"You little brat, don't you know you can't have blood in the tomb? Have you forgotten all the rules?" Old Pizi swung his hand and gave Lu Gouzi a vicious slap across the head!
"That wasn't blood, it was black!" Lu Gouzi cried out, looking very aggrieved.
Hearing this, Old Pizi frowned and looked down at the ground.
I, however, didn't care whether that dark, murky puddle was blood or not.
Instead, I was thinking that the head from just now had been fake.
A real human head has a skull—it was impossible for it to burst into pulp from a single strike of a shovel!
"Old Pizi, that wasn't a head just now, it didn't have bones!" I quickly reminded Old Pizi.
Upon hearing this, Old Pizi immediately stripped off his jacket, covered it over that dark, murky slime, and then snatched the iron shovel from Lu Gouzi's hands. Using the shovel, he pressed the jacket against the slime and scrubbed hard.
After wiping it clean with the clothes, he promptly used the iron shovel to toss the garment into a large tripod, sealing the lid tight!
Next, he took a bottle of alcohol from his shoulder bag, poured it onto the ground, and set it on fire.
Only after the alcohol burned out and the dark slime on the ground had been thoroughly scorched away did Old Pizi slowly let out a sigh of relief.
Though I didn't understand the point of what he had done, subconsciously I felt that he seemed to have averted an unknown crisis.
Though Lu Gouzi had taken a beating, he bore no grudge against Old Pizi, seemingly long accustomed to it.
Once Old Pizi finished dealing with the mess, Lu Gouzi mindlessly scampered over to open the final large tripod.
Old Pizi and I hurried over to join him.
After the tripod lid was lifted, Lu Gouzi reached inside and pulled with all his might.
This time, whatever was inside seemed very heavy. After pulling hard twice without budging it, he called me over to help.
I ran over too, grabbed his arm, and we pulled outward together with all our might.
With a sudden heave, the two of us actually dragged a person out.
The person's face was deathly, ghastly pale, without a trace of blood!
"Damn it, we pulled out another wax-sealed thing!" Lu Gouzi cursed in exasperation.
Yet I noticed that this was not a wax-sealed dummy, but a living person!
He was dressed in modern clothing and had a crew cut.
His chest was still rising and falling—he wasn't dead, he was alive.
It was just that the rise and fall of his chest was extremely slight, likely caused by restricted breathing from being cooped up in the tripod for too long.
My first thought was to save him.
I immediately laid the man flat on the ground, placed my left hand against his chest, and struck it hard with my right.
After a good thirty or forty blows, the man finally let out a breath and opened his eyes.
His gaze looked ice-cold, and his face remained devoid of any color.
Upon waking, he glanced at me, stood up, turned around, and walked back to the large tripod from moments ago. He felt around inside, pulled out a Ghost-Head Broadsword, slung it across his back, and turned and left without saying a word.
"What the hell, we saved you, why didn't you even say thank you?" Lu Gouzi shouted indignantly at the man's retreating back.
Yet the man didn't even look back.
"Stop shouting. If he really came back, we'd be done for!" Old Pizi waved his hand at me and Lu Gouzi, saying.
Judging from Old Pizi's words and tone, he seemed to know the man.
"Who is he?" I asked Old Pizi.
"Nobody knows his real name; everyone just calls him Dead Face. He's a notoriously bad omen in our line of work. Not a single person who has ever entered a tomb with this guy has made it out alive! Ten years ago, a pretty famous master craftsman in our trade organized seven or eight people to enter a large ancient tomb. They ran into this fellow inside, and as a result, every single one of them perished in there. I also heard that five years ago, this guy went into a Han dynasty tomb by himself, and three Corpse Kings chased him right out of the Ancient Tomb, hunting him for seventy or eighty miles. In short, whenever you see this guy, you have to give him a wide berth—he's nothing but bad luck," Old Pizi warned me with a grave expression.
I was somewhat speechless.
It seemed this Dead Face was no ordinary person.
To have tomb robbing result in three Corpse Kings chasing you out of an Ancient Tomb for seventy or eighty miles—that was truly one of a kind.
Of course, these were just rumors and weren't necessarily true. They certainly weren't witnessed firsthand by Old Pizi.
"That's right, my master told me about this Dead Face too. Word has it that this guy might not actually be a living person; he's supposed to be a monster two scum of the tomb-robbing underworld brought out of an ancient tomb thirty years ago. Back then, this guy was still a child, reeking of evil energy, and they say he even ate raw meat—something my master saw with his own eyes back then," Lu Gouzi chimed in from the side with a paranoid look.
Lu Gouzi's words left me utterly speechless.
He himself was scum who dug up graves, yet he had the nerve to call others scum.
That was rather shameless.
However, I found myself growing curious about this Dead Face, feeling certain there must be secrets hidden within him.
Especially that Ghost-Head Saber—when it was drawn, it gave off a bone-chillingly cold sensation.
I was certain that must be a murder weapon that had taken lives.
"Remember this: no matter what, under no circumstances should you ever have anything to do with this person! Since even Dead Face has shown up, I think we'd better drop our greed. Let's get out of this place of trouble right now! If we run too late, we might lose our lives!" Old Pizi frowned and said.
"Th-this... such a huge ancient tomb, and we haven't taken a single thing—what a waste!" Lu Gouzi was clearly somewhat reluctant, muttering with a pout.
"Do you want money or your life?" Old Pizi scolded him.
At that exact moment, however, I faintly heard the sound of screaming.
The sound was very faint and intermittent, yet I heard it with crystal clarity.
"Did you guys hear a sound?" I hurriedly asked Old Pizi and Lu Gouzi.
Both of them wore blank expressions, seemingly having heard nothing.
"Listen carefully, there's definitely screaming, and it keeps cutting in and out!" I figured the reason they hadn't heard it was because we had been talking the whole time.
Hearing this, the two men stopped talking and strained their ears to listen intently.
"Ah..."
The scream came again.
Still intermittent and indistinct.
Yet I had definitely heard it.
"I really didn't hear any sound, Jiang Feng. Could you be hearing things because you're scared?" Lu Gouzi asked me suspiciously.
"Which direction is the sound coming from?" Old Pizi asked me.
I pointed to the left; the sound should be coming from that direction.
I truly couldn't understand why I had heard it while the two of them hadn't.
Could I really be hallucinating?
That intermittent screaming acted like a catalyst, causing horrific visions of murder, heart-gouging, and cannibalism to flash back and forth in my mind.
Old Pizi frowned deeply and took the Dragon-Seeking Ruler out of his shoulder bag.
"The vast majority of coffins face south. The direction where you heard the sound should be due north. If the tomb has two passageways, let's head south first. By bypassing the Main Tomb Chamber, we might be able to avoid danger." After determining the direction with the Dragon-Seeking Ruler, Old Pizi told us.
Neither Lu Gouzi nor I had any ideas of our own, so we had no choice but to follow Old Pizi's lead.
We followed closely behind Old Pizi, striding swiftly toward the south.
After exiting the burial chamber we had just been in, we entered a very long passageway and walked southward all the way.
Yet after walking for a few minutes, I noticed that the screaming was growing clearer and clearer, seeming to be right ahead of us.
Both Old Pizi and Lu Gouzi also heard those shrill, miserable screams, stopping in their tracks and gazing forward with vigilant expressions.