Chapter 294: Alchemy Room

I looked at her and saw she had already reached the edge of the massive stone grinding plate at the center. We moved closer and saw that it was a stone astrolabe, covered with small dots arranged like a chessboard, representing the stars in the sky, and each dot was made of an ugly, dark green pebble.

These were the elixirs Third Uncle had shown me before—there were so many here.

"What are these? Elixirs of immortality?" A strange voice came from behind, accompanied by a whistle. We turned around and saw that Mop had followed us in with several of his men.

I immediately felt a headache coming on and shook my head: "These are deadly poison that will kill you instantly. You absolutely cannot touch these elixirs—they're extremely toxic."

"Of course we're not going to eat them, but can't we at least look?"

"No," I said. "You can't touch anything here."

Those men were very interested, but when I said that, they muttered resentfully, and one of them lit a cigarette, saying, "Who do you think you are, giving us so many rules?" His tone had lost all its earlier politeness.

I pretended not to hear. Just then, the flares burning around us went out one by one. Fatty lit two more and looked up, suddenly shouting in alarm.

We all looked up and saw that at the highest point of the cave, where the flares illuminated, several iron chains were suspending something. More than a dozen chains spread out like a spiderweb, one end embedded in the stone and the other connected to that object, which was pitch black, like a huge black ball.

The flare then fell, plunging the top of the cave back into darkness.

"What is that thing?" someone beside me muttered in surprise.

"That's a hanging furnace," Wenjin exclaimed. "Oh my god, this cave must be the acupoint of the great geomantic vein of the Ten Thousand Mountains' Dragon Mother. This is the highest realm of alchemy—the furnace doesn't touch the ground, absorbing all the essence of the entire dragon vein."

Fatty swapped in a high-altitude signal flare and said, "Let's get a clear look." He fired another shot, and this time the flare hit the edge of the black ball and burst, making it perfectly clear. Up there was indeed a carved bronze spherical vessel, at least three times larger than any of the other bronze artifacts here. From below, connected to those chains, it looked like a giant wolf spider crouching at the center of a spiderweb.

Wenjin immediately told Fatty to stop firing, saying that there might be flammable materials inside the furnace and that an explosion would be like being bombed by a bomber—no one here would survive.

Fatty sighed and said, "It's a shame we can't get up there to look. Maybe the elixir of immortality is right up there. If we had a dozen of those, we could go straight to the moon. I wonder how Chang'e is doing these days." I slapped Fatty and said with a sigh, "You've finally shown your true colors, Marshal Tianpeng. No wonder your build looked so familiar to me."

Fatty was about to protest when we suddenly heard Wenjin shouting, "What are you doing?"

We immediately turned around and saw those men standing by the stone astrolabe. One of them was holding Wenjin back, preventing her from stopping them, while another, wearing gloves, was reaching for the elixir on the stone plate, saying, "Don't worry, Big Sister, I'm an expert myself—not any worse than your boyfriends."

I was horrified and yelled, "You bastards! Do you want to die?" Immediately, a man drew a gun and aimed it at us. Poker-face and Fatty quickly shielded me, telling me not to get agitated. The man with the gun nodded at Fatty and said, "Drop the gun." Fatty cursed and threw his gun to the ground.

The man taking the elixir laughed and said, "Little Third Master, you really think you're still some kind of boss? Times have changed—people don't care about seniority anymore."

As he spoke, he dug out a pill, shone his flashlight on it, and examined it closely. But the expression on Poker-face's face changed, and I heard him mutter quietly, "It's over!"

The moment he finished speaking, the stone astrolabe suddenly lost its balance and tilted to one side. Then everything fell silent.

The men were also startled. No one dared to move; everyone froze in place, waiting to see what would happen.

After waiting for a while, nothing happened. We looked at each other in confusion, and Fatty said, "Damn! Was that stone just not set firmly?"

But Poker-face's face grew even paler. Instead of looking at the stone grinding plate, he turned his gaze to the jade burial suits around the cave. Then we clearly heard a "clatter" from among the suits. We immediately looked over and saw that the pieces of one suit had scattered apart, as if the gold wires holding it together had been suddenly pulled out, causing the segments to lose their shape and fall off, revealing the ancient corpse inside. It was a hideous horse-faced mummy, completely desiccated, but the moment I saw the face, I recognized it as identical to the ones I had seen at the Cloud Summit Palace! Then the suits on the four corpses surrounding that one also fell away, and like dominoes, one after another, the "clatter" sounds came in an unbroken chain—louder and faster, more and more—until all the jade suits around the cave had fallen apart, exposing the dried corpses inside.

I was stunned speechless. I had heard that once the jade suits fall off, the corpses would immediately reanimate—this was really bad. I immediately shouted, "Get out! Quick!"

Before I finished, a series of locking mechanisms clicked at the cave entrance. The stone door had already dropped, sealing our way out.