Volume 5 Chapter 16 The Crater (Part 2)

The scale of the complex was beyond my imagination. If the underground palace was located beneath these buildings, it would be comparable in scale to the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor.

According to the images in the underwater tomb, the real Genting Palace should have been above our heads. After the avalanche, the upper palace may have been completely crushed. I don’t know how deep the snow is above our heads as the earthen cover for the underground palace.

The flares we had fired earlier had all gone out in the darkness, and darkness had once again enveloped us. Our light sources had become a few flashlights that were clearly not powerful enough.

Everyone’s faces, except for Shunzi’s, were filled with a kind of almost fanatical excitement. Tomb raiding represents one of the most primitive human desires, the desire for wealth and the desire to explore death.

It took ten minutes for us to recover and get ready to go down. Chen Pi Asa said to Hua Monk, “Leave the useless things behind and prepare the rope. We will go lightly.”

Hua Monk immediately began to prepare. We organized our equipment and put the unnecessary things we had abandoned on the platform here to avoid unnecessary risks from climbing with a heavy load.

Then we all put on gas masks and followed the standard mountain climbing steps, climbing down the cliff step by step with ropes.

Below us were a large number of dead trees, and the strange smell permeated the air, even the gas masks could not filter it out. After everyone had descended, Pan Zi said, “This is a dead pit, we have to hurry, if we stay too long, we may die of lack of oxygen. When I was in the army, I heard that birds can’t fly in this kind of place.”

It was the sulfuric gas emitted by volcanic activity. The toxicity was unimaginable.

Hua Monk lit a cold firework with a strong illumination, illuminating the surrounding environment. We looked around and saw that the stone path was two car widths wide, paved with stone slabs, and almost straight ahead. This was the sacred path to the mausoleum, leading directly to the main entrance of the mausoleum. Here, we could vaguely see a huge black shadow at the end.

Hua Monk asked Chen Pi A Si, “How do we go?”

“Follow the sacred path and enter the mausoleum first,” Chen Pi A Si replied.

We had no experience dealing with imperial tombs, and at the time we had no other ideas, so we didn’t waste any time and followed him, trotting all the way over.

After climbing over many dead trees that had fallen on the road, we soon came to a stone gate. This was the first stone gate of the imperial tomb, called the Heavenly Gate. After passing through the stone gate, there would be a large number of stone carvings on both sides of the road.

As we passed through the stone gate, Chen Pi A-si said, “When you come out, remember to go backwards, so as not to hit the broken head gate.”

I read about this in my grandfather’s notes. This first stone gate has a very strange identity. Before this gate, it was the place where the funeral procession was slaughtered and the coffin was carried. After the funeral ceremony was completed, everyone who came out of this gate would be cut by a knife, so this gate is equivalent to the gate of yin and yang. If the tomb raider enters along the sacred path or enters the first gate of the underground palace, then when he comes out, he must come out backwards, otherwise it will be very troublesome.

Of course, there are almost no grave robbers who have the opportunity to enter the imperial tomb along the sacred path. We may be one of the extremely rare few. The people who were able to rob the imperial tombs in the past were either warlords or heroes, and of course they were not afraid of the so-called head-cutting door.

After passing the heavenly gate, there were white stone men and horses every five meters on both sides of the sacred path. We were not archaeologists, and we couldn’t move this stuff. We didn’t even look at it along the way, and we just went straight ahead.

As I ran, suddenly, the fat guy in front of me stopped. I followed him, bumped into him, and fell to the ground.

This was really sudden. The fat guy was almost knocked down by me, too. I hurriedly asked him what he was doing.

The fat guy turned around and looked behind him. His face turned pale, and he said softly, “It seems like someone is standing by the road.”

The people in front of us noticed that we had stopped, and they all turned back. Pan Zi asked, “What’s going on?”

When the fat man told them what he had seen, the others didn’t believe him. Pan Zi said, “It must have been a stone man. You must have been mistaken.”

The fat man shook his head. “It was just a flash. I just reacted. Look at me, I’m sweating. I must have seen it right.”

“Did you see it clearly?”

“It looked like a woman, but I’m not sure.” The fat man said, “I ran too fast, I didn’t see it clearly.”

We all shone our flashlights at the stone men behind us. There was one every five meters. We had just seen six or seven of them pass by in a flash. There was no woman in the range of the flashlights, and maybe she was even further back.

Hua asked, “Old man, do you want to go back and take a look? Maybe it’s the woman from that group?”

Hua Monk was referring to Ning, and I thought to myself, “How could that be? They took the main entrance to the Yunding Palace. Even if they had successfully crossed the border, they should be drilling holes in the ceiling above us by now. They definitely wouldn’t be as fast as us.”

Fatty also said, “That definitely isn’t it. If it were that woman, I would definitely recognize her at a glance.”

Chen Pi Asu hesitated for a moment, and then said to Hua Monk, “You and the others go ahead,” and then patted Shunzi on the back, “You accompany me to take a look.”