Chapter 45 Corpse Country Boundary Marker

I originally suspected that we weren’t following the same route that Shen Qianjue had taken. This doubt still existed since there were so many river valleys here, and I couldn’t help wondering if we had taken the wrong entrance when we came to this place.

But if we had been walking in the same valley that Shen Qianjue had gone through, then her journey with Old Bing definitely wouldn’t have been as smooth as she had said.

This meant that she must have concealed the difficulties they went through, as well as their strength.

But why? I could understand hiding their strength. Her partner sounded very powerful, so maybe they didn’t want to get involved in too many worldly affairs and decided that it was best not to attract our attention. But why conceal the difficulties they went through?

Logically speaking, the reasons for concealing the difficulties they had gone through could be enumerated:

1. She didn’t want me to know what difficulties and dangers lay on the road so that we would underestimate the enemy. (I didn’t think this was a plausible reason because she actually gave us a slight hint of the danger we could expect. In essence, Shen Qianjue wanted us to leave the grassland.)

2. She didn’t dare say it.

I was leaning more towards the second one, because in that brief moment before she hung up the phone, she seemed like she wanted to say something but hesitated.

I no longer failed to tell the difference between good and bad people, so there was no doubt in my mind that Shen Qianjue was a good person. She wanted to speak up but didn’t say anything in the end, which meant that she was afraid to say it.

If so many things hadn’t happened before, I wouldn’t feel so afraid, but now I actually felt really scared as I thought about what she was afraid of. But she was out of the grassland now and should be absolutely safe.

There were two possibilities for why she might have been so hesitant to talk. First, there was a dangerous thing that could hear us talking. This kind of thing could threaten them even if they had made it out of the grassland, so she could only provide us with very limited information.

Or, they didn’t leave the grassland at all. Maybe they had died here and we were talking to a pair of ghosts.

If that were the case, then they were probably under the control of some kind of force that was making them tell us all that information. But they couldn’t tell us the truth, so that was why she said the journey was so uneventful.

As I thought about it, I began to realize how ridiculous it was that I was seriously entertaining the idea that there were ghosts here. Admittedly, I did recognize the possibility that ghosts existed, but it was basically impossible for ghosts to communicate so freely with people.

It was more likely to be the first situation, but that just creeped me out even more. If Shen Qianjue was still afraid of that force after leaving the grassland, then what was it? And why couldn’t she tell us everything that had happened on the road?

Of course, I would know the answer soon enough.

When we went back to the tunnel, I told Poker-Face about the face in the pool. He checked the bottom of the pool and told us that it was very soft and there were a lot of holes so we’d have to be very careful. I looked everywhere for Ping Lian, but didn’t know where he had gone. The sun was starting to set, and I knew that when that happened, this place would quickly become dark.

And once night fell, there was a chance we’d face another unknown situation. The night here was strange and unusual, so it was time to make a quick decision.

After the three of us discussed it, we decided to find the strongest grave robbers’ tunnel in this place. We would then dig out the collapsed layer, cut some branches from the trees outside to make a support structure, and move forward carefully.

We didn’t dare dig another grave robbers’ tunnel like the others because I felt that there were too many holes here. The entire structural integrity of the soil had been completely compromised, so if we dug any more holes, the whole mountain might collapse.

So, we found a grave robbers’ tunnel that all three of us felt was the sturdiest. The hole was about half a person’s height, so we crawled in, reached the collapsed section of the tunnel, and then started digging.

The three of us took turns digging, managing to shovel the soil out quickly since we were all veterans. Fatty cut branches outside for our support structure so that the tunnel wouldn’t collapse again.

We soon dug up a stone slab, so I knew that the grave robbers’ tunnel turned here. I couldn’t tell what the external structure of the underground palace was from this stone slab, but it didn’t have a breach so we couldn’t go any further.

We explored up, down, left, and right before we figured out that the tunnel turned to the right. After that, we continued digging to the right for a while before we finally bypassed the stone slab.

It was at this time that I suddenly realized that it wasn’t a stone slab but a stone tablet. Moreover, there were Chinese characters on this stone tablet.

I immediately stopped and took a closer look with my flashlight.

Because we didn’t dare clear out the soil around the top and bottom of the stone tablet, we could only see a small bit of text in the space that had already been cleared out. The text had been carved vertically, so the sentences were cut off pretty badly. As a result, we could only read it section by section and guess the meaning of the top and bottom parts. Fatty looked at it and said, “This is a boundary marker. It says that people will reach Corpse Country after they go past this boundary marker.”

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