This wasn’t Luo Su’s first time going down into the mines, but the only time he had ever gone so deep was his first visit.
He kept close to Hooknose. He was the leader of the team, making his life the most valuable, so sticking with him would be safer.
As the team of 19 continued deeper into the mines. The electric lines and lights above them had reached their end, and the tunnel before them was pitch-black. They could only rely on the helmet lights for illumination now.
Luo Su recalled Foreman Leon warning him that tunnels without electric lines were very dangerous. Once he got lost, he would find it very difficult to get out alive, not even if he was an experienced miner.
This was because humans would lose their sense of direction in the darkness. You might think you were traveling in a straight line when you were really just walking around in circles.
“Captain, we didn’t bring a guide…” Luo Su realized how bad things were. The team hadn’t even brought an old miner with them. This was far too bold.
“A needless concern. I never play around with my own life. You have to trust your comrades. None of them is an ordinary person.” Hooknose dropped back and pointed at the soldier leading the way. “Because you’re not an official member and haven’t signed the confidentiality agreements, I can’t tell you very much. His code name is ‘Map.’ With him here, we’ll never be lost.”
The code name was connected to the ability, and Luo Su didn’t take long to guess what ability Map had. But as the word ‘Map’ wasn’t followed by the word ‘Cannon,’ he could guess that Map lacked any offensive power. But even so, he had very practical supportability. When the team was on a special mission, he was a member whose presence was absolutely necessary.
But then what should my code name be…
Ditto?
The Man of a Thousand Faces?
After walking another five minutes, or at least after Luo Su had mentally counted around three hundred seconds, the team arrived at the location for their mission.
This was the end of the tunnel. There were clear signs of digging, and if you went back fifty meters, you would find the entrance to a different tunnel. The map had not chosen to go down this tunnel, instead of stopping at the dead end and gesturing to Hooknose that the mission was complete.
This was the tunnel where Leon had found gold, but the further investigation hadn’t even turned up fart…well, that wasn’t true. Fart had methane, and this mine had plenty of methane.
An average-sized soldier walked out of the group and placed his ear against the wall. He lightly knocked against the wall with his hand and listened. Without Hooknose’s explanation, Luo Su could already see that this person also had supportability.
“He’s ‘Radar,’ the ears of the team. He probably has the best hearing in the world…” With the breathing apparatus us, Hooknose had a very muffled voice.
Five minutes later, Radar shrugged. It was a real wall without any hidden mechanisms. This really was a dead end.
The search team had hit a deadlock. Hooknose came to the melancholy realization that the truth was not as simple as he had imagined. He firmly believed in his hypothesis. There had to be some sort of secret in this tunnel, so he had his team disperse. In order to prevent the entrance from activating, he made it so that each team member was in the vision of another.
Luo Su stayed at Hooknose’s side, looking around with the aid of his helmet light. In the end, he stopped at a crack in the ceiling above his head.
From the look of it, this crack had produced when the tunnel was being excavated!
Hooknose followed the helmet light and also saw the crack in the rock ceiling. Without any obvious action on his part, all the members gathered around. They supported Radar as he listened to the ceiling to determine if there was anything past it, but he obtained the same result.
Luo Su solemnly looked at the crack. His sixth sense told him that the truth of the spiders was in there. They just hadn’t found the right method yet.
Another soldier walked out of the team. He cut his palm with his knife and then pressed his palm onto the crack.
Under the light of the helmets, a strange scene unfolded. The red blood began to creep along the walls like a living organism, dividing into countless thin strands that formed themselves into a complex pattern.
In the end, a six-pointed red star formed, radiating a faint light. The blood boiled away, and only the blood at the crack retained its crimson hue.
“He’s ‘Dessert.’ His blood can activate supernatural energies and is irresistibly delicious for many monsters…”
Hooknose’s tone was rather stiff. Based on his past experience with supernatural phenomena, he determined that this was a sealed area buried deep underground. The damaged six-pointed star indicated that the seal had lost effect or was in the middle of losing effect.
Luo Su could also see that this was a seal. Although he had never interacted with magical energy before, he lived in the information age, where there were countless movies, novels, and cartoons on this subject.
But the problem was, who had broken the seal?
Luo Su’s first thought was Leon. The spiders had appeared right after he had found the gold. This didn’t mean that Leon was the schemer behind the curtain. Rather, there was an eighty percent chance that he had damaged the seal while digging through the area.
The trash seal wasn’t sturdy at all!
Luo Su silently cursed. It seemed that the grass wasn’t always greener on the other side of the hill. If this had been China…fine, there were a lot of monsters and devils that ran out of their seals there too.
What had those bigshots who had sealed all those monsters been thinking? Just kill them! But they just had to leave a trap for their descendants.
Anything involving the occult immediately became extremely illogical. Hooknose began to think about retreating and having a specialist handle this. His team was good at fighting mutants, but they were lost when fighting ghosts.
But just when Hooknose was about to give the order to fall back, the ground suddenly trembled. Not just the ground, the entire tunnel trembled.
Rocks showered down from the ceiling. The team pressed themselves against the wall and did not dare to move, praying that the mine didn’t collapse.
Although he didn’t have a sense of direction and didn’t know west from east, when pressed against the wall, Luo Su could sense that the tunnel he was in was moving like a shifting turntable.
Kerkerclackclack!
As the shaking stopped, the end of the tunnel suddenly shone with gold.
It was gold ore!
The breathing of the soldiers turned heavy, greed, causing them to inadvertently step forward. Hooknose grunted, and these people immediately froze and came back.
At the edge of the gold, ore vein was a straight and silent path. It had also been excavated but by giant spiders, not people.
A dim light came from the end of the passage. Hooknose glanced at Map, who nodded and began to lead the way. A team member at his side took out his Kukri knife. From the look of it, he seemed to be a combat member.
The path wasn’t long, and it sloped upward. The team needed less than thirty seconds to reach the exit.
The path opened up into a massive cavern—stalagmites and stalactites in the most fantastical shapes linked together to form bizarre stone pillars. The walls radiated a dim light to reveal this plaza-like cavern, the ceiling more than thirty meters high in some places.
But the team was not entranced by this beautiful sight. Their attention was immediately drawn to the bones covering the ground.
They were human bones, the passage of time causing them to darken, piled up in countless numbers. The bones at the very bottom had already fused with the ground, and the bones piled atop them were extremely brutal. The empty eye sockets of those numerous skulls made one’s blood freeze.
“What in the world happened here?”
Hooknose grimaced. America had a history in this place of fewer than 200 years, but the bones had been piled up here for far longer than that.
“Look for any clues in the area, and then let’s get out of here.” Hooknose felt an inexplicable disgust that made him feel uneasy, but since they were already here, they needed to come back with something.
The team members split up in pairs, the bones cracking and popping as they stepped on them. It didn’t take long before a cry of disbelief came from the center.
“Captain, you need to see this…”
Hooknose strode over, Luo Su following right behind. Quite a few other team members also approached, and once they saw what it was, they glanced at each other.
A pure white hand was extended out of a pile of rotting bones; five slender fingers extended straight for the sky as if wanting to grab something.
Hooknose swallowed. He didn’t know how many years this place had existed, but it was long enough to rot away everything, so what was with this fresh hand…
Was there another passage into this place?
In the face of his team members’ questioning gazes, Hooknose made a difficult decision: “Dig it out…”
The team members worked together to move aside the bleached bones, revealing the true appearance of the arm’s owner.
It was the corpse of a Caucasian woman, her lower body buried in the bones while her upper body was completely naked. She had a pleasant and simple appearance, and her body could court the envy of all other women. She was twenty-seven or twenty-eight, but definitely not more than thirty.
For a beautiful woman’s corpse to be hidden in this mountain of bones made Luo Su shiver. In comparison to all these decaying skeletons, this female corpse was far more horrifying. It was like…
She could come back to life at any moment…