Author: 年终 / Nian Zhong
Translator: Kinky || https://kinkytranslations.com/
Chapter 94: Ant Nest
Fu Xingchuan, who was running, made a gesture, and the heavy stone gate opened in response. There was a faint light shining inside the door as the cold wind blew out.
Fu Xingchuan’s scarlet flames enveloped the five people as he took the lead and rushed into the stone gate. Li Nian followed closely behind. When he passed the door frame, he retracted the green willow whips in his hand. The scalps of Yin Ren and Zhong Chengshuo narrowly brushed against the ceiling of the cave, and they managed to escape the fate of bumping their heads against the threshold.
The sound of cracking and things breaking sounded behind them as the stalagmites bit into each other, blocking the stone gate tightly.
Fu Xingchuan breathed a sigh of relief as he stopped and put Qi Xin down. “Miss Qi, are you alright?”
Ordinary people probably wouldn’t see such a special effect-like scene in their entire lives. Qi Xin’s face was pale, and her neat hair was loose. The ends of her eyes became redder, and a few strands of hair were stuck to her cheeks with sweat. It wasn’t surprising if she cried in the next second.
Fortunately, she was barely conscious.
“I’m fine,” Qi Xin said stiffly.
After saying this, she didn’t say anything else, as usual. Qi Xin just glanced at Fu Xingchuan with her slender eyes, as if trying to remember his appearance.
Fu Xingchuan was a little surprised to see such a calm crowd. Instead of breaking the subject, he walked back to the entrance of the stone gate. A round ball of fire ignited in his palm and illuminated the gate.
The appearance of those “stalagmites” was also revealed in front of them. They were yellow and white, with thick and dark dirt on them. The dirt was brownish red to almost black, exuding a faint fishy smell.
They clenched tightly, blocking the stone gate door.
They looked like teeth.
Fu Xingchuan let out a long sigh. The fireball in his hand jumped twice. “The mechanism here is interesting.”
He snapped his fingers with his free hand, causing Yin Ren and Zhong Chengshuo, who were floating, to suddenly fall. Zhong Chengshuo knelt on the ground decently, but his clothes weren’t as neat—as a science post, Zhong Chengshuo was invulnerable to ghosts and spirits, but his clothes weren’t immune to the levitation spells. He was basically carried around by his clothes, which were affected by the spell, so his shirt was a mess and a section around his waist was missing.
Yin Ren played stupid to the end and fell on his ass on the stone floor.
It had to be said that Lord Ghost King’s appearance was quite advantageous. Yin Ren’s movements were quite embarrassing; his face was lined with black hair, which made the entire picture quite pleasing to the eye.
Unfortunately, except for Zhong Chengshuo, who was seriously watching, the others weren’t the least bit fooled.
The stalagmite teeth didn’t grow beyond the stone door, so they were barely safe. Professor Li didn’t let go of the green willow whips. They were still wrapped around Zhong Chengshuo’s and Yin Ren’s wrists, tightening like shackles. The scene looked like they were prisoners being escorted, or as if they were being walked like dogs.
With one hand tied to the wicker whip, it wasn’t convenient for them to move freely. This caused Zhong Chengshuo’s brows to curl a bit.
Yin Ren expressed dissatisfaction across his entire face. Perhaps because his gaze was too direct, Professor Li casually said, “I don’t know how to perform spells, so I can drag you over at any time. This makes it more convenient to protect you.”
‘Rather, putting it another way, this was more so to prevent us from stabbing you in the back,’ Yin Ren muttered in his heart.
But they really didn’t take advantage of the situation—this unfortunate accident was really triggered by them. Yin Ren was in a daze for a while. Since entering Shian, he hadn’t encountered a “smooth” case.
Could it be that the 1,000-year-old Evil Spirit’s peach blossoms* have all withered and he has overdrawn his last remaining luck?
*Peach blossoms are often associated with love and luck.
He glanced at Zhong Chengshuo from the corner of his eyes. His gaze was colliding with Zhong Chengshuo’s gaze. In the dim stone cave, those black eyes didn’t have any trace of luster. The man was tidying his clothes as his gaze floated over after a while, making Yin Ren’s cheeks itch.
Yin Ren scratched the side of his face in satisfaction.
Seeing that Yin Ren and Zhong Chengshuo had calmed down, Fu Xingchuan bluntly instructed, “If you have nothing to do, go inside first. There’s wind here, so there must be a way out. As long as I can find a crack, I can blow it up.”
“Lao Li, look at the environmental indicators. Don’t let our people administer mold or poison gas. Miss Qi, please follow me and let me know if you are tired.”
Qi Xin nodded.
The passage behind the stone gate wasn’t long, and the firelight at the end was even a normal, warm color, with a faint smell of human smoke.
Fu Xingchuan walked in front as usual. The flame shield turned into two thick fire dragons. They bent their long bodies to protect the group of people. In the firelight, the scales of the little dragons were clear, and the dragon’s eyes would turn around cautiously, as if they were alive.
Zhong Chengshuo stretched out his hand to touch it, but the dragon bent its body skillfully and avoided his finger. He watched it go around regretfully and then stared at Yin Ren’s hair.
This time, Yin Ren failed to look at him with “a tacit understanding”.
…Yin Ren smelled the stench of corpses.
Very many, very old corpses. They were lying at the end of the tunnel, waiting for them quietly. The faint scent was sent out by the wind, wrapping them like corpse gauze.
There was no problem with the corpses themselves. Many ancient burial pits would have the smell of old corpses—the problem was, those corpses were mixed with strong and weak Evil Force. It mixed in with the smell, which made the faint stench of the corpses icy cold.
What was worse, the Evil Force didn’t originate from the same Evil Spirit.
Fu Xingchuan probably also realized something was wrong as he walked slower.
The appearance of this bigshot from Shian hadn’t changed, but Yin Ren could feel the churning of that person’s power—like a beast hiding behind the bushes, Fu Xingchuan was ready to throw a fatal blow at any moment.
The stone tunnel wasn’t long, but Yin Ren felt they had been in it for 10,000 years.
Finally, they stepped into the light at the end of the tunnel.
They were in the interior of a building that looked extremely old. It had everlasting lights burning on the wall. The lights shook gently with the wind, illuminating the surrounding scene…
Qi Xin took two steps back and covered her mouth and nose. She froze in place blankly, showing a look of not knowing if she should vomit.
The building was spacious and gorgeous, with a mottled mural. The style of the painting was typical in the Gong Dynasty. Most of the murals were hidden in the shadows, and the parts that were illuminated by the fire could only vaguely show figures of people and evil things. They didn’t know what the ingredients of the vermillion pigments were, but thousands of years later, it was still so bright that it was dazzling.
There was an empty altar in the center of the room. It was painted with the same red color as the murals and was so bright that it seemed out of place. They could see that something had been originally placed on it but was later removed.
But there were still many “things” that hadn’t been removed.
For example, those extremely distorted and deformed mummified corpses that were bound in chains and charms on the wall. They were chained to the wall and almost blended in with the distorted murals.
Yin Ren knew that the corpses belonged to people, but he only judged by the smell.
Looking at the appearance of those things, it was difficult to classify them into the category of “people”.
The nearest body to them was more than two meters high. The corpse’s shoulders were bent and folded, so that the person’s armpits were almost flush with the hip bone. His arms and legs were the same length, folding into a shape like a comb with only four teeth.
The man’s head was embedded in the middle of his arched upper body, and his mouth was abnormally enlarged, almost piercing into his chest. Above the huge mouth, there were only two erect human eyes. They were so shrunk that they were only the size of a thumbnail and were hard to spot unless they examined them carefully.
His—or her—withered arms stretched out of the altar, and his deformed mouth was open wide, revealing teeth the size of a child’s fist. They didn’t know whether he was screaming or cursing.
And this was just the most “normal” one among them.
Beside it, another corpse had a head as big as a torso. Its facial features were all over its head. A little further away, the skin of the corpses was extremely proliferated, as if the person in the center was wrapped in layers, like a withered fresh flower.
Their appearance was too bizarre. When ordinary people saw it, it would take them a while to “figure out what this is” before realizing that “it’s a corpse”.
Everyone in Shian was silent for a moment.
Half a minute later, Zhong Chengshuo took out his phone and backpack and coughed lightly. “Can I take pictures and take samples?”
Yin Ren could hear that he tried extremely hard to suppress the expectation in his voice, but unfortunately, he wasn’t very successful.
To Zhong Chengshuo, this wasn’t like entering an underground monument full of strange corpses but rather like a five-year-old child wandering around a candy store.
Fu Xingchuan looked at Zhong Chengshuo speechlessly. “…You can take pictures.”
“Don’t touch anything besides the corpses,” before Fu Xingchuan finished speaking, Li Nian added. “This building was left over from the Gong Dynasty, and it’s well preserved. The murals and stone carvings are important cultural relics.”
Fu Xingchuan glanced at his partner even more inexplicably. He exhaled slowly and summoned more than a dozen fire dragons.
“I’ll look around,” he said casually.
Minister Fu’s tone was understated. The scene in the area was huge…
More than a dozen fire dragons with elongated bodies were drilled out along the doors and windows of the area. They circled and shuttled around the space with their flame, which was blazing like the scorching sun, illuminating the dark underground into a bloody dusk.
At the same time, Fu Xingchuan crossed his hands. A water curtain appeared under the dome of the building, suddenly creating a miniature mirage.
The scenes around the fire dragons were shrunk one by one on the water curtain.
Looking out from the huge doors and windows of the area, the door leading outside was still a door, and the windows were still windows. Buildings of different dynasties were stacked and overlapped, making this place look like a mix-and-match insect nest.
The air around the fire dragon was a little warmer, and under the toasting of their heat, the smell of corpses came from all directions.
The scene on the water curtain Fu Xingchuan made was silent for a while before he activated his headset.
“Lu Xiaohe, go get Hao Wenzhe,” he said.
“Things are getting a bit exciting. We found the biggest ‘Ant Nest’ so far.”
Lu Xiaohe: “……”
Lu Xiaohe: “…Ant Nest?”
Including the Snake Swallowing, the development of this execution mission was simply getting more outrageous.
“That kid Xiang Jiang can’t even do a good job investigating. Sunken Society is using the mines to raise evil things? …We thought this was a dog cage of Sunken Society, but it turns out that was just the guard dog. The specialty dishes are behind it.”
A fire dragon circled Fu Xingchuan, reflecting the color of his red tunic so brightly that it almost burned. Li Nian clicked his tongue loudly and tightened the willow whips in his hand. Zhong Chengshuo was solemnly slicing the corpse when he was dragged by the long willow whip and almost scratched his hand.
“What is the ‘Ant Nest’?” Yin Ren asked knowingly.
“Sunken Society is a very old organization. You must have learned about it.”
Fu Xingchuan scratched the stubble on his chin.
“They also have their own research division. Previously, Huajisi, uh, Shian’s predecessor, closely tracked them but could only find a limited number of hidden places. In addition, some ‘research materials’ are difficult to transfer. After a research building is scrapped, they will build a new one near the original site… They call this complex of research buildings the ‘Ant Nest’.”
Above the water curtains, layers of buildings blend with each other, which was countless times more “prosperous” than the mountain town above ground. It had been abandoned for thousands of years, but the everlasting lights in the building hadn’t been extinguished for a long time. In the chaotic darkness, it was like a behemoth with countless open eyes.
Yin Ren nodded. “Since this is an abandoned test site from Sunken Society, shouldn’t they protect it properly?”
However at Fu Xingchuan’s level, there was a high probability that he didn’t need to be induced.
Sure enough, Fu Xingchuan gave him a meaningful look. “The experimental buildings aren’t easy to build. They must have abandoned it because there’s some kind of ‘danger’ here. As for what that danger is, it depends on the research topic of this damn place.”
Sunken Society didn’t deliberately hide this Ant Nest. Since the beginning of the Gong Dynasty, this Ant Nest hadn’t been discovered by Huajisi for thousands of years.
This only represented one thing—no one from the “right side” who had seen this Ant Nest had lived to tell the tale.
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