Chapter 73 Inferences 2

Poker-Face squatted and watched me do the initial move. Later, I remembered that I was too tired and my self-control had declined, so I thought that I had only done the initial move when I was actually already dancing. I personally felt that the essence of this dance was the action of the old man struggling to pull out the radish while breaking a sweat. When I first performed this dance, I was three years old and wearing a beard, which must have been very cute. As a result, my family wanted me to perform every holiday, which ensured that this move was deeply engraved in my DNA.

Of course, I stopped once I came to my senses. When I saw that Poker-Face didn’t want to dance at all, I coughed and said, “Waist—my waist hurts. I’m just moving around a bit.”

At this time, Fatty stood up. He was looking much better than before and also stretched his waist a little before coming up behind us. “So, your conclusion is that the hint on the map isn’t to find the tunnel under the dancing girl figurines, but to be the dancing figurines yourself?”

After speaking, he suddenly twisted his hips enchantingly, made a samba shuffle, and circled around three times.

He looked down at his feet, but there weren’t any changes nor any hidden tunnels revealed.

“You guys are fucking crazy. There’s absolutely no logic to this. The entrance is drawn on the map. It’s under the dancing girl figurines. Let’s look again,” he said.

“No one would dance in the underground palace on a whim. There must be a special reason for these footprints. It’s very critical,” I argued. We had all looked very carefully just now, so it must not be down below.

“I don’t think so. They were probably just in a hurry to pee. I bet they were stamping their feet while trying to dig wet wipes out of their bags.”

“Then what about Xiao Hua dancing?”

“Can’t Xiao Hua have the urge to pee? Or are you trying to say good-looking people don’t go to the bathroom?”

“Who the fuck performs opera when they have to pee urgently?” I scolded him.

These footprints were definitely formed by someone dancing, and Xiao Hua’s footprints gave off the sense that they had a strong foundation. One of the owners of these two sets of footprints could definitely dance, and Xiao Hua had very strong control over his body.

So, this dance was definitely done with serious intentions.

Xiao Hua sometimes joked, but his jokes were very logical and not whimsical at all. Not only did this not seem like a joke, but I had never seen Xiao Hua use elements related to opera singing to make a joke.

All of these thoughts were giving me a headache, so I made a determined effort and did the “Radish Pulling” dance a few more times. Unfortunately, nothing happened.

I sat down again, feeling cold, hungry, and tired. It seemed I had really reached my limit. Fatty told me not to worry and that we would go out first. Once we were back aboveground, we could take a break before we continued our discussion.

I shook my head. The Sea of Black Lights aboveground was even scarier after dark. The black things in the ground came out from below as soon as it was dark and I didn’t know what they would do under the cover of darkness. On the contrary, we already had control of the situation in this underground palace (relatively speaking). Those black things should be in the outer coffin above, so as long as we didn’t disturb them, we could stay here for a while.

I thought we could move on quickly, but I didn’t expect to get stuck again. I even felt that Shen Qianjue and the others had seen both Xiao Hua’s footprints and the murals when they came here. By putting the two clues together, they probably theorized that dancing was the key. So, they danced in the underground palace to see if any mechanism would be activated.

In this way, they also found nothing, so it was reasonable to believe that they had headed back.

I carefully walked up to Xiao Hua’s footprints and squatted down to examine them carefully. That was when I suddenly found some problems.

I was probably the only one who would notice this kind of problem, because whenever I cleaned the shop, I often saw people’s bare footprints tracking through the dusty layer on the masonry floor.

Wang Meng and Fatty would often take naps in the shop, but they always took their shoes off because they both liked to be barefoot. Whenever they got up and went to the toilet, they never bothered to put their shoes back on since they just went back to sleep again when they were done. As a result, the soles of their feet would be completely black, which ended up dirtying my blankets. I repeatedly told them to put their shoes on, but I kept finding that nothing had changed.

Sometimes, I couldn’t catch them in the act, so all I could do was look at the footprints on the ground to see who did it.

Fatty was heavier and Wang Meng was lighter, so their footprints were different. This difference mainly depended on the small traces left around the footprints in the dust.

I looked at Xiao Hua’s footprints and came to the conclusion that he weighed a lot, but Xiao Hua was actually very light. So, this meant that when he was dancing, he was carrying something heavy on his back!

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