Empress Fu Yao [Volume 3]

Chapter 126

Meng Fuyao smiled and shook her head. “There’s no need to be so clear on who saved who,” she said as she took big strides, walking past the painting and the crystal formation to arrive at a stone wall. “Behind this door is the passageway of the tomb.”
T

here were strange characters on the door, though it was unknown whether it was written using cinnabar or blood. Meng Fuyao did not even raise her head and directly muttered the translation, “Those who dare to dig my tomb will die without any descendants.”
Zhan Beiye was carefully scrutinizing the Gun Tribe’s characters that were hard to understand. When he heard that line, he asked dumbfoundedly, “You can decipher the language of the Gun Tribe?”
Meng Fuyao chuckled. “All the tomb owners in the world only know this curse.”
Zhan Beiye looked at her and laughed. “I really like how silly and bold you are.”

Meng Fuyao pretended not to hear. She looked at the huge door shaft and said, “I don’t know whether the door opens inwards or outwards. Let’s give it a try.”
It turned out that the door could only be opened from the inside. Meng Fuyao inserted a dagger into the seam of the door and moved it up and down. “There is a door lintel and two jambs on both sides. It seems like there’s also a lock that is quite complicated,” she said.
She reached out her hand and ordered, “Fatty! The crowbar!”
There was only silence behind her. Meng Fuyao froze for a moment and remembered what she just said. For a while, she was a bit confused, and as she turned her head, she met the peculiar gazes of the people behind her.
Meng Fuyao twitched her mouth and embarrassingly said, “Slip of the tongue, slip of the tongue… ”
Two soldiers handed over two awls and asked, “Do these work?”
“I will make do with it,” Meng Fuyao replied as she used the tools to open the door. Behind her, everyone stared at her so intently that it was slightly awkward. Meng Fuyao predicted that Zhan Beiye was probably looking at her with an expression that said, ‘so you are a tomb raider’.
‘Sigh, this is too embarrassing.’ The reputation that she had been maintaining up till now had dissipated.
To be honest, the skills that Meng Fuyao was showcasing belonged to a tomb raider’s skill sets and not of an archaeologist. For excavations on a national level, they would usually invite some “folks” to help solve complex situations without damaging the site. Meng Fuyao’s skills were picked up from one such “folk”.

Moments later, there was a sound of a crack. The door of the dead person had finally been opened by Meng Fuyao.
Meng Fuyao pulled Zhan Beiye away as a pungent smell that seemed to have gone stale for 1,000 years wafted from the depths of the passageway towards the people standing at the door.
A look inside revealed a fifty-meter long passageway without any stone doors on the walls. It was starkly different from the Han Dynasty and Tang Dynasty tombs that Meng Fuyao had encountered in the past world, whereby boulders were used to block the passageway, and that made her slightly relieved. If there were too many boulders, it would have been impossible to blast them up using the current gunpowder technology.
The group cautiously stepped into the passageway, and Meng Fuyao instructed the group to light up the lighters. The top of the passageway was filled with colorful illustrations that mainly depicted warfare and sacrifices. Occasionally, they saw strange statues. As Meng Fuyao’s gaze passed by a corner of the mural, she vaguely felt that something was wrong, but that thought flashed by in a split second. The soldier that held the lighter had already walked passed that corner and also because they did not have many lighters to waste, Meng Fuyao had no time to stop and investigate.
As she walked, Meng Fuyao kept throwing out a few crystals that she had picked up earlier to test if there were any booby traps. The soldier who had the lighter was walking in front and answering Ji Yu’s queries. Suddenly, he froze as if he saw something and subsequently, fell against the wall of the passageway.
Following a thunderous sound, the walls cracked, and huge heaps of golden sand flowed out like river streams. The sand quickly filled up a crack that was very hard to notice, and another thunderous sound followed.
The soldier suddenly dropped vertically.
Whoosh!
Zhan Beiye, who was walking at the back of the group, suddenly leaped to the front, his robes rustling against the wind. As a black figure flashed by, Zhan Beiye picked up the falling soldier. Below him, the ground creaked and suddenly swiveled, revealing a trench that was four to five meters deep. In the hole lay sharp blades that seemed to be waiting for their next victim.