“Sister Gu?”
“Sister Gu…”
“Gu—holy shit!”
Two splashes sounded. In her daze, Gu Xianwang only heard muffled booms echoing in her ears, like sinking into the deep sea time and again. Her body drifted lightly, freer than it had felt in ages. Pain hadn’t returned yet—just a dull heaviness. Her limbs were like cold stones, stiff and leaden. Her eyelids bore the weight of a thousand pounds; she couldn’t force them open. Exhausted and lethargic, she yearned to simply drift off into sleep…
She floated like a passenger in a small boat, dipping and rising. It must have been autumn or winter; the wind carried a chill. Gradually, she sensed the boat’s hull wasn’t steady—something kept bumping against it from below. The sensation left her uneasy, urging her to roll over and investigate. The impulse grew stronger, but her body only sank deeper. At its nadir, pain pierced through. In her struggle, she suddenly capsized, water surging into her mouth and nose, flooding her lungs. “Cough—”
“Hey, careful, careful!” Ye Chan hurriedly steadied her.
Pfft!
She spat out a mouthful of water and finally snapped awake. Returning with awareness came excruciating pain throughout her body. Gu Xianwang furrowed her brow at once. The back of her head throbbed fiercely; she didn’t dare touch it. As her vision sharpened, the dark surroundings took shape—a rock cave of middling height, murky water reaching her chest, and foul, stagnant air. The walls were half smooth stone and half earthen mound laced with fine roots. The position felt low, reminiscent of one of those old cellars hand-dug in ancient logging camps.
Standing on tiptoes, with just her forefeet grazing the bottom, Gu Xianwang drew a steadying breath. She raised her hand and flexed her fingers—they moved normally. But the water was filthy, her clothes festooned with rotten grass and leaves. She shook them off and turned to Ye Chan. “How are you holding up? Any injuries?”
Ye Chan looked ready to burst into tears. “I’m okay. You scared the life out of me—I thought that damn monkey had smashed you dead!”
Smashed… Right, there was a clear bruised lump on the back of her head, though it seemed to have stopped bleeding by now. And her arm—probably empowered by the Forbidden Witch Bone once again. It was impossible to say whether that thing was a curse or a blessing for her. A mixed fortune, perhaps. “It’s nothing serious. How did we end up here? Any memory of it?”
Ye Chan was drenched head to toe, her face and hair plastered with mud and grime. When they’d been tossed into this water dungeon, she’d barely managed to grab hold of Sister Gu. Not only was Sister Gu unconscious from her injuries, but her body had gone rigid, wracked with convulsions—like death was knocking. With great effort, Ye Chan had buoyed her up, only to feel warm liquid trickling from her face, seeping from every orifice. Her spirit eye granted night vision but not color discernment, yet the fluid’s heat was unmistakable. It had nearly terrified her to death.
Sniffling a few times, she managed to calm herself a little. “Those Mountain Demons carried us here. I remember it wasn’t too far from Long Li’s previous position—about a kilometer, give or take. But they took a winding route. I played dead the whole way and couldn’t make out the path clearly. The terrain sloped downward steadily. In the end, they chucked us into what felt like a well or some kind of pit—right through the opening ahead, where we dropped in.”
“The water’s too deep over there for me to stand, so I had to support you while feeling my way inward. Good thing there were some higher ledges; otherwise, I couldn’t have held out this long.”
Gu Xianwang listened while thoughtfully taking stock of their surroundings. This water dungeon was far larger and more labyrinthine than she’d imagined. The entrance Ye Chan mentioned lay straight ahead, requiring a vertical drop through a two- or three-meter tomb passageway to reach their current spot. What she’d taken for a simple rock cave spanned roughly seven or eight square meters, its four walls surprisingly regular. Ignoring the water erosion, it resembled a tidy little square room.
She now stood along the room’s diagonal axis, with passages branching left and right. Picturing a simple floor plan in her mind, the layout resembled: entrance—passageway—room—passageway—another room…
Hiss. Why did this feel like an ancient tomb?
“Have those people come by?”
“Sister A and the others?” Ye Chan shook her head. “No, but after they caught us, that big Mountain Demon whistled once more. No clue what it meant. These monkeys are freakishly smart, though—they stripped us of all our gear and knives. Might as well have peeled off my clothes too. It pisses me off! I huffed and puffed carrying that stuff all night, and in the blink of an eye, it was all looted.”
Without any equipment, Gu Xianwang pursed her lips. For a fleeting moment, despair washed over her, but sulking wouldn’t help matters. Fortunately, the Undying Turtle was still with them. “I think this place has the layout of an ancient tomb. What do you reckon?”
“A tomb?” Ye Chan blinked in surprise. She truly hadn’t paused to consider it. Nearly a quarter-hour had passed since their fall, every second devoted to raw survival. Reflecting now, she added, “Come to think of it, you’re right. Shaanxi is riddled with underground burials anyway, but sticking one in such a godforsaken spot is beyond remote. If it’s genuinely an ancient tomb, it has to date back ages—at least before the Tang Dynasty.”
She pondered briefly, then waded through the water to run her hands over all four walls. Next, she leaped for the ceiling, but her height fell short; another try would mean a painful tumble. Gu Xianwang rushed over, scooped her up, and hoisted her higher. “Carbon powder…”
“What?”
Ye Chan dropped back down and thrust her finger under Gu Xianwang’s nose. “See? Carbon powder. The walls are mixed with lime and charcoal for moisture control. This spot really could be a front chamber.”
Gu Xianwang hated to dampen her enthusiasm but did so anyway. “True enough, but even if it’s an ancient tomb, it’s long since been stripped bare. The hole we dropped through was probably an enlarged tomb robber’s tunnel.”
The Mountain Demon pack had swarmed them in force. Gu Xianwang had braced for a savage slaughter, yet the beasts hadn’t devoured them alive—instead dumping them into an ancient tomb. What was the angle? Had the folk of Golden Hook Town put them up to it? Was there some ulterior purpose for the captives?
—Damn it all, there was. Wasn’t it the Human Skin Drum that Sister A had mentioned!
A sudden chill prickled across Gu Xianwang’s skin. Time was of the essence. If they were being fattened for drum skins, once tonight’s Hanging Coffin Ritual wrapped up, they wouldn’t live to see tomorrow’s sunset. “How high was that hole we fell from? Any chance of scaling it barehanded?”
Ye Chan thought back. “Not terribly high—maybe three meters off the ground. But it’s not near the edge. We got chucked down at the same instant, so that widened tomb robber’s tunnel has to be close to two meters across. Even standing on my shoulders for a boost, you’d still face five or six meters straight up. No way without gear.”
Gu Xianwang nodded. “Fair enough. Let’s press deeper inside, see if there’s another way out.”
~~~
They could never have anticipated the sight awaiting them in the Main Coffin Chamber.
At worst, they’d expected a gutted ancient tomb, maybe some yawning coffins clogged with silt. What more could there be?
Ye Chan gaped, half-convinced it was another hallucination. This chamber, roughly ten paces square, featured a wall opposite the tomb passageway heaped with corpses in a precarious slant. Waist-deep water lapped here too, yet the pile towered a full meter above it—that much visible from the threshold alone. For it not to avalanche inward, the foundation had to be massively compacted and stable, implying the floor within was carpeted in bones.
Silver lining: these bodies didn’t look human. Dark cloud: this tomb now screamed Mountain Demon pack “pantry.”
Which meant—after all that, they were still just larder stock?
As she stood frozen, a feeble voice piped from a corner of the Main Coffin Chamber. “Who’s there?”
Ye Chan jolted, drenched in icy sweat. A ghost? Had to be. She’d wrestled solo with Sister Gu amid all that racket for ages, no echo in response. How the hell was someone piping up now!?
“You—who are you? What era? Rank and title!?”
The barked challenge even threw Gu Xianwang for a loop. The voice hesitated, then replied, “I… I’m from the twenty-first century. Political affiliation… ordinary citizen.”
Huh? Ye Chan scowled. Another modern ghost?
“What’re you on about? It’s a live one.”
Gu Xianwang swatted her arm. They splashed urgently toward the sound. The Main Coffin Chamber’s floor crunched and grated underfoot—bones in every twisted shape, a spine-tingling tread. Luckily, their mystery guest craved rescue and shoved clear the corpse mound, rising unsteadily from the skeletal heap.
“Holy crap?” Ye Chan reeled in shock. “You?”
He huddled amid the bones, quaking, shoulder gashes bled pale in the soak, face bloated and puffy. He looked far rougher than either of them. Gu Xianwang stared in bewilderment. “How’d you end up here? Where’s Old Liu?”
“That’s not right. Aren’t the mountain demon pack the ones you people from Golden Hook Town tamed yourselves?” She frowned suspiciously and took a step back, saying warily, “Who did you come down here with?”
Clinic Brother blinked, his voice weak. “How… how can you see me so clearly?”
The way he said it made it sound like he really thought he was a spirit. Ye Chan coughed. “Never mind that. Our eyes are sharp, so just come clean. How did you get down here? Why did you come down? And why aren’t the other villagers coming to save you?”
Clinic Brother said dully, “Hunters… are always hunted in turn. Since it’s a sacrifice, of course… if someone gets caught, they’re as good as dead. What reason do they have to save me? The mountain demons won’t listen to me. In their eyes, without the protection of the mountain sentries… I’m just food.”
“I haven’t seen anyone else. When I woke up… I was already in this cave. I’ve lost too much blood. I need to stay warm, or I’ll soon pass out from hypothermia.”
Ye Chan and Gu Xianwang exchanged a glance, thinking his explanation was reasonably plausible. The guy worked at a clinic, so huddling here to stay alive made sense. But on the other hand, since he was still down here, it probably meant the only exit from this ancient tomb was that tomb robber’s tunnel.
Gu Xianwang thought for a moment, then suddenly smiled. “Do you want to live?”
Of course he did. He nodded. “Yeah.”
She stepped onto the pile of bones and used her index finger to lift his chin, exposing the bloody hole hidden in his collar. “Trade the information you know for your life, and I’ll consider saving you.”
Clinic Brother stiffened, then chuckled wryly. “You can barely save yourselves, and you’re going to… save me? Cough cough… Even if I tell you everything, I’ll just die once I’m out. In my current state, if I don’t restore my body temperature soon, I won’t last much longer. I’d rather just… die here.”
Gu Xianwang said, “Your Mandarin is pretty good, and the fact that you work at a clinic means you’re educated. Medical students are so valuable—do you really not feel any resentment about dying for such backward customs?”
Clinic Brother reacted slowly. He stared blankly for a while before saying, “No, I don’t.”
Ye Chan rolled her eyes, thinking that regardless of anything else, these isolated villages really had brainwashing down to an art. With the Yelang Kingdom in the past and Golden Hook Town now, with eloquence and intensity like that, it was a shame they weren’t going into business at sea. Why bother worshiping gods when they themselves were the gods of brainwashing?
“Fine, no forcing it.” Gu Xianwang retreated back into the water, but suddenly snapped off a rib bone from some unknown animal beside him. The jagged end was sharp, and she jabbed it straight into his gun wound. The pain made him cry out “Ah!”
“You’re going to die either way, so how about I help you along and spare you the suffering?”
“Here in your village, you don’t value human lives anyway, so I’ll just follow local customs. Someone will clean up in the end.”
Clinic Brother’s face twitched in agony. Ye Chan felt a bit sorry for him, thinking that even if he wanted to call it off now, he probably couldn’t get the words out. She quickly intervened. “Hey, one more chance. Do you really want to live or not?”
Gu Xianwang had been waiting for her to play good cop. She smoothly pulled back, waiting for Clinic Brother to catch his breath before speaking again. “We have no grudge against you people. It was your Golden Hook Town folks who tried to take our lives first. Don’t play the loyal martyr here. Just tell me: Were your people the ones pretending to be gods and ghosts on Huima Ridge? Did you spread the rumor about the Ming Dynasty General’s Tomb just to lure in these tomb robbers and kill them to make drums?”
Clinic Brother was still hesitating when, in the silence, all three of them heard a loud thud—something splashing into the water. It didn’t sound like a person; it was too heavy, too solid. They held their breath and listened intently. From the tomb passageway came faint sounds.
It was like… someone calling out.
