Chapter Forty-Nine: Flare

Seeing this scene, my instinct was to recoil from the black fur, but I soon realized there was nowhere to hide.

In places both visible and hidden, black downy fur drifted everywhere, a sight that chilled the soul. Although we could not see what was happening above, the evidence before us and the heavy silence surrounding us made the outcome of that confrontation painfully clear.

Yet, I could not fathom what kind of creature could make tens of thousands of ferocious, red-eyed rats vanish into thin air in an instant.

Regardless, the Fatty and I were still alive for the moment.

"Hey, do you think they might have wiped each other out up there?" the Fatty asked, gauging the situation by the surrounding stillness.

"It's possible. There's no reason for so many red-eyed rats to die for nothing, but we’d better get out of here quickly."

Looking at the wreckage strewn across the ground, neither of us wanted to stay even a second longer. As we set off, I took one last look at the ground where the totem had been painted, only to find it completely obscured by blood and corrosive fluids.

The two of us walked side by side along the circular corridor, carrying our smokeless furnace. The Fatty couldn't move quickly this time, so the task of keeping watch fell to me. But after searching for a long time, we didn't see another stone door like the first. And the crack that Wei Lin had mentioned before now seemed like nothing more than a joke.

After walking for I don't know how long, the Fatty began to struggle, and I was utterly exhausted.

"We've been circling here for almost three hours. If we keep walking, we'll probably end up right back where we started." The Fatty set down the furnace and plopped onto the ground.

I was scouting beneath the wall, and seeing him sit down made my own legs turn to jelly. Still, I gritted my teeth and walked to the edge of the pit of bones, wanting to see what was inside.

That aimless glance sent a jolt of terror through my heart.

There, in the pit of bones, a massive hole had appeared near the edge. I carefully observed the area around the crater and confirmed that this was the very hole left behind when the giant rat had crawled out of the tunnel earlier.

"Damn it, have we circled all the way back here?" I looked back, but couldn't find the stone door, and there were no traces of the giant rat on the ground before us.

The Fatty walked over to ask what was wrong, and I explained the situation to him.

"Huh?" The Fatty was puzzled, but after a moment of thought, he said, "Could it be that this pit isn't the same one you saw before?"

It was possible, but that would mean there wasn't just one giant rat in the vicinity. Yet, no matter how I looked at it, the hole seemed all too familiar.

Although I couldn't recall every detail of the original crater, I felt that things were not as simple as the Fatty suggested.

After watching for a while, the Fatty suddenly turned his head toward me with a strange look in his eyes.

"Miss, how about we take a look inside this pit?"

The moment he made the suggestion, my hair stood on end.

I stared at the Fatty, speechless. "Are you out of your mind? Forget about whether there might be giant rats down there; the whole area is covered in skeletons. If your weight presses down on that, what if the hole collapses?"

"Stop picking on my figure, would you? What I mean is, we've been walking here for so long—you know the situation as well as I do. Instead of fantasizing about an exit up ahead, we might as well look inside. Maybe there’s something else down there."

That might be true, but I didn't think we would find much in that hole.

After all, we were trying to find a way up, and this pit was clearly leading down. Since it didn't seem to help our situation, I saw no reason to take the risk.

After discussing it with the Fatty, we decided that if we circled back to the place where the meat sarcophagi had fallen and still found nothing, we would return to check the pit.

The Fatty gave up on resting, and the two of us continued forward.

But just a few steps later, a "clatter" sound erupted from the pit. We turned to look and saw some of the dry bones sliding downward. Thinking something was in there, we stopped in our tracks, tense.

After a while, the noise ceased, and we saw nothing unusual.

The Fatty patted me, telling me not to panic, and we started walking again.

Just then, the sound of sliding bones came from the pit once more, and it was even louder than before.

Both the Fatty and I were suspicious, so we turned around to face the pit again.

I had always thought the stability of the pit was poor; the noise was either caused by something moving beneath it or by vibrations making the bones shift.

We really didn't believe there was anything down there. The Fatty, unwilling to be intimidated, turned and took two more steps.

I stayed put, but the moment the Fatty moved, I saw several bones on the edge of the pit begin to slide again. And as soon as the Fatty stopped, the sound vanished instantly.

"Well, that’s truly strange." The Fatty still didn't believe it. "Can the vibrations of our footsteps really travel that far into the pit?"

He tested it a few more times, walking back and forth, but the result was always the same.

Gradually, I began to feel that something was deeply wrong. I was convinced that the reason the bones were rolling into the pit had nothing to do with our footsteps. After watching in silence for a while, a bizarre feeling took hold of me—the pit filled with skeletons seemed as if it didn't want us to leave.

At that thought, the lifeless, dry bones before me seemed to pulse with a faint, evil vitality.

The Fatty and I stood at the edge of the corridor, carefully observing the pile of skeletons for anything else. In the dead of silence, a strange "hiss" echoed from above us.

The Fatty and I shuddered in unison and immediately looked up.

The Fatty's previous theory about them wiping each other out was silenced by that sound. And as we searched for the source of the noise, a series of sounds erupted from the bone pit beneath our feet.

"Clatter, rattle," many of the skeletons began to slide into the hole.

Looking down, I realized it wasn't just the bones near the edge that were moving; the entire pit of remains—every broken limb and shattered bone—was now surging into the hole like a flowing river, moving faster and faster.

No matter how many bones poured in, the size of the hole did not change in the slightest.

At the same time, the noise above our heads began to intensify. Recalling the reaction of the red-eyed rats, I knew that whatever was up there was no ordinary threat. If it could deal with tens of thousands of red-eyed rats so easily, then finishing off the Fatty and me would be child's play.

I suddenly realized that since arriving here, everything the Fatty and I had done had been purely reactive. Though we were still alive, we were effectively in a position where we could be slaughtered at any moment.

Peanut had said he knew something about the Tomb of the King of Yelang, but he had no concept of this place. At this very moment, I felt that the "concept" Peanut spoke of was nothing more than pure, malevolent sorcery.

This ancient tomb wasn't just filled with traps; it felt as if it had become a gathering place for all sorts of terrifying horrors for some unknown reason.

The poisonous biting insects, the living coffins, the giant red-eyed rats, the underworld specters, the thing hovering above us, this eerie pit of bones... and the word "Gold" that Yang Lang had struggled to write before he died... it felt as if we hadn't broken into an ancient tomb, but had stepped into a nest of monsters.

With the strange occurrences happening both above and below, the Fatty truly panicked. Without consulting me, he pulled a flare gun from his gear bag, loaded it, and pulled the trigger toward the ceiling.

White light erupted from the muzzle and shot rapidly into the heights. The increasingly dazzling glare made my eyes ache, but I didn't shield them, straining instead to see the surroundings.

At first glance, I saw the exit of the tunnel the Fatty and I had fallen from. It hung high above us like a fifty-meter diving board.

Thinking about falling from such a height without breaking a single bone, I didn't know whether to call myself lucky or cursed.

And the brick walls above us were lined with ring upon ring of corridors, each layer separated by nearly twenty meters. I couldn't even count how many levels there were. Looking out, I felt as if I were at the bottom of a towering pagoda.

Before the Fatty could cry out in shock, I spotted something moving near the massive brick carvings on the upper walls and the stone tripods scattered along the corridors.

At that moment, the Fatty shouted down at the pit: "Damn your ancestors!"

I looked down into the pit of bones, and the veins on my temples felt like they were about to burst.

As things stood, the pit of bones could no longer be called a pit of bones. Because every skeleton and every white bone had poured into the hole at the edge, I could no longer see a single bone. What was revealed beneath them was a massive, hideously distorted... human face.