Volume 5 Chapter 40 Guardian’s Lair

The bodies were all wearing tattered armor, some of them had been mummified by the wind, and some had become half-skeleton-like. These should all be the Jurchen warriors who were hunted down on the way to explore the road. However, their weapons were too primitive at the time. Now we have so many M16s and Type 56s, and the firepower is very strong. When I think of this, I feel much more at ease.

After entering the area of the hanging corpse chains, we climbed down another 50 meters or so. The corpses were everywhere, and the hollow, rotting eyes staring at you were really uncomfortable. The atmosphere suddenly became gloomy.

To prevent dead ends or dispel the fear, a few people lit cold fireworks, and the brightness around us reached an unprecedented intensity.

Surprisingly, there were no strange birds, and I didn’t feel the restlessness they had when flying in the air.

The fat guy pointed to the hanging bodies and asked me quietly, “They are all old bodies, no fresh ones.

I shook my head and told him to be quiet. It is possible, but since the strange birds here can go out hunting, it means that there must be an exit nearby, and we hope it is much larger.

Of course, it is also possible that they are not here temporarily, like a group of bats, all flying out of the hole at the same time to hunt. So I said hello and urged them to speed up.

At this time, Kirk and Pan Zi in front of us stopped, and Pan Zi turned around and beckoned me to come over.

I told the others to rest in place, and after jumping and climbing down a dozen or so, I came to Kirk’s side and looked down. It turned out that his powerful flashlight could already illuminate the huge bottom of the rift valley, and it looked like our career as Spidermen was about to end.

However, the light beam was too diffused, and it was hard to see what was down there. After the strange experience in the Chinese tomb, the German had obviously lost confidence in his own judgment, and he would only make decisions after I had seen it.

The underground rift was too big to be useful for seeing with a flashlight. You could only know that there was something down there, but you couldn’t see anything. With night vision binoculars, you could only see a vague green image.

We still had a few flares left, and we wanted to save them, but there was no way to do that in this situation. I asked Fatty to think of a way to launch a flare in this environment, and to try to make it last as long as possible.

A-Ning and the others had more advanced flares than we did, and Fatty knew how to use them.

He lit up a fluorescent stick, cut it with a knife, and used the paint inside to paint the tip of the flare. Then he threw the flare into the abyss below. We saw a small fluorescent dot slide down like a shooting star, falling to the bottom of the rift valley and falling twice and not moving.

Then Fatso picked up a five-six rifle and fired a three-point shot, hitting the tip below. Suddenly the flare burned up, and the entire valley bottom was clearly illuminated.

We had indeed reached the bottom of the valley, where the ground was covered with extremely uneven black volcanic rocks and bones that had fallen from above. There were layers and layers of bones and black excrement, covering almost all of the rocks. On the cliff wall at the bottom of the valley was a huge two-sided bronze gate.

I can’t even describe the grandeur of this huge gate. It is about 30 meters high and nearly 60 meters wide. If it were a modern building with three meters per floor, this gate would be 10 stories high.

The entire facade looks like it was cast as a whole. This is definitely not a bronze product that the ancients could cast, and it is definitely not for human use. Because such a gate weighs tens of thousands of tons and is pressed against the rock, who can open it?

A-Ning said, “This must be the underground gate that the legendary Emperor of the Ten Thousand Slaves appeared in the Dongxia legend. After each dynasty changed, they sealed the gate again with the skin of human sacrifices. Guess… what is inside?”

I shook my head. My mind was elsewhere. I thought to myself, who cast such a huge gate? How did the King of Ten Thousand Slaves come out? Could it be that he was really a god, with the power to move a ten-thousand-ton boulder? I muttered, “No matter what’s inside, we’ll never get in.”

The same giant bronze artifact, as well as the giant bronze tree I saw in the deep mountains of the Qinling, were also buried deep at the bottom of the mountains. Are these giant bronze artifacts, which cannot be built by human power, related? Or are there other giant mountains, such as the Kunlun and Himalayas, where such things also exist in their huge mountains?

I felt vaguely that I was approaching a huge ancient mystery. A sense of extreme inferiority arose spontaneously. Compared to the ancient mystery of these miracles, I was really unworthy of mention, and I could not even see the hope of knowing the truth.

The flare gradually went out, and the darkness enveloped the ground again. But I stayed there until Pan Zi patted me on the side and said, “Go down,” before I came to my senses.

We climbed down the chains one by one, and soon we reached the bottom of the valley. We walked carefully on the bones beneath our feet, and when we reached the bronze gate, I felt even more insignificant, and I almost felt like kneeling down.

People in our generation would feel the same way if they came here. It is not hard to imagine how shocked the Dongxia warriors would have been when they came here with Wang Zanghai after so much effort. It is no wonder that they would never forget their experience here, and they would do anything to record everything here and pass it on to future generations. I could even feel Wang Zanghai’s pain, the fear of suddenly realizing that he knew nothing, after having thought that he had thoroughly understood the laws of the universe.

I was lost in my thoughts when the fat man interrupted me.

He was shining his flashlight into the middle of the rift valley. The bottom of this underground rift valley was 500 to 600 meters wide, and the gravel on the ground was like small hills. The fat man walked very far and saw a huge rock in the middle of the rift valley, which had been split into a series of platforms, like a small pyramid. A long stone staircase was built on one side of the rock, and there was a small lamp on each side of each step.

What caught the fat man’s attention was the object placed on the stone platform. It was a huge white stone coffin the size of a car. Nine stone-carved centipedes were coiled at the bottom of the coffin, forming the image of a lotus flower. There were also four black stone figures standing around, facing in all directions and making a kneeling gesture.

In front of the coffin was a large tripod with offerings, and behind it was a screen wall. When viewed from above, these things are the same as ordinary stones and are not easy to see, so I didn’t see them just now.

I gasped in surprise: “Could this be… the Nine Dragons Coffin of the King of Ten Thousand Slaves? What Wang Zanghai said in the secret scroll of the dragon fish?”

The fat man said, “It’s definitely the case. Didn’t someone say that the coffin of the King of Ten Thousand Slaves was guarded by nine dragons? Look at the bottom of the coffin. Aren’t there nine centipedes? I thought Chen Pi A-si was just trying to confuse us, but I never thought it was true!”

We had always thought that the King of Ten Thousand had only a shadow coffin in the underground palace of his tomb, and that his body had been buried in the sky. We had already given up hope of finding the real king’s coffin, but here we had actually found the real Nine Dragons Carrying Coffin. We were all excited, and several of the more impatient ones had already run over. Ning, who was standing nearby, hurriedly stopped them, shouting, “Don’t go over there, it’s dangerous!”

The people who had run over immediately stopped. Ah-ning shouted, “Don’t you see the centipede dragon under the coffin?”

The fat man said, “My aunt, that’s a stone carving. It’s not dangerous at all. What kind of eyes do you have?”

Ah-ning’s eyebrows were raised. “What kind of eyes do you have? I’m not talking about those stone carvings. Look carefully at the edge of the stone platform!”

The edge of the stone platform? I saw that Ah-Ning’s expression was very serious, but I looked left and right at the edge of the stone platform, but I really couldn’t see anything. I didn’t know what she was so nervous about, so I let her point it out to me.

A-Ning used a flashlight as a teaching stick and pointed at it. At first, I still didn’t see anything. When I was extremely puzzled, I suddenly discovered that the stone platform had moved. I immediately discovered that there was actually a huge volcano centipede coiled on the stone platform, which was five or six meters long. Because it was so big, and because the color of its shell was almost the same as the color of the volcano, at first glance, I couldn’t see that there was such a thing lying on it. After finding the first one, we immediately found the second, third, fourth… a total of nine giant centipedes, all coiled on the stone platform, like reliefs on the stone, almost blending into the stone platform.

Nine dragons carrying a corpse, it is truly worthy of the name!

Ah Ning said, “If you climb onto the stone platform and don’t understand what’s going on, you’ll definitely be bitten in half. Volcanic centipedes are carnivorous insects that are very fierce and fast. Our body shape is exactly what they like to prey on.”

I’ve already experienced a lot of strange things. If these centipedes grow to a meter long, I can still forgive them. After all, this is an underground rift in a volcano, and the environment and air composition are mostly different. They have also been found in other places in the world, but I have never seen insects so big and beyond reason. This is like a monster mutated by radiation in an American horror movie.

A Chinese expert in Aning’s team said to himself, “This is strange. The lifespan of this kind of centipede is usually only two or three years. The bugs should have died when they were only as long as a finger. These few can grow to this size. Could they have lived for thousands of years?”