Chapter 241
Chapter 241
This method truly offered a chance of survival!
But it was also extremely dangerous.
Feng shui divination could never be one hundred percent accurate, especially when I had made my calculations deep underground with the golden compass. It was essentially a blind test. What if I was wrong?
What if this underground river did not lead to the Chuan River north of town at all, but merely twisted back and forth through the mountain’s rock layers?
No matter what, remaining trapped here meant certain death!
If we tried, at least we had a sliver of hope.
After hearing Old Cao’s suggestion, I immediately nodded.
“All right! It’s our only choice, so we’ll risk our lives on it. Hopefully this underground river will offer us a path to survival.”
I hurriedly took three pieces of talisman paper from my coat pocket. Fortunately, the water in the cavern had only just risen past my waist. If it had been any deeper and soaked all my talisman paper, we truly would have been finished!
I bit my finger and quickly drew three Breath-Holding Talismans in blood, then stuck one onto each of us–Old Cao, Roundy, and me.
The moment I finished, the water had already reached my chest!
It was warm sulfur water surging from deep underground and would probably have felt quite pleasant to soak in.
I had sometimes heard Yao Nan and Wang Dachun talk about visiting hot-spring resorts in Yu City’s Beibei District during vacations. The more natural a hot spring was, drawn straight from underground, the more expensive it tended to be.
Now we were soaking in the finest hot spring for free, yet it brought us no pleasure at all. We were terrified instead.
Old Cao tightly gripped my hand.
“Xiao Wu, don’t be nervous. With your Breath-Holding Talismans, we won’t drown or choke in the water. The current will only toss us around. As long as we hold tightly to each other and don’t get separated, we’ll be fine.”
“I understand, Old Cao!”
Then I tightly grabbed the stupid bird Roundy’s wing too.
By then, the water had reached our necks!
This was an enclosed underground cavern, and only the underground river was flowing out, creating tremendous suction. We did not even need to swim toward it; the pull dragged us over.
We plunged straight into the underground river channel and disappeared beneath the surging Yellow Springs water.
At once, my entire body seemed to enter a strange state.
I could neither see nor hear, and I had no control over my body. I was swept helplessly along by the swiftly flowing underground river…
Because the Yellow Springs water flowed through rock layers, the space was not large and was even narrow in places. The torrent occasionally swept us near the rock walls, and every collision hurt sharply.
I could only endure the pain and did not dare cry out.
The Breath-Holding Talisman merely allowed a person to hold their breath and survive underwater for a comparatively long period. If I opened my mouth, water would still rush inside!
Choking would be agonizing, and once water entered the windpipe, suffocation would naturally become a danger!
And so, two people and one bird drifted helplessly through the sulfurous underground river, swept toward an unknown destination.
In such circumstances, a person’s perception of time changed.
Perhaps only a few minutes passed, but they felt as long as a century!
I had no idea how much time went by…
Suddenly!
I felt the Breath-Holding Talisman expire.
That meant if the current did not soon carry us into the Chuan River, where we could surface, we would truly drown in this underground river!
The thought alone was miserable.
“The Breath-Holding Talismans I can draw currently last five minutes. That means the river has swept us through these underground rock layers for five minutes, yet we still haven’t reached the riverbank? Now we can only rely on holding our own breath.”
At home, I often submerged my head in a washbasin and practiced holding my breath. On a good attempt, I could last roughly two and a half minutes, entirely thanks to internal martial arts training, which had greatly increased my lung capacity.
Old Cao and Roundy certainly could not do that!
That made me worry even more about them.
After another unknown span of time, I still did not find holding my breath too uncomfortable. Suddenly, my body felt light. The water around me seemed to diminish, then vanished altogether…
The muffled silence of being underwater shattered. I heard water roaring, and my body flew uncontrollably through the air.
“What’s happening?”
Before I could react, I slammed heavily onto the cold ground with a dull thud.
“Ow!”
I cried out instinctively.
Then I discovered with delight that I had escaped the underground river.
I quickly opened my eyes, wiped the water from my face, and looked carefully.
The Yellow Springs water had actually washed me into another underground cavern!
Here, the roaring underground river split into two streams. One continued from the fork into the rock layers, probably flowing toward the Chuan River.
The other branched off and poured into this cavern.
At the fork, all three of us had happened to be swept into this new cavern!
Cough, cough… Retch, retch…
I heard Old Cao coughing up water. He had clearly choked. If we had not been washed out just then, he probably could not have held his breath much longer.
The stupid bird Roundy stood on the ground, vigorously shaking its feathers like a soaked dog and flinging water everywhere as it complained without pause.
“Good heavens! Lord Bird really does hate water most of all. Damn it, this underground water stinks. That sulfur smell is awful.”
It spat several times.
Knowing we had escaped danger for now, I remained fairly optimistic and relaxed a little. I laughed and scolded it.
“Stupid bird, you should be grateful we survived. What are you complaining about?”
I helped Old Cao up, then began examining our surroundings.
This cavern was probably even deeper underground than the one containing Corpseglow Moss.
Of course, it was also much smaller–only about the size of a classroom. Its ceiling was five or six meters high, however, so it was not low.
A faint blue light also filled this cavern. But it did not come from Corpseglow Moss on the walls. It came from blue crystalline ore.
The ore resembled crystal, though it was not as transparent.
“Old Cao, Roundy, do you recognize this glowing ore?”
Both shook their heads, indicating they had never seen it.
Old Cao suddenly pointed upward and lowered his voice.
“Look above you!”
What?
I raised my head. By the glow of the blue ore, I saw humanoid figures hanging from the cavern ceiling!
Because the cavern was rather tall, I had not noticed them at first.
At a glance, there were about a dozen. Suspended in this deep underground space, they looked indescribably eerie and sinister.
Whew…
I let out a long breath and smiled bitterly.
“Looks like something strange has appeared again.”
Roundy clamored,
“What is there to fear? All three of us are strong. So what if those things hanging from the ceiling are fierce ghosts or corpse-fiends? We’ll wipe them all out!”
As the fat bird spoke, it even drew a wing across its throat in a comical throat-slitting gesture.
I ignored it and carefully studied the upside-down humanoid figures.
White threads were wound around their bodies, wrapping them so tightly that I could not see what lay inside.