Chapter 176: Seeking Death

I watched in silence as Lu Ayao walked toward me. He ignored me at first, instead looking the White Corpse Turtle Immortal up and down where it was pinned to the wall, split in two by his Mountain-Cleaving Machete. Only after confirming it was thoroughly dead did he pull the blade free. Blood dripped all over the floor as he drew it out, bypassing me to sit in a dark corner of the passage.

I sat where I was, taking a long moment to recover my wits. From the darkness about three meters away, Lu Ayao spoke. “It’s dangerous here. Don’t run around blindly. When He Yu gets here in a bit, go back up with them.”

I finally looked up, alert enough now to realize that Lu Ayao was in a very strange state. To put it simply, he looked as if his soul had been snatched away. Normally, he wouldn’t just sit there like this.

At that moment, I remembered the corpse I’d glimpsed earlier, wedged into the crevice of the wall. The hair on my arms stood up, and an involuntary shiver ran down my spine. My legs were still weak, so I leaned over and shone my flashlight toward the crack in the wall I remembered.

The corpse wedged inside was very small and thin. The parts I could see had already skeletonized, curled up in the deepest part of the fissure. It looked as if the man-eating wall had swallowed her whole. Even with my flashlight, I could only catch a fleeting glimpse of the remains.

Lu Ayao was sitting nearby. He kept his head down, his hands covered in blood. I felt certain that his reason for sitting there was connected to the body in the wall. I patted my legs and began to crawl toward him, slapping my thighs as I went, trying to get my blood flowing and warm up my body.

I crawled to his side and said, “I’m glad I found you. I was too impulsive before. Now I think He Yu was right. There’s definitely more than one White Corpse Turtle Immortal here now. It’d be safer if we found a way back up first.”

Lu Ayao stared at the beads of blood dripping from his blade. “I’m not going back up,” he said calmly. “You all leave. Don’t follow me anymore.”

I froze. My immediate reaction was to check the wound on his arm. He Yu had mentioned before that the traps in this tomb were incredibly vicious. Lu Ayao had come down to scout the path while barely recovered from a serious illness, and we hadn’t met up until now. Had he fallen prey to some trick of the Yin-Yang Thirteen Palaces?

At the thought, I stood up and unslung my backpack, reaching out to roll up his sleeve. “Where are you hurt? I have medicine, it’s fine. We still have Tian Xiaoqi with us.”

To my surprise, the moment I grabbed his arm, he shoved me away. It was a decisive movement, delivered with enough force that I stumbled back half a step, nearly falling on my backside again.

Confusion flooded me, followed quickly by a surge of resentment. I’d gone through hell to get here: nearly crushed into a meat patty, nearly bitten to death by an Ancient Corpse, and just moments ago nearly falling to my death. Now that I’d finally found him, Lord Lu was actually giving me the cold shoulder.

“Explain yourself. What do you mean by that?” I snapped, throwing my backpack onto the ground and looking down at him.

I stared at him, and we stayed in that exact position for over ten minutes. Just as I reached my breaking point, Lu Ayao finally spoke. He dropped his blade and said, “Lu Xiaosu is dead. There’s no point in me going back.”

“How do you know she’s-” I stopped mid-sentence as a realization struck me. I leaned sideways to peer back at the curled-up corpse inside the fissure, suddenly realizing I had overlooked a problem.

Lu Ayao’s pace was naturally much faster than ours. He was skilled in martial arts, and ordinary illusions shouldn’t have been able to trap him. Because of me, we had been trailing far behind him, and we’d been hit by ghost blinding as soon as we entered the Yin-Yang Thirteen Palaces. By all rights, Lu Ayao should have reached the perimeter of the Main Hall by now. He shouldn’t be here.

If he was here, there had to be something keeping him here willingly.

“We found eight bodies further back,” I said hesitantly. “The remains here are already skeletonized. How can you be so sure it’s Lu Xiaosu?”

He silently produced a cloth bag from behind him. I knelt down and looked through the contents. The mountain-cleaving machete must have come from this bag. Besides the mountain-cleaving machete, there was also a white whip inside that was better made and more resilient than the one Lu Ayao had broken previously.

“The bag was outside. She crawled in there herself,” Lu Ayao said.

I set the bag down and shifted back outside the fissure, touching the stones that formed the crack. This fissure was only as wide as my single fist. Even a child might not be able to squeeze inside. The mysteries in my mind multiplied—for instance, why had she chosen such a difficult way to die?

But I couldn’t dwell on that right now. Between the living and the dead, the living were definitely more important to me. Even if this really was Lu Xiaosu’s corpse, before figuring out how to get her out, I had to bring Lu Ayao back out first, no matter what.

Having made up my mind, I turned back around just as the sharp click of a windproof lighter sounded near my ear. Lu Ayao had pulled out a cigarette from somewhere and was leaning against the wall, smoking it after lighting up. In my memory, he had never smoked before; it seemed I still didn’t know him as well as I thought.

I walked over, sat down beside him, and held out my hand to ask for a cigarette. “Got any left? Give me one too.”

He stuffed the remaining three into my hand. I pulled one out from the damp cigarette pack, lit it myself, and took a hard drag. The motion left me briefly dazed; for a second, I felt as if I were back in middle school, hiding in the last stall of the boys’ bathroom, taking drags while poking my head out to watch for the dean coming to catch us.

As I inhaled the smoke, my frantic nerves finally settled. I’d run too fast and hadn’t looked where I was going; it might take He Yu a while to find me. Thinking of this, I clicked off my flashlight.

“If you think I’m leaving on my own, you’re wrong. You want to stay here and starve to death? I’m telling you, as long as I, Gan Ji, am alive, that’s not happening,” I said, stating my position simply between puffs of smoke.

Lu Ayao thought for a moment. “Just go. If I’m missing for a month, the Lu Clan will begin funeral preparations for the Clan Head. This won’t involve the Gan Clan or the He Clan.”

I realized then that he had completely misunderstood me. Tossing the cigarette butt aside, I rolled over and sat up, clicking the flashlight back on with a sharp snap and pointing the beam straight at him. “Is that the point?! Is that the point?! What kind of people do you take us for?! The point is that I want to save you! Didn’t you just save me back there too?! The four of us are going to get out of here safe and sound together!”

Lu Ayao lowered his cigarette and turned to look at me. “Gan Ji, I have nowhere left to go.”

I didn’t quite understand what he meant by that, but I answered anyway. “How is that possible? If you don’t want to go back to Nanjing, you’re welcome at my place anytime. As long as you come to Henan, I’ll always have a place for you to stay.”

He fell silent again, head bowed in thought. Seeing that he seemed to waver, I quickly pressed further. “You aren’t alone. There are so many people in this world who genuinely care about you. Why would you want to die all alone in a godforsaken place like this?”

Lu Ayao let out a short laugh at my words. “Who is left that genuinely cares about me?”

“I do! If you’re willing, I can keep you company. We have to stay hopeful about life; you can’t just give up on yourself.” I patted his shoulder twice, inwardly hoping my chicken soup for the soul would have at least some tiny effect on him.

Lu Ayao didn’t argue with me this time. He sat there stroking the white whip in his arms, lost in thought. By the time he finished his cigarette, he tossed aside the Mountain-Cleaving Machete and stood up. He’d decided to follow my lead and find a way out.

At the time, I was quite smug, thinking my chicken soup for the soul had actually worked. It wasn’t until later, when I learned the truth and recalled his silence at that moment, that I realized how delightfully naive I’d been.

Lu Ayao was never someone who could be moved so easily.