Chapter Ninety-Three: Your Ancestor, Your Ancestor!

The disappearance of Lin Feng was far too uncanny. Before Wind Slaughter could even recover from his shock, he felt his body slide and plunge into the water. He flailed twice with his hands, and then his body, which had only been submerged to the calves, sank straight down.

The others felt it too, at the same moment, as though their whole bodies had fallen into a swamp.

"No!"

Someone cried out.

The voice was swallowed at once.

With a grim face, Su Yi had already been dragged completely beneath the water by the terrifying mud and silt at the riverbed.

At first glance, the river did not seem very deep. That was only because the mass of living sand had formed the base beneath it. If that living sand were to shift, it would be enough to drag a person down into the depths.

Bubble after bubble rose from below. The lamp at her waist was still lit, and as its beam swept across the water, Su Yi seemed to see several others also being dragged under.

Being underwater was truly dreadful, especially for her, since so many of her brushes with death had involved water. And now, once again, she was in such peril.

Whether she could yet escape disaster, she did not know.

Su Yi felt the soft yet forceful mud and sand frantically dragging her legs downward with brutal strength. Without hesitation, she curled her body, and the searchlight at her waist shone upon those twisting strands of silt. She saw the yellow-brown mud and sand boiling like mire in a swamp, gurgling with bubbles.

There was something in the silt.

Su Yi's eyes turned cold. In her curled posture, she drew the fang dagger in her hand and slashed hard across the mud and sand bound around her legs.

With a sharp tear, a streak of red burst through the interior.

At once, the silt-like tendrils seemed to writhe in pain and fear, releasing her legs.

The moment she broke free, Su Yi kicked forward at once, swimming toward the figure sinking ahead of her.

Gurgling bubbles rose. Ninth Miss, her long hair floating in the water, looked like some dying water spirit; had her eyes rolled back, she would have been a drowned ghost.

Su Yi had cut the mud-and-sand tendrils from her legs, and seeing this, the others immediately set to work as well, each bending their bodies like a row of shrimps.

And just then...

Ninth Miss suddenly widened her eyes, staring past Su Yi's shoulder...

"Mmmph, mmmph!"

She tugged at Su Yi's arm.

The moment Su Yi turned her head, she saw a gigantic wave of mud and sand.

In an instant it slapped their group apart.

-----

In the dark, damp, and gloomy underground passage, the path twisted and turned in countless directions. One could not tell which way was right. In such a place, atop a huge moss-covered rock, there crouched a writhing thing like a worm, and this thing was also making nauseating sounds...

"Ugh... ugh..."

Su Yi stood nearby, brushing the mud and sand from her clothes, silent for a long while. At last she turned to Ninth Miss, who was sprawled on the ground, and said, "The way you're acting makes it easy for others to feel sick too."

Ninth Miss immediately turned her face away, glaring. "Mind your own business!"

Though her face was pale and weak, her pride remained intact.

Su Yi gave her a cool look, then glanced down at her. "Have you not noticed what you're lying on? It's a human-face lichen."

"What!"

Ninth Miss sprang up from the boulder at once, only to slip beneath her feet and nearly fall back into that strange river.

A finger hooked the collar of her shirt and held her in place.

Su Yi looked down at her indifferently, and with a tug, pulled her back. Ninth Miss seized Su Yi's sleeve, still shaken.

"Are you afraid of loaches?"

Su Yi's remark made Ninth Miss stiffen. Biting her teeth, she said, "What nonsense are you spouting? Of course I'm not."

A dead duck with a hard mouth.

Su Yi turned away and checked the guns at her waist and the things in her pack.

In the river, Ninth Miss had already been saved once by Su Yi, so she trusted her ability to a degree. Besides, after being defeated twice, she could no longer keep up the airs of a young lady. So she quietly got to her feet and looked around, then suddenly froze.

"That isn't human-face lichen! You tricked me!"

"Mm."

"Could you answer any more perfunctorily?"

"Oh."

"..."

Su Yi shook the gun, pouring the water out of it. Ninth Miss rolled her eyes at her. "At a glance I can tell you don't understand this at all. Even if this is a Russian revolver and its inner mechanism is not very delicate, and even if getting wet won't immediately ruin it, it could still misfire. Do you think a handgun is a rag, something you can shake, wring out, and keep using?"

Was that so?

Su Yi inspected the handgun for a moment. After some thought, she still tucked it into the side pocket of her pack, then gripped the fang dagger again. "Based on your experience, which way should we go?"

On matters like this, she was as clueless as she was with firearms.

And as for the professionals, Wind Slaughter and the others had been separated from them. No one knew where they were now, let alone which direction to take to find them.

"People in this line of work live and die by fate. I know you used to work the smuggling routes too, so there’s no reason you should be blind to this either." Ninth Miss's tone was somewhat detached, as though she did not care much whether Wind Slaughter and the others lived or died.

Su Yi said nothing. Not care? Who had just been risking her life in the water trying to drag Wind Slaughter and the rest out?

And she herself had been as weak as a wet chicken.

"I just looked. This passage is entirely natural, not man-made, so there isn't some elaborate maze of eight trigrams and nine chambers. But it was definitely modified afterward by people from your side, so we should follow where the traces of human interference are strongest."

After a pause, Ninth Miss narrowed her eyes and pointed to a row of footprints on the ground.

"Whether these footprints belong to another group, or to Brother Ma and the others... or perhaps..."

She did not say the rest, and Su Yi understood. She slung her pack over her back and followed Ninth Miss into the dark passage where the footprints stretched on.

Along the way, the two also tested the walkie-talkies, only to find the signal completely blocked. Based on Ninth Miss's experience, there were only two possibilities: either the strange underground site had a natural magnetic field that disrupted the signal, or the subterranean area had been deliberately fitted with jamming devices.

So Ninth Miss once again, right in front of Su Yi, greeted her ancestors.

The deeper they went, the thinner the air seemed to become. Suddenly Ninth Miss stopped and shone the searchlight on the wall for a moment.

There was a row of words carved there with a small knife, but later scratches had blurred them out.

Ninth Miss's expression turned grim. "I'm certain this was left by Brother Ma. He always had this habit, and the width of the cuts matches his pocket knife exactly. But..."

"They've been targeted."

"Right. It might even be your ancestors!"

"..."

Su Yi thought that, fortunately, they were not her ancestors. Otherwise, that woman should have been leaping out to strangle her by now.

Yet just as that thought crossed her mind, Ninth Miss suddenly felt a chill at her neck. "Ah!" Her throat had been seized.

Bang!

Ninth Miss twisted both arms and wrenched the hand away, then spun to evade the body pressing in against her.

At the same time, Su Yi sent a snapping kick toward it.

Crash!

The other party slammed into the wall. Su Yi's fang dagger and Ninth Miss's curved blade flashed across its throat together.

A spurt.

The head separated from the body.

Only it was still perched on the shoulders.

Its eyes were wide open, its skin deathly pale, and it stared straight at them without a trace of life.

Ninth Miss's breath caught.

"Li Yang..."

Su Yi also recognized him as one of those who had been with Ah Hai and Brother Ma. No one knew what had happened, but he had actually launched a sneak attack on them.

And his appearance was deeply uncanny as well.

Still, the feeling of having killed a former companion with their own hands was far from pleasant. However, Su Yi's brows twitched slightly, and she exchanged a look with Ninth Miss. Then she stepped aside while Ninth Miss lifted Li Yang's shoulder with her curved blade and flipped him away from the wall.

The soft corpse thudded onto the ground, and the head rolled down with a dull sound, its motion strangely off.

In truth, both Su Yi and Ninth Miss's first reaction was that it was strange to think so at all, yet they still could not help feeling...

The head seemed far too light.

And on Li Yang's back... a gaping, bloody cavity had been torn open, exposed nakedly before them.

The stench came from the bloody hole in his back.

"Look at this," Su Yi said, her gaze shifting to the opening in the wall.

"It didn't seem to be there just now. Did it appear in an instant?"

About the size of a fist, as though something had bored straight through it. The opening went very deep... deep enough that they could not slice through the wall and trace what lay within.

After thinking for a moment, Su Yi aimed the strongest beam of the searchlight directly into the hole.

Not long after, a shrill and terrifying burst of laughter rose from inside.

Gooseflesh prickled over Ninth Miss's skin, but her face darkened. She spat out one word: "A sorrow child ghost."

What?

Su Yi frowned.

"Su Yi, this tomb of your ancestors... is even beyond my imagination."

-----

Brother Ma and Ah Hai were indeed breaking into a cold sweat now. Pressed against the corner of a wall, they faced a twisted series of tunnel mouths before them, packed densely like a honeycomb yet somehow evoking terror.

The hands of the three men behind them, each clutching a blade, were trembling. Their faces were pale, their hair soaked through.

"Brother Ma, Brother Ma, are those ghost things still around?"

"Bah!" Brother Ma spat and flipped the long blade in his hand. "How the hell should I know? I ain't the worm in those ghost things' bellies."

Ah Hai sniffed. "It seems like those ghost things can crawl into our bellies..."

"Dammit, brothers, please stop talking. Just thinking about what those things look like makes me sick... I've spent all these years robbing tombs, crawling through graves like a rat, and I've never seen anything so rare and grotesque. Right, Doggie..."

Doggie nodded weakly, trembling all over. Cold sweat beaded on his forehead.

Then, all at once, the five of them heard that eerie laughter...

It sounded like a woman, and like a baby too, seeming to be right beside them and yet also far away.

It made the scalp prickle with dread.

"It's catching up to us! Damn that thing..."

Brother Ma cursed in his hometown dialect, gripping his blade with both hands and staring hard at the dense openings ahead. Any moment now, some ghost thing would come crawling out of there and throw itself onto their faces, or their bellies, and burrow into their bodies...

Feast on their flesh and blood, hollow out their brains, and crawl back out from inside them like an alien from a horror film.

Damn it, just thinking about it was enough to make one's bones crawl.