Chapter 223: Exploring the Tomb

With dozens of muzzles pressed against her, Zhurige knew she couldn’t say “no” at this moment. The deeper meaning behind Ye Yuzhu’s words was that he intended to force her into the forest. Outnumbered and outgunned, Zhurige had no choice but to agree.

Everyone dismounted. Ye Yuzhu’s plan was to scout the depths of the Crying Forest first. If they confirmed that Gune Kingdom City was indeed beneath the forest, they would send men back to bring the main force forward.

Without delay, the men organized their packs outside the woods, shouldering weapons and equipment and lighting their lanterns. Ye Yuzhu took the lead, holding his lantern high as he stepped first into the dense, sunless forest.

Zhurige followed the team, walking for several hours in a state of constant anxiety. Ye Yuzhu proved to be a calculating man; every time Zhurige reached the brink of collapse from thirst, he would double back specifically to give her a few sips of water. This left Zhurige unable to truly hate him or like him. Ye Yuzhu understood the principle of the carrot and the stick all too well.

As they neared the foot of a mountain, Ye Yuzhu raised his hand to signal a halt. He crouched down slowly, pinching a few blades of grass from the ground and sniffing them. Then, he raised his lantern, his eyes unreadable as the light pointed toward a specific direction ahead.

Qian Chuanzi, standing behind him, squinted his eyes and immediately made a hand gesture. A team of men pulled out Whirlwind Shovels and Ground-Probing Needles, rushing forward to start digging exactly where Ye Yuzhu had placed his lantern. The Ground-Probing Needle was a treasure invented by Chief Chief Ye. A single needle was divided into three sections, each kept by a different person. Now, the three men reassembled the Ground-Probing Needle and drove it violently into the soil.

Immediately after, Old Monster Xiong stepped forward to move the lantern aside. Using the position of the Ground-Probing Needle as the center point, the workers used their Whirlwind Shovels to dig downward in a triangular formation. These Whirlwind Shovels had four blades; once deployed, as long as one mastered the basic technique, the blades would spiral downward like a whirlwind, making them incredibly efficient.

“Heh heh, this forest is so huge, there must be plenty of gold and silver down there! Brother Ye! Looks like we made the right call this time!” Old Monster Xiong rubbed his hands together as he watched the workers digging frantically, his eyes gleaming.

Ye Yuzhu stood to the side and did not answer him, his mind seemingly occupied with other calculations.

Before long, after peeling away the grass covering the rocks, someone’s Whirlwind Shovel struck stone. Ye Yuzhu’s expression shifted just as a worker shouted from the pit, “Chief! We’ve hit the tomb door!”

Everyone gathered their lanterns to look. The massive Ground-Probing Needle was stuck in the soil directly in front of a stone door. The earth compressed by the needle had loosened, revealing a tomb door over two meters high. Carved upon it was a pattern of ten thousand lotus stalks. It was undoubtedly Gune Kingdom City.

“As expected of the Chief Chief, that needle hit the mark perfectly!” Old Monster Xiong fired a shot into the air and shouted to the men in the pit, “Dammit, clear that door for me! Once we’re inside and find the treasure, every brother gets a reward! We’ll go back to eat meat and drink wine, whatever you want!”

“Yes, sir!” The workers in the pit were full of energy, beginning to clear away the remaining mud and grass.

Ye Yuzhu fixed his gaze on the lotus patterns on the tomb door and carefully confirmed the era. It was definitely Gune Kingdom City. He hadn’t expected the tomb entrance to be found so easily, and for a moment, he was overcome with joy, the inextinguishable arrogance in his veins surging even higher.

Qian Chuanzi sidled up to Ye Yuzhu and cupped his hands. “Congratulations, Chief Chief. This is a brilliant start. I didn’t expect things to go so smoothly. However, as happy as we are, that old man Gune was sinister and ruthless in life. His ‘yin residence’ is bound to be full of traps and dangers. Chief Chief, we should make preparations early.”

Ye Yuzhu raised a hand. “Naturally. That’s why I plan to take a small team in first to scout. If it’s a decoy tomb, we won’t lose all our brothers. If it truly is the kingdom city, it won’t be too late to bring the rest of the force in.”

“The Chief Chief is far-sighted. I am in awe,” Qian Chuanzi said with a chuckle.

By now, a chunk of earth clinging to the stone door had been scraped away, revealing the two tightly shut stone slabs in their entirety. Ye Yuzhu used a buckle to tuck his long robe around his waist, rolled up his sleeves, and was the first to jump into the pit.

Examining the door, Qian Chuanzi said, “Chief Chief, the material of this door looks extremely heavy. Ancient emperors liked to place ‘soaring stones’ behind stone doors to prevent theft. The weight of this door is likely beyond what human strength can push open.”

After observing the area around the tomb entrance, Ye Yuzhu waved his hand decisively. “The King of Gune was a tyrant. Thousands of slaves must have died to build a door like this. Today, we take the gold and silver to aid the displaced commoners, which is also a way of ridding the people of a past evil.”

Having spoken, Ye Yuzhu turned to the brothers holding the lanterns and commanded, “Brothers! On my mark, set up blasting holes at the bottom of the door. Blow it open!”

“Yes, sir!”

Row after row of detonators were planted by the door, with several stacks of explosives piled up. Once Ye Yuzhu and the others had moved a safe distance away, the explosives were detonated. The ground shook for a moment. When they walked back, the stone door had been blasted open, and the tomb passage behind it was completely exposed to the air.

At Ye Yuzhu’s command, dozens of men assembled at the entrance.

“Chuanzi, stay behind to guard. The rest of you, follow me in to scout,” Ye Yuzhu ordered. He then raised his lantern and entered the pitch-black tomb passage.

Zhurige felt a sense of taboo in her heart, yet she was pushed into the passage as well. Dragged along by two of Ye Yuzhu’s men, she felt a bone-chilling breath of cold air hit her face the moment she entered.

The team moved slowly. As Ye Yuzhu and Old Monster Xiong walked, they used their lanterns to inspect the tomb bricks on either side. Rounding a corner, Ye Yuzhu suddenly took a sharp step back. With quick eyes and hands, he grabbed Old Monster Xiong by the collar, pulling him back just as half his body was about to tip over the edge.

“What’s going on!” Old Monster Xiong, having been shoved to the ground by Ye Yuzhu, stood up and brushed off his backside. He then saw that the spot where he had been about to step was actually empty. For over ten meters ahead, there were no floor bricks at all. It was a bottomless abyss.

“Damn it all! It’s so far across, how the hell are we supposed to get over there?” Old Monster Xiong cursed as he stared into the abyss, a darkness so deep no light could reach the bottom.

Ye Yuzhu frowned and waved a hand. “Get the Thousand-Mile Cable!”

The moment he spoke, several men pulled thin iron chains from their packs. They linked the segments together to form a substantial Thousand-Mile Cable and handed it to Ye Yuzhu.

“I’m telling you, Brother Ye, your Thousand-Mile Cable might be famous in the martial world, but this gap is massive. Even if we threw the damn thing at the sky, we’d never clear it,” Old Monster Xiong said.

Ye Yuzhu shot him a glare but remained silent. He wound one end of the Thousand-Mile Cable around his arm several times, then took a three-step running start toward the wall. He actually began running along the uneven stone surface, with nothing but a bottomless chasm yawning beneath his feet.

Drawing a deep breath, Ye Yuzhu twisted his body in mid-air. The Horse-Head Blade in his right sleeve unsheathed, piercing the ceiling of the tomb to hook onto a stone. The Thousand-Mile Cable wrapped around his left arm immediately went flying. The grappling hook at the end of the cable sank deep into a gap between the bricks of the tomb wall, locking firmly into place. As the rest of the cable was pulled taut, several men quickly grabbed the other end, stretching it into a perfectly straight line.

The Horse-Head Blade snapped back into its sheath. Ye Yuzhu spun in the air and landed as light as a dragonfly on the Thousand-Mile Cable. His stance was so steady and graceful that the cable didn’t even tremble beneath his weight.