Chapter 61 Passage in Water

I immediately jumped into the water and found that it only reached my waist. I slowly felt around and soon found that there was indeed a hole in the wall at the edge of the coffin river.

There was a dead body at the bottom of the river that had been soaking there for a while, so the water was quite smelly. I used my flashlight to shine around the mouth of the hole and touched the outer wall a few times. I then quickly shined my light on the position of the corpse, lest it float towards me.

Fatty also came down to help, and when he touched the hole, he stood up and said to me, “Yes, they came out of this hole. It seems that the structure here is basically similar to that of Xisha’s underwater tomb.”

All of the mechanisms here seemed to have come from Wang Zanghai, which indicated that the Zhang family and Wang Zanghai had a lot of connections to each other. A lot of technology and knowledge must have passed between them.

Fatty dove to the bottom, groped around in the water for half a day, and then went into the hole. I watched his flashlight slowly get dimmer as he went deeper and deeper.

“It’s very spacious inside. And there are steps leading out of the water only a few meters ahead!” Fatty said when he surfaced. “I guess it’s a waterway, but I don’t know what’s up ahead. If you want to go out, though, this is probably the only way.”

I finally felt a little calmer.

We climbed out of the coffin river, retraced our steps, and prepared to come back with Poker-Face.

I had just picked up Poker-Face and taken a few steps when I felt like something was wrong—my throat was really uncomfortable.

Fatty’s respiratory system seemed to have been injured and his discomfort was obviously worse than mine. He had only taken a few steps before he immediately covered his nose and mouth, his expression twisted in pain.

I thought it was strange. What’s going on?

Fatty’s face was already blue, but he suddenly motioned for me not to move. He then turned and ran to the secret passage that had brought us here, practically rolling and crawling the entire way.

I put Poker-Face down and ran after him, but before we had even reached the entrance of the secret passage, we saw a thick fog drifting in. As long as you breathed in this place, you’d feel a severe burning pain all the way from your nasal cavity to your lungs.

“Shit, the mechanism was activated?” I was shocked.

Fatty nodded desperately beside me, “Go!”

As we rolled and crawled our way back, I thought to myself, God damn it, it’s too dark and there wasn’t even any movement. This mechanism started so quietly!

When I ran to where I had left Poker-Face, I picked him up while Fatty grabbed the backpack that he had put down. Then, we continued running desperately to the coffin river.

When we reached the river, we jumped in without any hesitation. I quickly found the hole and dove all the way in, finding that it went less than ten meters in. Fatty grabbed my arm since carrying Poker-Face was causing me to float upwards. I groped my way forward desperately and soon found that there were stairs up ahead. We walked up them step by step and soon emerged from the water completely.

We used our flashlights to take a look around and found that we were in another passage, but the water here only reached our knees. When we looked forward along this passage, we could see that there was an entrance to a cave about seven or eight meters away.

Was it the poison gas cave full of pools? If so, I had finally come out without any danger. I didn’t expect this time to go all that smoothly, so if I really did get out like this, I’d definitely find a god to express my gratitude to.

I was ecstatic and started wading through the water while Fatty ran in front of me. But as soon as I reached the entrance of the cave, Fatty stopped so abruptly that my whole body bumped into his bear’s back. Before I could react, Fatty began to retreat.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked. 

“Damn it, this thing is too troublesome,” Fatty said. “It bodes ill for the three of us.”

I looked over Fatty’s shoulder and saw something very strange at the entrance in front of us—there were a lot of things that looked like silk threads hanging there horizontally. I could also see a lot of things that looked like fruits hanging on those silk threads.

How can I describe the structure of this cave? It’s really too difficult.

It was basically a circular cave that had an ankle-deep pool at the bottom of it. We could see that a wooden bridge built with iron chains hung over the water, stretching all the way to the opposite side where another hole was located. There were countless thread-like silk things at the entrance of the cave that could have been iron wires or some other material that was as dense as coiled silk ropes. I realized that the fruit-like things on these silk threads were something I had seen long ago and was a little afraid of—hexagonal bells. There were countless bells hanging in this space. Was this what Fatty was referring to? As long as one silk thread was pulled, all of the hexagonal bells here would ring. If that happened, the situation would be completely out of our control and we’d have no idea what would happen. I gasped and asked myself, how did Poker-Face and the others get through here? I figured that everyone was in a bad situation at that time, but with Poker-Face’s skills and concentration, it would be possible if he carried them one by one.

“This is an anti-theft system,” Fatty said. He pointed to some holes on the cave wall that had been carved into dragon mouths. “When the Zhang family passes through here, they’ll pour water through these holes, flood all the bells, and then dive by themselves.”

It was obviously impossible for us to activate the mechanism, so I looked at the top of the silk threads. I thought maybe we could do it if we could pass through the top of the cave, but when I looked, I found that there were also a lot of bells above me.

“Walk through the water below?” I asked Fatty. 

He shook his head, “Look. This cave is about thirty meters wide and the water’s only half a palm’s width deep. We can’t dive under the water unless we become cockroaches.”

“You can become a tortoise (1),” I retorted. 

“We’re at least temporarily safe for now,” Fatty said. “Don’t worry and take a rest. We’ll come up with a way.”

I sat down on the ground and marveled at the fact that it really hadn’t been easy to find a place to rest along the way. Then I went to check on Little Brother and saw that his eyes had opened for a moment. “We’ve already come out,” I said to him. “Don’t worry, we’ll be safe soon.” Poker-Face was very weak and immediately closed his eyes again, so I said, “Have a good rest.” But as I spoke, I saw his mouth move.

I felt as if he was trying to say something so I waited for a moment. Sure enough, his mouth moved again. I was sure he wanted to talk, so I put my ear close to his mouth and heard him say, “I love boats.”

What did he mean he loved boats? What computer brand was that? “Ok,” I said. “We’ll buy one for you when we get out.” 

Fatty, who was already a little dazed, turned his head and asked, “What are we buying?”

I told Fatty to come over and listen. He frowned and said, “No, Little Brother asked us to cook porridge. He wants to drink porridge.”

Drink porridge, when was Little Brother so unreliable? Fatty suddenly smacked his thigh and said, “No time for porridge. Little Brother wants us to go quickly!”

“Go quickly? What do you mean go quickly? Is there any danger here?” I asked.

Fatty looked at the dark passage around him and took a few steps back before yelling, “Fuck, let’s go!”

“What’s the matter?”

“Fog!” I also looked over and saw that strong white alkali fog was coming out of two small holes in the wall of the passage we had just come from. It looked like a living thing as it slowly spread in the air in a very dense cloud.

The poison gas system here seemed to have no oversight and would enter all of the passages!

<Chapter 60> <Table of Contents><Chapter 62>

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TN Notes:

(1) Think it’s a play on their last names. Cockroach= zhanglang, tortoise=wangba. You know, since Poker-face’s surname is Zhang and Fatty’s is Wang.

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Updated 4/26/2021

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