The bronze bell stick in Zhou''s hand was inserted three inches into the mud, and the rusty bell tongue whimpered in the wind. The coffin splashed with black donkey blood was like a dormant beast, and the nine iron chains glowed in the rain. Lin stared at the old man''s blue-gray arm. The talismans and tattoos were coiled on the skin like snakes, biting into strange totems with the lines on the coffin. The raindrops suddenly became sticky and hit the skin with a fishy smell. Lin wiped his face and found that his palms were full of tiny blood beads, each of which stretched out silky tentacles while rolling.


    A muffled sound came from the depths of the riverbed, and the cracked silt arched and collapsed, revealing half of the rusty Luoyang shovel - it was an artifact left by the dredging engineering team in 1953, but now it was covered with new blood moss. Zhou grabbed Lin''s collar, bloodshot eyes bursting: "If the Dragon Gate is not sealed before midnight, the whole village will be fed to fish and shrimp!"


    The lights of the distant village twisted into a ghost-like green in the rain.


    Two thousand kilometers away in the heart of Lop Nur, Su''s fingers sank into the sand. Thirty meters away at the bottom of the sand dune, half of the canvas backpack revealed the faded word "Peng", and the zipper teeth were stained with undried blood. Assistant Xiao Wang''s metal detector suddenly burst into a sharp buzzer, and before the voice fell, the camp car ten meters away was swallowed by quicksand. The satellite antenna on the roof was twisted into a twist, and the figure standing on the top of the sand dune made Su cold all over - the white lab coat was spotless, and the word "Peng" on the badge glowed coldly in the moonlight.


    "Run!" She grabbed Xiao Wang and rushed towards the camel, and the sand waves chased her heels. The moment she fell into the quicksand pit, she fell into an underground river. The blue light of the Pisces jade pendant illuminated the grooves on the cave wall that were as dense as a honeycomb. In each groove was a dried corpse with a left hand broken at the wrist.


    The red lacquer door of the river temple creaked in the strong wind. Zhou inserted the bronze bell stick into the incense burner, and when the incense ash splashed, five shrunken geckos arranged in the shape of a Big Dipper were revealed at the bottom of the furnace. The left eye of the clay sculpture of the Dragon King on the altar fell off, revealing a white skull, and a ball of fetal hair wrapped in red thread was stuffed in the right eye socket. "A black coffin was fished out in 1953," Zhou tore open his sheepskin coat, and the scar on his chest was blue-black. "The twelve engineers who opened the coffin began to petrify from their toes..."


    The sound of nails scratching outside the temple was getting closer and closer. Lin looked through the hole in the window paper and saw the old village chief crawling upside down with his head against the ground, and octopus-like tentacles protruded from the cracked mouth at the back of his head. Zhou shouted "Kneel!", and Lin''s knees hit the blue bricks uncontrollably, and black water seeped out of the cracks of the bricks and soaked his trouser legs. The old man bit his index finger and wrote a blood curse on the skull of the Dragon King: "What exploded in Lop Nur in 1958 was not an atomic bomb, but the mother body of the Yinxu worm!"


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    The water level of the dark river suddenly surged. Alena emerged from the sand and dust, her glazed right ear reflecting a colorful halo, and the copper bell in her hair was engraved with the Loulan sun pattern. "Your father''s backpack is the bait thrown by the Yang coffin," she raised her hand and pointed to the bottom of the river. Countless canvas bags embroidered with the word "Peng" floated in the blue light. "The Loulan people fed the Yang coffin with their left hands. Your bloodline is not accidental."


    Su''s left hand uncontrollably pressed against the crystal coffin, and the broken wrist of the figure in the coffin perfectly overlapped with her wrist. At the moment of the sharp pain, the memory fragments of 1980 flooded into his mind-Peng stood in the same position and broke the Pisces jade pendant. In the ancient city in the sandstorm, countless "Pengs" were repeating the same action.


    The roof of the river temple collapsed in the explosion. Zhao emerged from the smoke, his gold-rimmed glasses adorned with a jade pendant from the Imperial Astronomical Observatory. The black-clad man''s rocket launcher smashed the left half of the Dragon King statue. "Master''s zombie Gu is well-fed," Zhao rolled over the insect corpses on the ground, and opened Lin''s eyelids with a bronze dagger. "The mirror image is being reassembled at the missing point of Peng. Doesn''t the Yin Key host intend to save the Yang Key?" Lin''s right arm was burning and bleeding, and the birthmark merged into a topographic map of Lop Nur on the incense ash. He vaguely saw Su trapped in a crystal coffin, and the next second he was pinched by the throat and pressed on the altar. Zhou took the opportunity to throw the bell stick, and the exploded bronze bell released the Yinxu insect swarm. The old man grabbed Lin and broke through the rear window and disappeared in the rainstorm. The water flow of the dark river swept Su against the rock wall. Alena inserted her glass fingers into the cracks of the stone, and the sand condensed into Loulan characters in the air: "The Yin-Yang Coffin is opened, the Xiran appears, and the desert will swallow half of China." The Yinxu worm crawled out of the cracks in the crystal coffin, drilled into Su''s skin along the trouser legs, and the birthmark on the wrist glowed with blood. She heard Peng in 1980 whispering in her ear: "Don''t believe the ''I'' of the Yellow River..."


    Lin vomited in the rainstorm, and the transparent worm swimming in the black water drilled back into his fingers. Zhou tore open his sleeves, and green smoke rose when he smeared the birthmark with incense ash: "The mirror body Zhao said is the reflection of the Yinxu worm after parasitism. Zombies like you and me are just watchdogs of the Yin-Yang Coffin." In the distance, the river surface was rising with turbid waves of a hundred meters, and countless blurred figures stood on the waves. Lin saw that the nearest "person" had his own face, but his right hand was connected to the broken palm in the crystal coffin.


    The old man lifted up his trouser legs, and his petrified calves cracked into salt crystal-like lines: "I ate the Yin coffin mud in 1959. Now it''s your turn to choose - restart the world, or be replaced by the mirror image?"


    When the thunder rolled over the horizon, Lin''s birthmark suddenly tore the skin, and a line of blood shot into the western night sky, igniting red stars in the direction of Lop Nur.