Chapter 172: Severe Injuries

The massive grinding of stone and the whistling of wind roared in my ears. Simultaneously, an even louder sound emerged. At first, I thought it was the resonance of dozens of stone beams moving in unison, but after listening for a while, I realized with a jolt of alarm that it wasn’t.

The realization hit when my leg touched a relief on the rock wall. It was a turtle-faced immortal holding a banner. This immediately put me on high alert, because this rock wall should have been far away from us; Tian Xiaoqi had to navigate several stone beams just to jump to where I was.

I looked up and saw that the reliefs on the opposite side, which had been completely hidden in darkness moments ago, had suddenly appeared within my line of sight.

I reacted instantly, cursing loudly, “Climb up, damn it! The rock walls on both sides are pressing inward. This tomb master wants to squash us into meat filling for buns! This is a damn trap! We’ve been caught!”

We had been clinging to the stone beams long enough to have adapted to the rhythm of their vertical movement. As soon as I finished shouting, I saw Tian Xiaoqi release one of the hands she used to hold onto me, adjusting her posture to prepare to jump. But since she was held flat against the beam with me, she had no point of leverage.

I couldn’t afford to be afraid now. I looked up to find a suitable stone beam. The reliefs on both sides were becoming so clear that it proved the inward pressure was accelerating. This chasm might truly close shut in less than ten minutes.

“I’ll toss you up!” I shouted, hooking both feet onto the stone beam and stretching my posture as wide as possible.

I spotted the nearest stone beam above us and locked eyes with Tian Xiaoqi. I gripped the handle of my claw knife tightly with one hand. The blade had cut deep into my palm, covering it in blood, but I had no time to worry about that now. Once I adjusted my stance, I mustered every ounce of strength in my other arm and gave a great shout, throwing Tian Xiaoqi upward.

She was light, and as soon as I let go, she caught smoothly onto the beam above. However, at that exact moment, the claw knife in my hand let out a crisp “clang.” The blade had actually snapped under the force I exerted.

“Gan Ji!”

It all happened so fast that I only had time to protect my head. My flashlight was knocked away, and I tumbled downward, slamming into a moving stone beam without any cushion for the impact. As the beam shifted away, I continued to fall. I could only hear the dull thuds of my own body. I was being battered like a ball of flesh against solid stone; in less than half a minute, I felt as though my internal organs had been pounded a thousand times by a heavy sledgehammer.

At some point, my descent abruptly stopped. The moment I came to a halt, hanging in mid-air, I coughed up a mouthful of blood. My mouth and throat were filled with a thick, metallic taste. I was barely conscious from the impact, feeling only that my wrist was being pulled so hard it was about to dislocate.

The person holding me dragged me up from mid-air and shone a flashlight into my pupils. His voice drifted in and out. I was suddenly jolted awake by another mouthful of blood welling up in my throat, choking me. My mouth was covered in bloody froth. For a moment, I couldn’t even feel my legs.

“Let’s go, move now!” I vaguely heard He Yu shouting. Then I felt my body being moved. He hooked his arm around mine, hoisted me onto his back, and began sprinting into the darkness.

The jolting as he ran felt like it was going to bounce my lungs right out of my chest. As He Yu ran, I coughed continuously against his back, and by the time his flashlight beam finally settled, I had coughed myself fully awake. We had run into the palm of a relief carving of a Turtle Immortal, where a mountain gate opened into a man-made corridor.

Tian Xiaoqi was waiting ahead. He Yu’s flashlight beam met hers. He swept the light around our surroundings and checked behind us. Thinking it was safe for the moment, he quickly lowered me from his back and had Tian Xiaoqi check my injuries.

I was fully conscious, but my chest hurt terribly, and my hearing kept cutting in and out. I thought to myself that this fall had really hit me hard.

“Can you see me? Can you hear me talking? Don’t tell me you’ve actually been knocked stupid, damn it.” He Yu waved a hand in front of my eyes.

I struggled to raise my hand and push his away, leaning against the wall and gasping in waves of pain. But at the same time, I was genuinely happy—happy that He Yu hadn’t ultimately abandoned me down there. No matter how harsh his words sounded, he would always come back to help me in the end, even if he did it grumbling all the way.

“How did you…” I managed to squeeze out a few words.

Squatting beside me, He Yu said, “Don’t get any wrong ideas. I really intended to go up, but after doubling back, I realized that level was a complete dead end. Just like you said, no way up or down. I had to turn back, and then the rock walls suddenly started moving. I knew something bad was happening, figured you must have done something again.”

My chest still ached, but it was slightly less intense than before. With no professional equipment on hand in such harsh conditions, Tian Xiaoqi could only gently press around while asking where it hurt.

“Damn it, though, I’d barely crawled onto a stone beam to figure out what was going on when I saw you dropping. So I rushed over to catch you. Still, catching you makes it all right.” As he spoke, he kept rotating his wrist every now and then.

I knew that after sprinting from so far away to grab an almost unconscious dead weight like me, there was a ninety percent chance he had injured his wrist too.

Tian Xiaoqi slumped onto the ground, looking at a loss for where to even begin. “It might be a pulmonary contusion,” she said. “Falling from such a height so many times took a toll. But judging by how much blood you coughed up, it isn’t too extreme, probably just a minor contusion. Still, we really need to figure out how to get out of here.”

He Yu surveyed the surroundings once more. “We’re already deep underground, yet there’s still air circulating down here. Maybe we didn’t take the wrong path after all. Besides, that gate we just passed through looks a lot like a tomb door.”

“Are you saying this is the real underground palace?” Tian Xiaoqi asked. “We were just trying to stay alive and ended up stumbling right into the entrance?”

Taking a deep breath, I pushed myself up against the wall and spat out the bloody foam in my mouth. “Then the deduction Lu Ayao and I made earlier should be correct. The real underground palace starts right here. Everything outside was just a decoy, the outermost layer. I just didn’t notice this tomb door in the beginning.”

“What do you mean? What deduction did you two make?” He Yu asked, studying the patterns on the wall.

I briefly explained the “three-layer old and new tomb” theory that Lu Ayao and I had come up with to Tian Xiaoqi and He Yu.

He Yu traced the patterns on the wall and turned back to look at me. “So, if we don’t count the collapsed modern research institute, the structure of this entire tomb complex should be divided into three layers. Did you two analyze the age of those stones back then?”

“One was old, one was new. I don’t know the specific eras,” I answered him.

He Yu had a sharp eye for such things. He nodded. “Then that should be right. At least two groups of people built this underground palace. I’ve looked around; the walls here all belong to the same era. Do you think this is the second layer or the core of the palace?”

I used the wall for support and struggled to stand up. Seeing this, Tian Xiaoqi immediately came over to steady me. By the light of He Yu’s flashlight, I wiped the blood from my lips with my sleeve. “If I had to guess, we’ve probably just reached the second layer, which is also the most dangerous one. Everything before was just an appetizer. The builder brazenly set up a tomb gate like this just to lure us in here.”

“Or rather, he believes that even if he lets us in, we won’t have the ability to enter the main burial chamber.”

Hearing this, He Yu hitched up his trousers and walked over to help support me. “That’s pretty arrogant. I’ve always hated people who act so cocky. Based on the legends, Master Jiyun didn’t seem like such a boastful guy.”

I shook my head and said, “I feel like something is wrong. This underground palace feels off. I still don’t know if my visions were real or fake, but if they were real, and the person buried here truly is the legendary, miraculously powerful Master Jiyun, then it’s very likely he wasn’t the one who designed and built this tomb.”

I had entered two illusions previously. In the first, inside the head of the Tomb-guarding Beast, I saw Master Jiyun suspended in mid-air by ropes. His entire body was bound, and his face was covered with a sari. To me, that seemed like an insulting way to bury someone.

Master Jiyun lying properly in a coffin was the content of the second illusion. That second vision conveyed a lot of information. First, I saw the research institute from years ago, and then I saw members of the 434 Archaeological Team. My grandfather being involved wasn’t even the most shocking part; what truly stunned me was that they had actually unearthed Master Jiyun’s entire coffin and transported it to the institute.

These two illusions were highly deceptive. I wasn’t sure if these events had actually happened, because in reality, I hadn’t seen any hanging corpse inside the Tomb-guarding Beast, nor had I seen any coffin in the research institute. However, these two false illusions were the only references I had.

So, I recounted the details I had seen in the visions.

“Do you really think the illusions here are reliable references?” He Yu asked me. He clearly felt that relying on information from a vision to find a way out wasn’t very reliable.

Leaning against the wall, I tried my best to keep from coughing too violently. “If there were any other way, I wouldn’t want to rely on illusions either. But if I extrapolate based on my visions, Master Jiyun’s body probably wasn’t kept in a coffin originally. Someone moved it into that Golden Silk Phoebe Wood Coffin^[1] later on.”

He Yu thought for a moment and then asked, “What’s the use of deducing all this?”

He hadn’t caught my drift, and I was almost driven to exasperated laughter. I continued to explain: “What I mean is, if the second level of this underground palace was built to protect the Golden Silk Phoebe Wood Coffin stored in the main chamber, then according to my vision, the 434 Archaeological Team already hauled it out. Even though we haven’t seen the coffin with our own eyes, it indirectly proves that people have been in here before and made it out completely unscathed.”

“So there should be traces left behind by those archaeologists,” Tian Xiaoqi said, picking up on my train of thought. “As long as we follow their route, we can get out too.”

I nodded, leaning against the wall for support.

He Yu slapped his thigh. “If that’s the case, then damn it, we’ve got nothing to be afraid of! Let’s move! Quick, Xiao Yao, get on my back. Let me carry you so we can hurry up and find a way out!”

He Yu turned around immediately and crouched in front of me. The pain in my chest hadn’t eased in the slightest, so maybe Tian Xiaoqi’s diagnosis of a pulmonary contusion was right. Since I had lasted this long without dying, it was probably only mild, but moving on my own was practically out of the question now.

I climbed onto He Yu’s back. This time, I truly felt what a burden I was. If He Yu hadn’t come back for me, I would definitely have fallen to my death in that fissure. Even if I hadn’t died from the fall, I would have been crushed into a meat patty when the crevice closed later.

Feeling embarrassed, I thanked He Yu.

He scoffed at me right away. “What are you talking about? Save the thanks for the dinner table. And let me tell you, one meal won’t cut it—it’s gotta be two! Saying it down here doesn’t count. I’ve got your number now; you and that guy Lu are cut from the exact same cloth. Both of you are stubborn as mules, clinging to your dumb logic and refusing to listen to a word anyone says. I mean, this tomb is right underground; it’s not like it’s gonna grow wings and fly away. Would it have killed us to gear up properly before coming down?”

This time, I didn’t argue back. His voice gave me a rare sense of security. He could berate me all he wanted, and I’d just listen. I just wondered how Lu Ayao was doing, though he was undoubtedly faring much better than me.

After sorting through their remaining gear, the two of them set off deeper into the passage. As He Yu marched ahead, staring at the bare, unadorned walls made me feel increasingly drowsy. I didn’t know if it was from blood loss, but my eyelids kept drooping heavily. Before long, my vision grew hazy, and a numbness crept into my hands and feet.

Just as I was about to drift off, He Yu suddenly called out to me:

“Xiao Yao, you said this second level was packed with traps, but we’ve been walking for so long and haven’t run into a single one?”

I mulled over his words, forcing my mind back into gear. “That was just a hypothesis. Although there were plenty of master craftsmen back then, this is the seabed. Setting up traps inside a ship is already difficult, and with factors like seawater corrosion and the passage of time, any original mechanisms might have stopped working.”

“Hey, who do you think built this place anyway? Everything they came up with is so vicious: poison, illusions, and even keeping pets.” He Yu paused, then asked, “Wait a second, how do you know Master Jiyun^[2] didn’t build this place?”

For a moment, I didn’t know how to respond. That point really was just my own wild speculation. Or perhaps seeing Master Jiyun’s corpse looking so miserable in the first illusion had led me to conclude that he couldn’t have been responsible for all this.

“I don’t know. Maybe it was a hint from the illusion,” I said truthfully.

He Yu kept talking just to keep Gan Ji from falling asleep.