Chapter 99: Meeting The Ship Captain Again
This statue was just a little over one person’s height, and one or two minutes was enough to feel it all over. Zhang Qiling was still using his two magical Fa Qiu Fingers to inch by inch explore it, but Wu Xie and Fatty had already polished the statue to a patina.
Wu Xie had been observing the statue’s left hand, always feeling like there was something inside, but when he tried, with his strength without smashing the statue, he really couldn’t get it out. Zhang Qiling saw him keep looking at the statue’s left hand, leaned over to look: “This is a key.”
He studied it up and down, did something with his hand on the side, and that thing suddenly dropped out—it was actually a bronze key.
That key also looked like an antique, with repeated patterns carved on it. Seeing this pattern, Lin Yan ran back to the equipment, took out the bronze bell: “Look, doesn’t the pattern match the one on it?”
The three of them leaned in to look, and sure enough it did. It wasn’t obvious when taken alone, but comparing the bell and the key together, the decorations on them were from the same source. But after Wu Xie touched them, his expression was a bit strange: “These two things are from different eras. This bell seems like it’s from one or two thousand years ago, but this key looks like it’s from the Ming Dynasty.”
This meant that the person who made this place got that complete set of bronze bells from somewhere unknown, then forged this key based on the pattern on it? If this key was used to open a secret room within this secret room, doesn’t that mean this set of bronze bells was very important to the tomb owner? In other words, finding the origin of the bronze bell would be equivalent to finding the tomb owner of the underwater tomb?
But these could be considered later; what was important now was to first find this secret room.
When he saw this key, Zhang Qiling clearly seemed to remember something, held the key and retreated a few steps, said to them still standing in front of the statue: “Step back.”
Step back? Step back to where? It looked like Zhang Qiling was about to activate a mechanism, but Wu Xie remembered he had knocked over the entire floor before—where did this mechanism come from? The three exchanged glances, not knowing where to retreat to, so they could only retreat behind the statue first.
Zhang Qiling didn’t make them retreat further, probably thinking the distance was enough.
They watched Zhang Qiling occasionally glance at the statue in place to adjust his position, as if calculating some data. In less than half a minute, he found the position, squatted down, and carefully pried up a stone from the ground. Wu Xie’s eyes widened— no wonder he couldn’t find it before! Facing such a concealed mechanism, his half-baked skills were completely useless!
Zhang Qiling carefully placed that stone block aside, revealing a small hole underneath, and the key in his hand fit perfectly into it.
He gently turned the key, and with the sound of the mechanism operating, starting from where Zhang Qiling stood, a whole section of the floor slowly rose, bringing the statue with it. Now they understood how this statue had reached the top of the stone wall.
As soon as this passage was revealed, a blood stench dozens of times more concentrated surged into their noses. Fatty and Zhang Qiling were fine—Zhang Qiling had no reaction, Fatty showed disgust but didn’t say anything— but Wu Xie and Lin Yan were more miserable. They hadn’t seen much blood to begin with; Wu Xie rushed to the side and started vomiting, nearly throwing up bile. Lin Yan’s face didn’t look good either, but it was much better than Wu Xie’s.
Fatty curiously asked him: “Aren’t you two both rookies? How come his reaction is so big?” Lin Yan tried hard to hold his breath and breathe in small mouthfuls, trying to block out the blood stench this way: “That’s not okay, I just ate.”
This… Fatty was unusually speechless. It seemed his title of Fat Prince in the tomb raiding world might change hands— with Lin Yan eating like this without digesting, who knows, in a few years his weight might catch up to Fatty’s!
Zhang Qiling didn’t wait for them and went down with a flashlight on his own. Fatty originally wanted to follow, but seeing Wu Xie’s still bad complexion, nearly vomiting himself to exhaustion, he decided to wait for him to go together, in case something happened there’d be someone to look after each other. Hm? Why not look after Xiaoge? What a joke, with Zhang Qiling’s skill, not dragging him down would be good enough!
By the time Wu Xie barely stopped and adapted to this smell, it was almost ten minutes later. Even so, his stomach was still churning; the reason he stopped wasn’t because the smell no longer affected him, but because he really had nothing left to vomit.
This intense blood stench gave Wu Xie an ominous premonition. He felt that the source of this blood smell might be the corpses of the crew members and expedition team members. Although he really didn’t want to go down, he had to see with his own eyes; after all, they had spent so much time together on the ship… If conditions allowed, he wanted to cremate them right here, so at least their remains could be brought back to rest in their homeland.
Thinking of the ship captain whom they had saved from the sea monkey before, Wu Xie’s eyes couldn’t help but redden.
There was a world of its own below the passage; traces of torch burning remained on the stone walls on both sides, just like the corridors in the underwater tomb before, with one-meter intervals between lamps. Fatty and Lin Yan packed up the equipment, one on each side supporting Wu Xie as they headed into that dark tunnel.
“Where the hell is this? Why do I feel now that this isn’t a replica of the underwater tomb, but that this is the real underwater tomb?
“What do you mean the real underwater tomb?” Lin Yan listened to Wu Xie’s analysis beside him, a bunch of black lines on his head: “Did we enter a fake tomb or something?”
Wu Xie shook his head: “That’s not what I mean. I mean, this might be the prototype of the underwater tomb! I just checked— not sure if you noticed— the place where the key was, if it were a real tomb chamber, would be the distance from the altar to the main coffin! In other words, where we’re going now might be a sacrificial pit!”
This passage was wide enough for the three of them to walk side by side; after passing the statue’s position, the passage suddenly turned sharply to the left. After the turn, less than ten steps later, another left turn; Wu Xie silently noted the position, estimating that when they reached the dry corpse stone carving in the previous stone chamber, the passage finally came to an end.
Wu Xie explained as he walked; just as he finished speaking, flashlight light appeared ahead. Seeing Zhang Qiling’s back, without time to think about what Wu Xie meant, the group had already arrived where Zhang Qiling was.
As Wu Xie expected, this was indeed a sacrificial pit! Perhaps because it was relatively dry under the stone chamber, the corpses hadn’t decayed much, presenting to Lin Yan and the others a large pit filled more than halfway with corpses!
This pit, about ten meters deep, was roughly square-shaped, but strangely, if observed carefully, the corpse bones inside were piled into a standard circle— excluding those at the very bottom that had fallen scattered on the ground. But they had no mood to think about this for now, because atop this pile of corpses… were the ship captain’s wide-open eyes staring blankly at them.
