Chapter 3: Echoes from the Forbidden Zone

The rusted fence groaned in the night wind, a fine, fragmented sound like the last death rattle of a dying creature, piercingly loud in the silent expanse of the wilderness. Patrick clung tightly to unconscious Chidi with one hand while his other struggled to pry through the curled barbed wire.

The cold metal bits left shallow blood trails across his palm, but he couldn't spare a second for the pain. Sticking close to the ground like two frightened rats, they crept carefully into the edge of the Mining Corporation’s abandoned Forbidden Zone.

Beneath their feet, the end of the once-busy Railway Tracks had long since been swallowed by loose sandy soil. Rusted ties were hidden under weeds, stretching out into the dark depths, looking like an entrance to hell. Chidi’s eyes fluttered half-open, his lips moving as his consciousness drifted between dream and reality. He murmured in a sleep-talk, "The Forbidden Ground... the elders say the bones of the Ancestral Spirits are buried here..."

His voice was so faint it was nearly inaudible, yet it sent a chill down Patrick’s spine. He pressed down on Chidi’s trembling shoulder, lowering his voice with an unyielding seriousness. "Shh. No noise."

Far away, a snow-white patrol beam swept through the dark like a sword, instantly slicing the desolate land into two halves of light and shadow. The two flattened themselves immediately, bodies pressed tight against the cold ground, shuffling toward the camp site along the dried riverbed. The water had long since run dry; the riverbed was cracked like a turtle’s shell, deep fissures spanning the expanse.

As Patrick’s fingers touched the cracked earth, he felt a trace of extreme faint warmth. It wasn't the lingering heat of sun exposure; it felt like the heartbeat of the deep earth, heavy and powerful, as if some sleeping leviathan were breathing beneath the skin of the world.

Ahead, a dull hydraulic stop echoed suddenly, like a beast swallowing its last breath. Patrick halted sharply. The air around them turned thick and viscous, as if Vitality had suddenly been cut off somewhere. Deathly silence fell like a curtain, covering everything.

He dropped to one knee, pressing his palm against the railway foundation. Ancestral Resonance activated quietly in his mind. The metallic veins unfolded within his consciousness, displaying a gray, morbid hue. Almost all the "Vitality" had withered away.

Except for a patch of light hundreds of meters ahead. It was restless and chaotic, like a dying ember still struggling to burn, radiating an unsettling heat.

Chidi struggled to wake, weakly pointing at the faintly undulating steel silhouettes ahead. "That's the drill rig cluster... abandoned. The tribe legends say it's the resting place of the Ancestral Spirits. No one dared touch it." Patrick looked up at those silent mechanical corpses. The towering derricks cast long shadows under the moonlight, standing like gravestones. His heart rate spiked, and warning bells rang in his head.

He approached the rusted drill rig. Salt frost had formed on the cooling pipes, glinting with a crystalline, dangerous cold light under the weak illumination. Patrick reached out, his fingertips touching the freezing metal.

Instantly, a torrent of images flooded his mind: the drill rig running at crazy overload, bearings burning, oil pipes bursting, metal fibers snapping like broken strings one by one, the pressure gauge needle swinging wildly, about to smash through the red line. The tension of impending collapse nearly swallowed him whole. He jolted awake, a sweet metallic taste surging in his throat, and screamed in a raspy voice, "Get back! Run! Run now!"

He shoved Chidi away from the drill rig. But as he forced the Resonance to cut off, Patrick violently vomited a mouthful of blood foam. His knees buckled, and his vision blurred. At the same moment, a massive crash of gears shattering echoed from the depths of the mine pit. Black rock mixed with mechanical debris rained down, shattering the fragile surface structures nearby. Dust churned, blocking out the moonlight, and the world plunged into a murky, yellow haze.

Patrick lay prone amidst the ruins, surrounded by rubble and twisted steel. He closed his eyes, holding his breath, letting Ancestral Resonance relight his awareness. He felt Vitality converging at the fracture points, like water flowing around reefs, seeking a new path. He groped his way toward a gap that hadn’t been completely buried.

Chidi lost his bearings in the chaos, panic-stricken as he shouted, "Patrick! Where are you?" His voice echoed in the collapsing crevices of stone, broken and helpless, like a string on the verge of snapping.

Patrick found an uncollapsed steel beam. Using every ounce of strength, he propped up the narrow space and pulled his coat over Chidi’s head. "Don't move. Breathe in the air here. The dust is too thick."

Separated by the gap in the steel beam, they gasped for air. Through the dust and fog, Chidi’s voice trembled, "Why... why didn't you escape yourself?"

Patrick wiped the blood foam from the corner of his mouth, his gaze piercing through the dust. "Because you're still alive. Ancestral Resonance cannot abandon anyone connected to living breath."

The words were heavy and firm, and Chidi stopped trembling, a complex expression flashing in his eyes.

In the distant dust, Amina's remote communicator flickered with a faint red light. Geological monitoring data came through in broken bursts: "Deep in the mine zone... unknown vibration source... it's spreading..." The synthetic electronic voice sounded thin and urgent in the noisy environment. Patrick braced against the steel beam, looking at the faint light in the gap. "Crawl toward the draft. The Vitality is thickest there."

He guided Chidi out through the crevices where the Vitality was most concentrated, crawling on hands and knees until his nails dug into the stone seams and his muscles ached from over-tension. Before the collapse could seal itself completely, the two rolled out of the pile of rubble and tumbled into the bushes on the perimeter. Behind them, the earth roared, the entire ruin collapsed, and a column of dust shot into the sky, blocking out the sun and moon.

In the silence, a low roar—a mix of machine and beast—suddenly emanated from the depths of the ruins. It sounded like a rusty chain dragging over boulders, or the growl rolling from the throat of a predator.

That pale giant claw slowly emerged from the gap in the rubble. Five clearly jointed fingers dug into the sandy soil, reflecting an eerie luster under the moonlight, gazing into the night as if waiting for something.

Patrick’s pupils shrank. The Ancestral perception exploded in a ball of burning pain inside his skull. That wasn't a beast, nor a machine. The thing deep in the ruins was climbing upward along the ore vein, faster than the collapse itself. He yanked Chidi up. "Run. Don't look back."

The bushes shattered under their feet as the two stumbled into the night. Behind them, the crisp sound of twisting metal rang out, followed by a dull thud. A whole chunk of rubble was flung into the air, grazing Patrick’s shoulder and embedding itself in the dirt. In the dust, that pale claw poked deeper, its joints clicking with the sound of meshing gears. The five fingers gripped the ground, carving deep furrows like a plow.

Amina’s communicator lit up again. The synthetic voice stuttered: "Monitoring shows... underground abnormal vibration source, migrating toward the surface... recommend immediate evacuation..." Before the signal cut out, she seemed to have something else to say, but her voice was swallowed by a burst of shrill static.

Chidi skidded to a halt, turning to look at the ruins, breathing hard. "It... it's following us." Patrick didn't answer. A very low-frequency resonance buzzed in his eardrums, like a needle swimming through his bone marrow—that was the warning from Ancestral Resonance, telling him that thing was locking onto their Vitality.

"It's not following us," he said, his voice hoarse. "It's chasing Vitality. As long as there are living things nearby, it won't stop."

They kept running, bursting through the bushes and climbing up a gentle slope. Rusty warning signs hung from the mining zone's barbed wire fence. As Patrick vaulted over the fence, he felt the ground beneath his feet tremble slightly, as if some massive creature was rolling over in the earth below.

In the distance, moonlight illuminated the edge of the mine pit. That giant claw had fully emerged from the rubble, hovering in mid-air, its joints rotating slowly, turning toward their direction.

Chidi looked at the hand, his eyes full of complexity. "I've seen this... Three years ago, there was an accident in the mine zone. The company sealed off a drill rig, saying it was 'contaminated.' The workers said... something lived inside that machine. The machine grew flesh."

Patrick felt a chill. The death-omina of "Vitality" he saw when he touched the drill rig, that pulse of overload—it wasn't the machine itself. It was a lifeform parasiting inside the machine, using the mine's energy to gestate and grow. The explosion was its birth pangs. And right now, it had woken up.

That night, the two retreated behind a rock shelf outside the mining area. Chidi leaned wearily against the stone wall, asking in a low voice, "Will it leave..."

"Will it leave here?" Chidi’s voice was tight.

Patrick didn't answer immediately. He closed his eyes, the Ancestral Resonance trembling in his eardrums, like tide washing over the sand. After a moment, he opened his eyes. "No. It just hatched. It's still hungry. It's looking for living things."

Chidi’s face darkened. "There are patrol teams on the perimeter of the mine. To the north is a canyon, and the only plank road collapsed three years ago. We're trapped."

Patrick looked at that giant claw hanging in the air. Under the moonlight, the joints at the claw's tips were rotating slowly, as if sensing something. He said quietly, "It locates us through Vitality. As long as we're alive, it can find us."

"Then make it so it can't find us." Chidi straightened up and pulled a metal badge from his chest pocket, engraved with the Mining Corporation's logo. "This is an employee card from three years ago. I'll take you to the abandoned ventilation shaft in the mine—it leads out of the mountain."

Patrick frowned. "It's over there too."

"That's what makes it possible." Chidi’s gaze sharpened. "The entrance to the ventilation shaft has a gate. If we can lure that thing in and close the gate, we can lock it in the mountain."

Before he finished, a dull impact came from the direction of the ruins. Both of them turned. In the center of the rubble, that drill pipe, wrapped in flesh membrane, was pulling itself out of the ground inch by inch, accompanied by wet tearing sounds. Its tip split open like a hungry mouth, silent but gaping toward the night sky.

Patrick gripped his short knife. "Move. Ventilation shaft."

They sprinted toward the canyon. Behind them, the drill pipe crashed to the ground with a thunderous roar, and immediately after, the first scream emerged from under the ruins—a low moan of mechanical gears grinding through flesh, mixed with the wail of a biological entity, as if the entire mountain mine were groaning. The sound cut through the night, chasing their retreating figures, getting closer and closer.