The Faqiu Finger was incredibly fast at disarming traps, moving so quickly it left afterimages. Fatty and Wu Tianzhen had been watching every step meticulously, yet upon trying to recall it, their minds were blank, unable to remember anything.
It felt like attending a math class, diligently taking notes for a long time, only to have their thoughts become jumbled the moment class ended, as if they had heard but not truly listened.
Wu Tianzhen: "This is wrong. When I took architecture, I was driven to tears by calculus. Why do I have to endure this torment again?"
Fortunately, at that moment, Zhang Qiling had already efficiently solved the mechanism, preventing Wu Tianzhen from dwelling further on "My Tortured Love Affair with Calculus."
A violent tremor ran through the ground, causing the piled stones to shift and fall. The pile of bones that had just been shattered by the Black Gold Ancient Blade seemed to have found a second wind in the vibration, bouncing wildly on the ground as if performing some infernal dance.
Fatty and Wu Tianzhen initially paid no attention to this skeletal dance, until the skull, apparently dissatisfied with the audience's inattentiveness, actually hopped over!
Just then, the trapdoor in the wall had fully opened, and a faint sound of water could be heard from a distance. Zhang Qiling, focusing his attention, was about to step through when the skull, taking the lead, shot forward and rolled right before him!
Zhang Qiling and the skull's two dark eye sockets met, and the scene fell into silence.
"Tianzhen, I bet you, this skeleton is definitely up to no good!" Fatty leaned closer to Wu Tianzhen, covering his mouth with a hand. Although he knew Zhang Qiling could hear, he still lowered his voice as a formality.
"It's just that our Xiao Ge looks good to it now, so it's coming over, hahaha!"
"You can connect that? Have you been watching too much 'A Chinese Ghost Story'?" Wu Tianzhen pushed Fatty's face away in disgust, but he was influenced. Looking at the skull again, he felt that its empty eye sockets and mouth exuded a strange lewdness.
He imagined Xiao Ge tenderly holding the skull and uttering some domineering CEO pronouncement, and couldn't help but shiver.
"Xiao Ge, this—"
"CRACK!!!"
Zhang Qiling, his expression unchanged, continued forward. His foot landed precisely on the skull, whether intentionally or not.
With a crisp sound, the skull instantly turned to dust. A gust of wind from the entrance blew over, scattering its ashes.
Skull: My past love and affection, in the end, I was the one who was wronged.
Wu Tianzhen and Fatty stared at the scene in dumbfounded silence. Seeing Zhang Qiling enter the passage, they quickly followed.
However, Fatty was clearly troubled by a new concern.
"Tianzhen ah..." he put on a mournful expression, sighing and lamenting:
"I don't know if it's my imagination, but I feel like with Xiao Ge like this, he'll probably be a bachelor his whole life."
Wu Tianzhen glanced at him but didn't reply, though in his heart, he felt the same.
The two of them silently stared at Zhang Qiling's retreating back, jointly letting out a sigh filled with three parts sympathy, two parts sentiment, four parts helplessness, and one part schadenfreude.
Zhang Qiling: ...
---
This was a dark, winding passage that led to an unknown destination, with the faint sound of water echoing in their ears, sometimes near, sometimes far.
Zhang Qiling walked at the forefront, his flashlight beam cutting straight ahead. It was clear that the workers who built this passage had initially intended for it to be intricately carved, using smooth, massive stone blocks for the side walls, adorned with complex decorative patterns.
However, for some unknown reason, they had soon abandoned this ambitious idea.
Visibly, the latter half of the passage became much rougher. Not only did they stop carving patterns with patience, but they were even stingy about smoothing the stone surfaces.
...They probably finally realized that a road for transporting materials to a warehouse didn't need to be so ornate.
To guard against potential dangers, the three walked at a moderate pace, but even so, the passage reached its end after more than twenty minutes.
The space before them suddenly opened up, revealing a river about twelve to thirteen meters wide and bottomless.
This river had numerous tributaries, spreading out like a dense spiderweb, leading into countless cave openings in the stone walls on either side. Looking at this place alone, one would suspect that the entire base of Snowman Peak had been "hollowed out" by the river.
This was likely the submerged part of the external water system, which, through accumulated erosion over time, had gradually carved out a new waterway within the mountain. If it continued to flow for another thousand years, this river might truly break through the base of Snowman Peak, causing the entire mountain to collapse.
Zhang Qiling carefully observed the river's interior. Based on his experience, water in forbidden lands often contained strange things, such as bones, corpses, snakes...
...Oh, and food (dog-faced eel).
The river water was murky and flowed forward due to the terrain. The roaring sound, reflected by the stone walls, created a powerful effect akin to thousands of horses charging.
Wu Tianzhen shone his flashlight to carefully identify the river channel's shape, thinking as he said:
"The stones around here are all naturally odd-shaped, only the sides of this river channel appear exceptionally smooth..."
"If I'm not mistaken, this shouldn't be a simple river, but a transportation channel specially modified by the builders on the basis of the original riverbed for transporting stone materials!"
"Throughout history, construction and transportation have always emphasized adapting to local conditions. 'Qu Shi Gan Quan Kou, Wei Shui Wei Bu Liu' [Taking stone from the sweet spring mouth, the Wei River does not flow] speaks to this principle!"
Fatty squatted by the riverbank, using his flashlight to illuminate the reflection on the water, trying to fix his noble hairstyle.
But clearly, his hair, after being exposed to rain and wind without timely maintenance, had dried and set into a stubborn bird's nest shape. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't flatten the sticking-up ends.
He tried a few times, his patience gradually waning.
"Then, according to Teacher Wu, since materials were transported by river, the direction of the water flow should be the direction of the destination, right?"
Fatty said, reaching into the river water, trying to wet his hair to reshape it.
"It's been so many years, this mountain might have shifted its course several times. Maybe the river's direction has completely reversed!"
"That's not entirely unreasonable..." Wu Tianzhen mused, "But if there were geological changes of that magnitude, the constructed river channel would have suffered irreversible damage."
"It still appears intact now, so I'm inclined to believe that the river's direction hasn't changed."
After speaking, he didn't hear Fatty respond. Wu Tianzhen looked over curiously, only to see Fatty, using his superb aesthetic judgment, styling himself into a mohawk. He was now admiring his reflection.
"Alas, Fatty's appearance!" The reflection in the water wasn't very clear, but Fatty didn't care, looking at it from all angles, lost in his own handsomeness.
But for some reason, as he looked, he felt the water was becoming clearer, making his reflection more distinct.
He was surprised, but subconsciously he leaned down to get a closer look at the clearer reflection.
As the water rippled, his reflection disappeared, replaced instead by a ghostly face that seemed to be rapidly rising from the water, growing larger and larger!