Chapter 63: Is He Inviting Us?
Fatty considered himself someone who had been down countless times and was good at accepting all kinds of strange things, but this didn’t include “his terrifying companion whom he thought was human turning out to be a vampire.” So when he saw Zhang Qiling sucking Lin Yan’s blood, while Wu Xie had a completely nonchalant expression on the side, he couldn’t quite accept it.
“Holy shit, he he he… isn’t human?” Fatty jumped to his feet in shock, his hand pointing at Zhang Qiling trembling. Suddenly, he realized something, quickly used his left hand to pull down his right hand that was pointing at him, forced a smile, and said to Zhang Qiling: “Vampire Xiaoge, I’ve been neglectful along the way, I didn’t mean to offend, if there’s anything I’ve done wrong, please be magnanimous and don’t hold it against me, for the sake of our harmonious time together on the road, just don’t kill me!”
Looking at Fatty’s face that looked uglier smiling than crying, plus Fatty’s rapid-fire speech without a single punctuation mark, Lin Yan unceremoniously burst into laughter: “Hahahahaha! He, he says you’re a vampire! Hahahahahahahahaha why is this so funny!”
Wu Xie almost couldn’t hold back his laughter either, but he felt Fatty was already pitiful enough and it was best not to stimulate him, so he forcibly held it back, nearly suffocating himself! As a result, his face flushed red from holding it in, making his facial expression look quite ferocious instead.
Zhang Qiling glanced at him with slight disdain, then shifted his attention back to the black mark on his own wrist, using his actions to show that this “vampire” had no interest in Fatty, this ordinary person.
“Cough, cough.” Unable to stand Fatty’s pitiful, helpless, and confused look, Wu Xie secretly adjusted his breathing and explained to him: “It’s like this, Mute Bottle…” He sneaked a peek at Zhang Qiling’s expression, which didn’t seem to mind the nickname, but he still changed it from the bottom of his heart, “Ah, I mean Xiaoge Zhang Qiling, his blood is different from ordinary people’s, it has a restraining effect on those strange things in the tomb. Lin Yan’s blood is also different from ordinary people’s, his blood can speed up Xiaoge’s recovery—”
He pointed at the mark on Zhang Qiling’s wrist that had faded to almost invisible: “See, it’s already better, right?”
Fatty had a dazed, sleepwalking expression: “This, this is already better?”
He pinched himself, feeling a bit of pain: “This, this is actually real? There’s such a thing?!”
He suddenly lunged over, suppressing his excitement as he asked: “Then if we give this young comrade some blood-replenishing medicine—” He pointed at Lin Yan, “and pair him with this Xiaoge, couldn’t we strut right through when we go down?” As he spoke, Fatty’s eyes began to wander, and the smile blooming on his big face suggested he was definitely imagining his beautiful dream of hauling treasures out of the tomb box by box.
Wu Xie hesitated for a moment, but still decided to shatter his beautiful dream: “But look at us now, is this strutting through?”
“Uh…” Fatty was momentarily speechless.
Soon, he cast aside this unrealistic idea and turned to concern himself with their current situation.
“You guys arrived before us, do you know where this place is? Is it the main tomb chamber? It’s a bit shabby.”
While bandaging Lin Yan, Wu Xie shook his head: “We only arrived a few minutes before you, we haven’t had much chance to observe before you came up. But from my guess, this might just be a side chamber, the real main tomb chamber is somewhere else. But this coffin is interesting, it’s clearly one that should be in the main tomb chamber, yet it’s placed here. What about you? What exactly is that thing that forced you into such a sorry state, escaping without even taking your clothes or equipment?”
Fatty waved his hand and found a place to sit down; he now felt that his legs were a bit weak from all the shocks they’d caused him earlier.
“Sigh, wasn’t it that female corpse? After we scooped out all the corpse water, we discovered the body was severely waxy, softening almost at a touch. So we came up with a way: take off our clothes, one wraps the head, one wraps the feet, then use a gun to pick it up—that’s how we got it out. After we got it out, we didn’t look closely; who would’ve thought there’d be something inside a pile of rotten meat? So we all went to study that stone tablet instead.”
“So did you figure anything out?” Lin Yan eagerly interjected; he thought Wu Xie was the only one in the team who studied ancient script—last time in Lu King’s Palace, didn’t they still need Wu Xie to translate? They could translate it themselves now? So impressive?
But as soon as he heard Fatty’s answer, he knew it was nothing like that.
Hearing him ask that, Fatty slapped his thigh: “Alas, exactly! The two of us were looking at that coffin-weighting stone—” He pointed at Zhang Qiling: “This young comrade said it was to prevent the coffin from floating up after the underwater tomb’s air-sealing system was damaged. There were only some large characters on it. But damn it, neither of us could read a single one, so we thought of you!”
He looked at Wu Xie: “Too bad you didn’t agree when we called you earlier; otherwise, those characters should have been deciphered by now.” He smacked his lips, looking regretful, and swallowed back the second half: “maybe it even said where the exit and treasures are.”
“So how did you get here? You actually came through the water route! I checked that tomb chamber before; there shouldn’t be any secret doors, right?” Wu Xie couldn’t hold back anymore; seeing him not getting to the point, he was getting a bit anxious.
Fatty grinned at him: “Young comrade, you’re wrong about that—there really is a secret door in there! We wanted to remove that stone and found it was firmly stuck to the coffin bottom with pine resin! After melting the pine resin with a fire starter, there was actually a big hole under that stone slab!”
At this point, he got excited: “Guess what? This hole wasn’t originally there; it was a tomb-robbing hole! In other words, this pit has already been robbed, but for some reason, nothing was taken!” A hesitant look appeared on his face: “Can’t say they did nothing though; this tomb-robbing hole did break the corpse-nurturing setup, so no matter how waxy the corpse got, it couldn’t undergo corpse transformation anymore. And then…”
He glanced at Zhang Qiling: “This Xiaoge reminded me something was off. I looked, and somehow a white-furred little hand had stretched out from the female corpse’s stomach, grabbing Xiaoge’s hand! I wanted to gun it down, but Xiaoge said that thing can’t be shot dead. After breaking free, it dragged me into the tomb-robbing hole. And guess what, under that tomb-robbing hole was a world of its own—the hole was dug well, the top wouldn’t collapse, and the bottom was fairly spacious. After crawling a few steps, it went into the water; there was a hazy light in the water, so I figured it was either you two or a new tomb chamber—better run first anyway. And here we are, we actually found you!”
As Fatty spoke, he stood up, drew his dagger, and said: “But it’s not like we got nothing; I don’t recognize those characters, but they looked important, so I memorized them.”
As he spoke, he used the dagger to replicate them on the ground. Before he could draw two strokes, Lin Yan heard movement from the pool behind him and quickly stopped Fatty: “Fatty, stop gesturing first, there’s movement in the pool!”
Zhang Qiling heard it too, and seeing Lin Yan say it first, he looked at him in surprise, then focused intently, on guard against the thing in the pool.
Fatty quietly asked Zhang Qiling, or maybe talking to himself: “When we escaped earlier, we saw a hand; not sure what it is.”
Zhang Qiling calmly said: “It’s a white-haired zombie; you can kill it by decapitating, but it releases a lot of corpse poison. Air isn’t sufficient now; can’t kill it.”
As soon as he said it, everyone understood: turns out when that thing comes out, they could only drive it away, not kill it, or they might die from corpse poison before suffocating.
Time passed in their full alert state; the pool gradually bubbled up massively, like some huge thing was about to emerge. But when the bubbling peaked, the water level in the pool rapidly dropped, revealing a spiral stone staircase leading to the pool bottom underneath.
Lin Yan suddenly thought of Wu Xie’s physique that always destroyed everything from tomb entrance to exit, including the tomb owner, and had an idea: “Wu Xie, do you think this is the tomb owner inviting us in?”
“What???”
