NR | Chapter 24

If He Yu hadn’t randomly drilled around and, by some twist of fate, ended up bumping into me, I might have been trapped to death in here for the rest of my life. In a place like this, a phone was never going to be reliable. No wonder He Yu had only brought a watch down with him. The watch’s timing function was extremely accurate, and it was waterproof and amazingly impact-resistant too.

The hands on the watch reminded me that I had been stuck in this cavity for a full three hours, and I hadn’t even realized it had been that long.

He Yu and I were both leaning against the stone wall at the cave mouth. He had dug bagged bread and crackers out of my pack and was wolfing them down. He looked like crawling through those tangled caves had burned through a huge amount of his strength.

After taking a sip of water and swallowing the crackers, He Yu asked, “What do we do now? Our situation’s pretty good, at least we somehow ran into each other. You’re smarter than me, got any ideas?”

Of course I had ideas, and plenty of them. Clearly, there were only three options right now. Either use the climbing axe to go back the way I’d fallen in, or crawl through the hole beneath the coffin and see whether there was another exit, or sit here and pray to heaven that Tian Yuqing would come find us.

I glanced at the climbing axe He Yu had tossed to the ground. The tip had been worn almost flat from use, so it was definitely impossible to climb back out with it. Silently, I folded one of the three fingers I had held up. Three options, and one had already been ruled out.

He Yu finished eating and brushed the crumbs off his hands. “You don’t need to think about whether Tian Yuqing’s going to come rescue us. That guy’s suspicious by nature. He doesn’t even know where the hell we’ve fallen to. Weighing the pros and cons, with his personality, he probably won’t risk coming down to help.”

I silently folded another finger back. With just a couple of sentences, He Yu had directly eliminated my two most stable ideas. Now there was only one left.

If there really was no other way out here, we could only crawl back through that hole under the coffin, follow the tunnel back, and see whether we could find that passage that might connect to the tomb chamber. I didn’t know where Lu Yao had ended up either. Going by He Yu’s tone, if he were in a place like this, he’d probably have even more ideas.

I just hoped he hadn’t been knocked unconscious. If he had fallen into the water like He Yu, then his situation was no better than ours.

I couldn’t accept it. I stood up with my flashlight and said, “Let’s look again. See if there’s any other exit.”

He Yu patted his butt, got up after me, and said, “Fine. Full and fed, time to get to work!”

My flashlight beam swept across the opposite rock wall. The wall in the distance was completely bare. As the beam moved inch by inch, I realized this cavity really should have been sealed off entirely. The pit floor beneath us was covered with white bones.

The platform we were on was far from those bones, probably more than a hundred meters away. On top of that, there was still the cave mouth behind us letting in air, so the smell on the platform wasn’t too unbearable yet. I adjusted the flashlight and dimmed the beam a little, then stood there thinking.

I thought of that strange bone. If all those sacrificial animals had been killed and thrown in here as burial offerings, then why was there still one bone left on the platform? Even if there had been one, it should have been a complete skeleton, not just a single bone.

“Whoa!” He Yu suddenly shouted, startling me so badly I nearly jumped out of my skin. In just this short time, he was practically giving me nerves.

Rolling my eyes, I strode over to him and shone my flashlight up and down his face. “Hey, hey, hey, can you stop scaring me like that? I already didn’t sleep, my nerves are on edge, and you yell like that, you scared the soul right out of me.”

He Yu grabbed my sleeve, his expression dazed. “Stop cursing first. Look up there, what is all that?”

At first I thought he was trying to scare me again, but this time he really did seem off. He wasn’t arguing with me at all, and instead kept staring up at something above the cavity. I followed his gaze, and when our two flashlight beams hit it, my whole body broke out in goosebumps in less than a second.

For a moment, I couldn’t even begin to describe the scene in front of me. Right above the cavity, layer upon layer of corpses hung upside down, from different years, swaying like sheets of thin paper in the wind, bumping against one another.

The sheer density of them nearly covered the entire ceiling of the burial pit. I roughly counted, and these bodies were stacked at least four or five layers deep. I was 185 centimeters tall, and some of the older corpses hung so low that they were only a finger’s width above my head.

“Holy shit, why are there so many, bro? You hadn’t looked up once this whole time?” He Yu was shocked too by the scale of the bodies.

I cursed, “I only found a flashlight less than half an hour ago. With no light at all, what the hell was I supposed to look at?”

Actually, I had felt something hanging overhead. At first, I had assumed, on my own, that it was some kind of funeral banner or something like that. My fear of the dark had kept me hunched over the whole time anyway. Good thing I hadn’t stood up straight. If I had, I probably would have ended up face-to-face with some hanging bro.

“Eh?” He Yu suddenly slapped me, and his flashlight beam moved to a certain spot. That was a corpse relatively close to us. “Did you see it, did you see it? That bro’s state looks a little too fresh.”

I narrowed my eyes and hurriedly moved my flashlight over too. The beam landed on a ghastly white face. The body was hanging upside down above the burial pit. I looked at its clothes and saw a LOGO printed on its chest. I’d seen it before. It seemed to be a Japanese brand.

There was a huge gash ripped open in the corpse’s stomach, and its intestines and organs had been pulled out. The dried blood on it probably wasn’t more than a month old. A corpse this fresh really sent a chill straight down my spine.

No matter how that person had gotten here, if he had met his end in this place, he definitely hadn’t ripped out his own intestines and hung himself up there. Something had to have caused the state he was in now.

I didn’t hesitate. I shifted the flashlight away and immediately shoved He Yu beside me. “Stop looking. This place isn’t safe. We need to get back into the hole you climbed through just now, fast.”

He Yu met my eyes, and sure enough, he had the same feeling I did. So without a word, we both shut up. One of us turned straight around and headed back, the other slowly backed away.

I ran ahead to the coffin and quickly lifted the coffin lid off the small coffin inside it. The moment I got close, I smelled a stench wafting out of the coffin. I immediately turned my face away to breathe fresh air, nearly gagging on the spot. I couldn’t imagine how He Yu had managed to stay inside for twenty minutes.

He Yu pushed me aside and, rolling up his sleeves, jumped straight into that small coffin. “You go keep an eye on that corpse. I’ll get the wet corpse out from inside. You’re not used to this smell, and if you go in later, you’ll puke the moment you see it.”

I had never been so sincerely grateful to him, so I let out a breath of relief and turned around to shine my flashlight on the hanging corpse. But after searching up and down for a long time, I couldn’t find it. I rubbed my eyes, took a few steps closer, and searched again, but still couldn’t find it.

“That’s not right?” I frowned, holding the light in one hand and reaching out with the other to tap the edge of the coffin. “Lao He, where exactly was that corpse? Tell me again. There are too many bodies here, I can’t seem to find it.”

He Yu’s voice was muffled. “Quit bothering me. Can’t you see I’m busy? You can’t even find one corpse, what exactly can you do?”

I turned back and saw him bent over in the coffin with his butt sticking up, a strip of my gauze tied around the back of his head to cover his nose and mouth. I slapped his ass without mercy. “Hurry up!”

“Ow, hey! What are you doing? Are you a pervert?” He Yu laughed as he rubbed his butt. With one hand on the coffin edge, he flipped himself out, moving agilely around the coffin with his flashlight. “You can’t even find such a big corpse? I’m really服了 you, isn’t it right here?”

His voice cut off abruptly. I walked over to his side and saw him staring blankly in one direction, so I asked, “What’s wrong?”

He clutched my hand tightly, and his entire face went white.

“The corpse is gone.”

He shone his flashlight in one direction. The bodies were packed extremely densely together, and I could clearly see that the spot He Yu was lighting had a noticeable gap in it.

I swallowed hard, my chest tightening. “Did you remember the wrong place?”

He Yu spoke very quickly, his gaze sweeping over every corner of the cavity. “No way. I can recite a ten-thousand-character paper in ten minutes without missing a single word.”

I said, “We can’t stay here long. Forget the wet corpse. We need to crawl into the hole right now.”