116: Chapter 116 Muds and Water Workers

At the innermost corner of the second floor of the Laoya Ridge inn, there hung a paint-peeling wooden plaque with the numbers "204" written on it.

The room's swaying tungsten filament bulb hanging in the center of the ceiling was not turned on.

The mountain wind outside blew fiercely, causing the old wooden lattice window to bang back and forth against the window frame with a clanging sound.

The cries of unknown night owls from deep within the mountains were mixed in with the wind, growing louder one after another, exuding a piercing shrillness that made one's bones ache.

The cramped guest room was filled with a thick, pungent odor.

The spicy smell of cheap local dry tobacco mixed with the pungent odor of medicinal liquor for bruises.

Beneath it all, there was also an unshakeable, age-old stench of rotting soil that could never be washed away.

Four men sat closely around a crude wooden board bed.

Only a single speck of dark red fire glowed in the darkness.

That was a homemade paper-rolled dry tobacco held between the fingertips of the boss, "Second Master Lei".

The rough tobacco leaves were moistened by his saliva, and with his forceful sucks, the red glow on the cigarette tip flickered on and off, illuminating his rugged face.

He wore a black leather eyepatch over his left eye, and his remaining right eye was hidden behind the swirling blue smoke, exuding a gloomy viciousness honed from years of licking blood from the edge of a blade.

The room was unusually quiet.

Aside from the "huffing" sound Second Master Lei made while smoking,

there was only the suppressed, hoarse panting of the third-in-command, "Rat", coming from the corner.

"Second Master."

Rat clutched his right arm tightly, his entire body shrinking into the corner of the bed and shivering uncontrollably.

His teeth clattered loudly, and his voice carried a clear tearful tone.

"I'm afraid this arm of mine won't last through tonight."

"The nether mud brought out from that tomb trip has already grown into the cracks of my bones, and it's crawling upward."

The second-in-command, "Dazhuang", sat on a bench with a missing leg.

His build was as burly as a black bear, and his two thick arms were covered in bulging veins.

In his hand, he held a ragged rag, repeatedly wiping a homemade double-barreled muzzleloader with a shortened barrel under the faint moonlight seeping through the window.

Hearing Rat's wails, Dazhuang knitted his brows and let out a rough, low roar:

"What the hell are you panicking for! With Second Master presiding here, the sky won't fall down."

"Fourth, bring the medical kit from the marching pack and put some antiseptic realgar powder on Rat to suppress that evil Qi."

Fourth-in-command, "Yaba", who sat behind the door, was a lean and withered man.

He was mute from birth, and upon hearing Dazhuang's instruction, he immediately untied the canvas bag at his feet.

The moment he reached his hand inside, Second Master Lei's tobacco pipe knocked heavily twice against the edge of the bed.

"Tap, tap."

The muffled knocking sound interrupted the commotion inside the room.

Second Master Lei exhaled a large mouthful of thick blue smoke, his single eye coldly sweeping over his three subordinates in the room.

"Keep your mouths tightly shut, all of you, and put your homemade guns back into your bags with the safety on."

"Whoever accidentally fires and makes the slightest noise, bringing disaster to the next room, I, Lei Lao'er, will skin him alive first."

Hearing this, Yaba gestured a few times in mid-air with his short, thick fingers.

He pointed in the direction of Lin Ye's room on the other side of the wall, placed his palm horizontally beneath his neck, and made a fierce slitting motion.

That habitually expressionless face was now filled with fear of the unknown.

In the end, Rat couldn't endure the piercing, bizarre itch and severe pain.

He recklessly tore open the sleeve of his windbreaker on his right arm, exposing his arm to the air.

Dazhuang turned on a military high-intensity flashlight, covering most of the light head with his hand, leaving only a sliver of light to shine on Rat's arm.

As the faint light swept across, the skin on Rat's forearm had completely changed its appearance.

A layer of grayish-white hard skin had grown over the once-vibrant flesh.

This layer of hard skin presented an eerie fish-scale texture, rough and astringent on the surface.

The texture was that of "Guanyin soil" mixed with corpse tallow and underground river water, buried deep underground for hundreds or thousands of years.

The grayish-white earthy hard skin had already spread past the elbow, eroding step by step toward the shoulder along the meridians of the upper arm.

Dazhuang gasped inwardly, veins bulging on the back of his hand holding the flashlight.

In the Great Xia grave-robbing circle, everyone knew the four major factions: the Mo Jin, Fa Qiu, Ban Shan, and Xie Ling.

Yet in this humid Miao border region of the Southwest, where underground water networks were dense, there still lurked a secret branch unknown to outsiders.

Insiders called them [Mud Diggers], commonly known as Mud and Water Travelers.

The ancient tombs in the Miao border area were mostly built beneath water springs and swamps deep in the mountains and old forests.

After two thousand years of moisture immersion and crustal changes,

the dome of the tomb chamber had long collapsed, and the entire underground palace had turned into a bottomless quagmire of slurry and mud.

The traditional dragon seeking ruler would completely fail under strong magnetic fields.

When the Luoyang shovel was driven down, everything brought up was thin, rotting stinking mud, completely failing to probe the solid foundation of the tomb bricks.

When Mud Diggers went down to tombs, they brought no compass and lit no candles.

They relied entirely on a [parting water mud-avoidance needle] several zhang long, forged entirely from pure copper.

This copper needle was hollow inside, filled with high-purity realgar and quicklime.

When entering a tomb, this needle was forcibly inserted deep into the quagmire, the mechanism at the needle tip was activated, and the quicklime exploded with intense high temperature upon encountering water, forcibly coagulating and hardening the surrounding flowing mud.

Taking advantage of this fleeting hardened space, the Mud Diggers carved out a narrow "mud path" that could only accommodate one person.

Since childhood, they practiced a niche technique called [breath-holding and pulse-reducing skill], able to hold their breath for a full stick of incense's time in the pitch-black, stinking, turbid mud.

They closed their eyes, relying entirely on their bare hands to grope for the outline of the coffin in the cold mud, pry open the coffin lid, and snatch burial objects.

This kind of work where one's head was tucked into one's waistband was called a [wet tomb] in the trade.

Soaking year-round in the extremely Yin tomb mud, the Mud Diggers' bodies would inevitably be eroded by the evil energy of the earth veins.

The grayish-white hard skin growing on Rat's arm was precisely the fatal occupational disease left by descending into wet tombs.

Mud and Water Travelers called it [mudification disease].

"Second Master, this mud skin has already passed the joints."

Rat panted hastily, his tears mixing with the black mud on his face to wash out two white streaks.

"If I endure for another three days, this half of my body will completely turn into a senseless mud bodhisattva. I don't want to die in these mountains. My old mother is still waiting for me to take money back for her medical treatment."

Second Master Lei stared fixedly at Rat's worsening arm, the light in his single eye flickering uncertainly.

"What are you crying and wailing for? In our line of work, reaching into a dead man's pocket for money means we should have risked our lives long ago."

Second Master Lei knocked his pipe bowl against the edge of the bed, poured the ash onto the ground, and stamped it out.

"I told you. Only the heart blood of poisonous insects from the deepest part of the Ten Thousand Gu Demon Cave, paired with the extremely Yin pool water there, can resolve the mud evil in the cracks of your bones. Our trip into the mountains this time is precisely to enter that underground palace to find the antidote."

He sighed, his tone turning exceptionally heavy.

"You also know that for the past half month, we've brought the mud-avoidance needle and dug three water springs in this Xishan area, and all that's underneath is a bunch of soaked rotting bones and broken pottery shards."

"The real bronze gates of the Yellow Springs underground palace are hidden within the maze, and we simply can't find the trick to it."

Dazhuang gritted his teeth, turning to look at Yaba crouching behind the door:

"Fourth, dump out the burial objects in your backpack and let Second Master examine them carefully. I don't believe that among the things we brothers dug out by risking our necks, we can't find a way out."

Yaba nodded.

He untied the thick canvas bag stained with yellow mud, turned the bottom of the bag upward, and carefully dumped all the objects inside onto the wooden board bed.

Several excavated objects carrying a strong aquatic stench revealed their forms under the faint light of the flashlight.

A bronze inscription tablet broken into two halves.

Its surface was covered with a thick layer of blackened patina, faintly revealing a few incomplete ancient Zhou seal script characters.

A palm-sized headless Buddha pendant carved entirely from black jade.

The carving of this pendant was crude and eerie, and the fracture at the Buddha statue's neck was extremely smooth.

As soon as the pendant was taken out, a pungent corpse stench diffused throughout the room.

Finally, there was a remnant hand-drawn map of the Xishan water system on crude sheepskin.

The edges of the sheepskin had become soggy from groundwater, and the surface of the map was covered with dense lines and cinnabar markings.

Second Master Lei fished out a pair of reading glasses from his pocket and put them on, his single eye drawing close to the broken bronze inscription tablet.

He gently scraped off part of the patina on the surface with his rough fingers, his fingertip slowly wandering along the grooves of those ancient seal characters.

In his early years, Second Master Lei had studied epigraphy for a few years with an old scholar from the late Qing dynasty, and he was quite knowledgeable about such ancient scripts.

"This bronze piece is a remnant block of the chronological stele left by the tomb-building craftsmen of the Western Han Dynasty."

His voice was kept extremely low, explaining the content above to his subordinates word by word.

"Inscribed on it is a deep secret: back then, King Zhou mobilized a large army for a southern inspection tour, which was actually to suppress a terrifying evil entity crawling out from beneath the ground."

Second Master Lei put down the bronze piece and pointed his fingertip at the wrinkled sheepskin water system map.

"Look at the Feng Shui trend on this map: the remaining veins of two extinct volcanoes intersect here, and the entrance to the Yellow Springs underground palace is hidden at the position of this bead."

Dazhuang listened anxiously on the side, reaching out to scratch his messy hair:

"Second Master, it's drawn so clearly on this map, why don't we just follow the route and feel our way over? Why must we waste time in this shady inn on Laoya Ridge?"

Second Master Lei took off his reading glasses and cast a cold glance at Dazhuang:

"What the hell do you know? The maze set up by the ancients is not something you can barge into just by relying on a tattered map."

"The second half of that chronological stele states clearly: to open the gates of that underground palace hidden beneath the swamp, one must find a token called the [King Zhou Age-Suppressing Key]."

He weighed the black jade headless Buddha statue in his hand, his gaze profound.

"Without that guide, anyone who steps into the outer periphery of the Ten Thousand Gu Demon Cave will be instantly corroded into a pool of yellow water by the poisonous miasma accumulated for two thousand years. We wouldn't even be able to touch the threshold of the underground palace."

Rat clutched his already numb right arm, leaning desperately against the wall.

"The Age-Suppressing Key... This thing was long lost in the long river of history, where are we going to find it? Second Master, my life is pretty much done for right here."

Second Master Lei picked up the dry tobacco pipe from the head of the bed, stuck it into his mouth, sucked on it dryly a couple of times, but did not light it.

His single eye flashed with an extremely greedy and calculating glint in the dim room.