Chapter 245
Chapter 245
Winged creatures had a unique gift for finding their way.
At Qin Ying’s command, Jinbao circled through the darkness.
It was quite intelligent. It had simply lived for years on the uninhabited Golden Saddle Mountain without even another bird to talk to, leaving it rather innocent by nature.
As it circled overhead, it soon discovered a pattern in the walls of dry bones below.
Whoever had pulled the teeth from the ancient battlefield remains and bound the bones together with iron wire to form these walls must have been highly versed in divination and numerology.
The walls of bones formed concentric rings throughout the underground chamber, laid out as a Bagua diagram.
They corresponded perfectly with the Bagua Well above.
In this pitch-black place crowded with human remains, any intruder would most likely become lost among the identical walls of bones.
But whoever had arranged all this years ago had failed to anticipate one thing.
The people who broke in after all these years no longer carried dim torches. They had cell phones.
Nor had that person expected one of them to be able to fly.
Jinbao did not need to understand the I Ching or Bagua. It simply flapped its wings and cheated from the air, quickly finding the way out of the hidden chamber.
After returning to Qin Ying’s shoulder, it pointed in that direction.
“Good work.” Qin Ying raised a hand and stroked it.
Before they set off, she took out her phone.
No matter how many ingenious schemes the builder of this place had devised, they could never have imagined that cell phones would exist years later.
More importantly, they were still beneath the Hu Family Manor, yet the signal was… surprisingly good.
Qin Ying opened the map app on her phone and started recording their route.
Following Jinbao’s directions, the three of them wound around one wall of ancient bones after another as they headed toward the exit.
After about five or six minutes, Xie Shao suddenly said, “It connected.”
Qin Ying and Han Lie both turned to look at him.
Expressionless, Xie Shao raised his phone. The screen showed that it had connected to a Wi-Fi network.
The network was named Exhibition Hall.
Qin Ying found the whole thing bizarre. In a place littered with molars and resembling an ancient battlefield, suddenly connecting to Wi-Fi was downright surreal.
With his enlarged hand making the phone look like a tiny cracker, Xie Shao said, “I visited this place this afternoon.”
“The Exhibition Hall displays artifacts from the Hu Family Manor.”
Things like the old millstone in the rear courtyard, an antique toilet, and a canopy bed.
Back then, Xie Shao had connected to the Exhibition Hall’s Wi-Fi upstairs.
Unexpectedly, his phone had automatically reconnected down here.
After thinking back, Xie Shao told Qin Ying and Han Lie, “The Exhibition Hall was built outside the Hu Family Ancestral Hall.”
He pointed his mutated, carrot-thick hand in the direction the Thunderbird was leading them.
“So, in theory, the place we’re heading toward should be beneath the Hu Family Ancestral Hall.”
There was no need to elaborate on how important an ancestral hall had been to a clan in the old days.
Something extremely important to the Hu Family had to be hidden beneath it.
Xie Shao said solemnly, “Stay sharp from here on. Once we’re out, let’s all go have tea together.”
Honest as ever, Han Lie nodded.
Qin Ying, however, frowned at his words. They sounded terribly ominous to her.
The thought had only just crossed her mind when a pinprick of green light appeared around the corner ahead, glowing eerily in the darkness.
In a sinister place like this, a green light was worse than no light at all.
Qin Ying instinctively raised the Di Shang Dagger to defend herself.
Han Lie slowly hunched forward, his entire body like a compressed spring ready to uncoil at any moment.
Xie Shao stepped over the teeth strewn across the floor as the muscles throughout his body swelled, making him appear a size larger.
The three of them remained warily on guard, but the pinprick of green light did not move. It stayed dozens of paces away.
Qin Ying said, “Let’s take a closer look.”
Together, the three of them advanced toward the green light.
After rounding a bend, they saw a blue-green flame hovering faintly beneath a wall of bones.
It was the spontaneous combustion caused by the phosphorus in bones converting into phosphine, collecting in low-lying areas, and igniting when the humidity was low.
“Phosphorescent fire?” Qin Ying blurted out.
Xie Shao visibly relaxed and was about to straighten up when Han Lie warned, “Careful.”
Han Lie might have been young, but he was by no means inexperienced in combat.
In fact, he was exceptionally sharp.
While Xie Shao was breathing a sigh of relief, thinking it was only ordinary phosphorescent fire, Han Lie was the first to realize something was wrong.
As he called out his warning, he reached into the wall of bones beside him and forcibly wrenched out a femur to use as a weapon.
It was a gruesome and filthy choice of weapon, but still better than fighting barehanded.
Gripping the leg bone, he stepped in front of Qin Ying.
The instant his warning left his mouth, the flame shed its earlier ghostly stillness and shot straight toward them.
Xie Shao was big and slow to react. Though he heard Han Lie’s warning, his body failed to move in time.
All he could do was watch as the ghostly flame hurtled toward his face.
Ordinarily, phosphorescent fire did not burn at a high temperature.
But as the flame lunged at him, Xie Shao could already smell the black hair on his face scorching.
Having fused with the incomplete genes of the Monstrous Beast Dang Kang, he had inherited some of the mountain boar’s ferocity as well.
Seeing that he could not dodge, he gritted his teeth, shut his eyes, and rammed his head toward the flame.
Sizzle.
The blue-green fire singed the black hair on his face into curls. Just as even his skin began to feel the searing heat, a sharp gust swept in from the side.
A yellowed femur whipped past Xie Shao’s cheek and struck the blue-green flame head-on.
The blow stopped it cold, and the momentum of the swinging bone scattered the flame.
Xie Shao’s blind headbutt hit nothing. If not for the thick muscles around his neck, he might have wrenched it.
He opened his eyes to see only wisps of smoke left by the dispersed flame.
Letting out a long breath, Xie Shao looked back. “I thought you didn’t care whether I lived or died!”
He had seen it from the moment they met: this kid Han Lie was Qin Ying’s personal bodyguard through and through.
Whenever danger struck, his first priority would always be protecting Qin Ying. He might not have had time to bother with Xie Shao at all.
Han Lie was an honest man. At those words, he instinctively cupped a fist in salute. “It’s not as though I would have ignored you completely.”
While the two of them spoke, Qin Ying raised the Di Shang dagger and extended its blade into the scattered remnants of the flame before drawing it back.
She touched the blade and found it scorching hot. A lingering sense of alarm rose within her. “That wasn’t phosphorescent fire. It’s extremely dangerous.”
If it touched bare skin, it would cause serious injury, if not death. Even Xie Shao would have had every last bit of his boar hair burned off.
Qin Ying wisely kept that last thought to herself.
With the small threat dealt with, they headed toward the wall of bones behind where the ghostly flame had been.
Judging the underground structure by the layout of the buildings above, once they passed this wall, they would reach the ancestral hall’s front courtyard.
In theory, there should be a rather sinister tree growing there.
The three of them rounded the bone wall in single file. The next instant, Qin Ying and Xie Shao swore in perfect unison.
“Goddammit.” After cursing, Xie Shao turned to look at Qin Ying.
He had not expected such a pretty, refined-looking young woman to have such a filthy mouth.
The open space replicating the ancestral hall’s front courtyard was densely packed with black urns.
They were not wine jars, but ancient ossuary urns.
Though the black urns had been buried deep underground, the glaze on their surfaces still shone. Each opening was sealed with cloth.
A hundred years ago, that red cloth must have been brilliantly vivid.
Exactly eighteen black urns had been arranged in neat rows on wooden racks.
One of the racks had collapsed after years of decay. Its black urn had shattered on the ground, spilling the bones inside.
A rusted helmet sat crookedly atop the pile of bones, serving as a grave marker and indicating the identity of the remains’ owner, someone of relatively high status among these ancient dead.