NR | Chapter 33

He had barely finished speaking before I saw He Yu, like a toad, his arms clamped around the smooth coiling dragon pillar as if they were two iron tongs, climbing upward. Luo Ayao quickly reached a point diagonally above me too, while I was the pitiful one left hanging from the iron chain.

I didn’t have He Yu’s terrifying upper-body strength. Hanging half on, half off like this was obviously an absurd waste of energy. If either of them had been in my place, with their physical strength, they might have already been up there clinging to the chain.

Climbing the iron chain was undoubtedly the easiest route, but that easiest method was still far too difficult for me.

I swayed in midair, so dizzy it made me nauseous. After thinking it over, I knew I couldn’t just keep hanging here and wait for Luo Ayao to pull me up, so I shut my eyes hard, forcing that sick feeling down. I switched hands on the chain and started trying to haul myself up.

Luo Ayao probably felt the movement and stopped to look down at me. I used everything I had, straining with all my might to reach higher with my hands, but my legs had no leverage at all. I didn’t manage to flip myself up, and I nearly slipped off with my hand instead.

“Enough, enough, Xiao Yao! Stop messing around! If you slip and drag Lao Luo down with you, then what?” He Yu said, wriggling around the pillar like a maggot. Even while sweating buckets from exhaustion, he didn’t forget to mock me a couple of times.

I rolled my eyes at him. Then I suddenly felt the soft whip at my waist lift upward a little. Looking up, I saw Luo Ayao had already wound the spare rope around his waist and looped it once around the pillar, with the knot just passing through the hollow of the dragon’s mouth and catching in place.

He tightened the rope, and once he was sure the knot had locked, he wrapped the soft whip a few more times around his left hand. Then I felt a huge force begin to drag me upward.

I reacted at once, quickly gripping the chain and pushing with all my strength. My legs kicked up, and I flipped my whole body onto the chain. I had gotten up, yes, but I was lying face-down against the chain like a giant roasted whole lamb, my posture absolutely ungainly.

Even while hugging the pillar, He Yu still managed to give Luo Ayao a thumbs-up. “Lao Luo, that was awesome!”

“Gan Ji, I can only pull you three more times at most.” Luo Ayao let go, and from his voice, it didn’t sound easy at all.

I laboriously raised my head. My ascent just now hadn’t felt especially difficult, so Luo Ayao must have put in a tremendous amount of force. But even if he were strong, he couldn’t possibly haul me up the whole way by himself. Besides, this side chamber was terrifyingly deep, and our flashlights couldn’t even reach the top.

So I quickly came up with another plan.

“Don’t pull me anymore. Don’t waste all your energy on me. I’m fine just hanging here. You two climb faster, go up first and see if there’s any place to stand. Once you find a good spot, throw the rope down to save me,” I shouted.

He Yu and Luo Ayao exchanged a look, probably considering whether what I said was feasible. Not long after, He Yu said, “This really is the most workable plan right now. Hang in there, Xiao Yao. I’ll come back for you once your buddy climbs up!”

The words had barely left his mouth when the support at my waist suddenly loosened. I didn’t know how Luo Ayao had reeled in the whip, but when I lowered my head to look, the soft whip around my waist was already gone. In an instant, my palms started sweating.

Being sprawled there on your own and being sprawled there with safety support were two completely different things. Every muscle in my body went stiff. The surroundings fell abruptly silent. When I looked up again, He Yu’s flashlight beam was no longer where it had been a moment ago. I didn’t need to think about it. At their speed, those two had long since climbed far away.

The range I could touch with my hands was instantly swallowed by darkness. The iron chain swayed now and then, and cold sweat began to pour off my forehead, because I knew that if I fell now, there would be truly no saving me. At the same time, I started doubting whether my earlier decision had been right.

I lay there a while longer. To save battery, I dimmed the flashlight and tried my best to keep my body balanced. Then suddenly, I felt something like an ant pinch my cheek, and a liquid began to run down my face.

I lowered my head and wiped it with my hand. A thick bloody smell immediately slammed into my nose, and I knew something was wrong. There shouldn’t have been anything this sharp here capable of cutting skin. In the next second, my peripheral vision caught the stone gate of the side chamber.

The quicksand had rushed in too fast just now, and it had directly collapsed half of that stone gate.

Seeing that, my heart turned icy. I subconsciously looked up and shouted, “He Yu! Luo Ayao! Are you done yet? Can you hear me?”

Only my own echo answered me. No one responded.

Before I could react, a huge mass of human-faced bats suddenly went berserk and charged up from directly beneath me. My body was instantly slashed open and drenched in blood, and every joint in my bones started aching.

I cursed under my breath, and while I was cursing, I also imagined how I might end up. Would I be drained dry of blood and essence like those hanging corpses, left dangling from the cave ceiling like a wind-dried rabbit? Or would I be torn apart until not even my skin was left? Maybe I should just stop hanging here. I’m afraid of heights.

Blood spread across the iron chain. I tried to use my arms to block the human-faced bats. At the same time, I saw huge centipedes swarming toward me from the walls on all sides, their numbers terrifying. One sweep of the flashlight revealed at least twenty of them.

I got so scared my hand slipped. The chain spun once, and in an instant I could no longer hold on. I fell straight down from dozens of meters in the air. I smashed a pit into the quicksand, but the yellow sand quickly gathered back together.

“Is anyone there? He Yu!”

I bit into a mouthful of sand, and the moment I sank into it, I was buried half a body deep.

It was horrifying, like countless hands were frantically dragging at your legs beneath the sand. The quicksand was dense and strangely heavy, and once my legs were wrapped up, I couldn’t move at all. Even though I did my best to stay still, my body kept sinking.

Beside me, in the sand, countless clay figurines appeared. I didn’t know when they had emerged from beneath the sand layer. I only had to reach out to touch their water-eroded heads.

The sand was compressing my chest from all sides. In less than two minutes, the yellow grains had already reached my mouth and nose. There was no way I could keep from struggling. I began thrashing my limbs desperately, stretching out my hand in hopes of reaching the nearest coiling dragon pillar.

But quicksand does not wait for rescue. In almost the next instant, the yellow sand buried me over the top of my head. Suffocation crashed down on me. I inhaled sand into my mouth and nose, and my fear, amplified by my own panic, was pushed to the absolute limit.

I touched the sand beside me. It was icy cold and slightly damp. By then I could barely feel my body or my legs anymore. Something came to mind, as if a flash of inspiration had struck, but this suffocating feeling made it impossible to calm down and think.

“Gan Ji! Gan Ji!”

I choked on my own saliva and jerked upright, coughing violently. It felt like my whole throat was packed full of sand. He Yu’s flashlight was shining straight into my face, and the light stabbed at my eyes so hard I couldn’t open them. I raised my hand to shield my face from it.

“Are you awake yet? Are you awake yet? Were you possessed for a second there? You were literally crawling straight into the sand!” He Yu moved the flashlight away and held up a half-bottle of mineral water, patting my face. Luo Ayao was standing beside him.

“Bats! So many bats!” I looked toward the pitch-black walls around us and instantly felt like I had found a lifeline. I hurriedly grabbed Luo Ayao’s sleeve. “Right! And centipedes, and clay figurines that could move!”

“What are you even talking about? Bats, centipedes, clay figurines?” He Yu looked over his shoulder in confusion after hearing me.

Luo Ayao crouched down and asked softly, “Were you hallucinating?”

I looked past him at the walls. They were spotless. There wasn’t a single bat in the air. Suddenly it felt like a mouthful of sand had lodged in my throat, and it was unbearably uncomfortable.

I dry-heaved on the ground for a long time, but nothing came up. Instead, my vision kept going dizzy. Luo Ayao crouched in front of me. He pressed on my shoulder and made me lean back. The cold glazed tiles were against my back, and after leaning there for a while, I finally started to clear up.

Gradually, I realized I was sitting on a slope. This was actually more like a corner of an eave. He Yu was standing in front of me, one hand resting on the dragon head coiled around the pillar. The ground beneath my feet was covered in broken glazed tile fragments, and if I moved back even a little, a large number of those tiles would tumble down.

I cleared my throat. “Where are we?”

Luo Ayao said, “This is one of the flying eave bracket sets on the coiling dragon pillar. We think there should be many similar bracket sets above us too.”

Supporting myself with Luo Ayao, I lifted my butt slightly and looked down. Borrowing He Yu’s flashlight beam, I could see directly to the iron chain I had been hanging from just now. It was about a hundred meters down.

“What happened to you? There should be a lot of bracket sets up here too. We originally wanted to explore farther upward, but Lao Luo said the chain kept swaying, which didn’t seem right, so I called out to you. Who knew that right after I shouted, you let go? It scared us half to death, so we hurried and rappelled down to fish you out,” He Yu said, taking a swig of water.

He lifted the half-broken rope in his hand. “Here, look at this! You really are strong, kid. When the two of us were hauling you up, you were fighting like hell to burrow back into the quicksand. This treasure rope of mine got ruined by you. You’re paying me back after we get out!”

I was speechless for a while, my brain still foggy and unable to properly process the flood of words He Yu had just dumped on me. But I understood every key point. I didn’t need to think to know the situation back there had definitely been extremely dangerous.

Those two ropes weren’t very long. I had no idea how they had managed to fish me back up with just two spare ropes. If I imagined it, the posture must have been absurdly difficult.

But the pain and suffocation had been real. I quickly rolled up my sleeve to check my arm, only to find not even a single wound on it. If this had happened when I first came in, my logic would probably have been on the verge of collapse, but after everything we’d been through to get here, it seemed like nothing would be strange anymore.

I took ten minutes to sort through my chaotic thoughts, then said, “I think I found the underground river in the tomb.”