Chapter 181: The Wall of the Dead

But how could there be people talking inside the walls!

The realization made my entire body go rigid. Lu Ayao didn’t loosen his grip on me at all, clearly afraid that if my terror reached a certain point, I might bolt and crash into the wall.

My eyes had mostly adjusted to the darkness by now. I opened them wide, desperately trying to see if any strange new figures had appeared in the tunnel. Unfortunately, despite my searching, nothing new had emerged. Instead, with the light extinguished, the large-headed faces on both sides looked even more lifelike in the dark.

I tried to shift slightly, but Lu Ayao held me too tightly. Those whispering voices seemed to hover all around us. I couldn’t speak, and in the pitch black, I couldn’t even signal Lu Ayao with my eyes. Left with no choice, I strained my ears to listen to the movement around us.

The voices were definitely coming from inside the walls. They were everywhere, on all sides, and even above our heads. I tried to focus, wanting to hear exactly what they were saying, but I couldn’t make it out. I could only tell that this was absolutely not a sound produced by animals; it was the distinct effect of humans communicating in low voices.

I attempted to exhaust every bit of scientific knowledge I’d learned over the past twenty years to explain the cause of these voices, but the sound was simply too eerie. These voices weren’t gathered in one fixed spot; they were constantly moving around us. Sometimes they sounded far away, and sometimes they felt as if they were speaking right against my ear.

The few of us remained completely motionless for nearly fifteen minutes. Both of my legs had gone numb, yet the voices continued to fill my ears. They grew louder and louder until it felt as if we were trapped in the middle of a crowded marketplace. If I listened any longer, I felt like my ears would explode.

Suddenly, I felt Lu Ayao’s wrist move rapidly. This was followed by a series of crisp sounds of falling stones. The voices in my ears stopped abruptly. Then, I heard what sounded like a tide of people surging toward the back of the tunnel.

Once the voices faded away, Lu Ayao clicked his flashlight back on with a sharp snap. Brightness instantly returned to my vision. Lu Ayao let go of me, and I saw He Yu quickly shuffle forward a bit before hurriedly turning on his own flashlight.

Soon, the area around us was illuminated, but those large-headed faces painted on the walls didn’t disappear.

He Yu broke the silence: “What was that just now?”

Tian Xiaoqi was so scared she was nearly paralyzed where she lay, but she was too intimidated by the figures on the walls to move, so she remained flat on the ground. “I saw those paintings a while ago,” she said. “But we’d been crawling for so long without any sound from you guys that I didn’t dare say anything.”

I wiped the sweat from my forehead with my sleeve. “Same here. These wall paintings appeared suddenly after we went down that steep slope. What was that noise just now?”

“I don’t know, but there’s a high probability this passage wasn’t meant for us,” Lu Ayao said, his nerves clearly still on edge.

“Not for us?” He Yu gasped. “Holy crap, you don’t mean it’s for those things just now, do you? A ghost hole?”

Lu Ayao shook his head. “It was likely meant for a specific group of people. I heard that back in the Republican era, the Lu Clan trained a special branch of descendants. These people were usually from collateral branches of the family and were born with disabilities. Some had issues with their eyes, others with their ears. When there were perilous tombs that normal living people couldn’t enter, they would send these people down to explore.”

As he spoke, he turned back around and continued crawling forward through the tunnel.

Hearing this, I felt it was completely mind-boggling. “How can disabled people explore tombs? Your ancestors were a bit too heartless. A place like this is so dangerous that even normal people couldn’t handle some of these situations, yet you actually sent people born with disabilities in here?”

He Yu suddenly sighed from behind us. “I remember now! Isn’t that the Can Tong? I’ve heard of this!”

“Master He, with all your vast knowledge, why don’t you educate an uncultured guy like me?” I ducked my head to dodge a stone pillar that materialized out of nowhere ahead.

He Yu and I chatted as we crawled. A big reason for talking was to help distract ourselves. Keeping a calm mind while crawling through such a long tunnel was hard enough as it was, to say nothing of all those pale, large-headed human faces that had appeared on the walls.

Lu Ayao didn’t stop us, but simply tried to speed up his crawling pace. It seemed that, to some extent, he tacitly approved of our attempt to distract ourselves.

He Yu cleared his throat from the back of the line and explained, “The Can Tong often appear in folk tales and unofficial histories, mostly from areas where major tombs have been excavated. According to those records, these Can Tong were children born with physical disabilities. At first, they were used as mere tools to probe dangerous tombs, no different from stray cats or dogs. But later, the ancestors of the Mojin Xiaowei discovered that when one sense or organ was impaired, another would become extraordinarily developed.

“For example, a child born deaf was said to have a far more developed sense of touch or sight. Some could notice things that ordinary people like us would miss. It all sounds pretty mystical.

“Anyway, true or not, someone back then really did train a group of children like that specifically for tomb raiding. I heard they even favored the blind ones, ideally born blind, the kind who couldn’t see even a speck of light. They say these kids had incredible skill in their hands. They could touch a piece of Mingqi and know exactly which dynasty it was from and how much it was worth just by feel. Just like Old Lu said, those were the so-called Can Tong. Pretty twisted, right?”

I listened in dumbfounded silence. It was hard to imagine what those so-called Can Tong had gone through back in the day. Merely to satisfy human greed, five- or six-year-old children might have been sent down to terrifying places like this to handle the belongings of the dead. If they failed to find anything, they might even have been beaten to death.

Up ahead, Lu Ayao spoke. “In those years, many disabled children were abandoned at birth. The Lu Clan would often send people to search uninhabited, desolate mountains. If they found such a child, they would bring them back to train. But later, amid years of hiding and displacement, that practice was abandoned. This place is very likely a passage built specifically for the Can Tong.”

“Then what’s the deal with that sound above our heads? It’s making my skin crawl,” He Yu asked.

The moment He Yu finished speaking, Lu Ayao suddenly stopped up ahead. Since I was keeping an arm’s distance behind him, I managed to stop in time, avoiding another “rear-end collision.”

I poked my head out to see what was happening. One look, and I froze. I never imagined this cave could be so sinister. What I was looking at went completely beyond my understanding of the world.

Following the beam of Lu Ayao’s flashlight, about ten meters ahead of us in the stone tunnel, a wall appeared that had been completely sealed off with stones. The wall fit seamlessly against the rock sides, but what baffled me most was that several wrists and arms were protruding from its surface.

Yes! It wasn’t a poor choice of words on my part; these dead arms and hands were literally sticking out from behind the wall. When the wall was built, living people must have been sealed inside alive. That was why they had tried so desperately to push their hands out through the stones, hoping to carve out a way to survive, only to get their arms through before suffocating to death inside.

Lu Ayao shone his light on those hands and arms, his brow furrowed deeply.

“Was this something you expected too?” I whispered.

Lu Ayao stared ahead in silence and shook his head. Clearly, this wasn’t something he had anticipated. Perhaps even he hadn’t expected the only tunnel leading to the Main Hall to hide so many sinister secrets.

“Holy crap,” He Yu muttered, having crept up beside us at some point. His mouth was hanging open in a perfect “O” shape, staring at the scene ahead so stunned that he couldn’t speak for a long time.

Lu Ayao and I watched from below, while Tian Xiaoqi and He Yu leaned over our shoulders to peer from above. The four of us were huddled together in a tight bunch; none of us had ever seen anything like this before.

Suddenly, He Yu blurted out, “How many bodies do you think are behind this wall?”

With that single question, the three of us shifted our gaze toward him. I thought to myself, You really know how to pick a topic, don’t you? His words sent a chill down everyone’s spine, but it was a crucial point. If there were only a dozen or so people crammed into the tunnel, it probably wouldn’t have reached this state. For them to be packed in so tightly that they suffocated to death, the number of people behind that wall had to be massive.

“Those voices we heard whispering in our ears earlier… they wouldn’t happen to be the spirits of these people, would they?” He Yu added in a low, eerie voice right above my head.

I swallowed hard and said, “From the looks of it, I’d say so.”

If it had been the old me, I would have laughed myself silly if someone tried to talk to me about something so far-fetched. But after everything I’d experienced, I really had no choice but to start giving it serious thought.