Chapter 128 Entering the River

“But we don’t have time! It’s crawling with stone horseshoe crab insects out there. Who knows where that tiny qi vent is in a place this big? Besides, this entire underground palace has undergone a massive shift in position. There’s no telling if the qi vent has been blocked!” Han Jian spoke faster and faster, clearly gripped by panic.

I listened from the side, just about to speak, when the entire Buddhist pagoda suddenly began to shake violently. Several workers standing too close to the stairs lost their footing and plummeted from the tower in an instant. In the chaos, Chen Canghai scrambled against the wall and managed to grab hold of a window frame.

He Yu couldn’t keep his balance either. He was thrown hard against the stair railing. The thousand-year-old wooden railing completely gave way under the impact, and he let out a sharp cry of alarm.

I was hugging a pillar for dear life. Terrified, I spun around and lunged for him, catching him by the collar just as he slipped. He was left dangling in mid-air. I didn’t even dare to breathe. The pagoda was still shaking, and large chunks of dust and stone were raining down from above. My arm quickly began to ache from the strain.

“Help him! Old Lu! Get over here and help, I can’t hold on much longer!” My face was flushed deep red. I was holding onto He Yu through sheer willpower, the veins in my arms feeling as though they were about to burst from the pressure.

He Yu took one look down the stairwell, closed his eyes, and started hollering, “Mamma mia! Xiao Yao, this time next year, you better remember to burn some paper^[1] for me! Oh, and bring a bottle of wine! I want the expensive stuff!”

“Shut up, He Yu!” I roared at him.

Just then, I felt a gust of wind at my back. A hand reached out and grabbed the other side of He Yu’s collar. The weight in my hand lightened instantly. I caught my breath, then put every ounce of strength I had into pulling with Lu Ayao to haul He Yu back up.

He Yu crawled over like a maggot and hugged the pillar just like us. The brush with death had turned his face ghostly pale, and he still hadn’t recovered.

“Wha… what’s the situation here? We didn’t set off any explosives. Can this pagoda understand human speech? Did it decide to dismantle itself just to save us some dynamite?”

The pagoda continued to vibrate, shaking off most of the stone horseshoe crab insects that were crawling up its sides. I focused on the sensation. The tremors didn’t seem to be coming from the base of the tower, but rather from deep underground. It was the ground shaking that was causing the pagoda to vibrate.

Just as the thought crossed my mind, the pagoda gave a sudden lurch.

“What’s going on? Did it stop shaking?”

He Yu was about to cautiously let go of the pillar when the Buddhist pagoda began to shake even more violently. This frequency was on an entirely different level than before. The world spun around me, and I was nearly shaken loose from the pillar I was clinging to.

“Is this a damn earthquake?!” He Yu cursed. “We can’t just stay like this. Think of something!”

“Oh no, we’re sinking!” I heard Lu Ayao suddenly say.

His words jolted me alert. A flash of insight struck me, and the outline of a plan immediately took shape in my mind.

I tried to shine my flashlight out toward the stone wall to find a reference point, but we were too far from the window. Combined with the dust falling from the spire, I couldn’t make out a thing.

I hugged the pillar tight and shouted to Lu Ayao and He Yu, “Guys! I think I know what’s going on! But just to be sure, I need to take another look from the window!”

Hearing me say that, He Yu was so excited he almost slapped the pillar. “Hurry, hurry, hurry! The two of us will push you over. Little Chen is right by the window, but make sure you stand firm. Don’t go plunging headfirst!”

Chen Canghai, who was a meter away and closest to the window, freed one hand the moment he heard me and braced his stance, ready to catch me. I adjusted my posture as Lu Ayao held me steady, and then He Yu gave me a hard push from behind.

Chen Canghai caught me cleanly and quickly made room for me to press against the wall. Dust from the top of the tower covered my head and face. The pagoda was still slowly sinking, and I knew I had to move fast.

I grabbed the window frame with both hands and leaned out to look down. With just a single glance, I was almost entirely certain of my earlier theory.

We had been wrong. This entire underground palace, along with the cliff from before, wasn’t currently beside the river; it was completely submerged beneath the riverbed. The cliff and the underground palace had likely been solid rock originally, until the builders hollowed out their interiors and installed a complete traction mechanism.

Not only that, but this mechanism operated on a timer. I suspected there were two sets of machinery currently in this underground palace: first, a timed mechanism that pulled the cliff up to make it appear out of thin air, and second, the anti-theft device Lu Ayao had triggered earlier.

I hadn’t been sure before because this primitive type of traction mechanism required a special kind of bearing. To haul an entire underground palace up and down, that bearing would have to be built on an abnormally massive scale. But seeing this eighteen-story Buddhist pagoda made everything click.

It wasn’t that there was no bearing; it was that there was more than one.

The eighteen-story Buddhist pagoda we were in was the main bearing. Each of the other small chambers held a pagoda of its own to serve as secondary bearings, all rising and sinking on schedule along with the main eighteen-story pagoda.

When the set time arrived, the eighteen-story Buddhist pagoda would sink, driving the internal machinery of the palace to rise. The towering cliff would then surface from beneath the water, creating the illusion of appearing out of thin air. By the same logic, when the next timed interval arrived, the eighteen-story pagoda would rise, and the cliff would sink back down.

That was why the top of the pagoda we were in was so close to the roof of the cave.

On the map Qiao Sangui had me memorize, a dotted line was drawn beside the infant corpse pit. I hadn’t quite understood what it meant before, but thinking about it now, that dotted line was very likely the vent Lu Ayao had just mentioned.

“Can you be sure of the location?” He Yu shouted to me.

I thought for a moment and shook my head. “The floor plan was way too simple. All I know is that there must be an opening on the underwater wall connecting to the river outside.”

Lu Ayao looked up at Han Jian, who was reaching for a window frame, and said, “It doesn’t matter. Just swim after me. I can calculate the approximate location of the vent. Once the pagoda sinks to a certain height, we jump!”

“Damn, Old Lu, you can even calculate that? That’s insane, a walking smart GPS! I’m taking you everywhere with me from now on!” He Yu looked at Lu Ayao with instant adoration. Pressed against the wall, watching his expression gave me goosebumps all over.

Just then, Chen Canghai glanced out the window and said to me, “The height is about right.”

I quickly got into position.

“Jump!” Lu Ayao shouted.

Almost the moment he spoke, I leaped out from the window frame. There was still quite a distance to the water from here. I covered my head as I plunged into the water, the freezing cold sending a sharp jolt through me. I swam up a couple of strokes and saw others jumping down one after another.

Lu Ayao landed to my right. As soon as he hit the water, he grabbed my arm and swam outward. I followed him while using my flashlight to signal He Yu to come along. We swam hard in one direction for two minutes. Underwater visibility was terrible, and I completely lost my sense of direction.

All I knew was that I soon touched a stone wall, and a circular underwater passage appeared before me. Lu Ayao immediately began clearing away the stones blocking the entrance by hand.

Running low on oxygen, the few of us floated up to catch our breath, then dived back down to help. The stones only blocked a small section of the passage; if we cleared them all out, the river water outside might suck us all through. So as we got down to the last few rocks, He Yu signaled for me to hold off.

We surfaced to find the stone walls above the water crawling with stone horseshoe crab insects.

Lu Ayao looked at the pagoda sinking into the water in the distance and reached out to He Yu for his backpack. “I need to go back down. This pagoda cannot be allowed to remain in this world.”

“Wait, you’re going to blow up the pagoda again?” I grabbed him.

He Yu thought for a moment before handing over the backpack stuffed with explosives. “Hurry up! Blow it to hell so we can get out of here and have a decent meal!”

He then patted me on the back. I understood the look in their eyes and finally let go.

Lu Ayao took the waterproof backpack and swam back. He was incredibly fast. Within minutes, I saw his head pop out of the water. He threw the backpack, which was already sputtering with fire, hard toward the pagoda spire, then immediately plunged headfirst back toward us.

He Yu slapped my shoulder, and I quickly dove into the water. Han Jian was using a knife to pry the stones loose at the bottom. Chen Canghai was the closest and was sucked in instantly. A moment later, I felt a powerful suction pull both He Yu and me inside as well.