護花近衛 - 第1332章 走錯路了 - 清風書屋

Wei Zhao's gaze swept over everyone present, but it came up with nothing. There were indeed a few skilled hands in the party, but the strongest of them stood only at the peak of the late Yellow Rank — not even Mystic Rank.

Still, the best men these tomb robbers could ever hire were Yellow Rank at most; after all, no Mystic Rank would sell his life for them. The tomb-robbing trade was far too perilous — a man might drop dead at any moment — nowhere near as comfortable as serving as a bodyguard in some rich man's house.

What was more, most Mystic Rank experts had been snapped up by the great clans, making them as rare as phoenix feathers and unicorn horns among common folk. There could never be many of them, to say nothing of Earth Rank experts.

And yet a man had most certainly died here, and no one even knew how. That left one other possibility: the killer was not in the party at all. He was no member of their group, but someone lurking in the dark who killed and then slipped back into hiding.

Of course, the remaining possibility was that an Earth Rank expert of the external school walked among them, and that while he kept his strength concealed, Wei Zhao's golden finger failed against him and automatically filtered him out. But one had to understand how hard it was to cultivate to Earth Rank in the external school. Even a great clan like Wu Chengtian's had never produced an external-school Earth Rank expert.

The moment Mr. Qiu died, nearly everyone in the party went pale — Lord Hao most of all. His gaze sharp as a blade, he looked at Brother Keng, at James, at Wei Zhao and Qiu Lingshan: "Which of you did this? What good does it do you? We're all lost, we can't get back out — are you not ruining others along with yourself?"

"Lord Hao, that's not right of you to say. Why must it be one of us who killed him?" Brother Keng was rather displeased. "Couldn't that fellow Qiu have killed himself? Why don't you ask Old Hei? Maybe he pulled this 'warrior severs his own wrist' stunt on purpose, meaning to pin it on someone else and then swallow the tomb's riches all for himself!"

"Bullshit! Even if I were going to cut off a wrist, I'd never use Mr. Qiu for it!" Old Hei was about to explode with rage — his best man dead for no clear reason, and now he was a suspect on top of it. The indignity was killing him. "Mr. Qiu was an expert at the peak of the early Yellow Rank that I paid a fortune to bring in. How could I let him die? I've got plenty of small fry — you think I'd kill off my best man for the fun of it? Am I sick in the head?"

"Hmph. The man's dead. Even if you say he was Mystic Rank, we've no way to verify it." Brother Keng spoke coldly.

"Enough! Let's drop this for now and talk about what we're going to do." Lord Hao waved a hand, sounding rather helpless. "Old Hei, this path — something's wrong with it, isn't it?"

"Wrong, all right! Before, we walked maybe ten minutes — five or six hundred meters at most — and reached the entrance to the underground palace. Now we've been walking over half an hour, well past a thousand meters, and we're still nowhere near it, with nothing but blackness ahead. We've definitely taken the wrong path..." Old Hei shook his head. "It was precisely because I feared we'd go wrong that I had Mr. Qiu bring up the rear, but..."

"Who knows what you're plotting — maybe you led us astray on purpose!" Brother Keng had a foul temper and a belly full of anger, and now he made Brother Hei his whipping boy.

"Fuck your mother! Old Keng, say one more word and I'll put a bullet in you, I swear it!" Old Hei, furious, humiliated, choking on it all, drew his gun outright and leveled it at Brother Keng.

"Heh heh, go on then, if you've got the guts. If you don't shoot, you're a son of a bitch!" Confident that Lord Hao's presence would keep Old Hei from doing anything rash, Brother Keng cursed him to his face.

"Old Hei, don't you dare shoot!" Lord Hao barked as well.