Chapter 23: A Number of Caves

He Yu was inside the coffin!

The moment that thought struck me, I rushed forward and jammed the shovel under the coffin lid. In ancient times, coffins and their outer casings were sealed extremely tightly to prevent decay—leave a living person in there long enough, and they’d suffocate to death.

The more I thought about it, the more anxious I became. I picked a spot and pushed upward with all the strength I had. The nested coffin lid, which normally would take two or three people to lift, budged halfway open with a loud creak, sending a jolt of pain and numbness through my arms.

I tossed the shovel aside and flipped the top layer of the coffin lid onto the ground, kicking up a cloud of dust. The outer coffin was massive, with each groove filled with burial fluid. Scattered among the fluid were fragments of burial artifacts, and in the center sat a smaller inner coffin.

He Yu was inside, trying to push the lid open from below. I didn’t care whether the burial fluid was filthy or not—I grabbed the shovel, hooked its blade onto the edge of the coffin, climbed on top, wedged the blade into the gap of the lid, and leaned back with all my weight. With a loud bang, the lid flew off.

I crashed hard onto the ground, pain shooting up my back. I didn’t even have time to rub it before scrambling up again and climbing back onto the coffin with the help of the shovel.

“You little punk! You thought I was a corpse, huh?” He Yu was drenched from head to toe in the burial fluid, reeking of something awful. “Hurry up and give me a hand. It’s too damn slippery—I can’t get out.”

I reached out and, after a lot of effort, finally managed to drag him out of the coffin. That’s when I noticed he’d used his climbing pick to chisel a large hole in the bottom of the coffin. Who knew where it led?

He Yu patted me. “Don’t bother looking. The corpse is down in that hole. A wet corpse, no less. I was stuck down there with it for at least twenty minutes! Do you have any idea how traumatized my delicate soul is right now?”

Hearing that, the tension that had gripped me for so long finally eased a little. I pulled out a full bottle of water from my bag and handed it to He Yu to clean himself up.

He took it but only wiped his face, neck, and arms before shoving it back into my hands. “Water’s a rare commodity down here. We need to conserve it. I don’t want to end up drinking my own piss. Hey, we fell down here together—how come your side’s so much safer?”

I asked, “How’d you end up inside the coffin? Did you run into Lu A’yao?”

He Yu shoved me, grumbling, “You little bastard. I’m standing here looking like hell and you’re worried about that guy named Lu? This place might as well be his ancestral home—how could he be worse off than me?”

I laughed. “Quit whining! Just tell me what happened.”

He Yu kept it brief, but he remembered all the important details.

His reflexes were clearly way better than mine. The moment the sand layer collapsed, he grabbed the leg of the nearest terracotta figure and clung to it like a gecko.

But those terracotta figures were ancient and couldn’t handle the strain. After about ten minutes, the one he was holding snapped, and he fell into one of the pits clutching a broken leg.

According to him, he didn’t see Lu A’yao. The pit he fell into was filled with standing water, and the water was swarming with bloodsucking leech-like parasites. He got bitten half to death the moment he landed. It was sheer willpower that got him climbing up the rock wall with his climbing pick. That’s when he discovered several other caves carved into the rock.

He didn’t think too much about it and crawled into one at random. He figured it was a hidden escape route left by ancient craftsmen. At the time, all he wanted was to find a drier place without leeches. He never imagined the tunnel would connect to the coffin chamber I was in.

I shone my flashlight down from the platform. Below was a pile of broken, bleached bones—cow bones, sheep bones, and probably other livestock remains. Above us were the terracotta figures. It looked like we’d accidentally fallen into a small burial pit beneath them. If not for these tunnels, this place would’ve been completely sealed off from the start.

I asked He Yu, “While you were climbing, did you notice anything unusual?”

He Yu thought for a moment. “Now that you mention it, yeah. But I’m not sure if it counts as unusual. Halfway through the climb, I found another passage that cut across the tunnel. It was narrow like the one I was in, but a bit different.”

“How was it different?” I asked.

“It had a curved, domed ceiling. Felt smoother to the touch than the one I was crawling through. But I didn’t dare go that way—the direction was off. That one clearly sloped downward, while the one I was in was going up.”

That gave me a sudden insight. After seeing enough architectural diagrams, you start to recognize patterns. Many ancient tombs were designed with passageways like that. But the one He Yu saw probably wasn’t a main corridor for transporting stone or chariots—it was more likely a side passage connecting to the tomb chamber.

From his description, there wasn’t just one tunnel—there were several, all man-made. They ran through the burial pit, beneath the terracotta figure layer, and even cut across the side corridor. That’s a massive amount of excavation. There’s no way this was the work of burrowing animals—unless we’re talking about some seriously ambitious groundhogs.