Chapter 349: Second Half Underground

My entire understanding was turned upside down. Not only was the location of this ancient building off, but even its structure was bizarre: behind the door leading to the back section was actually a corridor going underground. Could it be that the entire mansion behind was built underground? The designer had obviously deliberately tampered with it. Perhaps the actual length of the back hall was different from the interior length of the room. When someone entered and saw this door, they would think it was the back door, but in fact it was some distance from the real back door, with a hidden corridor in between.

The main gate was above ground while the rest was built underground. Could that even be called a house? It was like a rat's nest. The designer really had an incredible imagination.

Suddenly I remembered a saying that Third Uncle had told me a long time ago: "If someone builds a villa deep in the mountains, either they're an overseas Chinese or they're tomb-raiding." This place counted as deep mountains, right? Could this ancient house in the deep mountains be a fake building for tomb-raiding? Like how we often hear of people building a pigsty on top of an ancient tomb to cover up their tomb-raiding.

On the surface, it really fit that idea. Going down the corridor might lead to the ancient tomb they were excavating, and these iron figurines were burial objects dug out from the tomb.

But on second thought, I knew it was impossible. I understood the temperament of grave robbers. Even the most powerful and eccentric grave robber would never build such a sturdy corridor just for tomb-raiding! This was clearly a permanent stone corridor built by highly experienced craftsmen, not something improvised.

Moreover, why build a Han-style building in an Yao village? The purpose of a fake building was to conceal, not to draw attention to tomb-raiding activities. Building a Han building in an Yao village would only make it more conspicuous. Following that logic, the best and most efficient method would be to build a Yao stilt house here, then dig a hole at night and go down. Building such a tall and solid Han-style ancient building would cost far more time and money than the value of robbing a single ancient tomb. It was too ostentatious and completely unnecessary.

For that claim to be plausible, there was only one possibility: what was underneath was of astonishing value and extremely hard to reach, requiring twenty or thirty years of preparation. But I was basically certain that there couldn't be a large tomb down there, because this place happened to be in a low-lying area of the mountains, where all the groundwater flowed. It would be impossible to build an oversized burial chamber.

Based on what I knew about architecture, I could also be sure of one thing... This building seemed to have been constructed specifically for some special purpose. All its features served that purpose. For now, I didn't know what that purpose was, so I couldn't judge, but the core of that purpose should be underground.

I checked the oxygen gauge. There wasn't much left—at most another fifteen minutes. No more time to waste. Looking at the corridor, it didn't seem too deep. After a dozen steps it leveled off, and below was a floor of blue bricks.

The blue light didn't reappear, and there was no sense of danger. I thought, even if it was a water ghost, it didn't seem malicious. On the contrary, it seemed to be deliberately guiding me step by step. If it had wanted my life, I would probably have died long ago.

My earlier experience made me feel a bit like a coward. So I steadied myself, carefully opened that door, and swam into the pitch-black area below.

When I reached the bottom and shone my exploration light, I immediately gasped.

Below was a brick-built basement, not large but extremely narrow and long—so long that I couldn't see the far end from here.

On both sides of the brick room were many iron racks, on which lay countless iron figures, one after another.

It was a bit like a kiln for dragons—the iron figurines on both sides stood displayed like freshly fired porcelain. Under the yellow exploration light, they also looked like corpses, giving off the feeling of a secret underground chamber in a foreign cathedral. A rough estimate put them at at least six hundred.

Could this have been a factory for casting iron men? There was much less sediment here. Many iron figurines were covered with rust scales in patches, looking like rotten black corpses.

As I went along, I found that the figurines' poses were all different. Even more bizarrely, none of the iron figurines had a right hand—all right hands had been destroyed, with irregular tear marks, as if done intentionally. The earlier extreme panic had numbed me. Staying alert, I continued forward close to the ground. When I reached the end of the room, I didn't see the imagined underground courtyard. Instead, there was a sealed wall, and on the brick floor at the very end I saw a well.

Digging a well in a basement, and in Guangxi with its abundant water sources, was a crazy thing to do. But then I noticed that beside the well there were recessed steps for climbing, and I immediately understood that there was something below.

At this point, my earlier judgment began to waver. This looked so much like the signs of a fake building for tomb-raiding! Maybe there really was an ancient tomb below. Maybe there was an old gang leader with a very eccentric personality who liked to spend a fortune building super-luxurious houses over tombs, even more luxurious than the tomb below, and wanted to make the house extremely distinctive so that the more attention it drew, the better.

Maybe there really was an imperial tomb built in an area with abundant groundwater. Hell, people even built tombs in the sea! Why shouldn't someone allow theirs to be soaked in water?

I shone my exploration light into the well. If this was a robbers' tunnel, the structure was enough to confirm that the ancient tomb was very hard to enter, requiring a corridor for large machinery or many people to work simultaneously. The tomb should be under someone else's house, so they had to take a roundabout approach instead of going straight up and down. In that case, this group was definitely not entirely professional grave robbers. It was likely a large and motley crew, which brought to mind the style of the grave-robbing warlords of the past.

The warlords had immense influence locally. If they wanted to build a building in the Yao village, no one dared say no. At the same time, relations with the Yao and Miao were tense. If the Yao found out they were robbing tombs in the village, it would inevitably escalate ethnic conflicts.

On one hand, they needed speed; on the other, they needed concealment. If the underground tomb was huge, to save time they might indeed build a sturdy corridor to facilitate large numbers of people going in and out. Cross-referencing that couplet above, the Zhang family building master had military merit. That actually made it possible.

Feeling pretty smart for figuring that out, I looked again into the well. It was deep and dark, and I couldn't make out anything. Carrying my oxygen tank, I couldn't go down, so I prepared to pull back.

Just then, a faint green light glowed from within the well.

My heart lurched. Here it comes again! This time I could see the light was very close to the well mouth, only two or three meters away. I wanted to shine my exploration light on it, but before I could move, the green light moved first, rushing toward me in an instant.

I immediately raised my military spike, thinking, This is for real! But the green light came too fast. Suddenly it flashed past my ear like a meteor.

In that flash, I saw nothing, but I immediately confirmed that this was not a ghost or water spirit—it was more like an animal emitting green light.

I quickly turned around and saw the green light flash into a nearby iron rack, then vanish instantly. When I shone my flashlight, it flickered once and lit up again, as if responding to my flashlight.

Finally, I saw the true form of that thing. It looked like an incredibly fat, gray creature resembling a four-legged snake, about the length of my arm. It was lying on the head of an iron figurine, and it seemed to have something tied to its body. Looking closer, it was actually a flashlight, emitting a faint green light.