NR | Chapter 27

He Yu blocked me in the crack between the rocks and tossed me a fruit knife. “Don’t come out!”

As soon as he said that, he rushed out to help. Once there were more people, I wasn’t scared anymore. At a time like this, telling me to stay put was useless. Both of you went out, how could you leave me here all by myself like a dog?

I picked up the fruit knife and squeezed out of the crack too. Then I saw a giant centipede, several meters long, lying gutted on the ground. Lu Ayao shook the black water off his hand. The dagger in his hand had already snapped in half, with one half stuck in the centipede’s body.

He Yu lifted the centipede’s severed tail, handed me a spare flashlight, and wiped the sweat off his forehead. “This thing’s pretty strong. What do you say, brothers, if we stew it, we should be able to hold out for at least another week.”

Lu Ayao gave him a look and ripped one of the dead centipede’s antennae off to use like a whip. “This bug breeds by feeding on corpses. If you want to stew it, go ahead and eat it yourself. I’m good.”

I ducked and climbed over the bug’s corpse. “When did you two get in touch? How come I didn’t hear a thing? Mr. He, can we have even a little trust between us? If I’d crawled forward a bit more, this thing would’ve eaten me.”

He Yu smiled and didn’t get mad. “You just crawled forward too fast. I wanted to pull you back, but I missed. Still, don’t worry. Later, we figured you’d definitely come back after realizing no one was there. As long as we were fast enough, we could pull you in too.”

“Aren’t you afraid I’d just ditch you and run? I already found the passage anyway,” I said sourly.

He Yu chuckled. “If it were someone else, I’d have to think it over. But you? I can at least be sure about your character.”

Lu Ayao took the lead and started crawling forward, and we followed behind him. “This bug crawled over from your route. If there’s one, there’s bound to be a second. This cave isn’t safe anymore. We need to get into the passage as fast as possible. Best case, we run into Tian Yuqing’s team.”

Once the flashlights came on, I finally saw that most of the clothes on him had been cut to shreds. Some of the wounds were fresh. He Yu had injuries too, but compared with Lu Ayao, he was much better off. They were probably all caused by the fight with the centipede just now.

So while crawling, I took the band-aids out of my pocket and tossed half to He Yu behind me. I held the other half and tapped Lu Ayao with them. “There are meds in the bag. Do you want to put these on before we keep crawling? Won’t it get infected if it goes too long?”

He ignored me. I felt a little awkward and had no choice but to stuff the band-aids back into my pocket. Since I’d known him, I’d already been shut down so many times I’d lost count. No wonder no one had built especially close ties with the Lu family for all these years. Even the Tian family, the best businesspeople around, couldn’t be bothered to deal with the people in the east. This guy’s personality probably really did have a problem.

The three of us crawled out of the hole at top speed and officially entered the passage beside it. The ceiling was arched, much more refined than the hole we’d just come from. Especially the stone walls on both sides, which had bird patterns carved into them, so lifelike they seemed ready to fly off the wall. They were really beautiful.

Following Lu Ayao, we quickly picked a direction. We crawled a little farther before stopping to rest. Lu Ayao sat down and didn’t even bother with his wounds before saying, “There are at least a hundred artificial holes like the one just now. After I fell down, I crawled through twenty-three passages. All twenty-three led in different directions.”

I thought to myself, What are you, a groundhog? How can you crawl that much?

He Yu said, “Could they be tomb robbers’ tunnels? The way they were dug looks pretty similar. In ancient times, there were also plenty of government-backed tomb robbers. They’d send in whole armies to dig, then haul the goods out a trip at a time.”

“Probably not. Which dynasty’s government-backed tomb raiding army would be that bored? Treating people’s graves like anthills to dig out. Digging more than a dozen passages might make sense, but hundreds? Were they bored, or was a pangolin fine?” I cut in.

This time, Lu Ayao gave a slight nod. He glanced at me. “The period of that hole shouldn’t be more than a hundred years old. It can’t be the work of ancient government-backed tomb robbers. The digging method is basically the same, and the angle of every strike is the same too. My guess is that all these holes were dug by the same person.”

If that was true, then these holes were a huge project. One person dug them, and kept digging until they’d nearly hollowed out the mountain. It couldn’t be that he’d built some giant whack-a-mole amusement park, right? Thinking of that, I couldn’t hold back my laughter.

Lu Ayao was puzzled by my laughter, and neither of them paid me any mind. He turned his head and kept probing farther ahead.

He Yu misunderstood too, and started laughing along with me. “You really do get the advantage from being young. No wonder you’re our little youngest. Just now when he said he was going to deal with that bug, I didn’t even dare stop him. Their Lu family is famously full of people with mental problems. Mentally ill people don’t commit murder as a crime, you know. And you actually dared laugh at him. Not bad, keep it up.”

I stopped laughing and said, “Huh? No? I wasn’t laughing at him.”

“Dare to do it but not admit it, huh?” He Yu narrowed his eyes and poked at me while chasing after Lu Ayao ahead of us. “I get it, I get it. You don’t have to say it, I get it.”

That only confused me more. I hurried to catch up. Damn it, I hadn’t said anything. What exactly did he understand?

The passage sloped downward all the way and gradually started getting taller. The carved beams and painted rafters at the bends increased a lot, and in the end it widened enough for all three of us to stand fully upright. So we stopped crawling and started walking instead. Our speed was obviously a little faster now, and I could take the chance to stretch out my old arms and legs.

“Hey? Do you think that hole from earlier was dug by the corpse before it got eaten by the bugs?” He Yu asked.

I had considered that possibility from the start, but it still felt unreliable to me, and it didn’t make sense. There were so many identical holes here. From the way Lu Ayao put it, some of them even connected all the way up to the surface. The person who dug them couldn’t have been doing it just to survive.

If they could survive, the digger wouldn’t have ended up in such a miserable state like that corpse. So these holes must have had some other use. I just hadn’t figured out what that use was yet.

Also, the corpse’s clothes didn’t really look like those of a tomb robber. The situation had been too urgent then, and I hadn’t had time to look clearly.

Lu Ayao swept the area with his flashlight and slowly approached a wall. “Those holes are all on the surface. They never really went deep into the core of this tomb. The places they connect to are basically all areas where those bugs are active.”

He Yu also looked toward the wall. I pulled out my spare flashlight and saw that it was a wall painted with murals. Ancient murals were generally very abstract. For someone like me, who had never been trained, I couldn’t even read the images, at most I could count how many little figures were on a mural.

Lu Ayao naturally gave He Yu room and stepped back to stand beside me. Clearly, he couldn’t make sense of it either. I finally felt a little inexplicable delight inside, thinking, So what if he’s from the Lu family? He still gets trapped here with an amateur like me.

He Yu roughly looked over the mural and then turned back. “Let’s keep walking a bit. This is only a small part of the painting. There should be more content ahead.”

With that, he moved on. Lu Ayao and I followed behind him. Sure enough, he was right. Ten meters later, after a few tomb bricks, a second painted mural appeared. But this one wasn’t as well preserved as the one before it. A section of the lower half had flaked off.

After He Yu finished looking, we kept going. The passage was very long. Every two or three tomb bricks, another mural would appear. We walked for a long time without seeing a trace of a burial chamber. Rather than a passage, this was more like a gallery.

After we finished looking at the ninth mural, no more murals appeared ahead.

He Yu stood in front of the ninth mural for a very long time. Lu Ayao and I didn’t rush him either. I knew very well that looking at murals wasn’t simple. The way ancient people thought was very different from modern people. To fully understand a picture, you needed years of appreciation and a rich imagination.

After waiting ten minutes, He Yu finally came back. Frowning, he said, “These paintings are pretty easy to understand overall.”

I watched him quickly run back to the first image.

Pointing at the first mural, He Yu said, “Because of the tyrant’s rule, the people were suffering terribly.”

Then he started walking toward us, pointing at each painting as he went. “Out of the common people came a high priest who led them in praying to the heavens, hoping for a miracle. Then a giant dragon descended to the mortal world and killed the tyrant, so all the people knelt and worshipped the dragon and the priest.”

He stopped in front of us. “This looks like a kind of religious faith, but there’s one problem in it that I can’t understand.”

I asked what it was.

He pointed at one of the murals. “Besides the people worshipping below, both the dragon and the priest are upside down.”