Chapter 242: The Child

“So what you’re saying is, we took the wrong path? This place doesn’t connect to the burial chambers below?” He Yu asked.

I explained to him that the lack of water sounds only proved there were no mechanisms down here that relied on water power to operate. In short, it wasn’t the kind of trap where stepping on a tile would trigger a drop-panel. However, that didn’t rule out the possibility that this was still a mechanism at its core. Something like a mechanical lock, for instance, requires external force to activate.

Kneeling on the ground, I began pulling tools out of my multi-purpose belt. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Han Zhuo didn’t seem inclined to leave; instead, he limped over to us. He Yu had never given him a friendly look, but at this moment, he knew Han Zhuo was quite proficient with certain mechanisms, so he didn’t give him a hard time.

While I was getting my tools out, Han Zhuo squatted down and tapped on the two floor tiles, looking puzzled when he finished. “Do you two really think there’s some kind of mechanism under these two stones?”

He Yu said, “Why? Got any brilliant insights?”

Han Zhuo stood right up. “Don’t waste your energy. These are probably just two floor tiles with special patterns carved on them.”

I spread my tool roll out on the floor, thinking to myself that this kid named Han was a newborn calf who didn’t fear the tiger, young and lacking experience. Ignoring him, I pulled four tools of varying thickness from the cloth wrap. I had custom-commissioned a blacksmith to forge them out of iron, and I called them “Cloud-Probing Needles.” Overall, they resembled elongated ear-picks, but instead of a concave tip, the ends were completely flat with a sharp bend, like miniature shovel heads.

Holding a Cloud-Probing Needle in each hand, I inserted one into the gap between the floor tiles. The tip probed down a few millimeters until I heard a crisp click as it struck something made of bronze. My eyelid twitched. There was definitely something down here.

Next, I inserted a second Cloud-Probing Needle to widen the gap. Old Qian angled his flashlight downward, revealing a six-rotational keyhole beneath the stone tile. I recognized it at a glance as a Qintian Six-Son Rotating Lock from the Xia and Shang dynasties. Unlocking this type of mechanism was simple enough: inside was a hidden spring-wire as thin as a strand of hair. As long as you hooked that wire onto the bronze catch inside the lock cylinder, the lock would open. However, these locks had a chilling reputation: hidden arrows could be loaded beneath them. Once the lock opened, it was very likely to trigger a crossbow mechanism underneath, so I had to be extra careful.

Using three Cloud-Probing Needles, I pried open the keyhole of the Six-Son lock. Probing down less than four centimeters, one of the needles hooked onto the hidden spring-wire.

I signaled with my eyes for everyone to back off and shifted from kneeling to crouching so I could escape quickly once the lock opened. Holding the Cloud-Probing Needle steady, I hooked it onto the upper bronze catch. With a creaking sound of mechanical gears turning, the two floor tiles beneath me shattered into a thousand pieces that fractured outward. I let go immediately. A split second later, an arrow whistled through the air, flying out from the keyhole.

My movements were already incredibly fast, and I was mentally prepared, but I hadn’t expected the arrow below to be so small and fast. Startled by the sharp wind, I lost my footing and fell back onto my rear. The arrow grazed my ear as it flew past, and my face immediately burned with a searing pain; the skin had definitely been broken. He Yu had the fastest reaction, lunging forward to tackle me to the ground. He saved my life, preventing me from being turned into a pincushion by two more arrows that shot up immediately after.

Once the noise on the ground subsided, I immediately scrambled up to check on He Yu. “Why did you rush over like that? Are you okay?”

He Yu pounded his lower back. “You’d better check yourself first! Don’t go getting your fucking face ruined before we even get into the tomb, or we’ll really be taking a massive loss!”

I hadn’t noticed until he mentioned it. I reached up to touch my face and pulled my hand back to find it covered in blood. In a dead man’s tomb lit only by dim candlelight, it was a thoroughly creepy sight. But my first thought wasn’t whether my face was scarred; I didn’t care much about my looks anyway. My greatest fear was whether the arrow had been coated in something. Poisoned arrows were all too common in ancient times, and I could only hope the King of Gune had forgotten that detail.

Old Qian squatted beside me, eagerly handing me tissue after tissue. I took them and wiped the blood from my face, then leaned back against the wall to sit for a moment. I didn’t feel anything strange in my body, so I got the others to shine their flashlights over toward the opening. Turning the lock had revealed a pitch-black hole, just wide enough for an adult man to squeeze through. The tunnel seemed to curve and run quite deep, with occasional gusts of wind blowing out from the opening.

Just as I was considering whether to go down first to scout ahead, He Yu suddenly raised his flashlight. The beam hit me right in the eyes, and I quickly shielded them with my hand.

I slapped his arm. “What are you doing? Trying to blind me?”

He Yu waved his hands frantically. “No, no! A child just ran past over there in the passage!”

Because of how the floor tiles were laid out, the three of us had been crouching with our backs to the passage the entire time. Only He Yu had been facing it, making him the only one who could see what was behind us. When he blurted that out, none of us could quite process what he meant for a moment.

I stood up with him and looked toward where his flashlight was pointing. It was the first bend in the passage. Because of the curve, we could only see less than ten meters ahead. The passage was empty; there was nothing there.

“What child?” I asked. “How could there be a child in a place like this? Are you trying to spook us at a time like this?”

He Yu clicked his tongue and gestured anxiously. “A kid really did just run past! A boy, maybe seven or eight years old. He ran right from that sacrificial pit we just came out of over to that side. I saw him clear as day! If I’m lying, I’m a dog!^[1]“

He spoke with such vivid detail that it actually sounded believable, and I started to feel uneasy. If a child had come out of the sacrificial pit we’d just exited, was it possible some local kid had accidentally fallen down during the earthquake? Maybe he’d seen the hole and followed us inside. If it really was a local kid, we couldn’t let him wander around in here. If he touched the wrong thing, it would be a disaster.

Thinking this, I grabbed my flashlight and hurried over to the bend in the passage to take a look. The area was brightly lit and the corridor was wide, with no hidden blind spots. I walked a full loop around the passage and came back, but I didn’t see any sign of the child He Yu claimed had run inside.

When I got back, I slapped the blood-stained tissue onto He Yu to vent my frustration. “I didn’t see a single ghost of a shadow! You’re definitely seeing things!”

Seeing that I had gone to check, He Yu was no longer as confident as before and seemed to genuinely doubt his own eyes. He rubbed them and prepared to be the first to climb into the hole.

Although wind was blowing out of the shaft, we didn’t know how long it was. We planned to crawl in slowly, head-first, keeping a distance of three meters between each person so we could look out for one another if something went wrong.

He Yu led the way, and after he had descended a few meters, Old Qian followed. Han Zhuo and I locked eyes. He was much more cowardly than I was; his face had already turned deathly pale when He Yu mentioned the child earlier. Still, he insisted on coming with us, and I couldn’t just leave him behind. After all, no matter how brightly lit the passage was, it was still a tomb—a place for the dead filled with a chilling Yin energy. If I let this kid Han bring up the rear, he might actually faint from terror.

I handed him the flashlight. “You go first. I’ll take the rear.”

Without hesitation, he took the flashlight, adjusted his posture, and started crawling down. I sat on the edge of the hole counting seconds, waiting until I reached fifty before following him down.

Bored out of my mind, I looked up at the ever-burning lamp^[2] directly above me. The flame flickered twice, yet I didn’t feel a hint of wind. Thinking my eyes were playing tricks on me, I blinked hard. Before I knew it, all the candle flames in the tomb passage began swaying as if in the wind, flickering dim and bright, but I still couldn’t feel a single draft. Sensing something was off, I grabbed my rifle. Just as I lowered my head to release the safety, every light in the passage blew out at once.

In an instant, everything went pitch-black. I tried to stand, but my body felt as if someone were forcibly pinning me down, and I couldn’t make a sound. A bone-deep chill spread across my shoulders, and sweat soaked my back in an instant. A second later, the extinguished lamps flared back to life one by one with a whoosh, except this time, every flame was a ghostly green.

Before I could figure out what was happening, someone shoved me hard from behind. Head-first, I tumbled into the hole along with my rifle. The shaft sloped so steeply that I couldn’t stop myself, slamming right into Han Zhuo while he was struggling to crawl ahead. Han Zhuo then crashed into Old Qian. The three of us slammed into one another in a chaotic mess, tumbling head over heels down the tunnel.

We splashed into the water one after another. Since I was stuck at the bottom of the pile when we fell, I sank the deepest, nearly reaching the pool’s floor. Water rushed into my throat before I quickly held my breath and kicked upward. Realizing my gun was missing, I stopped and opened my eyes underwater to search for it. The rifle was stuck upright in the fine sand on the pool floor not far away. I quickly swam over and pulled it out.

Looking closer, I realized the fine sand on the pool floor wasn’t real sand at all, but pulverized bone powder, though some of it hadn’t been completely crushed and remained in small chunks. Mixed into the bone dust was gold powder, along with gold and jade artifacts, golden wine vessels, and gold chariots and horses. There was no telling how many layers were buried under the bone dust. No wonder the entire pool floor glittered with gold.

Holding my gun, I swam up. Just as my head broke the surface, I saw He Yu preparing to leap off a bridge into the water. I quickly waved at him, and he slammed to a halt at the edge of the bridge before coming over to haul me out.

Coughing up water, I was pulled onto the bank by He Yu when a soaking-wet Han Zhuo stomped over to demand an explanation. “Gan Ji! Are you crazy? You’re the one who said we should crawl slowly, so what’s with you diving right into the hole? Now look at this, my clothes got completely torn up in that tunnel! Do you have any idea how much this outfit costs? Can you even afford to pay me back?”

He Yu shot him a sidelong glance. “We’re all proletarian workers here, so drop the bourgeois attitude. If you keep annoying me, I’ll leave you right here and you can swim back on your own. You hear me?”

Han Zhuo was deeply materialistic. It might have been because the brand-name jacket he wore, whose brand I couldn’t even name, was exceptionally expensive, giving him a lofty attitude around us. But now I had shredded his clothes, leaving him just like the rest of us. To put it nicely, we were four drowned rats; to put it bluntly, we were no different from beggars.

He kept nagging me for money, but He Yu and I completely ignored him as if he were a noisy parrot. I looked around the bridge we were on. It was a massive cavern with a hundred-meter-wide pool below, and the space both ahead and behind us was vast and empty.

Wiping blood from my forehead, I said to He Yu, “That kid you mentioned earlier… you might not have been seeing things after all.”

He Yu’s eyes lit up. “You saw him too?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t see him, but he set me up back up there. Quick, check my shoulders and see if there’s anything on them. It hurts like hell.”

He Yu immediately stepped behind me and lifted my shirt, clicking his tongue twice at what he saw. “Xiao Yao, did you get into a scrap with him up there? There are two black handprints on your shoulders, small ones. This ghost looks like he has some serious cultivation. You didn’t get a ghost resting on your shoulders^[3], did you?”

I turned my head to look at my shoulders. The two handprints were small, sitting right on top of both shoulders. No wonder I felt like I was carrying a mountain earlier and couldn’t budge. That thing must have taken advantage of me being alone to mess with me. Logically speaking, I was wearing the Blood Jade, so ordinary malevolent spirits shouldn’t be able to get near me. This was the first time I’d encountered a child ghost. People often say the smaller the ghost, the more vicious it is, so this one must have deep cultivation.

I was furious. It was bad enough being messed with by people, but now even a little ghost dared to play tricks on me. I pulled my clothes back on and spat on the ground. “Don’t let me catch him again.”

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