considerably young age and small size.”
“
This didn’t last very long, it wasn’t long before the soldiers over worked him, and during the last violent
battle he had with his fellow colleagues, he died. The men did not want their crime to be exposed to the ignorant
outsiders, so they sealed him in the jammed earth and made him part of the wall. Little did they know, the soul
was never able to rest peacefully. On one particular evening, a hostile shadow appeared on the wall as the men
were retreating from work. Many of them were astonished and drew back. However, one of the clumsier
workers incautiously stepped on the shadow, and immediately, the wall cracked and shifted aside, revealing an
abyss from which, steaming hot lava erupted restlessly, and a orb of flames embraced the worker in its fiery
arms almost instantly and guided the poor soul down to the underworld. The ghost has never been seen ever
since, yet it’s still rumoured that it lurks around the grounds of the Wall. Nevertheless, it is only a tale of the
heart, and not a real occurrence…”
Wang was now late for his duties; he rapidly grabbed a burning torch from the marshal’s tent and strolled
off. For the first few hours, he felt tired at the damp skies, relentlessly taunting him to retire for the night, and
wrapping its seemingly endless black blanket around Wang’s tiny body, invading his mind with millions of
lullabies. They seemed to have been telling him, “Go to sleep, my dear child, you know you’re tired, let the
exhaustion of the day end, save yourself everlasting energy and come into my arms. Sleep my child, sleep…”
Wang’s eyes started to shut as he drifted off to dreamland.
Hours had passed before Wang got into action again, and by then, it was only an hour before dawn. The
worn out labourer rose from his uncomfortable crouching position and stretched. However, right when he did
that, the flames of the torch picked up a strange colour, as if a radar had just sensed a sharp reading of danger.
He turned to his left in a cautious manner. What he saw he gazed at with an astonishing sense of bewilderment,
a shadow, lying right beside his own, floated around the boundaries of the wall without a rightful owner. Gliding
around, it did not resemble the movement of an unfriendly ghost’s eerie flow, but instead moved with swift
grace and slid from here to there, as if it were a professional ballerina. Wang simply couldn’t comprehend the
spectacle he viewed, “it is a miraculous phenomenon that I am finally able to witness, after all of those years of
slacking about and journeying across an endless plain of this country,” thought Wang. The brilliant sense of
curiosity tempted Wang to approach the shadow and touch it with his fleshy hand, and see what it was made of.
He knew the outcome of such an action, but his precautions were drowned within a fierce sea of exploratory
unrest. His hands started to move unwillingly, as if a supernatural force was dictating his actions.
“
No, no, Wang,” whispered a small voice inside his head, “you know where this will bring you, retreat now.
Touch not what is hazardous, no…” Whilst the voice was bickering, Wang was too busy thinking about the
sensation of touching the shadow. He couldn’t wait any longer, but just when he wanted to reach out, the wall
had already cracked open. In the confused and wild reality, he had actually made contact with the shadow
already. A whole blob of fiery flames shot out and burnt Wang’s body. Eroding away, he was now able to view
the underworld, Wang smiled with contentment and descended into the land of no return.
The shadow sealed the opening with its darkness and turned it into a crack in the wall. It now looked as if
someone had punched a great big hole in the wall, but the person responsible for it will never have a tale told in
his remembrance, apart for this one, of course…
* * *