Chapter Forty-Eight: The Blood-Red Dawn Redwood

It felt as if a heavily reinforced Chery QQ sedan with a Beijing license plate had fallen from the sky. The moment I hit the ground, a mouthful of bile mixed with blood spewed from my lips. I thought I would be knocked unconscious on the spot, but to my dismay, things turned out even worse. After that turtle-bastard Fatty Cao landed on top of me, he simply caught his breath and—out of sheer habit, perhaps—performed a wild boar flip, rolling off me in a single, abrupt motion.

By the time I vomited a second mouthful of bile, I instantly understood what it must feel like to be a piece of pork about to be minced into meatballs.

At that moment, however, neither Fatty nor Peanut was paying me any mind. "The flashlight! Don’t let it get away!" Fatty shouted, and Peanut immediately flicked on his light. But in just those few seconds, when he shone the beam upward, the spider had already vanished—only a bit of powdery lime fell from above.

Peanut stared upward in confusion, while Fatty scratched his head and muttered, "Damn, that thing is way too fast." Only then did he remember there was still someone lying on the ground.

"Heh, Miss Yuan, I didn’t expect you to be so loyal," Fatty said, hauling me upright by the arm. "Fat Lord here won’t forget your heroic deed today. Don’t worry, from now on, when it comes to finding Lord Yuan Six, you can count me in."

I wiped my mouth, shooting Peanut a look that made me want to strangle him on the spot. But... well, truth be told, I couldn’t really take him on right now—not after such a gut-wrenching blow. Revenge, as they say, is a dish best served cold. I decided to let it go for now.

Clutching my chest, I turned to Fatty. "If you can’t handle it, don’t go messing around!"

Fatty grinned sheepishly. "No, it’s just that something bit me on the waist—hurts like hell." He lifted his shirt for me to see.

I picked up the flashlight and shone it on his side. Sure enough, several small, bleeding punctures marred his flesh.

"There’s no shortage of sneaky bugs in old tombs like this. Otherwise, Fat Lord would’ve stomped that thing already," Fatty said, as if making excuses for himself, then let his shirt fall back into place. "But that big spider didn’t seem capable of moving so fast. If it could slip through the passage that quickly, I wouldn’t have caught it at all."

I looked up at the ceiling. "If it didn’t run out, could it have slipped into the stone slab above...?" As I spoke, an idea struck me.

Fatty immediately perked up. "You think there’s really a way through up there?"

I nodded and turned to Peanut, only to see him standing stock-still before the iron door, staring intently at the gap.

That’s when I suddenly remembered the matter of the iron door. I hurried over, about to tell them what had happened when Peanut raised his hand to stop me. "Light the torches around us first."

Before I could move, Fatty had already relit the torches near the iron door. The three of us lined up before the narrow opening, quietly observing what lay beyond.

At that moment, I saw no sign of that bizarre arm—only those white strands of spider silk, trembling ever so slightly.

Fatty whispered, "No use just looking. Let’s open the door."

Neither Peanut nor I responded. Fatty waited a moment, then slowly pushed the door open by hand.

I held my breath as the spider silk gradually unfurled into view. Was the kind of danger Tan Wei had warned about—the kind even Peanut couldn’t handle—lying in wait behind this door?

Once the door was fully open, I saw the entire burial chamber swathed in webs. The chamber’s faint glow seemed to emanate from the silk itself. Apart from the thickly layered webs, there was nothing else to be seen.

"I saw a human hand in there earlier," I said, glancing at Peanut and Fatty.

Neither replied at first. After a moment, Peanut spoke. "There’s space behind the webs." With that, he was the first to step inside.

"If there’s a hand, that means there’s a corpse in there. We don’t have any black donkey hooves, so we’d better be careful," Fatty muttered warily, clearly unnerved by the scene.

Nevertheless, the three of us edged inside. I looked around anxiously, afraid that hand would reach out from some tangle of webs at any moment. Fatty, more concerned that the door might slam shut again, lingered near the entrance.

If this side chamber was the usual size, then the part blocked by webs covered at least two-thirds of the room. The section directly before us was especially thickly shrouded. Who knew if all these threads were the work of a single spider or a collaboration of thousands?

The air was thick with a ghostly chill. After entering, none of us spoke, as though we all sensed something hidden here.

Peanut reached out and touched the nearest web. He placed his finger on it ever so lightly, yet immediately, the webs throughout the entire chamber trembled, as if the whole room itself was shuddering. We all froze in astonishment. Evidently, every strand was interconnected—the complexity and wonder of a spider’s craft far beyond human imagination.

As fear gnawed at my heart, Peanut suddenly yanked his arm, tearing open the webs before us. What shocked me most was that as soon as the gap appeared, all the surrounding webs began to cascade to the floor, like countless white phantoms sweeping past. In the end, the silk settled along the chamber’s walls.

After several stunned seconds, our gaze shifted once more to the room’s interior.

As I turned, a faint, peculiar fragrance wafted into my nose. Then a massive, rectangular object appeared before us. It took me a long moment to recognize it as a coffin—one two or three times larger than the average.

"Holy shit, really?" Fatty cried out behind me. "That’s... that’s ‘Blood Dawn Redwood’!"

Fatty’s astonishment was beyond words. Without a second thought for the door, he rushed over, torch in hand, to the side of the coffin.

"What’s ‘Blood Dawn Redwood’?" I asked, puzzled.

Fatty didn’t answer at once. He stared at the coffin, his face flickering between joy and surprise. Only after a long pause did he recover his wits.

He explained that dawn redwood is a very rare wood, and Blood Dawn Redwood is an even more legendary material, the finest of all for coffin-making. Ordinary dawn redwoods aren’t thick enough for coffins, but the trunk of a Blood Dawn Redwood can reach three meters in diameter. Wherever one grows, all plant life within miles withers and dies. This blood-red wood, rare as a unicorn, is said to be used for coffins only in a singular, elaborate way—the corpse must be placed inside while the tree is still alive, a coffin carved from its trunk, and only then is the tree felled. If you cut the tree down first, it bleeds out, its red sap gushing like blood until it withers. But if the corpse is placed inside first, the sap merges with the body, preserving it almost perfectly. The fragrance we smelled was the aroma exuded by a corpse suffused with that red sap.

The coffin before us was lustrous as a young woman’s cheek—astonishingly vibrant for a container of the dead.

Fatty went on, "Historically, it’s said that only Genghis Khan was ever honored with a Blood Dawn Redwood coffin."

Listening to Fatty rattle off these legends, I couldn’t help but doubt. "And you can recognize something from legend at a glance?"

"You don’t understand," Fatty said, still staring at the four-meter-long coffin. "I’ve explored countless tombs—seen every kind of coffin there is. This is about experience. If you haven’t seen something before, you deduce from its features. Legend or not, seeing is believing."

His last words even sounded a bit philosophical. I found myself convinced.

"But there’s only one coffin here," I said, glancing around. "No matter how rare it is, it won’t help us find a way up."

I turned to Peanut, hoping he might spot a clue.

Peanut walked over and stared at the coffin for a while. "Whether it’s useful or not, we’ll see. But the thing inside... is moving."

Both Fatty and I stared at him, dumbstruck, then instinctively stepped back.

"You got X-ray vision?" Fatty asked.

Peanut didn’t answer. He ran his hand along the coffin’s edge, slowly circling it. Suddenly, he stopped. "Open it."