Chapter 81 Black Pool

I was in a daze as I watched him slowly approach me. At that time, I must have fallen into a state similar to dozing off for a few seconds while driving, so I didn’t give an immediate warning.

As he gradually approached me, he slowly pointed to his intestines and I felt as if I could smell their fishy odor. At this time, a very weak instinct in my heart shouted: Don’t sleep!

I immediately woke up and looked directly in front of me, only to find that Jiang Siwang was gone.

Just like dozing off for a few seconds while driving, I first felt a huge sense of panic. But I wasn’t fully awake yet, so I looked around with my flashlight. Without Jiang Siwang standing there, it was just an open space in front of the tomb door. But for some reason, I found my whole body covered in sweat.

Was it a dream?

I looked at my watch (it showed a normal time, so there shouldn’t have been a time skip like before; Fatty was just really tired) and found that I had just dozed off for about a second. I wiped my face and looked around again.

At this time, I was still a layer away from reality and felt that kind of daze you normally feel just after waking up. But the constant psychological hints instantly woke me up and I found that there was really nothing there.

I dared not be negligent in this place and figured I’d have to be at least a little superstitious. I started to wonder if this was my subconscious mind reacting to this place. Was Jiang Siwang warning me about something? He was pointing to his intestines, but what did that mean?

His upper body was human while his lower body was intestines. I kept feeling like I had heard this story somewhere before.

This one-second nap had me feeling more energetic, so I stood up and thought about where I had seen this symbol before. But at this age, the more I felt that I knew it, the more I couldn’t remember it. I kept thinking about it—sometimes sitting, sometimes doing push-ups, sometimes lying flat on my back—but I just couldn’t seem to remember it. Fatty and Poker-Face slept very soundly, and before I knew it, more than an hour had passed.

When I got bored, I watched the door. To be honest, this observation habit came from my fear of the door, because I was worried that something would come out of it. But after watching it more than a dozen times, nothing came out.

After a while, the more I looked at it, the less I paid attention to it. At least, that was the case until the last time I looked at it. I didn’t see anything in the doorway this time, but after a quick glance I suddenly felt that something was wrong. I turned to look at it carefully and found that there was nothing in the doorway, but it still seemed different from before.

I couldn’t figure out what exactly was different, but I instinctively felt that it was. It was like the darkness in the doorway had become deeper, but my flashlight couldn’t reach it since it was at a higher spot. After thinking about it, I stepped on the niches in the fake door and began to climb up.

It didn’t take me long to climb to the place where Poker-Face had been at before. Since the darkness was so strange, I leaned in the doorway, held my flashlight up, and shined it inside.

A strange wind blew out from the doorway. It was very weak—almost like a breath—and had a musty smell that was mixed in with the cough-inducing stench of rotting viscera. It was very dark inside, but unusually so. I climbed up, squatted down at the entrance, and touched the wall of the tunnel. I found that the stone had been soaked in a black substance, which meant that it must have been specially treated.

This black substance seemed to absorb light, making it impossible for my flashlight to shine as far as before. But to be honest, when I saw this doorway earlier, I didn’t think that it was like this. After touching the tunnel wall, I found that this black substance came from a bunch of black spots on the stone.

Were these black spots that came out of the stone the same as the black spot we had seen before?

I looked into the depths of the doorway and found that it was another deep tunnel, but the deepest part was a dark, primal chaos.

I stared at this chaos carefully, hoping to see a clue, but there weren’t any details at all. The end was just like a void in the universe. I didn’t know why, but as I watched it, I suddenly found that I wanted to go in.

This kind of desire was so strong that it surged up from my heart and I almost immediately moved forward a few steps. But I quickly held onto the tunnel wall to prevent myself from moving.

The rational part of my mind knew that this was bad, so I tried to turn my face away from the front. But at this time, I found that I couldn’t turn my neck or eyes away. The void was like a huge vacuum, and my consciousness began to wander.

For about two or three seconds, I realized that I hadn’t been slacking off when I dozed off before. Since I was in the same situation now, I knew that it had all been because of this hole. But this reasoning only supported me for two or three seconds before I began to lose my sense of autonomy.

I don’t have any memory of what happened next; I only felt that the darkness in front of me was endlessly deep, but at the same time, it was like a kaleidoscope.

When I came back to my senses, I didn’t know how far I had gone. It was actually the extreme cold that woke me up. I found that I had come to a very dark space that was surrounded by endless darkness on all sides, but there were three huge stone tablets in front of me.

There was ancient Mongolian script on the middle stone tablet, but Chinese on the left stone tablet. I illuminated it with my flashlight and found that there were several very large Chinese characters on it: Shilongyishan Heichitian.⁽¹⁾

This should be the self-proclaimed name of the god who was buried here.

My toes were numb, so I pointed my flashlight at my feet and touched them. I found that the ground under my feet was covered in ice and I could even see my breath when I exhaled.

I looked around with my flashlight and found that it didn’t reflect off of anything, which meant that this space was huge.

I then looked behind me but didn’t see any footprints; I had no idea which direction I had come from.

I glanced at my watch and felt my heart freeze—I had been walking for almost three hours. Those two would surely be frantic when they woke up and found that I had disappeared. I wanted to go back immediately, but after thinking about it, I realized that I might get lost. I hesitated again and then looked back at the three stone tablets in front of me.

I took out my flares and shot one into the air.

The light catapulted into the sky and lit up the surrounding area. The light wasn’t that strong, but it still showed a vague outline of the area I was in. I found that this was a cave hall, at least the size of a stadium. There were countless stone houses behind the three stone tablets that looked very primitive, but all of them were built like temples. They were so densely packed into the cave walls that the walls were almost completely covered. These stone houses surrounded a huge stone building that looked kind of like a stone temple without any doors or windows.

It really was a stone mountain. This scene was about ten times the size of the Corpse Country banquet. The huge stone building was something that humans couldn’t build from scratch, so they had chosen a natural cave to use. But the most shocking thing was that there was a huge mountain wall behind the whole tomb chamber.

And on that mountain wall, there was a huge black spot like some kind of ancient virus that had infected the cave wall hundreds of meters up. Its tentacles extended all around like some kind of creature, forming one mark after another on the cave wall.

Black sun. This was a black sun.

I took a deep breath. This was the black pool that had been painted on the mural, so did that mean that this was a dragon vein?

My God, the world’s second most valuable tomb was built directly inside of a dragon vein. This is as pure as you can get it.

<Chapter 80><Table of Contents><Chapter 82>

****

TN Notes:

(1) Characters are “尸龙移山黑池天”. I think it can mean something like “black pool corpse dragon moves the mountains under heaven”.