The Woman from Ba [Cthulhu]

The Four Pillars crumbled, the Nine Provinces split apart. The sky could no longer cover all things, and the earth could no longer bear them.

Nuwa repaired the heavens, but her divine power was exhausted, and she perished. Her people scattered in every direction.

One tribe entered the deep mountains of the southwest and joined with the local Ba people, becoming known as the Ba women.

My teacher once obtained several oracle bones from Liu E, the author of The Travels of Lao Can. They recorded the divinations made when Lady Fu Hao, wife of King Dixin, led a campaign against the Ba people. The oracle-bone characters for "Ba women" appear several times, but the work of translating oracle-bone script is still incomplete, so the full meaning of the divinations has yet to be deciphered.

My teacher sadly passed away from illness. His final wish was to visit the Ba women's tribe in person. Perhaps he could find historical sites or artifacts corresponding to the oracle-bone inscriptions in that hidden mountain paradise.

As my teacher's most prized student, I naturally had to fulfill his final wish. Leading a group of junior fellow students and one female student, we ventured into a mountain forest even more treacherous than the Shu Road.

It was filled with countless snakes, insects, rats, and ants, and thick with miasma. It was an incredibly dangerous place. But at the time, I had no idea that the most dangerous things in that forest were beyond anything humans could imagine...

I'm writing a short story to get some practice.

A story combining folk customs from southwest China with Lovecraftian horror.

Theme: Promote traditional culture.