Chapter 1351 — No End
The Blossom Guardian · Page 1 of 2
Fortunately, the jade pendant he carried had an automatic team-forming function: anyone Wei Zhao had accepted into his group within a certain range would send up an alarm the moment they ran into danger. So when Yu Xiaoke touched the stone door and Wei Zhao sensed no warning signal from the pendant, the tightness in his chest eased at once. He did not interfere with her, only stood coldly where he was.
Yu Xiaoke plainly had no idea there was no danger behind the stone door. As the others drew back, she pulled the door open and then shot backward at once, ducking into the passage beside it—the one they had taken by mistake the day before.
The stone door opened, but nothing stirred inside. No poison gas, no poisoned arrows, no monsters or demons such as they had imagined—only layers of age-old dust and a damp, musty smell swirling in the air.
"No problem here!" Old Hei swept his searchlight across the distance for a while, then said, "Someone got in here before us. There are spent arrows on the ground. The people ahead must have tripped the traps, so now that we have set them off a second time, there is nothing left to fear."
"So full of mystery. Didn't we already see that someone had gone in before?" Old Yu snorted. "Then why aren't we going in now?"
Old Hei nodded, then said to Yu Xiaoke, "You go first."
Yu Xiaoke felt a surge of gloom. This money was not easy to earn; she had come only to walk point, and if things went wrong she would be cannon fodder. But there was no help for it—if she wanted the money, she really did have to play the cannon fodder.
Wei Zhao, however, said nothing at all. Taking it as his own duty, he fell in behind Yu Xiaoke; if anything happened to her, he could shield her at once.
Mighty General followed behind Wei Zhao, and after him came Qiu Lingshan and Chen Yuxuan.
As for Wei Zhao taking the lead, Old Hei naturally had nothing to say. The farther forward one walked, the more dangerous it became; better to follow honestly at the rear. On their earlier tomb raids they had gone at most as far as the entrance to the underground palace, and everything inside that palace was unknown.
Once they entered the passage into the underground palace, the air grew noticeably thinner, which had something to do with the stone door having been shut tight before. Wei Zhao and the others were cultivators and were unaffected, but Old Hei and James had prepared oxygen tanks against any contingency.
The passage in the underground palace was just as it had been when they first entered—rugged and winding, now seeming to climb, now seeming to descend, now turning left, now right. Only the forked paths of before were gone, which set the hearts of the group a little at ease; at least there was no chance of going astray.
The one thing that left them uneasy was this: the passage seemed to have no end. Though they walked with care, wary of forks and traps, their pace was not slow, since their numbers were few. Yet after more than an hour they had seen not the slightest sign of an exit.
"What is going on? Why are we still not there after walking so long?" Old Yu's voice rose in inquiry.
"This passage must wind back and forth in an S shape, spiraling downward as it goes," Yu Xiaoke explained. "By any normal reckoning, at our walking speed we should have reached the foot of the mountain by now. That we haven't means the passage was deliberately built this way, to plant a kind of psychological fear in people." To those who robbed tombs often, this was nothing rare. Some ancient tombs were built as bizarrely as possible; the more they astonished a person, the safer they were.
Old Yu nodded. "In that case, let us walk faster! Dawdling like this, when will we ever reach the end?"
"If you think it's too slow, go up front and lead the way yourself. Otherwise, shut up!" Wei Zhao turned his head, glanced at Old Yu, and spoke coldly.