My Roommate is a Non-Human | Chapter 10 | The Altar in the Deep | Novela.app

I knew perfectly well that a cavern like this couldn't possibly exist beneath the hospital. It defied all logic. The hospital was over a dozen stories high; there was no reason for the foundation to be hollow, or the whole building would have collapsed. Moreover, this cavern was at least three stories tall. If this was the first basement level, then the first and second floors above ground shouldn't even exist. I became more certain that I was dreaming and decided to pinch myself awake. To my horror, I discovered I felt no pain. I dragged my hand across the sharp tip of a stalactite; I could feel that the stone was cold, and I could feel the blood flowing over my skin, but there was no pain. I slammed my head against the rock wall until my face was covered in blood, but at most, I only felt a bit dizzy. I was dreaming, but I couldn't wake up. I had my five senses, yet I was devoid of pain. But perhaps that was for the best. If I were to be killed, eaten, or tortured by something later, I wouldn't be so afraid—because it wouldn't hurt. With this realization, I felt as though I had donned a suit of bulletproof armor, and a sudden surge of courage rose within me. I wanted to find the person who had called me and told me to come down—if he was even human. Then I would demand to know everything, everything I didn't know but desperately wanted to understand. Subconsciously, I felt he knew a great deal. I just wanted to protect myself. Now, I would do as he wished and take a look. I felt that this was exactly why he had told me to come down. I descended the steps carved into the stone. The stairs were steep, spiraling down toward the center of the cavern. From my current vantage point, I could see that the entire cavern sloped downward like a funnel. In the center of the funnel, a circular stone platform rose slightly. The platform was vast, but it was shrouded in a pitch-black darkness that obscured everything. Many torches surrounded the platform, held aloft by exquisite stands, burning silently and illuminating at most two meters of the gloom. At the boundary of light and shadow, I saw humans dressed in patient gowns. They were lying flat beneath the torches, arranged in a circle around the platform, their heads pointing toward the center and their feet facing outward. I sensed they were my classmates. I was almost certain of it. It took me ten minutes to navigate the steep stone path to the center of the cavern, where I found the ground to be damp. The central platform was made of stone, now cracked and covered in moss, yet one could still see how exquisite the structure must have been in the past. On the edges of the platform, faint traces of murals and scripts were visible. Based on the strokes and general structural arrangement, I felt they belonged to the same language as the ones on the walls. It certainly wasn't Chinese or English, nor was it any widely used alphabet I had ever seen. I walked up the steps and stood beneath a torch, behind the feet of one of the patients. He lay there flat, the tops of his feet a ghastly pale blue. I gave him a tentative poke; he was cold, as if already dead. But this kind of death felt different. In truth, I had already prepared myself. From the moment the elevator doors opened, I expected to see a scene of carnage—flesh flying and bodies being put through a meat grinder. I was ready for that. But there was none of that. They were meticulously arranged in a circle, heads in, feet out, beneath ancient torches whose sockets had turned black with age. This gave me a sense of deliberate, calculated evil. Especially on a raised circular platform like this. It looked exactly like a sacrifice. I pulled a torch from its stand, took a deep breath, and walked forward, wanting to see what they were sacrificing at the center of the altar. But I stopped abruptly. I realized that looking only at the lower halves of the patients was foolish. There was something on their heads. I find it hard to describe that nauseating, deformed shape. I couldn't say if it was flesh or pulp; regardless, it grew from the brains of those patients in a long, cord-like form, enveloping their heads. I don't know what state of mind I was in as I studied it. It was disgusting, yet I couldn't stop. I looked at one after another. For some, everything above the nose was completely gone, melted into that sickening, dark green mass. Others had milder symptoms, allowing me to see the form before the condition worsened. A hole had been breached around their temples, and that disgusting green, soft-bodied organism was burrowing out like a vine, relentlessly extending toward the center of the altar, vanishing into the darkness. If this continued, those green things would grow thicker and larger. It was easy to imagine them eventually absorbing and enveloping the victims entirely until they became nothing but dark green sacs. Was this what that person wanted me to see? Fine, I had seen it. I couldn't save them, and they were already dead. I wanted to go back. Everything here filled me with such revulsion that I didn't even have time to feel sympathy for anyone. I didn't know how such a mutation could occur; I only hoped that this evil would never take a single step out of this bizarre cavern. Let the nightmare end with me. Even for myself, I would have preferred never to have witnessed this scene. Just as I intended to head back the way I came no matter what, I suddenly saw something swimming near my feet. I had just stepped down from the altar. The ground by my feet was sandy, very wet, and coarse. But something was swimming beneath the surface, much like an earthworm wriggling through mud. Only this thing was several sizes larger than an earthworm. The bulging, shifting shape was at least as thick as my calf and about a meter long. Watching it churn the soil was enough to induce physical nausea. Then, I realized a certain sound I had been ignoring had become impossible to overlook. It was like silkworms eating mulberry leaves—*shasha, shasha*—growing louder and more numerous. I looked around; beneath the sand, under the stone steps, beneath the stalactites, and even on the cavern walls, these hidden, writhing giant worms were everywhere. Behind the hard surfaces, they tumbled and rolled to their hearts' content, appearing and disappearing, reminiscent of parasites burrowing under skin. They were surging toward the altar, toward my feet. I immediately retreated back onto the circular platform. As expected, there were none of those writhing things beneath the altar itself. But I was so panicked that I retreated too quickly, landing hard on my backside on the stone steps and scrambling up the altar on all fours. Once I was safe, I realized the torch in my hand was gone. I turned my head; it had just flown into the air, paused for a moment, and then silently plummeted. In those brief two seconds, I saw something in the darkness of the altar. A massive, horrific thing. Those dark green, soft vines were converging toward it, desperately—like grains of sand building a tower—striving to become a part of it. The problem was, while the torch allowed me to see it, it also allowed it to see me. It had a pair of staggering eyes. Blood-red, with hard spikes outside the sockets that were nearly half as tall as a man. For several seconds, I was paralyzed. I thought, *I'm going to die.* Then, I felt someone behind me. I turned and saw a familiar face. I must have seen him somewhere before. Newspapers, television, Renren, Weibo... it could have been anywhere. In short, I had seen him, but I couldn't recall his name. He might have been a classmate, a friend of a friend, or perhaps an author I liked... yet I couldn't for the life of me remember his name. He was standing bolt upright behind me, looking at me. His eyelids were red, and his eyes were slightly bloodshot. But it wasn't terrifying, because he looked like a living person who had just finished crying. "You saw it," he said. I recognized his voice as the person who had called me. I nodded. He nodded back. Then he turned around and walked away. My gaze fell upon the right side of his head. I was wrong; he wasn't a living person either. There was a large hole in his temple as well. By the time I withdrew my gaze, I realized I was no longer in the cavern. I was on the hospital rooftop. There was a heavy wind; my hair was blown into a mess, yet his shoulder-length hair wasn't disarrayed in the slightest. Dressed in his patient gown, he walked to the edge of the roof. "Are you going to jump... Don't, don't do that! You haven't told me anything yet!" He pulled a gold coin from his pocket. It was crudely minted, yet it had grown smooth from being handled so many times. He toyed with it at his right fingertips. His fingers were very long and slender; he flicked his ring finger, middle finger, and index finger in sequence, making the gold coin appear and disappear between his knuckles. I was mesmerized by his technique. Suddenly, without any warning, he fell straight back from the edge of the roof. But his gold coin didn't. The coin was carried high into the air, spinning, pausing at its zenith, and then beginning its descent. It fell rapidly, its two sides alternating repeatedly, until finally, it landed face up with a *clack*. Simultaneously, I woke up. As I gasped for breath, the cardiologist happened to pull back the curtain and walk in. He recorded notes on a piece of paper while observing my complexion. "Sleeping until three in the afternoon? Your psychological state is quite resilient. I had someone check the X-ray room this morning; there shouldn't be any malfunction. No other patients showed any shadows in their scans. How about you go for a CT scan now?" "No!" I practically shrieked. Losing control slightly, I grabbed a pillow and hugged it to my chest. "Where... where is my roommate?" The doctor seemed a bit startled by my reaction. "He just woke up too. Said he was going out to buy you lunch." "I'll wait until he gets back!" The doctor wore an amused expression. "Two big boys like you, and you're still so clingy?" I remained silent. It was true; I was clinging to my roommate because something inconceivable was happening to me, and my roommate wouldn't hurt me. I didn't know where this certainty came from. The doctor asked a few more routine questions and prepared to leave. I called out to him, "Doctor, those... classmates of mine who were admitted yesterday, are they alright?" Because of the dream, I knew they were likely not doing well. Given the nature of the series of events happening around me, the things that person showed me in the hospital's basement were probably real, weren't they? To my surprise, the doctor said casually, "Their current condition is good. Although the mechanism of the onset is still unclear, most of them have no other symptoms. They're young, their vitals are normal, and many can already be discharged. A few injured themselves during the onset and need to stay for recuperation. We've also communicated with your school; it's likely related to academic pressure. They'll probably reduce your workload in the future." This outcome was entirely unexpected. Seeing that I was listless and uncommunicative, the doctor made an appointment for the CT scan once my roommate arrived and then left. I sat on the bed for a while, then decided to go for a walk. It was daytime now, and the sunlight was bright, giving me a psychological sense of safety. Moreover, the doctor's words made me desperately want to find those classmates who were brought in yesterday. I wanted to ask them what exactly they had experienced last night. I thought it would likely be very helpful to me. *** Glossary: