Volume 5Chapter 31: The never-ending cycle of death

The faces of the others were ashen. We looked around, and the more we looked, the more certain we became. There were still our footprints everywhere. This was indeed the same tomb chamber where we had just found Shunzi’s father.

The tomb passage was straight, and we didn’t take a single turn when we walked. The four of us, one corpse each, can all testify that, according to reason, we definitely wouldn’t have walked for twenty minutes and returned to the starting point. This is simply too incredible. It’s like being trapped by ghosts.

The fat guy was a bit puzzled. He looked at the entrance of the tunnel and said, “Could it be that we took a wrong turn without realizing it? This is really weird.”

Pan Zi said, “No, if we took a wrong turn, the four of us would have noticed. I remember that we walked straight, and the tunnel wasn’t long or branched off. There’s no reason to remember it wrong.”

The fat man said, “Then it must be a ghost wall. Shunzi, is your father playing a joke on us? You have to educate it. We’re doing business.”

Shunzi was so angry with the fat man that he said, “Stop talking nonsense.”

I stopped them. It was really not the right time to argue. I was sweating all over because I felt that the most undesirable thing might have happened. But I still wasn’t sure. I said, “Don’t argue. We need to see if we really took a wrong turn. There’s only one way to find out. Let’s go back and take another look.”

The others looked at each other. They probably sensed something was wrong when they saw my expression.

At that moment, I was already thinking about the expressions of those mummies. Was it possible that they had been trapped in this way, without food, and had died? It was too unbelievable that they would have gone back to the original room without food. But my intuition told me that I might be right, and that the same thing that had happened to them had now happened to us.

What I had to do now was to prove my hunch, or rather, to deny my terrible hunch. So I couldn’t wait to enter the tomb passage, and the others hurried to follow me.

Because we had already passed through it once and were sure there were no traps, this time we walked very quickly. I almost sprinted ahead, keeping my eyes fixed on the path on either side to make sure there were no side roads, and I didn’t turn back for no reason.

This time, it took less than ten minutes to complete the entire journey. When I felt that we were about to see the end of the tunnel, I was almost praying non-stop, hoping that my premonition would not come true. But in the end, when I saw that almost identical jade door, my heart suddenly turned cold, and cold sweat involuntarily came out.

After entering the door, the fat man rushed up to the golden mountain. Then he knelt down and covered his face. I rushed over and saw six corpses. Everything we had lined up was there… We were back.

My premonition had come true. We had gone straight all the way back to the starting point without any detours or turning back, with 100% concentration.

The fat guy was tired and panting, “This is a ghost wall. This is definitely a ghost wall. No matter how we go, it’s a loop. Both ends of this tomb are this tomb. This time we’re going to see Shunzi’s father. Shunzi, you should talk to your father and stop playing with us, or we’ll leave him here and go on our own.”

Shunzi was already surprised enough to be unable to argue with him. I was also flustered and kept turning around to look at the walls, but I didn’t know what I was looking at.

“Calm down! Calm down!” Pan Zi was panting heavily on the side, “Don’t be rash. Didn’t you say that Wang Zanghai’s stuff was just a small trick to create psychological pressure at best? We must not fall for it even if we know this. We must be calm now. Something is definitely wrong.”

After Pan Zi said that, I suddenly had a revelation, and I suddenly became much more sober. The feeling of despair immediately faded, and I hurriedly nodded, saying, “You’re right. This must be a trap. We have already confirmed it in the underwater tomb. There is no such thing as a ghost hitting the wall. Wang Zanghai is good at using clever traps to create a strange atmosphere. If you don’t know the details, it’s easy to let him lead you by the nose.” As he said this, he hurriedly rubbed his face to get himself out of that suffocating feeling.

I said these words to myself, and I didn’t know what I had said after I finished.

Afterwards, I thought about this time, and I felt that I should have already felt that things were beyond my control, and I wanted to use these words to hint to myself not to give up.

Because just now when I walked down that tomb passage, it felt too real. I couldn’t imagine how the mechanism could have caused this phenomenon. The first thing that came to my mind was that the tomb chamber or the tomb passage had moved, but that was impossible. We weren’t walking slowly, so if the tomb chamber had moved, how fast would it have had to be moving? The tomb passage was even more impossible. We were in it, so if there had been even the slightest tremor, we would have definitely known about it. But if it wasn’t the tomb passage or the tomb chamber that had moved, then there was no explanation.

Although I kept telling myself that it was a mechanism, I already knew in my heart that it couldn’t be explained by a mechanism. But saying it out loud was still good for others, at least it could reduce panic.

However, I underestimated the psychological endurance of the fat man and his friends. Pan Zi was much calmer than me. He wiped the sweat off his face and asked me, “No matter if it’s a ghost or a mechanism, we have to solve it. What should we do now? Do we have to walk again?”

I gritted my teeth and said, “Let’s walk again! This time, we’ll walk slowly and carefully, and I don’t believe there’s a flaw.”

So we walked into the tomb passage again. This time, we walked for forty minutes, but before we reached the end, we knew we had failed because the tomb door was exactly the same, and we didn’t feel anything along the way.

After that, we don’t know how many times we walked in, and all ended in failure. I gradually felt the despair of those corpses, and the faces of several people were getting worse and worse.

I felt that this was not the way to go, so after returning to the tomb room, I told them not to go any further. Since we had gone so many times, we had basically ruled out everything, and this mechanism must have been designed using a method that we could never have imagined.

The fat guy was so tired that he was almost exhausted, but he still insisted on continuing to walk. His idea was that maybe at some point, the previous tomb passage would come back, and at that time we would be able to escape.

Pan Zi heard him say this and only said one sentence: “You should give up this idea. That tunnel will never come back.”

He then looked at the few dried corpses on the side. The meaning was clear. Those few dried corpses had definitely gone into the tunnel many times more than we had, but they were still trapped and dead. So it was useless to go down the tunnel. It would be useless to go down the tunnel a million times. We don’t need to think about such a lucky thing.

The fat man suddenly stopped breathing, sat down, and said, “According to what you said, aren’t we dead? These people have definitely tried everything here, and it’s useless for us to try it again.”

Pan Zi said, “Don’t think about it. If you think about it now, then you might as well just kill yourself. Wait until we’ve done everything we can, and then think about despair. Now that we still have the strength, let’s think of a way.”

I thought of the corpse food and asked, “Do you want to limit the food now? We need to be prepared for a long battle. The longer we can survive, the greater the chance we have of getting out.”

Pan Zi sighed and shook his head: “Little Master, I won’t lie to you. We’re actually not as good as them. We don’t have much food. I think we can only eat two meals at most, and it’s not enough to fill us up. I don’t think we need to limit our food. We should eat as much as we want to keep our energy up. I estimate that if we can’t get out of here within two days, there will be no other way. Then we should use explosives. If explosives don’t work, then I’ll wait for someone else to collect my body.”

Two days. My heart trembled. How long have these mummies been here? Can we get out in two days? I really don’t have a clue.

The fat guy’s stomach was already grumbling, so he asked Pan Zi, “Comrade Cook, can we eat earlier? I’ll solve the things that distract me first, and then I’ll have the strength to think about other things.”

When the fat man said that, we all felt hungry. Pan Zi had no choice but to light the stove and cook. Our food was actually only leftover noodles. It was okay when we first ate it, but it didn’t last long. The fat man complained that there was no meat, and I said that there were frozen ribs. If you can eat them, Shunzi doesn’t mind, and we don’t mind.

After eating, we felt warm and full of energy. Several of us began to think about this thing. I recalled the entire process of descending into the underground palace. It was thrilling. I didn’t expect that after descending into the underground palace, it was still unstable. This underground palace, Wang Zanghai must have a design theme. What is it?

The underground palace is in the shape of a Chinese character “回” (hui), with the spirit hall in the middle, the most strictly guarded place. Wang Zanghai must not dare to tamper with it. In other places, the underground palace is surrounded by sacrificial pits, burial pits, drainage systems and intricate corridors and tombs. So we are still in the outer extension of the center of the underground palace.

I tried to estimate the vertical and horizontal distances we had traveled, and used my estimate of the size of the underground palace to determine our location. But it seemed very difficult. We had lost our bearings in the underwater tunnel, and no one knew which direction the hole we had finally emerged from was facing.

While I was rapidly spinning my brain, the fat guy, who was pretending to think, suddenly made a look of sudden enlightenment and said to us, “I’ve got it!”