairs, my chest felt heavy and suffocating. Someone next to me quickly supported my body, and he and Sun Mingyang helped carry me up to the first floor.\ When the officer saw me, he immediately shouted, "Looks like dehydration. Hurry, get a stretcher and take him to the medical room."\ From that moment, I truly felt saved. The outside air was a bit humid, probably because it had just rained. The moonlight was very clear. Soldiers were running back and forth around me. Listening to the noise around me, I peacefully closed my eyes.\ I was carried into the medical room. After examination, the medic administered an IV and told me to lie down and rest.\ I was too tired to open my eyes, but I could still hear the movements around me.\ A few people thought I was asleep and didn't dare to disturb me. They lowered their voices, whispering and discussing, "What's going on? Looks like he's possessed."\ Then I heard footsteps approaching. I heard a soldier who just entered say, "Found them. A Ming and Jian Zai have both been found."\ "Where are they?" Sun Mingyang asked. "Is everyone okay?"\ "Not good," the soldier said awkwardly.\ Upon hearing news of A Ming and Jian Zai, I immediately perked up to listen.\ "How is it? Speak quickly!" Sun Mingyang's anger flared, and his voice unconsciously grew louder. It looked like they had made a great effort to find us.\ "A-A Ming and Jian Zai have been found, but only Xiao Hei is still missing," the soldier said.\ "It's okay, at least we found two of them," Sun Mingyang sighed.\ "But…" The soldier stammered, hesitant to speak.\ "But what?" Sun Mingyang asked again.\ "All… all dead. A Ming and Jian Zai are dead. We found their bodies—they died in a very strange way," the soldier said.\ My chest tightened, and I fainted, unaware of the rest of their conversation.In the darkness, I kept hearing Xiao Hei's final cry: "Help me...... Hu Zhenghao! Help me!" I don't know how long I slept before I slowly woke up, but Xiao Hei's cries for help still lingered in my ears, making it hard to tell where I was—whether that voice was real or false. "Hu Zhenghao, are you awake?" Sun Mingyang shook my body. I opened my eyes and looked at him, my mind still a bit unclear. "Where am I?" "Infirmary, you've slept for a whole day and night." Sun Mingyang handed me a glass of water. I sat up in bed, still very weak, unable to muster any strength. I took a sip of water and looked around at my surroundings. Sunlight was streaming outside the window. It was daytime, and the troops were training inside the training ground. "Are you okay?" Sun Mingyang asked me. I nodded and eagerly asked him, "Did you find Xiao Hei?" "No, we only found Amin and Jianzi." Sun Mingyang pressed his lips together, hesitating whether to tell me the truth. "How are they?" I asked him, vaguely recalling what happened before he lost consciousness. I remembered someone had come to inform Sun Mingyang that they had found Amin and Jianzi's bodies. "They're all dead, and in a very bizarre way." Sun Mingyang said seriously, "Both of their bellies were cut open, as if a sharp blade had cut them open. The autopsy report came out this morning. Amin's cause of death was a cut in his abdomen and excessive blood loss. Strangely, his body seemed to have been bitten by wild dogs, with many bites, and a bunch of internal organs were missing. It was probably eaten, but when we went to the basement, we didn't see any stray dogs." I covered my mouth and remembered the scene where Amin was killed. Amin's internal organs were eaten by that group of **, not the wild dogs Sun Mingyang mentioned. None of this was my dream. "Then...... What about Jianzi?" I asked Sun Mingyang again. Sun Mingyang said, "He's dead too. His body was also disemboweled, but all his internal organs were found and leaked right next to his corpse. Strangely, there were strangulation marks on his neck, as if someone had tightly strangled him before dying." "I remembered this too. The one who grabbed Jian Zai's neck was a hanged female corpse. It was precisely this female corpse that couldn't escape because he couldn't escape, and the veteran soldier cut open his belly." I listened with lingering fear, cold sweat streaming down my forehead and back.I instinctively touched my body to confirm that I was really still alive. As my hand moved, it brushed over the bandages on my arm. I looked at my arm, which was already wrapped in thick bandages.

"You're injured too, looks like a cut from a knife. The medic has already bandaged it for you and given you a tetanus shot. It's nothing serious; after a few days of rest, you'll be fine," Sun Mingyang explained, patting my shoulder to help calm my emotions.

"Mm." I looked at him, feeling a strange melancholy. If they had found us earlier, perhaps Xiao Hei wouldn't have been taken away by that black mist.

"Right now, only Xiao Hei is missing; everyone else is still being searched for," Sun Mingyang sighed, then asked me, "Do you have any leads?"

"I… I was about to speak but swallowed my words back. If I tell them what happened that day, will they think I'm crazy?"

"Hm?" Sun Mingyang looked at me.

After pondering for a long while, I finally decided to tell him everything: "We encountered a ghost."

"What?" Sun Mingyang was momentarily stunned, but quickly regained his composure, "Take your time and explain."

He was so calm that I found it strange, so I asked him, "Don't you think I'm speaking nonsense?"

Sun Mingyang shook his head: "Under normal circumstances, I would definitely wonder if you'd hit your head or mistaken a dream for reality, especially after spending two days in a dark, closed basement. Your mental state would surely be unstable."

"Wait a second, you said I spent two days in the basement?" I interrupted him, surprised. "I only spent one night in there!"

"No, you were out of contact for two full days and it really worried us," Sun Mingyang said seriously, and his tone didn't seem to be lying.

So we had actually been in the basement for two days, but we thought it was only one night. The time discrepancy made me realize that the four of us had indeed fallen into an alternate dimension.

I stared at Sun Mingyang in disbelief. He continued, "Let me tell you something else. Do you know why we were reassigned to this area?"

"You tell me." I listened quietly.

"Actually… it was a directive from our superior instructing us to come here and seal the basement door. Don't you find this order a bit strange?"This is an abandoned camp, yet they want us to seal the door to a basement. That's really strange. It shows there's something really wrong with that basement. So I believe what you said—you really might have encountered a ghost." Sun Mingyang said quietly. It seemed this instruction couldn't be told to outsiders. "So that basement really has a problem?" I asked Sun Mingyang again. Sun Mingyang nodded, then asked me, "Now you can tell me, what exactly happened? Why did you say you encountered a ghost?" I recalled the whole incident and roughly said to Sun Mingyang, "The day we came to the camp, to report the results of the inspection to the boss, the four of us climbed over the wall to get in. Later, when we went to the dormitory building to check, we didn't expect to see a ghost on the playground. The four of us were terrified and immediately hid, but the ghosts on the playground had already found us and were searching everywhere. Of course, we were terrified and had nowhere to run, so we had no choice but to crawl into the basement. But as soon as we entered, it felt like a wall of ghosts—the stairs disappeared, and we were trapped in the basement... "And then?" Sun Mingyang listened, half believing. "Later, we met a child. We never expected that child would actually eat people!" I recounted everything in the basement in detail. Sun Mingyang's face gradually turned pale, and as I recalled it, my body instinctively started trembling again. By the end, Sun Mingyang kept nodding, as if he believed what I was saying. "I thought I was doomed. You happened to find me at that moment." I explained everything from beginning to end. Sun Mingyang swallowed nervously; now it was his turn to be scared stiff, unable to recover for a long time. After a long moment, Zisun Mingyang finally spoke: "You mean Xiao Hei was taken away by a ghost?" "I don't know, but I have a gut feeling he's still in the basement." I said. "That basement is really strange. It was built to imitate the dormitory buildings above ground, like reflections in a pond, projected underground. Why would the designer have wanted to build it like this?" Sun Mingyang exhaled, trying to lighten the eerie atmosphere from just now. "There's a rumor that the dormitory buildings above ground are actually just a cover, and the basement is where the troops can hide. That way, we won't have to worry about enemy bombing of the buildings above ground." I said.Sun Mingyang nodded and said ambiguously, "You rest, I'll go report to the boss."
"Okay." I closed my eyes and was about to sleep a little more, but then I called out to Sun Mingyang again: "Wait a moment."
"What's wrong?" Sun Mingyang asked, turning back at the door of the infirmary.
"I want to go back to the basement and look for Xiao Hei again." I was still preoccupied with the voice from my dream; Xiao Hei was calling for help, and maybe… he wasn't dead yet.
Hearing my request, Sun Mingyang was clearly startled. He looked at me in surprise and asked the confused question, "Are you sure?"
After going through such a terrifying experience, would I still go back? I hesitated over this question in my heart, but I always felt that only I could find Xiao Hei.
"Yes, let's search the basement again. He must still be there. Since we didn't find Xiao Hei's body, it means he might still be alive. We can't just leave him," I said.
"But we've already searched. He's not in the basement," Sun Mingyang tried to persuade me to give up the idea. "If he were there, we would have found him, but he's not. Even if you go down, there's no…"