Chapter 1378 — The Passage Opens
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
"This is maddening!" Yu Xiaoke brought her palm down hard on a pillar. It was the several-hundredth time she had examined one, and she had still come up utterly empty; the frustration was getting under her skin.
"Tock —" Yet under Yu Xiaoke's blow the pillar let out a crisp, ringing note.
"Hollow?" Yu Xiaoke started.
Old Black, Qiu Lingshan and Chen Yuxuan whipped their heads around toward her at once. Then, one after another, they imitated her and reached out to rap the pillars before them — and every pillar gave back a crisp note, though each sounded slightly different from the last...
"Hollow, sure enough. Could there be something hidden inside? Shall we break one open and see?" Old Black suggested.
"No!" Yu Xiaoke frowned and pointed to the crown of the pillar. "This whole hall is held up by these columns. Shatter one, and there is no telling whether the place stays standing!"
"And what, then, does Heroine Yan propose?" Old Black asked.
"Give me a moment to think it over..." Yu Xiaoke rapped the pillar before her again, then another not far off to one side. All at once a flicker of delight crossed her face, as if she had found a thread to follow. "Everyone, step back — clear the pillars!"
Old Black, Qiu Lingshan and Chen Yuxuan did as they were told and moved away from the pillars before them.
Yu Xiaoke tapped each and every pillar in the hall in turn, listened to the sounds, stood for a while musing in the center of the chamber — and then began striking one pillar after another in what looked like no order at all, leaving Old Black, Qiu Lingshan, Chen Yuxuan and even Elder Yu thoroughly lost in the fog.
"What are you doing?" Elder Yu could finally contain himself no longer. In his eyes, Yu Xiaoke was simply dashing about to no purpose.
"Do not disturb her!" Wei Zhao cut him off. "If I am not mistaken, this hall holds seven pillars in all, and each pillar stands for a single note of the scale. Heroine Yan seems to have found the relationship between those notes... It may well be the elegy on the stone wall, for all we know..."
"That is it! The notes Yu... that Heroine Yan has been striking — though the timing is a shade off — match the melody of the elegy on that painted wall exactly!" Qiu Lingshan knew a little of music, and with Wei Zhao's prompting she could see the connection without difficulty.
Elder Yu nodded, while a flicker of shock passed through Old Black's eyes. This tomb was no simple affair, it seemed — and Heroine Yan had not been hired for nothing.
The pillars stood far apart, and so, light as Yu Xiaoke's qinggong was, it still took her the better part of half an hour to play the whole elegy through.
"Phew —" Having struck the final note, Yu Xiaoke let out a long breath. Whoever had designed this place was a cruel piece of work — switch in a tomb robber without a sound constitution and he would expire on the spot from sheer exhaustion... Then again, a tomb robber with no stamina was no use either!
"Watch out!" Wei Zhao bellowed without warning — and with that cry the entire floor of the hall began to shudder.
Wei Zhao had cried out because the jade pendant had suddenly issued a warning of its own; the words themselves were blurted from him on pure instinct.
But the warning did no good, of course. From the first shudder of the floor to the instant it split apart, barely seconds elapsed, and no one had time to react. The floor of the hall, taking the very center of the chamber as its dividing line, broke into two halves, one on either side, and went plunging away at speed, tilting off toward the edges.
A merged chapter is coming — stay tuned.