The Lost Tomb Vol. 3

Chapter 35: Rhinoceros Horn Light

When I thought about it later, I realized that I mouthed these words in such a serious manner instead of saying them aloud because I was afraid that the ghosts would hear. This made it all too obvious that my nerves had been pushed to their limit. After all, if it had been an ordinary situation, or the pressure had been just a little less, I never would have even entertained the idea.

But given the situation, this state of mind was inevitable. We had spent so much time and gone through so many things to get to this point, only to end up falling into this hopeless situation without any apparent reason. And that wasn't even mentioning the long road ahead, or the fact that we didn't know how to get back. This situation was clearly keeping us from thinking properly, especially when it came to those problems that went beyond the scope of anything we could see or imagine.

Thinking about it later, I came up with many different ways we could have gotten out of there. For example, we could have held a compass in our hands and watched how the needle changed direction as we walked through the tomb passage. At the moment we reversed direction, the compass needle would definitely turn. There were other ways, but at that time, except for a few fixed ideas, my mind was completely blank. That was why I ended up turning to the possibility that this was the work of ghosts. I would have usually thought such an idea was funny or absurd, but this time, I actually felt a little creeped out.

Fatty and Shunzi were strongly influenced by the expression on my face and reacted worse than I did—their faces immediately turned pale and they both gulped. "Are you sure?" Fatty mouthed at me. "I tried to tell you guys earlier... What should we do now?"

At that time, I thought that the logical basis for the existence of this tomb passage was untenable, so there was no logical reason for this phenomenon to occur. But if it wasn't a dream, then it couldn't escape the shackles of logic. In other words, what we were seeing or hearing now was probably an illusion. It was hard to say what exactly was going on around us, but the only thing I could think of that could make four people experience the same illusion at the same time was an "evil ghost". This was the only thing that could ignore the rules of logic and trap people in such a way without revealing any flaws.

In this case, "evil ghost" was just a more relatable term used to refer to any type of force that couldn't be understood, but undoubtedly existed.

But if there really were "ghosts" here, then we were still helpless—we couldn't see them at all, which meant that we couldn't deal with them. Even if we cursed at them or used all sorts of methods, it wouldn't do any good. This had become the kind of situation that I hated the most—we knew that the source of the problem was right next to us, but we didn't have any way to deal with it.

My way of thinking at that time was still very childish, but there was also the issue of not knowing what kind of force we were dealing with. If it wasn't sentient, then we had a big problem—the lack of conscious thought meant that any tricks we used would be useless and we'd have confront it head-on. But if it was a ghost, then things should be easy—if it could think, then we could force it out and pressure it to make some mistakes.

When I told the others my thoughts, Fatty insisted that the ghost was one of the corpses in front of us, although he didn't know which one it was. He said that maybe the person's soul was still lingering here because they couldn't let go of their earthly desires, and when they saw that people had suddenly appeared here, they naturally wanted to play a trick on them.

Fatty ruled out Shunzi's father first, because he hadn't seen his son for ten years so he naturally wouldn't want to mess with his son's life. But that still left five others.

I already felt a little ridiculous at this point, but we had nowhere to go so I figured it was best to try everything. With that in mind, I walked over to the corpses, knelt down in front of them, folded several pieces of paper so that they looked like golden ingots,(1) and then burned them in front of each corpse. While they burned, I kowtowed to the corpses and said, "I am Wu Sanxing's nephew. I'm in a hurry to find my Uncle Three. I ask that whichever one of you is casting this spell, please accept this paper money and let us go. We really are in a hurry. How about we leave Fatty here to play with you and you can let the others go?"