The scene is etched in my memory, you can see the floating corpses coming from afar, and then disappearing under your eyelids, as if they just came to say hello to you. Neither I nor Zhang Wenbin himself could remain calm, this has exceeded all our expectations.

  "Retreat......" This was said by Zha Wenbin from his own mouth, and when I heard him say this, his voice was a little trembling.

  "Go..." I was leaning against the ladder, and the closest one to me was Fatso. The so-called platform was actually just a stone slab about one square meter in size. Fatso alone almost took up half of it. In the chaos, it's easy to make mistakes. And with that mistake, Fatso turned around, and his massive butt squeezed me right off...

  I don't know what posture I went down with, I remember the water there was very shallow, only to my calf, but when I fell down, it felt like falling into a bottomless lake.

  There was a loud rumbling sound, and then I felt water pouring into my mouth and nostrils from all directions. My head was still wearing the miner's lamp, and I struggled desperately in the water, unable to find any direction.

  In the chaos, I raised my head and found myself sinking down at this moment. On the surface of the water, there was a white dot that was getting farther and farther away from me...

  When I woke up, I didn't know where I was. Everything around me was pitch black, and I could hear the sound of water rhythmically hitting the shore, making a "gurgling" noise. I tried to move, but my whole body felt weak, and my hands, feet, and neck were all in pain, making me gasp for air. But there was a voice in my head telling myself: I'm still alive!

  He made a great effort to pat the headlamp on his head with his hand, and it actually lit up! The water here is very cold, my body temperature is rapidly losing, I know that if I don't move away in the next moment, I will be frozen to death.

  That was by crawling, dragging the unresponsive components inch by inch to the edge, and when I leaned against a rock, I saw a huge splash on the water surface not far away, and soon someone emerged from the water and swam vigorously towards the shore.

  About two meters away from that person, another person also came out just half a minute later. Who else could these two people be? Wasn't it Fatso and Cha Wenbin?!

  Fatso panted heavily with his hands on his knees after landing ashore: "I'm suffocating..."

  There was another person who was even worse off than him, about the same as when I first came up. At that time, I could barely protect myself, and the three of us fell down one after another in three places to rest for a long time before we slightly recovered.

  By the water's edge, there was dry grass and some wood that had been washed ashore. We gathered a few points of firewood and lit a bonfire. What season is this? If it were in Northeast China last year, even urine would freeze in the air on such days. Three men, each wearing only one layer of clothing, sat around the bonfire, their lower lips beating against their upper lips until their bodies warmed up slightly before they opened their mouths to speak.

  After they pushed me down, the two of them only heard my splash and then looked down to find that I was gone. What's even stranger is that the corpses that were originally floating on the water also disappeared. Except for a bit of ripple, the entire surface of the water was calm. The fat guy and Cha Wenbin immediately jumped into the water to look for me, but the water here was only so deep, and I, such a big living person, could have climbed out.

  They were also panicked, and they searched me from head to toe, including using their hands, but I had vanished into thin air.

  At the critical moment, it was still Fatso's brain that worked well. He noticed a small detail - on the water flow above the platform below, there were several leaves spinning around. That place was where we had never been before. The floating corpses earlier were enough to make us retreat. He took a step forward with great courage, and suddenly the water flow under his feet began to exert force. A huge, unreasonable power instantly tied up Fatso's legs, "bang" - he was pulled to the ground.

  Cha Wenbin simply thought that the fat man had just slipped and turned around to pull him, but unexpectedly the fat man disappeared under his eyelids. Then the whirlpool on the water surface began to grow larger, so much so that Cha Wenbin was also pulled in by that force.

  "Is it going to fall down?" I looked up at the top, but it was only three or four meters high, all of which were inverted stalactites. "Drip, drip", water was dripping down, but obviously the three of us had just floated up from the water surface...

  "I get it!" Fatso slapped his forehead and said, "I've been thinking for half a day and still can't figure out what's going on. Xiao Xia Ye, this really is all your fault."

  "Blame me? It's not like you didn't push me down with your fart. I was thinking of coming to this godforsaken place, no village ahead, no store behind, heaven knows if we can even get out, and you still have the nerve to scold me."

  "I'm saying you hit the nail on the head, in my opinion, this is a typical karst landscape. But it's a bit beyond my expectation, I thought this kind of thing was common in Yunnan and Guangxi, didn't expect to see it in southern Anhui."

  "This isn't strange at all. The neighboring county has a Taiji Cave which is really fun to play in... I even went there with my mom when I was little... You continue."

  "Fatty pointed to a nearby location and said, 'Have you guys noticed that in the short time we've been here, the water level is rising? I clearly saw that sharp rock over there was on the shore earlier, but now the part below it is already underwater.'"

  "What does this prove?" said Cha Wenbin.

  "This shows how we got here!" Fatso gestured with his hands: "This is my left hand, this is the river where we just passed through that coal mine tunnel; this is my right hand, this is where we are now."

  I noticed that the fat man's left and right hands were parallel at this time, then he slightly lowered his right hand and said: "There should be an underground river between the left and right hands, which is very common in karst landforms. However, it is estimated that during mining, the action was too large and the passage between the left and right hands was blocked. Speaking of Xia Ye, you should lose weight recently, because your sudden fall had too much force and happened to hit open the originally blocked passage between the left and right hands. In this way, a siphon effect will be instantly generated."

  "What's a rainbow vacuum?" Both Cha and I looked at each other in confusion.

  "You two are uncultured!" Fatso made an analogy: "Have you seen the wine seller in a small shop? He uses a leather tube, one end inserted into the wine jar and the other connected to the bottle. When someone sucks on it with their mouth and pinches and releases it with their hand, the wine comes out of the wine jar. We're now inside that wine bottle, previously we were like in the wine jar. And Little Xia, you just happened to unblock the tube for pouring wine, I was wondering why there's such a strong suction!"

  Cha Wenbin nodded in agreement: "I kind of understand now, Shi Tou is probably right, it's not far from the truth."

  "With his cultural level, forget it. Then you say those floating corpses, didn't they all come down together? I haven't seen a single one."

  Fatso said: "This has to be asked of Cha Ye, I'm also puzzled, when you fell down those corpses just disappeared."

  Zha Wenbin said: "I also thought, the most likely is that those things are not corpses."

  "What is it?"

  "It's a ghost."

  "I said: 'That's a ghost! How many ghosts are there? Luckily it fell down, otherwise it would be terrible!'"

  "The spirit is not a ghost, the essence of human beings is divided into two parts: one is the soul, which comes from 'heavenly energy', that is, yang energy; the other is the spirit, which comes from 'earthly energy', that is, yin energy. The two energies of the soul and spirit, one yin and one yang, complement each other and cannot be missing. The soul dominates the spirit, while the spirit dominates the body shape. When the soul and spirit have just left the body, they maintain their pre-mortem physical form, but as time goes on, it becomes increasingly blurred, until finally slowly disappearing. To maintain their physical form, they need to possess a living person or devour other spirits."

  However, in some special cases, the spirit and soul will separate. Without a soul, the combined spirits are just an empty shell. If you can imagine a ghost as a physical entity, then the spirit can be understood as a ghost without a soul.

  "Where did they go?"

  Zha Wenbin said: "The spirit is like the you in the mirror, when we are alive, the you in the mirror is your spirit. It looks like it has a physical form, but you can't touch it. Those things in the water are spirits, and if they suddenly disappear, it's probably related to falling into the water. The movement of the water surface is like breaking a mirror, and those spirits will also disappear. If I'm not mistaken, the corpses we saw at that time should be an image, but I'm not sure where it was projected from."

  "It sounds pretty precarious, I don't plan on staying in this ghostly place for long. Cha Ye, now that we want to go back, it's probably difficult. The suction power is quite strong, easy to get in but hard to get out. Before long, if we don't freeze to death, we'll starve to death."

  At this time, no one dares to guarantee that we can return alive. At the age of twenty, the word "death" seems still far away from me.

  Suddenly everything was quiet again, the crackling of the firewood, the sound of water, I was probably suffocating too, so I pulled out my throat and shouted loudly: "I haven't married a daughter-in-law yet!"

  "Haha!" The fat man laughed, and Cha Wenbin also laughed. At this time, the biggest enemy is actually oneself. The more one suppresses it, the more uncontrollable it becomes to think about it, and the more one thinks, the more depressed they become, ultimately trapping themselves to death!

  After checking, basically everything brought is still there, especially the three miner's lamps, which were obtained by Baozi from Zhou Youcai. At that time, they were specially supplied to the coal mining department as high-grade goods. According to Baozi's standards, this was military grade. A single charge could last for eight hours. We plan to use only one miner's lamp to save electricity.

  After the clothes were dry, we roasted two more pancakes to fill our stomachs. Originally, we planned to leave at dawn, and each of us brought two large pancakes as snacks. After eating our fill and warming up, we stood up to survey our surroundings. The area was roughly the size of two rooms, with an irregularly shaped circular water surface. Fortunately, the water was flowing, so we decided to follow the direction of the current and try to walk out...