Chapter Seventeen: The Road Ahead (Please bookmark and recommend)

Seeing me come running up drenched in sweat, the Fat Man grinned and said, "Well, look at you. A few days apart and your stamina’s gone up. Running laps down in a tomb now, are we? You’ve got potential. From now on, the rest of us are counting on you."

He and Peanut both laughed.

I had no mind to pay attention to the Fat Man’s mockery. Seeing that no one else was around, I turned at once and looked back toward the brick chamber behind us.

"Hm... no, that’s strange. With your personality, Miss, you should be the first to demand what we found. What’s the matter? Why are you so flustered?" the Fat Man asked in confusion.

I turned back, wanting to explain, but I couldn’t think of how to put it into one or two sentences. "Tch... damn it, anyway, something’s gone wrong."

Seeing that my expression was off, Peanut stood up and came over to me. "Calm down first."

When I met Peanut’s eyes, I did feel a little steadier inside, but when I tried to tell them what I had seen, I was still tripping over my words.

Once he finally understood what I was saying, the Fat Man sprang to his feet. "What’s wrong with your throat? Damn it, the moment you saw those things you should’ve shouted. Then Peanut and I would’ve run over right away."

I thought to myself that I had wanted to shout too, but in a moment like that I was nearly scared out of my wits, and my reactions were beyond my control. Still, when I thought about it, the Fat Man wasn’t wrong. More than once I had been like this: whenever I ran into something like that, it was as if I completely lost the ability to speak.

"But where could Yang Lang have gone? He’s such a big guy. There’s nowhere here for him to hide."

As I spoke, I noticed the Fat Man and Peanut staring at me strangely, not saying a word for a long time.

"W-what?" I asked, bewildered by their gaze.

The Fat Man rubbed his face. "Miss, you really did come here just to be our lucky charm, didn’t you? What’s so strange about not seeing Yang Lang when you turn around?"

His words made me feel even more frustrated. "Don’t you think that’s odd? I came over from Professor Chen’s side, and you two have been here the whole time. He..."

Peanut suddenly reached out and slapped my shoulder. "This isn’t a sealed room." Then he pointed behind me.

I turned and looked, and it hit me all at once.

Right. Every brick chamber had an entrance leading outside. Yang Lang might have gone out there. Damn it, how could I have forgotten that?

I dropped straight down onto the floor, and the Fat Man came over and handed me a cigarette. "You’ve always been too one-track-minded when something happens. You’re bound to miss things. Still, it is strange. What on earth did that brat Yang Lang run off for?"

He was clearly trying to calm me down. I took a drag and turned to look again at the way we had come in. "How should I know? Maybe he went out to take a leak."

Right then I had no desire to think at all, and my mood was thoroughly bleak. But I saw that Peanut was also staring toward the back, lost in thought.

The Fat Man went on, "I think he probably heard what you said and got so scared he slipped away."

"Slipped away? That seems unlikely," I said, recalling Yang Lang’s expression. "He looked pretty calm back then."

"Hey, maybe he was just putting on a front. He’d already seen some outrageous things before. Once you started talking, maybe he really did get scared and run."

What the Fat Man said could very well have been true, but there was no point in dwelling on it now. Besides, after what happened with Zhang Yaxi, I had learned my lesson. If I ran back to Professor Chen and the others only to find Yang Lang standing there again, Professor Chen would surely think I had gone mad.

"Hey, Yanran, what do you think those three figures and Zhang Yaxi I saw over there really were? I don’t think I was mistaken. It can’t really have been those things, can it?" I felt it was better to say it out loud. Even if it didn’t lead to anything, at least the Fat Man and the others could share some of the burden on my mind.

But the Fat Man didn’t seem to care much about this sort of thing. "When you go in and out of ancient tombs, you’re bound to run into something sooner or later. Once, I went underground with a friend of mine. We were digging around in that tomb for a day and a night and found nothing at all. All we saw were three black snakes crawling over the tomb owner’s coffin. My friend got so annoyed he skinned the three snakes right there and roasted them to eat. When we were leaving, he walked in front of me. The moment he stepped into the tomb passage, I saw a man, a woman, and a little child clinging to his back. All three of them had no skin, and they were baring their teeth and claws at my friend. I knew exactly what they were, but I didn’t dare make a sound. After we got out of the tomb, my friend was still fine, but a few days later he came down with some nameless skin disease, and the skin on his body rotted away... In the end, I found three fresh snake skins, went back into that tomb, and put them in the coffin. Only then was the matter settled."

"I asked you to help me think things through, and you start telling ghost stories? Damn you," I said, giving him a glare.

The Fat Man continued, "Anyway, once you’ve run into enough of these things, you naturally find ways to deal with them. Those three people you saw might have been the ghosts of Professor Chen’s three students."

His words made my scalp crawl, but they also taught me a lesson. From now on, I definitely wouldn’t dare wander off alone again.

"Oh right, what did you find in that coffin just now?"

Only then did I notice that the Fat Man’s arms were clean and white, and that pungent reek of rancid oil was gone too.

The Fat Man shook his head. "Nothing. But Peanut and I counted carefully just now. There should have been three people inside. I can’t say for sure yet, but I think those ought to be the bodies of Professor Chen’s three students."

I frowned and lowered my voice. "So they really were killed by someone?"

"Hard to say. But we’d better stay on guard. Anyway, I just get the feeling Professor Chen and the others have some kind of hidden purpose."

"Forget about that for now," Peanut said suddenly from behind us.

We turned and saw that he was still looking toward the entrance.

"The way down has appeared," Peanut said slowly, staring into that darkness.

The Fat Man and I both jolted and stood up at once.

"The way down has appeared? What does that mean?" the Fat Man asked.

Peanut did not answer. He just kept staring toward the place we had entered from.

A strange thought suddenly rose in my mind. Could the way down Peanut was talking about be right where we had just come in?

The Fat Man quickly understood what Peanut meant. He grabbed the miner’s lamp and rushed over. I followed immediately, while Peanut behind us walked along at an unhurried pace.

After we ran out of the entrance to the brick chamber and took only two or three steps, the Fat Man and I both stopped at once. Looking at the scene before us, neither of us could say a word for a full minute.

"What the hell, did we travel through time or get teleported? How the hell did this happen?" the Fat Man shouted.

I stared wide-eyed. Right before us was a passage nearly a hundred meters long, built of blue bricks and sloping downward. The ground beneath my feet was no longer muddy and covered with puddles, and the ceiling more than twenty meters above us had become a vaulted roof paved with stone slabs.

To explain such a transformation by ordinary mechanisms would be far too far-fetched. All I could do was stare blankly at the scene before me, silently marveling at the inscrutable mystery of Chinese civilization. If the sight of the reverse scales breaking the water had once been wondrous, then this was sheer and utter astonishment.

Beyond the changes all around us, I also saw that the walls of the passage were covered in enormous brick carvings. Dozens of dragon eyes and phoenixes were etched with startling lifelike detail into my vision, as though they might rise from the bricks at any moment and soar into the nine heavens.

Then, all at once, I remembered how, before he died, Grandfather had once seized my hand and, with a dazed look in his eyes, murmured, "We know... too little."