Chapter 161: The Abandoned Research Institute

I huddled in the corner as the world returned to silence once more. I crouched there with my eyes shut, waiting for a long while, but no monsters came rushing out. Only then did I slowly move my backpack aside, trembling as I swept my flashlight toward the source of the noise.

Under the beam of my flashlight, I saw porcelain shards scattered across the floor. The ceramics in this burial chamber were all placed inside niches in the stone wall. There was no wind here, so without someone moving them, there was no way they could have fallen and shattered out of nowhere.

At that moment, something caught the corner of my eye. I saw a flash of white behind the openwork pattern of that empty niche. Through my adventures over the past few days, I had developed a conditioned reflex for human movement; the instant another living person was in the space, I could tell whether it was human or something else.

And in that moment, I realized right away: it was a person.

“Hey! Who’s there? Who is that?” I shouted. The sound of running footsteps quickly faded into the distance. Without hesitation, I shone my flashlight and splashed through the water to take a look. Only a human would run hunched over like that.

That corner held a lot of porcelain and earthenware vessels, with a few scattered in the niches and on the floor. They didn’t look very valuable. Whether they had been submerged in water for too long or were just poorly made to begin with, they looked dull and lusterless.

I quickly kicked the porcelain shards aside, poked my head toward where the vase had been standing, and peered inside through the openwork carving. To my surprise, there was a huge space behind the stone wall. This chamber and the one behind it were likely two adjacent rooms separated only by a stone wall. The person who had fled had been hiding right behind the openwork. When he moved, he had knocked over the waist-high porcelain vase.

I had caught a glimpse of him and was certain he was human. But this was an underwater tomb. Aside from our initial group, no one else had come down to this part of the sea—unless this mausoleum had another entrance besides the one guarded by the Tomb-guarding Beast.

His movements just now clearly betrayed a guilty conscience. As soon as I shouted, he bolted. In a tomb where safety was non-existent, who knew how long he had been lurking behind that vase? I wondered if he had overheard my conversation with Bai Shenxian. If he turned out to be one of Liang Si’s men, that would be bad.

In any case, I had to find him, figure out what he was up to, and see whose side he was on. The moment I realized I’d been eavesdropped on, my fear vanished. The flashlight beam was narrow and it was pitch black inside, so I couldn’t see much. For now, it looked like the only way to reach the next room was to break down this wall.

Holding my flashlight, I walked a full circle around the burial chamber. There were no other paths. Aside from these two small, window-like openwork decorations, nothing else led to the opposite side. I crouched down, selected a sturdy earthenware jar to stand on, drew my Mountain-Cleaving Machete, and began hammering at the hollowed stone pillars with its pommel, hoping to smash them.

Who would have thought that while they were cheap with the funerary goods, they had made the pillars and beams quite solid? The openwork stone was exceptionally sturdy. After hammering away for a long time, I only managed to knock off a bit of stone dust, which splattered all over my head and face.

I had no choice but to hop down from the jar and think of another plan.

Thinking back, that person had fled so decisively. The moment he realized I’d spotted him, he didn’t hesitate for a second. That indirectly suggested he was extremely familiar with the space next door. And if he was that familiar with it, he probably wasn’t one of Liang Si’s men.

I looked up at the turtle carved into the stone caisson ceiling, and an idea struck me. Bai Shenxian had said that while I was under the influence of the Yandao^[1], I had circled the chamber, tapped on a specific brick, and found the mechanism to open the caisson.

Finding a mechanism hidden inside a tomb brick was very rare. Was it possible that this was a mechanism room?

Mechanism rooms were rarely seen in architectural history. In ancient times, only a few specific organizations had the ingenuity to build them, usually secret service or assassination organizations. These places were rarely recorded in history; even the most famous “Sticky Pole Bureau^[2]” was officially described only as an agency responsible for the Emperor’s entertainment.

Hidden information isn’t hard to find if you have the right connections. Fortunately, my grandfather had many such connections in his early years. I had once found the structural diagrams for this specific type of mechanism room in a collection of rubbed ancient texts.

Old tomb raiders usually called chambers with these features “Juehu Cages.” The name implied that while the structure looked simple from the outside, it contained too many hidden tricks. The things hidden in the cracks and wall cavities were as intricate as a fish trap. One wrong step and you’d be caught like small fish or shrimp, wiped out entirely, trapped one by one.

But these tricks wouldn’t work on me. I had studied almost every known tomb structure in existence. I tossed the jar aside, pressed myself against the wall, put my ear tight against the bricks, turned off my flashlight, and closed my eyes to listen.

Everything fell silent instantly. Soon, I heard a tiny cracking sound from a component inside. This underwater tomb dated back to an early era when machinery hadn’t even become a formalized system. Generally, structural components didn’t incorporate metal yet; mortise-and-tenon joints made of wood or stone were most common. Over time, no matter how advanced the preservation techniques were, it was hard for wood not to make a sound.

Once I confirmed it was a mechanism room, I knelt and began feeling along the bricks near the corner. There had to be a path leading next door, and the connections in a Juehu Cage were most likely arranged starting from the four corners.

After feeling around for a bit, I found a funerary vase that felt out of place. I tried to lift it but found it wouldn’t budge; it was bolted into the floor tiles. I tried twisting it left and right. The moment I turned it an inch, I heard a massive, rumbling sound of machinery operating inside the wall. I gave it another half-turn, and in the darkness, something suddenly appeared directly in front of me.

I stood up and clicked on my flashlight. A flight of stone steps winding downward had appeared before me.

The appearance of these steps was truly baffling. I had imagined the room next door might have the exact same layout as this one, but I never expected a staircase leading down!

I didn’t rush in to investigate. First, I switched to a handy short blade, moved the flashlight to my left hand, and tightened the buckles on my backpack. The person who had bolted seemed very agile. If he was hiding down there waiting to ambush me, I needed to be fully prepared.

Once everything was ready, I took a deep breath to steel my nerves. Gripping the knife, I descended a few meters down the stone steps. As soon as I got down there, I noticed something strange.

On both sides of the stone steps were metal railings.

I clamped the flashlight between my teeth and ran a hand over the copper rust on the railing. I was stunned. What? How could these be modern-style wrought iron railings? Was this a joke? I suddenly felt like I was being played.

In the moment I froze, the stone door behind me suddenly let out a sharp click. By the time I turned around, it had already automatically closed, leaving only a sliver of a gap. I rushed back up and tried to pry the door open, but it was clearly impossible. This solid stone door had to weigh several tons; it was absolutely impossible to move by human strength alone.

I let out a frustrated sigh and looked toward the ceiling. A nearly identical stone platform was positioned directly above me. The platform was narrow, perhaps once used for a door plaque or something similar. For a martial arts expert, that width was just enough to plant a foot.

From that height, one could peer through the openwork lattice into the space I had just left.

Just who was this person, and how were their skills so impressive? There didn’t seem to be any prodigy on our team capable of jumping two meters high.

I held onto the iron railing, feeling like my head was about to explode. With no way back, I couldn’t just sit there. I had no choice but to keep following the stone steps down with my flashlight. After descending for a short while, I reached a corner that opened into a flat area. The floor was made of concrete, and the walls were even coated in white paint.

These things gave me a sudden, fleeting illusion of returning to real life. I had to constantly remind myself that I was here to explore an underwater tomb, following the trail of the Tomb-guarding Beast. Still, these modern elements provided a rare sense of security; at the very least, they were much better than the ghostly burial goods found in the tomb.

I walked down the stone steps and stopped at the turn, sweeping my flashlight across the surroundings.

This was a modern building in every sense of the word. The doors were the old-fashioned wooden type with handles, and the walls had originally been green before being painted over with a layer of white. Now, that white paint was peeling away in mottled patches, leaving flakes scattered all over the floor.

But the place I had been before was undoubtedly a tomb. So what was this place? The stairs connecting to the Juehu Cage were newly built. Someone had constructed a modern building like this at such a depth underwater… but for what purpose?

I picked a direction at random and continued forward. Soon, the questions in my heart found an answer on the wall.

Four eye-catching characters were painted in red on the corridor wall ahead: “Strive, Seek Truth!”

It fit my impression of those earlier years perfectly. I’d heard that after the founding of New China, research was being conducted secretly in various places. These words immediately brought those projects to mind. This was most likely an abandoned underwater research station from years ago. But what exactly were these researchers studying?

Could they have been studying this underwater tomb?

If predecessors had built an underwater research station just to study the adjacent tomb, even if it were a secret operation, there should have been some records of it. Yet the Nine Rings project was a large-scale archaeological undertaking conducted through direct cooperation between the Five Masters and the higher-ups.

With a project of this magnitude involved, wouldn’t they have checked the archives? Did Fourth Brother and Tian Yuqing really not know about this? Or perhaps Fourth Brother was hiding something from me, but he hadn’t expected to be taken out before even entering the tomb, nor had he expected me to come down alone, let alone be swept here by the current to stumble into this building by sheer luck.

Suddenly, I stopped in my tracks and tilted my head, feeling that something wasn’t quite right.

No, wait a second. How exactly did I get in here?