Chapter 169: Lair of the

The corpses were all wearing tattered armor, some dried into mummies, others already half-skeletal. These must have been Jurchen warriors from that time, hunted down while scouting the path. But their weapons back then were too crude. Now we have so many M16s and Type 56 rifles—our firepower is very strong. Thinking of that, I felt a bit more at ease.

After entering the area of the hanging corpse chains, we climbed down another fifty meters or so. Corpses surrounded us from above, below, left, and right. Those rotting, hollow eyes staring at you were truly unsettling. The atmosphere suddenly turned grim.

To prevent blind spots in our vision or to dispel this fear, a few people lit cold flares, and the brightness around us reached an unprecedented intensity.

Somewhat surprisingly, no strange birds appeared, nor did I feel that restless agitation of them flying in the air. Surroundings were eerily quiet.

Fatty pointed at a hanging corpse on one side and asked me softly, "All old corpses, no fresh ones. Could this place have been abandoned?"

I shook my head for him to stop. It was possible, but since the strange birds here could still go out to hunt, that meant there must be an exit nearby. Our chances had greatly improved.

Of course, it was also possible they were temporarily away, like flocks of bats that all fly out of the cave at the same time to hunt. If so, we should quickly pass through this area. So I signaled and urged everyone to speed up.

At that moment, Keke and Panzi ahead stopped. Panzi turned and gestured for me to come over.

I told the others to stay put, then hopped down a dozen or so chains in a few leaps, arriving beside Keke. Looking down, his high-power flashlight could already illuminate the huge bottom of the rift valley. Our Spiderman career seemed about to end.

But the flashlight beam spread too wide to see what was down there. After experiencing the bizarre strangeness of Chinese ancient tombs, this German had clearly lost confidence in his own judgment—he wanted me to see everything before making decisions.

This underground rift was so vast that using a flashlight was pointless. You could only tell there was something down there, but not what it was at all. Even with night-vision binoculars, I could only see blurry green images.

We still had a few signal flares left. I wanted to save them, but in this situation, there was no way to hold back. I told Fatty to figure out a way to fire a flare in this environment, trying to make the illumination last as long as possible.

Flares from A Ning's group were more advanced than ours. Fatty knew what he was doing and gave an OK gesture.

He lit a glow stick, cut it open, and smeared the inner coating on the flare tip. Then he dropped the flare into the abyss below. We watched a tiny fluorescent dot fall like a meteor, hit the bottom of the rift, bounce twice, and stop.

Then Fatty raised his Type 56 rifle and fired a three-round burst, hitting the flare tip below. Instantly the flare ignited, illuminating the entire valley floor clearly.

We had indeed reached the bottom. The floor was covered with extremely uneven black volcanic rock, along with bones and corpses that had fallen from above—layer upon layer of bones and black feces, almost burying the rocks. And on one side of the rift wall, there was a giant double-leaf bronze door.

I can't even describe the grandeur of this giant door. It was about thirty meters high and nearly sixty meters wide. Converting to a three-story modern building, this door alone was ten stories tall. The entire door face looked as if it had been cast as a single piece. This absolutely could not have been cast by ancient people, nor was it meant for humans. A door weighing tens of thousands of tons pressed against the rock—who could possibly open it?

The door was decorated with extremely exquisite patterns. Because the door was so huge, the complexity of those patterns was simply mind-boggling, and a suffocating feeling swept over me. The gap between the doors was perfectly sealed, covered with sheets of human skin frozen with blood, freezing the entire door seam shut. The skin had turned a bluish-gray and almost petrified. It seemed that after sealing the bronze door, no one had opened it for who knows how many years.

A Ning said, "This must be the underground giant door from the legends of the Eastern Xia, where successive Wannu Kings appeared. After each dynasty replacement, they would seal the door again with the fresh skin of human sacrifices. Guess... what's inside here?"

I shook my head, my mind elsewhere, thinking to myself: Who on earth cast such a giant door here? How did the Wannu King come out? Was he truly a god with the power to move ten thousand tons? I muttered, "No matter what's inside, we absolutely cannot get in."

Were these similar to the giant bronze sacred tree I saw deep in the Qinling Mountains, also buried at the base of the mountain range? Did these colossal, humanly impossible bronze wonders have some connection? Or could there be such things inside other great mountain ranges, like the Kunlun or the Himalayas?

I vaguely felt I was approaching an ancient, massive mystery. An intense sense of pathetic smallness rose within me. Compared to the ancient mystery of these wonders, I was utterly insignificant, with not even a glimmer of hope to know the truth. The flare gradually died out, and darkness enveloped the underground again. But I stood there frozen until Panzi patted me and said, "Let's go down." Only then did I snap out of it.

We climbed down the chains one after another, soon reaching the valley floor. Carefully stepping over the bones, we walked to the front of the giant bronze door. Instantly, my sense of smallness grew even stronger. I almost felt the urge to kneel.

If someone of my generation felt this way here, it's not hard to imagine how shocked the Eastern Xia warriors must have been when they brought Wang Zanghai here with great hardship. No wonder he was obsessed with his experience here, to the point of risking his life to record everything and pass it down to future generations. I could even feel his pain—his terror of originally thinking he had understood the laws of the universe, only to suddenly realize he knew nothing.

Just as I was lost in thought, Fatty interrupted my reflections from one side.

He was shining his flashlight toward the middle of the rift. The bottom of this underground rift was a good five to six hundred meters wide, with broken stones piled like small hills. Fatty had walked far and saw that in the center of the rift, a huge rocky mountain had been flattened into a platform, like a small pyramid. A long stone staircase was carved along one side of the rock, with small lamp slaves flanking each step.

What caught Fatty's attention was an object placed on the stone platform. It was a huge white stone coffin the size of a car. Nine stone-carved hundred-legged dragons coiled beneath the coffin, forming a lotus shape. Around it stood four black stone figures, facing the four directions in a kneeling posture.

In front of the coffin stood a large tripod for sacrificial offerings, and behind it was a screen wall, whose carvings were unclear. From above, these things all looked like ordinary rocks and weren't easy to distinguish, which was why we hadn't noticed them earlier.

I gasped, "Could this be... the Wannu King's Nine-Dragon Corpse-Lifting Coffin?" From Wang Zanghai's Dragon Fish Secret Text, was it this?

Fatty said, "That's definitely it. Didn't that guy say the Wannu King's coffin was guarded by nine divine dragons? Look at the base of this coffin—exactly nine centipedes. I thought Chenpi A'si was bullshitting us back then, but it's real!"

We'd always thought the Wannu King's coffin was only a shadow coffin in the underground palace, and his body had undergone a celestial burial, giving up hope of finding the true royal coffin. But now we'd actually discovered the real Nine-Dragon Corpse-Lifting Coffin here. We all got excited, and a few impatient ones ran over. A Ning on the side quickly called out to stop them, shouting, "Don't go over! Danger!"

The runners immediately halted. A Ning shouted, "Don't you see the centipede dragons under the coffin?"

Fatty said, "My dear granny, those are stone carvings. What danger? What the hell are you looking at?"

A Ning arched her delicate eyebrows and retorted, "What the hell are *you* looking at? I'm not talking about those stone carvings. Look carefully at the edge of the stone platform!"

The edge of the stone platform? A Ning looked very serious, but as I looked left and right at the edge of the platform, I really couldn't see anything. I didn't know what she was so nervous about, so I asked her to point it out.

A Ning used her flashlight as a pointer and pointed. At first I still saw nothing, extremely puzzled, when suddenly I noticed the stone platform move! Then I realized that coiled on the stone platform was a huge volcanic centipede, at least five or six meters long. It was so massive, and its carapace color was almost the same as the volcanic rock, that a quick glance made it impossible to spot such a creature lying there. After spotting the first one, immediately we counted a second, third, fourth—a total of nine giant centipedes, all coiled on that stone platform, blending into it like stone reliefs.

Nine dragons carrying the corpse—truly worthy of the name! A Ning said, "If you'd climbed up that platform, before you knew what was happening, you'd have been bitten in two. Volcanic centipedes are carnivorous insects, extremely fierce and fast. Our body size is exactly their preferred prey."

I had experienced many strange things by now. I could forgive these centipedes growing to a meter, given that this was an underground rift in a volcano with different environmental and air composition—similar discoveries had been made elsewhere in the world. But insects so unnaturally huge—I had never seen before. This was like a mutated monster from an American horror movie exposed to radiation.

A Chinese-American expert from A Ning's team muttered to himself, "Strange. This kind of centipede normally lives only two or three years. They should die when they're only as long as a finger. For these to grow so big—have they lived for thousands of years?"