Chapter 114: One Sword Opens Heavenly Gate, Three Lives Bridge
In the blink of an eye, the sky had already turned as black as the bottom of a pot, and the view from the plank road was completely obscured.
Seeing this, Su Mo simply had Hu Ba Yi and the others put on diving suits and oxygen masks, then jump into the pool together with him.
At this moment, corpse qi surged up from below, impacting the whirlpool in the water and churning the currents into extreme chaos, but it also offset part of the whirlpool’s suction, making it the perfect time to dive into the water.
The group immediately dove into the water, following the opening in the pool bottom smashed by the crashed airplane, and entered a tomb passage.
After swimming forward along the tomb passage for a distance, a staircase appeared under their feet, and they gradually stood on the water surface by stepping on the steps.
They saw that above the tomb passage was a gentle upward-sloping stone steps ramp, with many bronze men and horse-drawn carriages soaked on both sides.
Behind the bronze men and horse-drawn carriages was a huge sacrificial burial pit filled with many mummified corpses in horrific death poses, many of which still bore wounds from before death, clearly killed alive right here.
After looking around, Xue Li Yang said with a grim expression:
“Judging by these people’s clothing, they seem to be the craftsmen who built the tomb for Xian Wang. After the tomb was completed, they were killed here as sacrifices to prevent the tomb’s secrets from leaking out!”
Wang Pang Zi gritted his teeth and sneered:
“Good grief, that old bastard’s sins just piled up another one. When we find his corpse, Fat Master here will whip him a hundred extra times!”
Hu Ba Yi carefully examined the sacrificial burial pit and bronze men and horse-drawn carriages, then frowned and said:
“It looks like this isn’t the main burial chamber of Xian Wang’s tomb, and there’s no entrance either!”
Wang Pang Zi said:
“Don’t you know the Sixteen-Character Yin Yang Feng Shui Secret Technique? Just calculate it and find out!”
Hu Ba Yi smiled bitterly and shook his head:
“Down here, there’s no mountain shape or earth vein to observe, nor sun, moon, or stars to reference. I can’t find it!”
Everyone looked toward Su Mo.
Su Mo, however, was focusing intently on the water beside the tomb passage.
Through the Great Yin Meditation Technique, he had already seen that the corpse qi was leaking out from a water eye below, but now the corpse qi had gradually dissipated, and the water eye in the water had regained its extreme suction.
This water eye led straight to the underground river, sucking in all the water flowing down from the many waterfalls above into the underground river. If a person went down the water eye, they would likely be directly sucked in and eventually fall into the pitch-black underground river that led who-knows-where.
After thinking for a moment, he suddenly had an idea. He then had Hu Ba Yi and the others use three ropes to secure the airplane crashed in the pool, then tie the other end to a bronze horse.
Then, he lifted a bronze horse weighing over a thousand pounds from the side of the ramp and directly tossed it into the water eye.
The bronze horse’s own weight, combined with the water eye’s suction, quickly sank into the water eye, dragging the crashed airplane toward it, and soon the fuselage blocked most of the water flow.
The suction from the whirlpool in the pool immediately weakened a lot.
“We can go in now!”
Seeing that the water flow’s suction had been offset, Su Mo quickly said.
The group immediately swam over along the pool bottom, and sure enough, they saw another tomb passage at the pool bottom. It was extremely dark there, and with the water eye whirlpool nearby, ordinary people could never enter.
Soon, they swam deep into the tomb passage. After swimming forward dozens of meters, a stone ramp appeared ahead. Climbing up the stone ramp quickly took them above the water surface into a gentle upward-sloping ramp.
At the end of the stone ramp was a bluish-gray stone door, with a bronze door tower above it carved with clouds and mist swirling around various mythical beasts, and two large seal script characters engraved on it:
Heavenly Gate!
Wang Pang Zi couldn’t help cursing:
“That old bastard Xian Wang set up an entrance in this pitch-black place under the pool, and had the nerve to call it Heavenly Gate. I’d say just call it asshole instead!”
Hu Ba Yi couldn’t help slapping him:
“Don’t talk nonsense. We still have to go in through here!”
Hearing this, Wang Pang Zi finally shut his mouth, though he still couldn’t help cursing inwardly.
Zhang Qiling pushed the stone door with his hand, but it didn’t budge an inch. Clearly, it was locked from the inside and couldn’t be opened from outside.
He then said:
“Master, how about I go in through the Heavenly Gate and open it from inside?”
The Heavenly Gate he referred to was a narrow door opening less than two feet wide on the door tower, a small door preserved in Xian Wang’s tomb for his use when ascending to immortality.
Su Mo glanced at the Heavenly Gate and said:
“Forget it. This Heavenly Gate is as small as a dog hole. Even if we can squeeze through, Fatty probably couldn’t. That guy Xian Wang stirred up heaven’s wrath and humanity’s resentment. Toppling his lair is doing justice for heaven, so let’s just swagger right in!”
“You all step back. Watch me open the Heavenly Gate with one sword!”
With that, he drew the Frost Moon Sword from behind his back, focused his energy, and slashed fiercely at the lock position below the Heavenly Gate.
Clang!
With a sharp explosive sound, the Frost Moon Sword directly cleaved an opening in the Heavenly Gate. The sword edge sliced into the stone door, severing the door bolt behind it in one stroke.
With the door bolt severed, only the stone lock barring the door remained.
Though the stone lock weighed several thousand pounds, Su Mo didn’t want to crawl through that narrow door opening, so he pushed with all his might on the stone door with both hands, managing to force open a gap wide enough for a person to sidle through.
The group then entered through the gap, seeing a wide corridor behind the door spacious enough for carriages and horses. Bronze men and horses stood on both sides of the corridor, all dressed as warriors holding weapons of Dian Kingdom warriors—a group of tomb-guarding warrior bronze statues.
Passing through the array of bronze warrior statues, there was a flat tomb passage ahead, with several stone caves on both sides filled with gold and silver, bronze ware, gold ingots, jade ware, and other grave goods.
Seeing these things, Wang Pang Zi got extremely excited and pounced to stuff them into his backpack. Hu Ba Yi, seeing these grave goods, also couldn’t resist taking some portable items like gold ingots.
Su Mo smiled faintly, turned and walked into another stone cave, saw many grave goods inside, and directly stored them into his system space with a wave of his hand.
His system space was enormous; it could hold dozens more such stone caves’ worth of grave goods without filling up, and it was far more convenient than Wang Pang Zi carrying them in a backpack.
Last time at the New Moon Hotel auction, a lot of his inventory had sold out, so now was a good time to restock. Though he wasn’t very interested in gold, silver, or treasures, free grave goods from a guy like Xian Wang were not to be passed up!
In no time, he had stored the grave goods from the other three stone caves directly into his system space. When he walked out, he saw Wang Pang Zi with his backpack stuffed full, struggling along with it on his back.
Hu Ba Yi couldn’t help saying:
“Commander Wang, if you pack like that, I’m afraid you’ll be exhausted to death here before we can get out!”
“Pah pah pah, can’t you say something nice?”
Wang Pang Zi said:
“It’s not every day you see this much good stuff. If I don’t take some, how can I sleep at night?”
As they spoke, the group passed this section of tomb passage, and ahead appeared three short and narrow stone bridges.
Hu Ba Yi said:
“This should be the Three Lives Bridge. Xian Wang really went all out with his kung fu, thinking that passing the Three Lives Bridge and Heavenly Gate would make him an immortal!”
Xue Li Yang, however, looked toward Su Mo:
“After we cross this Three Lives Bridge, does that count as having walked through three lives?”
