Chapter 199
Chapter 199
Strictly speaking, Qin Ying had not known Yin Minmin for very long, but she had never seen her look so utterly hopeless.
Hearing that something was wrong with her voice, Qin Ying pressed a hand firmly onto her shoulder. “Don’t panic. Let’s put some distance between us and this place before we talk.”
There were still plenty of creatures like the Human-Faced Flesh Mass behind them, as well as the thing in the darkness that had apparently killed Black Fatty.
This was no place for a conversation.
Whatever Yin Minmin had been through had left her dazed. Qin Ying took her by the hand, and she stumbled along in a stupor.
Feng Meiyu and Zhao Jixian followed behind them.
They walked onward for what felt like an eternity.
By the time the kerosene lamp began to dim, they finally reached a smaller trackside refuge alcove.
It had no door or walls, only a curved recess about two meters wide cut into the side of the tunnel.
There was just enough room for three to five people to shelter temporarily.
Qin Ying stuffed two chocolate bars into Yin Minmin’s mouth, then watched her gulp down an entire bottle of mineral water.
Only then did Yin Minmin recover somewhat.
Suddenly, she started as though she had just remembered something and looked around frantically. “Sister Ying, where’s Zhang Lang?”
“He protected me on the way out. How did he disappear?”
The thought that Zhang Lang might have gotten lost in this godforsaken tunnel made Yin Minmin feel as if her entire world had come crashing down.
At her words, Qin Ying carefully thought back over what had happened, then slapped a hand to her forehead.
Come to think of it, the claw marks on the badly wounded thug’s back really did look like Zhang Lang’s handiwork after his Monstrous Beast Transformation.
Could the monster Black Seven and the others had encountered in the headlights have been Zhang Lang?
What gave Qin Ying an even bigger headache was that Zhang Lang had probably suffered badly at the Thunderbird’s claws during that whole case of mistaken identity.
Now he was wounded and lost somewhere in the tunnel, and no one knew whether he was dead or alive.
Qin Ying could not help glancing at the Thunderbird perched on her shoulder.
The whole misunderstanding had happened because the Thunderbird had never seen Zhang Lang, while Zhang Lang had never seen the Thunderbird either.
Noticing the change in her expression, Yin Minmin asked cautiously, “What’s wrong?”
She was terrified Qin Ying might say something like she had seen Zhang Lang’s body.
Qin Ying opened her mouth, then glanced at Zhao Jixian and Feng Meiyu beside them. She did not rush to explain.
Yin Minmin followed her gaze. Zhao Jixian, who wore his hair in a braid and was dressed in an old-fashioned train conductor’s uniform, immediately shrank back, his lips trembling.
Seeing that Yin Minmin looked ready to be frightened out of her wits again, Qin Ying hurriedly took her hand.
She introduced them. “They’re from Express No. 37, in the Third Year of Ruixi.”
Qin Ying read the details from the ticket Feng Meiyu carried.
Yin Minmin was quick on the uptake. Her expression crumpled as she realized that these two people came from a different spacetime.
She was not as mentally resilient as Qin Ying and could not bring herself to treat them as ordinary living people. She huddled behind Qin Ying like a frightened quail.
Qin Ying also knew that it would cause trouble if Feng Meiyu and Zhao Jixian overheard their conversation.
She said nothing else about Zhang Lang and merely asked, “What exactly happened to your group?”
At the thought of that awful experience, Yin Minmin pulled a bitter face. “We were all set up by the people in that village.”
When Yin Minmin and her group arrived, they had followed standard procedure and begun making inquiries.
None of them had expected to be inexplicably tricked in Qingzhai Village.
Just like the deception Qin Ying had encountered, the villagers had held a funeral and a wedding at the same time.
The difference was that Yin Minmin’s group did not share Qin Ying’s ability to detect lies. From the very beginning, they had been led around by the nose.
It had not taken long for them to fall into Zhang Yuqin and the others’ trap.
After hearing the story about the Mountain God taking a bride from the village, Yin Minmin and her companions made a decision.
They would have Yin Minmin put on the red bridal jacket and take the bride’s place, so they could find out what exactly this Mountain God was.
But the moment Yin Minmin put on that headdress, her mind began to grow hazy.
By the time she woke up, she was drenched from head to toe and standing inside this tunnel.
“This tunnel is like the Labyrinth of Minos. There’s no way out. We’ve been wandering around in here for days.”
Qin Ying sensed something was wrong and turned to look at Yin Minmin.
Days?
Even counting every possible minute, they couldn’t have been missing for more than forty-eight hours.
Though puzzled, Qin Ying didn’t interrupt Yin Minmin.
There had been five people in Yin Minmin’s group. For the past few days, they had survived by drinking water that seeped down through the rock, while Zong Li hunted creatures known as Human-Headed Flesh Mass to keep them fed.
In the end, they had Zhang Lang to thank. His Monstrous Beast Form was an armadillo, with sharp claws perfectly suited to digging.
They noticed something unusual in one of the refuge alcoves and dug a hole there.
They had thought it would lead them out, only to break into an abandoned underground project instead.
It had been built with reinforced concrete and quality materials, forming a small subterranean fortification.
The passageways inside twisted and turned like another maze. Only after reaching the center did they discover that the innermost chamber was a cavern that had been blasted open.
The cavern was filled with black Yellow Springs Eye Stone, and half a beast skeleton rested atop a Western-style altar.
Before Wu Qian and the others could figure out what it was, the skeleton suddenly exploded.
Literally exploded.
Someone had buried old-fashioned blasting charges beneath the altar, and the entire stone platform was blown apart.
At that distance, even immortals couldn’t have withstood the blast, let alone Wu Qian, Zong Li, and the others.
Only Zhang Lang and Yin Minmin, who had been bringing up the rear, escaped with relatively minor injuries.
Wu Qian, Zong Li, and the other member of the Action Team only avoided being blown to pieces because that man underwent Monstrous Beast Transformation and shielded them at the last second.
Even so, none of them could move. With no other options, they sent Zhang Lang and Yin Minmin back through the tunnel they had dug to try to find help outside.
After hearing the whole story, Qin Ying sighed.
A Western-style altar. An underground fortification. Blasting charges.
If she was right, this was the work of that Foreign Chief Engineer.
That foreign devil had definitely done more than simply build a tunnel.
He must have been up to something behind the scenes.
Qin Ying took a deep breath and said to Yin Minmin, “Let’s go back to the passage Zhang Lang dug.”
They couldn’t find a way out through the tunnel anyway, so they might as well head up there and try their luck.
Given his animal instincts, the injured Zhang Lang might have returned to the hole he had dug to hide.
Qin Ying’s suggestion was nothing more than a desperate gamble.
But no one had a better idea.
Zhao Jixian and Feng Meiyu, who had listened from the side without understanding half of what was going on, raised no objections.
The four of them headed toward the locomotive again.
This time, with a clearheaded Yin Minmin leading the way, they soon entered a refuge alcove on the left side of the locomotive.
The alcove had been tidied up, and traces of a campfire remained on the ground.
The people from the Cultural Preservation Bureau had clearly stayed here for quite some time.
A narrow earthen tunnel had been dug into one wall.
It was about half a person’s height and sloped gently upward.
Qin Ying bent down to look inside, only to find it pitch-black.
She reapplied Xuncao Flower Water to herself, then crawled inside first with the Thunderbird.
Crawling through the dark, cramped tunnel gave her a taste of what it was like to be a rat.
Before long, halfway through the tunnel, her hand brushed against something covered in scales.
She was startled at first, then overjoyed.
Using the dim light of the nearly empty kerosene lamp, she saw Zhang Lang curled into a ball, half his body charred black.
Qin Ying reached out and pressed her fingers to the side of his neck. When she felt that his pulse was still beating, she let out a long breath of relief.
By the time she dragged Zhang Lang out of the tunnel, she was utterly spent.