The Lost Tomb Vol. 3

Chapter 31: Endless Loop

Everyone's faces turned pale and we all looked around, but the more we looked, the more certain we became—those were our footprints all over the ground. This was indeed the tomb chamber where we found Shunzi's father before. But it was strange—how did we come back?

The tomb passage was a straight shot, and we hadn't taken any turns while we were walking (four people and one corpse could attest to that). Plus, logically speaking, we couldn't walk for twenty minutes and return to the starting point. It was just too unbelievable. This had to be a ghost-hitting-a-wall type situation.

Fatty cast a worried glance at the door leading to the tomb passage before asking, "When we left, did we end up turning back without knowing it? It's so fucking strange..."

"No way," Pan Zi said. "If we had turned back, at least one of us would have noticed it. I remember walking in a straight line the whole way. Plus, the tomb passage wasn't long and there weren't any forks in the path. There's no way I'd remember wrong."

"Then it's a ghost-hitting-a-wall situation," Fatty said. "Shunzi, is your dad messing with us? You need to educate him. Tell him we're just here for business."

Shunzi immediately became furious, "Stop talking nonsense!"

I quickly stopped them—now really wasn't the time to fight. My whole body was covered in a cold sweat because I felt as if the last thing I wanted to happen may have actually happened, but I wasn't completely sure yet. "Don't be so noisy," I said to them. "There's only one way to see if we really came back—let's go again and see what happens."

The others looked at each other in dismay. After seeing my expression, they probably realized that something was wrong.

At that time, I kept thinking about the hopeless expressions on those mummified corpses' faces. Had they been trapped here in the same way? It was true that there was no food among their belongings, but it seemed too unbelievable that they returned to the same room no matter how much they walked. But my intuition was telling me that I was correct, and whatever had trapped them here had now trapped us as well.

What I needed to do right now was prove my hunch—or maybe I wanted to deny the horrible premonition in my heart—so I hurried back to the tomb passage, the others quickly following behind me.

Because we had already walked through it once and knew that there weren't any traps, we moved quickly this time. I was basically moving at a trot as I stared at the walls on both sides, making sure that there weren't any forks in the path or inexplicable turns that would send us back to that room.

This time, we ran through the whole passage in less than ten minutes. When I felt that we were about to see the end of the passage, I kept praying that my hunch was incorrect, but as soon as I saw that nearly identical jade door, my heart suddenly froze and I broke out in a cold sweat.

We walked through the door, and Fatty rushed to the mounds of gold. Then he knelt down and covered his face with his hands. I rushed over to take a look and saw six bodies and all the things we had lined up before...we had come back again.

My hunch was correct. We had focused all of our attention on ensuring that there were no forks in the path and that we didn't somehow get turned around, so I knew that we had gone straight the whole way, but we still ended up returning to the starting point.

Fatty was gasping for breath after all that running, but still managed to say, "There's no doubt about—this is a ghost-hitting-a-wall type situation. No matter how much we walk, we're just going in a circle. Both ends of this tomb passage lead to the same place. We're going to meet Shunzi's father for sure this time. Shunzi, please tell your father to stop messing with us. Otherwise, we'll leave him here and find a way out ourselves."