NR | Chapter 23

He Yu is in the coffin!

The moment that thought flashed through my mind, I hurried up and used the shovel blade to pry at the lid. Ancient coffins and coffins with outer casings were usually sealed extremely well for preservation, and even a living person could suffocate to death if trapped inside for too long.

The more I thought about it, the more frantic I became. I found a spot and shoved upward with all the strength I had, and the outer coffin lid that two or three people together couldn’t lift was forced out by more than half a section. The impact jolted my hands so hard they went numb and ached.

I threw down the shovel, flipped the topmost lid onto the ground, and kicked up a cloud of dust. The outer coffin casing was huge, and every recess was soaked through with coffin fluid, with broken burial objects floating in it. The inner little coffin sat in the center.

He Yu was using something to push the lid upward from inside. I couldn’t care less whether the coffin fluid was dirty or not. I picked up the shovel and tossed it out. The shovel blade hooked over the coffin rim, and I pulled myself onto the coffin. Then I pulled the blade free and jammed it into the crack in the lid. I leaned back, using my own weight and brute force from my arms to pry backward. In an instant, the lid was flipped open with a loud bang.

I crashed hard onto the ground, slamming my back painfully. I didn’t even have time to rub it before I sprang up and climbed onto the coffin casing again, using the shovel in my hands.

“You brat! You think I’m a corpse or something, huh?” He Yu was soaked head to toe in coffin fluid, stinking to high heaven. “Hurry up and pull me up. It’s too slippery, I can’t get out.”

I reached out to grab him, and it took me a ton of effort before I finally hauled him out of the coffin. Only after he was completely out did I realize that he had already used the climbing pick he carried with him to punch a huge hole in the bottom of the coffin. No one knew where the hole led.

He Yu patted me. “Don’t just stare. The corpse is in the hole. It’s still a wet corpse, too. I was squeezed in there with it for at least twenty minutes! Do you know how much damage that did to my young and tender soul?”

The moment he said that, the nerves I’d had locked tight for so long finally loosened a little. I took out a whole bottle of water from my bag and used it to wipe He Yu down.

He took it, but only wiped his face, neck, and arms before shoving the water back at me. “Water is a scarce resource here. Save as much as you can. I do not want to end up at the point where the only thing I can drink is piss. Huh? Since we all fell down here together, why is your side so safe?”

I asked, “How did you crawl out of the coffin? Did you run into Lu Ayao?”

He Yu shoved me while cursing, “You little punk, I’m this miserable and you’re not even worried about me, but you’re asking about that guy with the surname Lu? This place might as well be his hometown. Could he be worse off than I am?”

I laughed. “Quit joking around. Hurry up and say it, what exactly did you run into?”

What He Yu said was brief, but he remembered every important detail clearly.

His reflexes were obviously much faster than mine. The moment the sand layer collapsed, he grabbed the leg of the mud figurine nearest him, and clung to it like a gecko.

But these mud figurines were far too old to withstand his heavyweight tugging, so after holding out for ten minutes, He Yu successfully ended up hugging a broken leg as he fell into one of the pits.

According to him, he never ran into Lu Ayao. The hole he fell into was full of standing water, and there were a lot of bloodsucking worms in it, leech-like creatures. The moment he fell in, they bit him half to death. He only managed to climb up the rock wall with sheer willpower and his climbing pick, and once on the wall he found several more holes just like it.

Without thinking twice, he picked a random hole and crawled into it. He thought it was an escape route left behind by ancient craftsmen, and the only thing he wanted at the time was to get to a relatively dry place without leeches. He never expected that the hole would actually connect to the coffin casing on my side.

I used my flashlight to shine down beneath the platform. The bottom was covered with shattered white bones. I could make out ox bones, sheep bones, and probably the bones of other livestock too. Above that were the mud figurines. We must have accidentally fallen into a small burial pit beneath them. If it hadn’t been for these holes, this place should have been completely sealed shut from the start.

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

He Yu thought about it, then said, “Now that you mention it, yeah, there was something. But I don’t know if it counts as the kind of unusual you mean. When I was about halfway up, I found another passage cutting across the cave. It was also narrow, but it was a little different from the one I was climbing.”

I asked, “How was it different?”

He said, “It had a curved, domed roof. It felt a lot better to the touch than this hole. But I didn’t dare probe that way at the time, because the direction wasn’t quite right. That one was obviously sloping downward, while the hole I was climbing was trending upward.”

Hearing that, I immediately got a rough idea. Anyone who has seen enough construction diagrams knows that many ancient tombs had tomb passages built into them. But the one He Yu ran into probably wasn’t the tomb road used to transport carts and stone materials. More likely, it was just a corridor connecting the burial chambers, something optional in the tomb layout.

From He Yu’s description, there wasn’t just one hole here. They were all man-made tunnels, and they almost pierced through the burial pit, the bottom of the mud figurine sand layer, and even crossed the corridor. The amount of work involved was way too much. It couldn’t seriously be groundhogs, could it?