Chapter 148: Where Did The Fire Come From?
“You fucking run, run slower! Slower! I can’t do it, I can’t run anymore!”
Wu Xie was panting heavily as Lao Yang pulled him along in a mad dash. In just a few minutes, he couldn’t run anymore. No matter how Lao Yang tugged, he refused to budge: “Th-this, there’s no movement behind anymore, don’t, don’t run!”
Lao Yang was actually almost done in too. He stopped, hands on his knees, gasping for breath. He looked back and listened for movement: “O-okay, it seems like there’s really no movement. Let’s rest a bit, I’m, I’m exhausted!”
Wu Xie didn’t care that there were coffins and scattered bones right beside him. He flopped down on the ground, staring at the dark cave ceiling and panting heavily on his own. It took a good while before he recovered.
After feeling like his lungs weren’t as uncomfortable, Wu Xie pushed himself up to sit with his hands, feeling like every part of his body was aching: “Lao Yang, last time you got out, you didn’t encounter these things?”
Lao Yang looked at him in confusion and gave a bitter laugh: “I-I didn’t expect it either. Last time I came out, I was probably a bit out of it, somehow I just went straight out.”
Wu Xie frowned. From the cliff looking down, he thought the big pit was pretty close. How come after running wildly for so long, they still hadn’t seen it? By the route, they’d circled more than half way around, right?
Lao Yang’s flashlight was still in his hand. This flashlight was said to last three hours, so he figured they needed to save it. Thinking of this, Wu Xie asked him: “Lao Yang, how long has your flashlight been lit? Does it still have battery?”
Lao Yang thought back. The flashlight seemed like he’d been holding it since going down the cave. Calculating, it’d been used for nearly two or three hours: “Two, two hours? No problem, if it dies, there are still batteries!”
Wu Xie said oh. He’d forgotten that, to be prepared, they’d brought at least two batteries per flashlight. So one flashlight could last eight or nine hours.
So he turned off the one in his hand and put it away, walking to Lao Yang’s side: “Save it, from now on we two can just use your flashlight. This is still just the outer area of the ancient tomb. Don’t get trapped down here because the flashlight dies, that’d be too stupid.”
Lao Yang touched the equipment on his back and nodded, changing the subject: “Do you know what that thing chasing the rat swarm was? I saw you not even daring to breathe heavily.”
Wu Xie shook his head. How would he know? Wasn’t that just defensive instinct? But he countered: “Then why did you just grab me and run? Did you see what that thing was?”
Lao Yang shook his head too. He hadn’t seen it clearly at all, just heard that thing jumping toward them and got scared into running. He barely remembered to pull Wu Xie along: “D-didn’t see clearly, it didn’t seem very big, a small thing?”
“Small thing?” Wu Xie scratched his head, thinking whatever could scare the rat swarm like that wouldn’t be a cat, right? Racial suppression?
Unavoidably, in some sense he had guessed the truth.
But now though they’d escaped with their lives, they were trapped by this coffin formation. Wu Xie had no experience, Lao Yang hadn’t been through this either. Neither had any good ideas, and after discussing for a bit, they couldn’t figure anything out.
Finally Lao Yang got impatient: “Sigh I say, if it really doesn’t work, just climb straight over these coffins! Why bother finding a way through this unknown winding path? Just go straight across, right? These things don’t rise, what are you afraid of!”
Wu Xie was annoyed at Lao Yang’s brainless attitude: “We don’t even know where we are now, which way to go? Aren’t you afraid of walking into a cliff? We need to figure out where we are first before deciding which way to go, right?”
Lao Yang got anxious: “Th-then what do you say to do? Walking a few meters in this place and you can’t see behind, how do you figure it out?”
Wu Xie glared at him and reached out his hand: “Where’s your flare? Take one out!”
Lao Yang was stunned for a second, then fumbled hurriedly in his backpack. He’d forgotten they had flares. This thing lit up ridiculously bright; one shot here and the surroundings would all be visible. This Ghost Wall couldn’t block the sky above too, right?
Facts proved it couldn’t. With this flare shot, not only could they see the surroundings, but Lin Yan and Uncle Tai searching for them behind also saw it.
Lin Yan was walking in front with Xiao Bai Jiang, Uncle Tai supporting Master Liang a few steps behind. They’d only been navigating here a few minutes when they saw a streak of red shooting up from the left front, lighting up everything around.
Lin Yan’s eyes lit up. While the light was still there, he quickly walked a few steps, picked up Xiao Bai Jiang, and dashed fast toward where the flare had launched. Seeing this, Uncle Tai and Master Liang hurriedly gritted their teeth and followed. This place was too eerie; they were afraid of falling behind and getting trapped again.
While running, Master Liang asked Uncle Tai: “Uncle Tai, what is that thing Lin Yan is holding? Why can it go underground and jump?”
Uncle Tai didn’t even give him a glance, acting like a mute and deaf person, completely ignoring him, and of course not answering. Master Liang found it strange, so he asked again. This time Uncle Tai finally reacted a bit.
He glanced at Master Liang with the corner of his eye, noncommittal about his full-faced curiosity, and inexplicably said: “Don’t ask, I don’t know. He himself might not know either.”
What did that mean? Could it be he didn’t understand the thing Lin Yan brought either? Master Liang was baffled, but he could tell Uncle Tai didn’t really want to say, or that was all he could say, so he stopped asking and focused on following Lin Yan’s faintly visible backpack ahead.
Lin Yan watched that red light gradually rising upward, the path ahead about to blur again, and grew anxious inside. He couldn’t help speeding up. Just then there was a fork in the road ahead. Vaguely, he seemed to see that what was a path had turned into a coffin in the instant before the light disappeared?
Coffin?
Lin Yan’s eyes widened. He braked hard in front of the coffin, taking two steps to stop. By his flashlight light, it was really a coffin, not some hallucination! But he’d clearly seen a path there before—Lin Yan felt chilled all over. Was this the power of the formation?
Though last time in the underwater tomb he’d experienced that Qimen Dunjia formation, he had no real concept of these things, always thinking they were like mechanisms. He didn’t expect to take a big fall here.
He tentatively stepped a foot toward where he’d seen the path before, and his heart skipped a beat. This was actually really a path! Though his eyes saw a coffin, the feel underfoot told him this was indeed a path!
When Uncle Tai and Master Liang caught up behind, the scene they saw was him with one foot stepping into the coffin, walking forward on it! Master Liang was shocked: “Where are you going? There’s no path here!”
Lin Yan turned back to look at them and waved for them to follow: “What do you mean no path? Have you forgotten, this formation can deceive the eyes. Seeing no path doesn’t mean there really isn’t one!”
If he wasn’t wrong, this used the principle of light refraction. Though there were no mirrors here, the coffins everywhere gave the formation maker great convenience. Putting these hundreds or thousands of coffins here, with their varying heights, blocked the light source. Every few meters with a small turn, after a few turns the light couldn’t be seen anymore. Unless like Wu Xie they shot a flare upward, no light source would work.
As for how it blocked sound here, he didn’t know, but he figured it was some small mechanisms. Otherwise they wouldn’t have gotten here alive so easily; a few more small mechanisms and they’d be wiped out.
Master Liang watched Lin Yan walking on the coffin, held back his disgust, held Uncle Tai’s hand, and followed behind him here. Though he was a million percent unwilling to step over these coffins and corpse bones, thinking of how even the place where he fainted was like this… it seemed like nothing?
Now the key was to get out of this ghost place first! Master Liang comforted himself while suppressing his pounding heart and dragging his already weakening body to follow.
Only after going did he discover that this place that looked like a coffin actually really had a path! It was just that where this path overlapped with the coffin, a stone the same color as the coffin was placed, plus this path’s color itself overlapped somewhat with the coffin, so they hadn’t noticed.
While following Lin Yan, the two secretly felt fortunate. If not for Lin Yan leading them here, by their choice they’d definitely go the other way, and probably circle back to the original place.
Looking up, the flare seemed to have reached its peak, hitting the cave ceiling and falling straight down. Lin Yan immediately stopped, preparing to use the flare’s bright light to look further at the path where Wu Xie was.
Sure enough, not two seconds later, the flare fell back toward where it was launched. Through the coffin gaps, he saw two people over there dodging and shoving each other, just three rows of coffins away?
“Wu Xie, Lao Yang!”
Lin Yan spotted the place, crossed the coffin and path in two steps as three, and ignoring how the terrain changed when the flare hit the ground due to the shifting light, jumped straight toward that direction.
“Who’s there?”
Wu Xie seemed to hear someone calling his name, but he wasn’t sure if it was a hallucination. Ghost Wall had appeared; a hallucination was reasonable too, right? Like the blue-eyed fox hallucination under Lu King’s Palace, impossible to guard against.
So after hearing the sound, he warily looked around, pulling out his dagger, afraid something would jump out midway with no time to react.
Lao Yang hadn’t noticed yet; he was busy looking at the surrounding terrain. At this moment, excitedly he pulled Wu Xie’s sleeve, nearly scaring him into slashing with the dagger: “Wu Xie look! I found the way down!”
Wu Xie looked where he pointed, and sure enough it was that empty ground they’d been to! But that wasn’t important now: “Lao Yang, quieter. I feel like… someone called our names!”
“S-someone called our names?” Lao Yang was stunned: “How come I didn’t, didn’t hear? Is it Lin Yan they coming, come over?”
“Don’t know!” Wu Xie hadn’t seen anyone and was still wary, until Lin Yan dropped from the sky, jumping down from a coffin in front of him. He was suddenly overjoyed: “Lin Yan! How did you find your way here?”
Lin Yan looked at Wu Xie and Lao Yang with a face full of joy too, looked them up and down and saw they were fine, then breathed a sigh of relief: “Thanks to that flare you shot! The coffins here are too weird; walking along you end up on a fork. Before it was Xiao Bai Bai leading, then we ran into Master Liang. Later Master Liang said you went this way, so we came here, and halfway we saw that flare you shot and directly saw where you were, so we came over!”
Wu Xie looked at the coffin Lin Yan jumped from, still with lingering fear: “Then just now it was you calling our names? When I heard it I thought it was a hallucination, scared me to death. I was just waiting for something to come so I could fight for my life!” He shook the dagger in his hand; now he had time to put it away.
Lao Yang watched them finish chatting beside them, suddenly remembered something and slapped his forehead: “Right, wh-where are the other two?”
At this time Wu Xie remembered too. Before he and Lao Yang had left Master Liang behind; Lin Yan should have Uncle Tai with him too. He said a few people came together earlier; where were those two? Not lost again?
“You mean them?” Lin Yan pointed at the coffin he’d jumped from: “They’re behind! This place is really eerie; some places look like paths but are actually loops, some places look like coffins but are actually paths!”
Hearing him say that, Wu Xie leaned in to look, and only then saw there was an extremely narrow path beside the coffin: “It really is!”
At this time he seemed to hear some movement above, guessing Master Liang and them were coming down, so he quickly stepped back a few steps, conveniently pulling Lin Yan and Lao Yang back a bit too, afraid of being hit by the two about to jump down.
Facts proved his caution was right. Just a few minutes after stepping back, Uncle Tai jumped down with Master Liang. More accurately, Uncle Tai had Master Liang clamped under his arm like a slab of pork, squeezing Master Liang till his eyes rolled back, and upon landing the man collapsed.
“You, couldn’t you be gentler?”
Master Liang rubbed his ribs with one hand, the other on his chest smoothing his breathing. Watching made Wu Xie feel his own ribs aching faintly… this was a bit empathetic. Speaking of, he wouldn’t get smashed this time, right? He wouldn’t, right?
Uncle Tai smiled at him without any apology. Heh, who was it who said he didn’t dare step in and wanted to be carried? And complained his stomach was uncomfortable being poked by the backpack, asking to change position? Complaining about rib pain now?
Master Liang, glanced at by Uncle Tai, remembered it was his own doing. A bunch of complaints stuck in his throat, he quickly changed the subject: “Have you found the place?”
“F-found it.”
Lao Yang looked at everyone, hesitating to speak. From his angle, he could see what was wrong with this place.
“What’s wrong?” Wu Xie saw Lao Yang’s expression off and quickly looked where he was staring, immediately shuddering: “Holy crap, where did this fire come from here?!”
