The Lost Tomb : Ten Years Later

Chapter 12: Stand Up

It wasn't long after we had climbed the tree just now that these centipedes burst out, so it must have been caused by the man secretly walking through the forest. I recalled the order in which the centipedes appeared, and knew that they had come from a wellhead in the southeast. That person must have come from there, so Wang Meng should be in that direction, too.

The wound on my palm really hurt and would take a long time to heal. I really hadn't wanted to use this method now, but there was no other way.

"Boss, do I need to come down?" Kan Jian asked from the tree.

"If you can handle it yourself, just stay in the tree." I replied.

Kan Jian jumped down, went up to me, looked at my hand, and I gave him a bloody mark too. He finally got to see my blood in action for the first time and was very excited.

"I won't wash my hands." He said.

"Don't talk nonsense, saying something so impossible." I said. After being alone, how many people had talked about going down together, but hadn't even made it halfway through the journey? People's promises were mostly based on temporary emotions.

"Why on earth are you two making such a scene?" Xiao Hua took his defense baton from his bag, twisted it into a long stick, and shoved away some of the centipedes that were in the way. With this stick in his hand, he could do anything, including using it as a chopstick.

I knew he was actually referring to Wang Meng, and I paused. I was a little tired as I recalled everything. "What people want to be, and what they can be, are two completely different things."

With that said, I tightened my belt, nodded to the two of them, and the three of us began to quickly make our way through the woods. Because there was dodder all over the ground, we could only use the flares to light the way, so even if we ran slowly, we would find that the whole forest, trees, and shrubs were full of stars and fluorescence. It was as if there were countless fireflies. If you didn't know what it was, you couldn't help but wonder how such a fantastic place existed in the world.

There were also larch trees here, and some other broad-leaved trees that I couldn't name. The trees were very close together, and sometimes we couldn't squeeze between them. The dodder formed a cobweb-like ecology in the middle.

After running for more than ten minutes, we saw flames and heard noises coming from the trees up ahead. When we got closer and looked towards the flames with binoculars, we saw a big coniferous tree, where Wang Meng and his party were using torches to push away the centipedes that had climbed up. The torches were almost extinguished, and he and his buddies were yelling and pushing each other. The pine needles were hurting their butts, and it looked like they were about to fall from the tree.

Kan Jian wanted to go up, but I pulled him back, and turned my gaze from Wang Meng's position to the forest behind him. I thought that the trees around Wang Meng were different from those around us.

It was an indescribable feeling. They all looked like pine trees, but it seemed as if the shape of the branches was very strange and there was no sense of coordination that trees normally had.

I put out the flare and made a gesture. The three of us crouched in the bushes, and I stared at the shadow of the forest around Wang Meng with my binoculars. After watching for a while, even Xiao Hua, who didn't have any binoculars, gasped.

"Those shadows are moving." He whispered.

I nodded. The shadows of the trees on the other side were getting closer and closer to Wang Meng, and those "big trees" were gathering at a speed that could even be seen by the naked eye.

I had a flash of inspiration, took out the IPAD, and saw that all the GPS signal points were heading in Wang Meng's direction, but the shape had changed into a circle.

"Those aren't trees. Those are giant centipedes that are standing up." I said.