The corpses were all dressed in tattered armor; some had dried into mummies, while others had become half-skeletons. These were likely the Jurchen warriors who had been hunted down during their exploration. However, their weapons were too rudimentary. We now have so many M16s and Type 56 rifles, with powerful firepower. Thinking of this made me feel a lot more at ease.

After entering the area where bodies were hung on chains, we crawled down nearly fifty more meters. Corpses surrounded us on all sides, their decayed, hollow eyes staring at us, which was genuinely unsettling. The atmosphere suddenly turned gloomy.

To prevent any blind spots in our vision or to dispel this fear, a few people lit cold fireworks, illuminating the surroundings to an unprecedented brightness.

Surprisingly, no strange birds appeared, and I didn’t feel the agitation that usually comes with their flight. It was eerily quiet all around.

The fat guy pointed to a corpse hanging to the side and quietly asked me, “They’re all old corpses, with no fresh ones. Could it be that this place has already been abandoned?”

I shook my head to silence him. It was possible, but since the strange birds could go out to hunt, it meant there must be an exit nearby. Our hopes were significantly raised.

Of course, it was also possible that they were temporarily absent, like a swarm of bats that all fly out of the cave at the same time to hunt. If that was the case, we should pass through this area quickly. So, I signaled to urge everyone to speed up.

At that moment, Kirk and Panzi in front stopped. Panzi turned around and waved for me to come over.

I told the others to rest in place, then leaped and crawled down several ledges to reach Kirk. To my surprise, his powerful flashlight was already able to illuminate the vast bottom of the chasm. It seemed our Spider-Man adventure was about to come to an end.

However, the flashlight’s beam was too diffuse, and we couldn’t see clearly what was down there. After experiencing the eerie tomb names in the Chinese ancient tomb, this German clearly had lost confidence in his judgment; he insisted that I take a look before making any decisions.

This underground chasm was too large; using the flashlight was of no use. You could only tell there was something below, but what it was remained completely unclear. Even with night vision goggles, we could only see vague green shapes.

We had a few signal flares left, and I had intended to conserve them, but in this situation, we couldn’t afford to hold back. I asked the fat guy to think of a way to fire a flare in this environment, trying to make the illumination last as long as possible.

Aning and the others had more advanced flares than ours. The fat guy knew the ropes and made an “OK” gesture.

He activated a glow stick, cut it open with a knife, and applied the paint inside to the tip of the flare. Then he tossed the flare into the deep abyss. We saw a glowing dot fall like a meteor, landing at the bottom of the chasm, bouncing twice before coming to a stop.

Then the fat guy raised his Type 56 rifle, took a three-round burst, and hit the flare tip. Instantly, the flare ignited, illuminating the entire valley floor clearly.

Indeed, we had reached the bottom of the chasm, which was covered in extremely uneven black volcanic rock and the bones of corpses that had fallen from above, layered upon one another. It was hard to tell how many bones and black feces were there, almost covering all the rocks. On one side of the chasm floor, there was a massive bronze door with two sides.

I cannot adequately describe the grandeur of this massive gate. It stands about thirty meters high and nearly sixty meters wide. If converted into modern buildings with three meters per floor, the height of this gate alone is equivalent to ten stories. The entire surface of the gate appears to be cast as a single piece, and this is definitely not a bronze artifact that ancient people could have forged. It is certainly not meant for human use, as such a door weighs tens of thousands of tons, resting upon the rocks—who could possibly open it?

Aning said, “This must be the great underground gate mentioned in the legends of Dongxia, where the emperors of the ten thousand slaves appeared throughout the ages. After each dynasty was replaced, they would seal the gate again with the living skins of human sacrifices. Can you guess… what lies inside?”

I shook my head, my mind wandering elsewhere. I thought to myself, who could have cast such a massive gate here? How did the ten thousand slave king emerge? Could he truly be a god, possessing the divine power to move ten-thousand-ton boulders? I murmured, “No matter what lies inside, we definitely cannot go in.”

The same type of giant bronze artifacts, as well as the giant bronze divine trees I saw deep in the Qinling Mountains, are also buried deep at the base of the mountains. Are these massive, humanly impossible bronze artifacts related in some way? Or could there be similar things hidden within other giant mountain ranges, like Kunlun or the Himalayas?

I vaguely felt that I was approaching a colossal ancient mystery, and a profound sense of insignificance washed over me. Compared to the ancient mysteries of these wonders, I felt utterly trivial, and I couldn’t even see a glimmer of hope for uncovering the truth.

The illumination flares gradually extinguished, and darkness once again enveloped the underground. Yet, I remained there until Panzi patted me on the shoulder and said, “Let’s go down,” which brought me back to reality.

One by one, we climbed down the chains and soon arrived at the bottom of the valley, carefully stepping over the bones beneath our feet until we stood before the giant bronze gate. At that moment, my sense of insignificance intensified to the point where I felt an impulse to kneel down.

Even in our modern era, we felt this way upon reaching this place. It’s not hard to imagine how shocked the Dongxia warriors must have been when they painstakingly brought Wang Canghai here. No wonder they were so haunted by their experiences here that they fought to document everything to pass on to future generations. I could even sense Wang Canghai’s anguish—his initial belief that he understood the laws of the universe, only to suddenly realize he knew nothing at all.

Lost in my thoughts, the fat man interrupted my contemplation. He was shining his flashlight toward the middle of the rift. The bottom of this underground rift was about five to six hundred meters wide, with rubble on the ground resembling small hills. The fat man walked quite a distance, and upon reaching the middle of the rift, he saw a massive stone mountain that had been shaped into platforms, resembling a small pyramid. A long stone staircase was built on one side of the rock, with small lamps on either side of each step.

What caught the fat man’s attention was the object placed on the stone platform—a gigantic white stone coffin, roughly the size of a car, with nine stone-carved centipedes coiling around the base, forming a lotus shape. Surrounding it were four black stone figures, facing the four cardinal directions, in a posture of worship.

Before the coffin, there was a large cauldron for placing offerings, and behind it stood a shadow wall, the carvings on which were not clear. When viewed from above, these things looked like ordinary stones and were difficult to see, which is why we hadn’t noticed them earlier.

I inhaled sharply: “Could this be… the Nine Dragons Coffin of the Wannu King? The one mentioned in Wang Canghai’s dragon fish cryptic text?”

The胖子 (Pangzi) replied, “It must be! Didn’t someone say that the Wannu King’s coffin is guarded by nine divine dragons? Look underneath this coffin; aren’t there exactly nine centipedes? I thought Chen Pi Ah Si was just messing with us, but it turns out it’s real!”

I had always thought that the Wannu King only had the shadow coffin in the underground tomb, and that the body had undergone sky burial, so I had long given up hope of finding the real king’s coffin. I never expected that we would actually discover the true Nine Dragons Coffin here. We were all excited, and a few eager ones had already run over. An Ning, who was nearby, hurriedly called out to them, shouting, “Don’t go over there, it’s dangerous!”

Upon hearing this, the ones who were running immediately stopped in their tracks. An Ning shouted, “Didn’t you see the centipede dragons under the coffin?”

Pangzi said, “My goodness, that’s a stone sculpture! What danger could there be? What kind of eyes do you have?”

An Ning raised her eyebrows and retorted, “What kind of eyes do you have? I’m not talking about those stone sculptures; look closely at the edge of the stone platform!”

The edge of the stone platform? An Ning’s expression was very serious, but I looked left and right and still couldn’t see anything. I didn’t know what she was so worried about, so I asked her to show me.

An Ning used her flashlight like a teaching stick and pointed. At first, I still didn’t notice anything, and just as I was feeling extremely puzzled, I suddenly saw the stone platform move slightly. To my shock, I discovered that there was a gigantic volcanic centipede coiled on the stone platform, measuring at least five or six meters long. It was so large that, combined with the color of its shell and the volcanic rock, it was almost indistinguishable at first glance.

After spotting the first one, I quickly counted a second, third, fourth… in total, we counted nine giant centipedes, all coiled around the stone platform, resembling a relief sculpture that almost blended into the platform itself.

The Nine Dragons Coffin was indeed living up to its name!

An Ning said, “If you climb onto the stone platform without understanding what’s going on, you’ll definitely be bitten in half. Volcanic centipedes are carnivorous insects, extremely fierce and quick. Our size is exactly what they love to prey on.”

Having experienced many strange things, I could still forgive the idea of centipedes growing to a meter long, considering this was an underground rift in a volcano, where the environment and air composition were likely different. There have been similar discoveries in other parts of the world, but I had never seen insects that were so extraordinarily large. They looked like monsters mutated by radiation from a horror movie.

One of the Chinese experts in An Ning’s team muttered to himself, “So strange. The lifespan of this kind of centipede is usually only two to three years. They should have died when they were only as long as a finger. How could these have grown so big? Have they been alive for thousands of years?”