NR | Chapter 19

Lu Ayao came back over to my side and handed me a bottle of water. He told me that just now, halfway through lowering the rope, the pulley had jammed. A few people had loosened their grip and were getting ready to fix it, but then the pulley suddenly started turning again. Several people above had tripped over themselves and fallen flat on their faces, the rope slipped from their hands, and I just kept falling all the way down.

It was lucky the rope connected to the buckle on my back was long enough. When I’d fallen about halfway, the buckle had caught in a crack between the rocks. Otherwise, I really would have been smashed into a cripple.

I sat where I was and used my flashlight to shine on the blue flagstones beneath me. A light flick of my finger was enough to make out the carved patterns on them. Using this many stone slabs was really a luxury. The patterns seemed like they could form a rather large image, but many of the slabs had been completely shattered, so there was really no way to tell.

“Fuck your mother! What the hell were you all doing just standing there?! You could see he was about to fall, why didn’t you catch him with something?” He Yu stormed over and saw the archaeological team members. Rage shot through him. He raised his climbing pick and went up like he was about to beat someone. My legs were still too weak to stand, so I hurriedly shoved Lu Ayao to stop him.

The one called Xiao Xu on their team apologized, then said, “We’ve never run into this kind of situation before. Besides, if someone falls from that high and gets hit, they could be seriously hurt. You can’t force us to save people for something like this, can you?”

“Come here, say that again if you’ve got the guts,” He Yu snapped. He was completely straightforward, and he didn’t accept Xiao Xu’s explanation at all. He immediately pointed the climbing pick at him and kept cursing as he stepped closer, his whole face flushed red with anger.

Before he’d finished swearing, I heard the sound of someone else sliding down the rope behind us. Lu Ayao reacted fast. He got up, grabbed He Yu, and yanked him back several steps.

He Yu still swore out loud, climbing pick raised. “No, look at them! It’s only been a few minutes since they came down, and the second they get in, they start running out. If they don’t help each other, how is anything supposed to work? They really don’t know the rules, do they?”

My legs finally stopped trembling. I got up somewhat awkwardly from the ground. Tian Yuqing deftly unfastened the buckle on his body and walked over to support me. He looked me over carefully from head to toe, as if checking my condition, then asked, “How is it? Are you okay?”

I was just about to wave him off, but before I could even lift my hand, blood had already soaked one sleeve, and some of it had stained Tian Yuqing’s hand too. He didn’t seem bothered by me at all. Instead, he held my elbow and turned my arm a few angles, asking whether it hurt. I didn’t really feel anything, so I shook my head.

Then I watched him crouch down and check my knees and legs. Overall, my upper body had more scrapes and bruises. My lower body, because it had been dangling out there the whole time and I had knee pads on, basically had no wounds at all.

Tian Yuqing took the gauze from the assistant and reminded me, “Watch closely. Once you learn it, you’ll have to wrap it yourself.”

I forced down the urge to roll my eyes and thought to myself, I swear this has to be the last time. I’m never using this skill again in my entire life.

Tian Yuqing’s bandaging technique was practiced. I guessed he must have received formal training in this area. Thinking about it, that made sense too. Someone like him would often work on projects jointly with archaeological experts, and in some hard-to-enter tombs, bumps and scrapes were inevitable.

After Tian Yuqing finished bandaging me, he turned back around. He swept his flashlight around the area, then said to Wu Yili, who had just landed, “Professor Wu, this is a burial pit. I suggest you remind your team members to watch what they say and do. If there’s anything, they should try to help. After all, no one knows who the next person to run into trouble will be.”

That sounded extremely inauspicious. Tian Yuqing’s tone wasn’t good, and I could tell he was defending me. In fact, in the early days, the rules of the external martial circles[[1]] were very complicated, and the Five Branches dealt with the Tomb Robbers’ Sect[[2]] most often, so naturally they followed a lot of the old rules as well.

Among them was a strange rule: no infighting until gold and silver had been seen. In other words, after entering a tomb, before any gold, silver, bronze, or iron artifacts had appeared, no quarrels were allowed. Everyone had to help each other. Even if a fight broke out over unevenly split spoils, they still had to wait until after seeing the funerary goods before taking it outside.

Of course, accidental deaths didn’t count, so murders inside tombs were by no means rare. But for people like the Five Branches, who played the role of strategists and planners, the death rate was the lowest.

He Yu had been completely pinned down by Lu Ayao. Once he’d calmed down, he shoved Lu Ayao away and came over to my side with the climbing pick in hand. “A bunch of bastards who just stand by and do nothing. Enough already.”

I patted his shoulder and took a few steps alone into the darkness. Lu Ayao immediately reached out and grabbed me from the side. He snapped off a few glow sticks and threw them out. Their luminous arcs cut through the pitch-black space and struck the uneven stone. It took them two or three minutes before they finally stopped and fell to the ground.

The glow sticks couldn’t light much distance. I squinted and tried to help with the flashlight, but everything in front of me was still blurry. Then, I don’t know who in the group fired a flare into the air, and in an instant, the entire area before my eyes lit up.

Even more than ten years later, that scene is still burned into my memory. No adventure novel could ever describe the spectacle before me.

At my feet was a huge pit. By eye, it was at least a hundred meters long and dozens of meters deep. The walls had all been cut by human hands, and inside stood clay figurines of all shapes and sizes. Under the flare’s light, these deep pits, large and small, were densely packed everywhere, stretching out with no end in sight. I made a rough estimate. There had to be hundreds of them.

I took a sip of water to calm myself, thinking that with a burial pit of this scale, the tomb’s owner in life must have been someone comparable to Qin Shihuang. That really was eye-opening.

Wu Yili, however, let out a cold laugh. He said, “I don’t see you people being all that capable either. Didn’t you say you’d take us straight into the tomb chamber? How did you end up digging into a burial pit like this after all that time?”

Lu Ayao turned to look at him. “If we don’t destroy the tomb structure and go by our current abilities, reaching this platform is the safest choice. The tomb chamber is buried very deep. We need to find the entrance before we can go in. Unless you allow us to use explosives, we can blast our way all the way down too.”

Xiao Xu shook his head furiously. “No, of course not. Let’s just keep looking slowly. Our supplies are absolutely sufficient. We can last a week with no problem.”

Then I saw Tian Yuqing make a gesture to Tian Tinghan. Lao Gen immediately took out bundle after bundle of ropes as thick as a thumb from his backpack. At the top of each rope was an iron claw that could open and close freely. Tian Tinghan moved extremely fast. He first tested the soil at the edge of the pit, then secured the iron claw in a special way.

Tian Tinghan wound the rope twice around his arm, then grabbed it and swung himself down. Right after that, Lao Gen fired another flare into the air, and Tian Tinghan immediately dropped at speed.

“Follow his example and all go down. Hurry up.” Tian Yuqing quickly handed out the ropes in his hands.

I considered myself pretty quick to learn. From elementary school all the way through university, my grades had always been above average. I copied Tian Tinghan’s method and secured the iron claw, then wrapped the rope around my arm a few more times. Full of confidence, I prepared to make a cool descent.

In the end, before my foot even left the ground, another hand yanked me back. I stumbled onto the floor and looked blankly at Lu Ayao. I didn’t know if it was just my imagination, but I could see deep helplessness and impatience on his face.

What? Was he looking down on me? I didn’t move. I just stared back at him in silence, using my eyes to tell him that I was extremely not to be messed with.

When He Yu saw the two of us locking eyes here, he burst out laughing. “Gan Ji, you don’t have Tian Ershao’s core strength. Don’t force it. For safety’s sake, just tie your buckle to the rope. Otherwise, later on, the two of us will still have to free up a hand to fish you out.”

I immediately lowered my head and looked at the lonely buckle hanging around my waist. I instantly felt awkward. Damn it, so after all that, this thing also has to be tied on, huh?

Lu Ayao walked away from my side. I didn’t have time to feel embarrassed, so I hurriedly tied the buckle on my waist to the rope, then awkwardly climbed to the edge of the pit and swung myself down, bracing my feet against the wall and inching down toward the bottom like a turtle.

As I neared the bottom, by the flare’s light, I vaguely saw a pitch-black hole appear on the pit wall. When I finally made it to the bottom, the first thing I did was shine my flashlight into the strangely appearing opening.

That look was enough to scare the hell out of me. I took several steps back at once. I could clearly see a desiccated corpse inside the hole, only an arm’s length away from me. Some centipede-like creature had crawled out of his eye socket from somewhere, and he was half-opening his mouth, leaning against the wall and staring at me.

He Yu noticed how stiff I was. He came up behind me and also used his flashlight to examine the body. After staring at it with folded arms for a full minute, he said, “The tunnel was dug pretty neatly. This was a grave robber.”

Wu Yili and Tian Yuqing crossed over one after the other to examine the corpse. There were very few clues on the dried body. Judging from how mummified it was, it had probably come in during the Republican era. The only things that suggested he might have been a grave robber were the rusty sapper shovel lying beside him and this extremely regular grave tunnel.

Wu Yili laughed. “This just tells us that people shouldn’t do guilty things like this. Otherwise, they end up like him, dying here with no name and no family, no one even collecting the body for all these years, keeping the clay figurines behind him company.”

Tian Yuqing crouched beside the desiccated corpse, thinking about something. His expression was somewhat grave. He never said a word, which only made me more puzzled, so I forced myself to overcome my natural fear of corpses and slowly crouched down beside him. “What’s wrong? Is there a problem?”

Tian Yuqing didn’t answer. He shifted slightly to make room for me to look with the flashlight myself, then asked me, “Take a careful look. What’s wrong with it?”

I didn’t know what practical meaning there was in making me do this extra step, but I still leaned over and carefully examined the corpse. The body had completely dried and rotted. The skin was brittle like a sheet of paper. It leaned against the wall, its head slightly raised, mouth wide open.

That posture felt strange to me. I leaned in a little farther and discovered that on the right side of the corpse there was a cloth bag. I reached out, took it into my hands, and shook it. The bag was clean and empty, except for a water flask that was already empty.

That was even stranger.

A grave robber couldn’t have entered a tomb empty-handed, and in front of us was such a massive mausoleum. Not to mention ropes and other gear, at the very least food had to be brought. A person without food or water could survive only three to seven days at most. Going in without supplies, I could only understand as either pure stupidity or a death wish.

So the only explanation for this empty bag now was that the food had been completely exhausted. I looked around. The silence all around was terrifying. Holding that utterly empty cloth bag, I started to feel my skin crawl.

A grave robber with plenty of experience from the Republican era dug into the tomb, then somehow remained by his own tunnel opening for several months. He ate every bit of food he had carried with him, drank all the water in his flask, and then starved to death inside the tunnel he had dug himself.

Why did he die here? What kind of thing forced him into a dead end, leaving him with nowhere to go, until he finally starved to death here?

As soon as I thought of that, I felt cold all over.

“The problem I can think of, you should be able to figure out too.” Tian Yuqing stood up and patted my shoulder.

He pulled a cold steel knife from the leather pouch at his waist, turned around, and looked at the rows and rows of smiling clay figurines in the darkness not far away. “Something’s wrong here. Everyone, stay alert!”