Chapter 35

I squeezed my eyes shut and then opened them again. It was too dark for me to see clearly, but I was positive that there hadn’t been any fingernails in the gap just now.

These two fingernails were clearly very different from normal ones. People’s nails could continue to grow a long time after death, which was why ancient corpses’ fingernails were curled. But if the nails continued to grow to a certain extent, the ends would become straight and sharp. Many people would resell this kind of fingernail as pendants and call them Heavenly Bone, but there were too few of them out there, so the price was very high. Fortunately, I had seen the whole thing before. The corpse had basically been standing there with its fingernails dragging on the ground.

The owner of these two fingernails must’ve also had long nails that went past their knees. But if it silently stabbed through the gap just now, did that mean that there was a zombie on the other side of this gate?

I wanted to talk, but Poker-Face still had his hand over my mouth so I couldn’t. Does he have to do that? Is it not over yet? I wondered to myself. The gate was so thick that we were still relatively safe even if there was a zombie behind it, but at this time, I noticed two more fingernails slowly probe out of the gap.

They moved very slowly, but I could clearly see the nails sticking out bit by bit. In the darkness, the group of old, mottled nails reached out strangely from the gap in the gate.

“More than one?” Fatty mouthed.

Poker-Face nodded. We stepped back slowly and saw more fingernails coming out of the gap. One, two, three…not only were they coming out of the gap in the middle of the gate, but they were also starting to emerge from the gap in the gate shaft.

Fatty pulled out my Kukri and mouthed, “I’ll cut them all and give them a manicure,” but Poker-Face shook his head.

How much could we cut off? If the fingernails went past the knees, then it was useless for us to cut off two inches. The three of us continued to retreat until we couldn’t see the gate anymore. “This gate can’t be opened,” Poker-Face eventually whispered.

“I still have a few detonators. If I blow the gate up, I’ll blow those things up as well,” Fatty said.

Poker-Face finally let me go and I fully understood why he wanted to cover my mouth just now. “There’s no telling how many of them are behind the gate and we don’t have many passages to go through,” I said to Fatty. “We don’t have enough people here so we need to outwit them.”

The sound of our discussion must’ve leaked into the tomb chamber and attracted all the zombies to come to the gate. God knew how many were in there. I didn’t know what had happened in the tomb to cause this. We didn’t bring any heavy equipment when we entered the tomb, and Fatty had been the one who insisted on bringing everything we had with us now. I hadn’t wanted to be weighed down with too many things, but now I really wanted to thank him. It was too bad we didn’t have any black donkey hooves among all the things we brought with us. In Fatty’s words, opening a coffin with Wu Xie when you didn’t have the three items to ward off evil spirits was tantamount to suicide.

And right now, we didn’t have any of those three items.

After summing everything up, we figured that although the South Sea King’s tomb wasn’t very big, it must’ve been designed by an expert. Even if it wasn’t any expert, this person was at least very familiar with Minyue sorcery. I had never seen murals that had eyes like this and it was also the first time I had encountered this kind of situation in a tomb chamber. We didn’t have enough equipment on hand, so we needed to rest and figure out what to do next.

We went back to the place where Fatty and I had set off the detonators earlier. The explosions had blown holes in both the floor and ceiling, so Fatty set off a flare and dropped it into the burial pit. We all looked at the situation below and froze.

The mud in the horse and chariot pit had drained into the lower level, revealing more of those fingernails from before. Not only were they growing out of the cracks in the wreckage of the thunder god statues, but they were two feet long and reaching up towards us. It almost looked like the statues had germinated and were sprouting like plants.

I suddenly had a feeling that this ancient tomb was coming back to life.

“We’ve got two options. One, go down to that drainage layer and hope it’s connected to the underground river or another burial pit. Or two, go up and walk through the abandoned tomb passage and hope we can find another way out,” Fatty said.

I narrowed my eyes as I went through everything from start to finish. Then, I took out my phone and refreshed my Bluetooth search.

Liu Sang was below us, meaning he had also entered the tomb alive. He was probably a few floors below us in the drainage level, so if he was safe, it would be better to join him. I needed his ears, after all.

The Bluetooth finally found Liu Sang’s device, but the signal was very weak.

His device name now read: “People everywhere, people everywhere, people everywhere”.

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