Chapter Eighteen: The Stone

  As soon as I chased after him, I discovered something was amiss. The dense black fog that had been accumulating in the cave suddenly vanished!

  In less than a minute, I easily arrived at a spherical inner chamber, very small, only enough to hold one person. In the firelight, I saw nine thick iron chains intertwined in a crisscross pattern, firmly fixed in the center.

  This is the central area of the Bronze Bells.

  The surrounding walls are covered with dense hieroglyphics and have holes of various sizes that lead to other passageways.

  "It was taken away." I stared blankly as a figure-like thing quickly darted into a hole in front of me and disappeared in the blink of an eye.

  I cursed under my breath and gave up chasing, starting to search non-stop in between the iron chains.

  "The thing that guy with the surname Sheng wants me to find should be here." I thought, holding a match in one hand and rummaging through the intertwined iron chain heap with the other.

  Soon, in a gap woven by two iron chains, a stone was found.

  This stone looks ordinary, no different from the stones picked up on the road. At first, I didn't pay much attention to it, but as soon as I touched it casually, its weight was astonishing. I put it in my palm and weighed it, a stone about the size of an infant's fist, weighing about one kilogram. I couldn't help but be secretly surprised: "Even gold doesn't have this kind of weight."

  I wasn't sure if what they were looking for was this stone, so I continued to feel around inch by inch, and after confirming that there was nothing else, I tightly grasped the stone, turned around, and crawled back through the original hole.

  Three minutes later, a gloomy green light appeared in my line of sight.

  I suppressed the joy of seeing daylight again, quickly broke free from the hole, and hung upside down on the chain, taking a deep breath.

  "Ah, I'm out! Haha ~ This is not a place for humans to stay." I was joyful with a hint of fear, if it wasn't for discovering the note from 0901 in time, I might have really suffocated to death inside.

  Suddenly, my eyelids kept jumping. Right in front of my line of sight was that big iron coffin.

  "Will there be another me locked inside?" I thought of this possibility and couldn't help but tremble. Slowly crawling onto the coffin, I knocked on the coffin lid and shouted loudly: "Hey, am I in here? Hey, am I or not?! Respond!"

  Inside the iron coffin was a deathly silence, with no response to my words.

  It was actually Oni and Shi Lao who had been waiting outside the iron gate for over an hour, when they suddenly heard my voice. They immediately perked up and excitedly shouted: "You finally showed up! What were you saying about not being inside? I'm asking you, did you get what we're looking for?"

  I ignored those two scoundrels, pressed my ear tightly against the large iron coffin and held my breath to listen for a while. It seemed that there was indeed no living thing inside. "Could it be that my previous encounter was just an illusion?"

  "Hey, Dongzi, respond! Did you get the things?" The old eunuch was stubborn.

  I let out a sigh, no longer insisting that there was one of myself lying in the big iron coffin. I shook my head and shouted towards the outside of the iron gate: "It's just a broken stone, is this what you're looking for?"

  To be honest, even if it's not, I'd rather die than go in and look for a second time.

  "Not bad, it's this one, bring it out quickly!" The old eunuch's tone couldn't hide his excitement.

  I grasped the stone tightly and jumped straight down towards the ground.

  Four meters of vertical distance, my robust body didn't feel a thing. At this point, I no longer wanted to stay in this godforsaken place for long, so I took off running. Just as I was about to take the first step, I felt a black shadow flash above my head. I looked up and, oh, it was the person with the pale face who had escaped earlier.

  It can no longer be called a human skin face, as the human skin has been fully stretched out and transformed into a complete human skin. This is a naked female human skin swirling above my head, spinning at the point where the coffin was placed. What makes my scalp feel numb is that the space inside is very quiet, without even a single particle of wind, yet this female human skin is dancing happily.

  If it were a flesh-and-blood woman dancing in front of me with such abandon, it would be somewhat beautiful and charming. But when it's just an empty shell, like an inflatable doll, awkwardly bouncing around, the aesthetic is completely lost, leaving only an inexplicable eerie atmosphere.

  I was taken aback when a woman with a light and airy gait appeared before me, blocking my way.

  "Think you can use your beauty to seduce me? I'm not that easy." Although I didn't know what kind of tricks this person had up their sleeve, I wasn't stupid enough to charge in head-on, so I quickly made a dash for the right side.

  Just then, something unexpected happened.

  All I saw was a woman's skin-covered finger pointing to a mud Bodhisattva, and I was shocked to discover that the expression on the bronze mask of the mud Bodhisattva was exaggerated to an absurd degree, with its mouth open so wide it could almost fit a fist, and its fangs protruding.

  In an instant, a large white worm suddenly sprang out of the mouth of the bronze mask, shaking its head and struggling to break free from the constraints of the mask.

  A chill ran up the soles of my feet: "Snake!" I had experienced the horror of this thing before, and I didn't dare wait for it to crawl out completely.

  I kicked my legs and ran, almost using all my might to sprint forward. Almost at the same time, the remaining seventeen mud Buddhas opened their mouths simultaneously, and a large number of earthworms quickly crawled out.

  "Open the door quickly!" I shouted loudly.

  In the blink of an eye, with a creak, the 'door' opened up a slit that only allowed one person to squeeze through sideways. I quickly turned around and squeezed into the slit like a loach, my arm almost dislocating from using too much force.

  I had just appeared when Guǐ Yè Jiāo and Shī Lǎo èr, without saying a word, suddenly slammed the door shut with a loud bang.

  I found that the two of them were tightly covering their mouths and noses, holding their breath. After a while, when the scattered poisonous gas had dissipated, the two of them took a deep breath and busied themselves.

  "Don't just stand there, hurry up and help!" Oni shouted, I quickly went over to join them in pushing the heavy wooden chests piled with gold to the outside of the iron gate, stacking them up to block the door.

  After everything was done, we finally let out a long sigh of relief.

  At this time I felt as if I had fainted.

  Oni no Yaiba glanced at the stone in my hand, snatched it away, and looked at it with shining eyes for a while. He then 'felt' it, smiled satisfactorily, nodded his head, and said to Shiro, "It's that thing."

  The old corpse's face smiled brightly like a chrysanthemum flower, and he stretched out his right hand with the palm open.

  Oni no Yaiba hesitated for a moment, his face changing color several times before reluctantly handing the stone over to Shiro. The latter also weighed the stone carefully and placed it in a hidden pocket on his waist, seemingly unaware of its weight, with an air of "old bones not afraid of straining their backs". I watched Oni no Yaiba hand over the stone carefully, thinking that these two people didn't seem as close as they appeared, and were probably together more for mutual benefit.

  "Why has it taken so long?" Oniichan asked me.

  I looked into the eyes of Gui Ye Jia and tentatively said: "Inside, I met a stubborn fellow, got annoyed and thought of a plan, so I 'smoked' a pack of cigarettes, and finished off the rest, hehe, this way I just wasted some more time."

  "Fart, that's enough smoke for you to 'smoke' for a few minutes, I guess you're not sleeping and having a 'spring' dream." Oni no Tsubasa scolded me back.

  I stared intently at his expression, but Kiyotsugu didn't show any unusual reaction. Normally, no matter how cunning a person is, when I emphasized the cigarette, their eyebrows would at least twitch slightly. I couldn't help but wonder if I had misjudged him - was he not the culprit? I eyed Kiyotsugu suspiciously and decided to keep a closer eye on him.

  "Dongzi, tell me, what exactly did you encounter inside that opened my eyes?" asked the old man with a great mood after getting what he wanted.

  I naturally couldn't reveal the matter of the note, glossing over what shouldn't be said, and briefly recounted my experience in the cave. Later, I emphasized the astonishing incident of the mud Bodhisattva spitting out a parasitic worm.

  The old man 'hummed' for a while, and then spoke out his speculation: "Those black misty gases are likely to be a hallucinogenic substance that can make people hallucinate. During the process of crawling through the cave, you will unknowingly inhale a large amount, and when you are unaware, you will fall into its trap. You think you're moving forward, but in fact, you might be stuck in one place without moving an inch. Hehe, you kid actually thought of using gunshots to wake yourself up, I don't know if it's because of good luck or not, but anyway, it accidentally saved your life. Actually, when encountering illusions, self-inflicted pain can also make people quickly sober up and break free from the fake scene."

  I listened to the old man's explanation, and I felt that what he said made some sense, but it didn't quite fit. If everything was just a dream as he said, then my dreams were too realistic, and how could I explain the scene in my dream where I was locked in a coffin?

  "As for that bronze mask, it's a bit... sinister. The old man pushed his sunglasses and pretended to be deep in thought, then turned to Oni no Tsuki: "What do you think?""

  "Oniichan said: 'Hmm, I think this bronze mask is likely to be a pre-Qin artifact, using the same technique as the Yue King Goujian's sword, memory metal.'"

  I was perplexed and asked: "I know that King Goujian of Yue's sword is valuable, but what is a memory metal?"

  Oni no Ya went to the outermost iron gate: "As he walked and talked."