Irapa

Irapa·Chapter 1 When Xia En woke up, it felt like there was a red-hot coal in his throat. She opened her eyes and saw an earthen wall. It has been tamped, and there are lines on the surface that people smoothed with their fingers, one after another, as if they were pressed at the end. Hanging on the wall were a bunch of dried chili peppers and a few leaves she didn't recognize. A beam of light leaked from the gaps in the wooden beams on the roof, and fell into a small round bright spot on a clay pot on the ground. She lay there for a long time before trying to sit up. My whole body ached, and the seams in my bones were sore, as if someone had been thrown from a height and then put back together piece by piece. She looked down at her hand - there was an old scar on her left hand, broken when she fell on the stone steps when she was seven years old. She recognized it. But there is dark brown ash embedded in the gaps between the fingers, and also between the nails, which cannot be rubbed off. The clothes on my body belong to someone else. Made of coarse linen, wide, the cuffs were rolled up twice before the wrists were exposed. She touched her neck and ribs. There were no new injuries. Someone is taking care of her. There was a voice outside the house. She listened for a long time, speaking fast and with unfamiliar syllables, like water flowing out of her ears. She tried to open her mouth and say a word, but she could only squeeze out a string of dry breath. The door didn't open. The footsteps came closer and then further away. Then it gets quiet. She stood up against the wall. My legs were weak, so I needed some help to stabilize them. She walked to the door and opened it. The afternoon sun was dazzlingly white. She squinted her eyes and glanced around - low houses scattered along the slope, with adobe walls and roofs made of hay. The ground was dry and hard to the touch. There is a mountain in the distance, with a flat top and a layer of low green on the edge. It glows in the sun with a luster that is not like a plant. She took a step forward. Then it stopped. The town was empty. There were people looking at her under the eaves, at the corners of the walls, and behind the cracks of half-open doors. She didn't count, but those eyes were like tiny needles piercing her body, neither approaching nor leaving. She raised her hands, palms facing outward, and slowly turned them in a circle. Then he pointed to his mouth and ears and shook his hand. She couldn't understand or speak. The crowd did not approach. Didn't disperse either. After a long time, an old man came out from behind. He was leaning on a wooden stick covered with copper, his back was slightly hunched, and he was half a head shorter than her. He walked five or six steps in front of her, stopped, and spoke very slowly, word by word, as if he was trying his best to speak clearly to someone who couldn't understand. Shane stared at his mouth and caught a recurring word - it sounded like "irapa". She nodded, pointed to the ground, and then pointed to the distance. She was saying: This is Irapa, where I came from. The old man looked at her for a while, then turned and waved to her. She followed through the town. The road is a dirt road, with hay bundles, animal bones, and pottery pieces hung on the low walls on both sides. She noticed that there were inscriptions on the pottery fragments, arranged regularly, like some kind of writing. She took a second look but didn't stop. The old man led her to an earthen platform in the center of the town. The platform is half a person's height, with a stone tablet erected on it. The surface of the monument is gray and black, roughened by wind and sand, but the scratches on it are still clear. Xia En took a closer look - the lines were not any words she recognized, but the arrangement made her feel familiar, like something that she should be able to understand had been dismantled and reorganized. She squatted down and hovered her fingers above the monument without touching it. The direction of those lines reminded her of the talismans unearthed in tombs of the Northern Wei Dynasty: an upside-down mirror image layout. She read from bottom to top, turned her perspective upside down, and the symbols suddenly took shape. The bottom line, translated into what she could understand, probably meant: "Seventh floor. The entrance is in the gap between breaths." Her fingertips landed on the line of carvings. It was cold, and the edges of the grooves were worn smooth by the wind, as if they had been touched repeatedly for many years. When she stood up, she spotted a loose stone slab on the side of the earthen platform. She knelt down and moved the stone slab away - there was a vertical crack at the bottom, only narrow enough for one hand to pass through. The cracks were deep, and a warm, dry wind came out of them. When the wind blew over her fingers, the black gray between her fingers lit up. It trembled slightly, like iron filings being attracted by a magnet. She drew her hand back. The ashes are still there, but the warm wind is still flowing out, with a very shallow rhythm - like breathing. It was very slow, very deep, and the interval between the two ups and downs was enough for her to say three sentences. She covered the slate back. He stood up and dusted his hands. The old man stood a few steps away and looked at her, but did not come over to look at the gap. It seemed like he already knew what was there. That evening she returned to the cabin. When I pushed the door, a small piece of something fell out from the crack of the door - it was a pottery shard, the size of a fingernail, with rounded edges. She picked it up and looked at the light. There was a symbol on it, which was the same as the word "seventh floor" in the line she saw on the monument during the day. She didn't know who stuffed it. No one in town came near her door. She turned the pottery over and looked at the back. There was nothing on the back. But she turned the angle towards the light and saw a dark pattern inside the pottery piece, as if some texture had been pressed into the clay before firing. The shape of the dark pattern is exactly the same as the outline of the flat-topped mountain in the distance. Shane put the potsherd into his pocket. Sitting on the edge of the bed, looking out the window. The sky was sinking into darkness, and the mountains in the distance turned into dark silhouettes. The short layer of green on the top of the mountain reflects a light cyan luster in the last ray of skylight, like the layer of light left after metal has been polished. She stared at the light for a long time. Then she discovered something - that layer of green was not static. It's moving. Very slowly, as if the mountain was breathing. The things covering the top of the mountain expanded and contracted slightly with the ups and downs. The amplitude was so small that she almost thought it was her own eyesight. She was not wrong. The mountain is breathing. The warm wind that she smelled coming out of the cracks in the rocks during the day was the breath exhaled by the mountains. Xia En sat in the darkness, holding the piece of pottery the size of a fingernail in his hand. She didn't know who put it there. The people in the town were afraid of her and did not dare to approach her. But someone came to her door. When she lay down, her hair hung down from the pillow and fell outside the edge of the bed. She turned over, pushed her hair back, and her fingers touched a small protrusion under the pillow. She pulled it out and found another piece of broken pottery. It was larger than the one in the crack of the door, and the corners were sharper, as if it had been newly knocked down. There are two rows of symbols engraved on it. She watched for a long time through the dim light outside the window. She had already learned how to read the second row during the day - from bottom to top. She read it once, and her heart beat faster. She didn't recognize the people in the row above. But the meaning of the row below is translated as—— "It knew someone was coming." Xia En clutched the piece of pottery and sat in the darkness. The mountains outside the window were completely invisible, but the warm wind was still blowing from the direction of the town, passing through the gaps in the roof, passing through the gaps under the door panels, and brushing against her ankles. With rhythm. It was like someone was in a deep place and slowly turned over. Conception:-