Yi Sa looked down.
Straight channels were extending from their feet to beneath the altar. Not just at their feet – channels led in from every doorway.
Ding Yudie was marking time again, his collar almost deformed from Zong Hang’s grip tightly constricting his throat. Yi Sa was both amused and exasperated: “Let him go, just keep him in sight.”
Zong Hang released his grip. Ding Yudie stumbled, then walked straight towards the altar’s edge while removing his backpack – it was time to place the “treasure.”
Yi Sa followed, first examining the steps.
The stone steps were also covered with carvings, but these no longer depicted daily life. After a brief look, Yi Sa recognized these as ancient creation myths.
— A massive figure was half-squatting, straining to lift upward, with sun, moon, and stars floating around them, rivers and mountains encircling their feet – this must be Pangu creating heaven and earth;
— Another tall human figure, whose gender was indistinct, was swinging a long rope downward, with countless small figures rejoicing and leaping at its end – this must be Nüwa creating humans;
— There was another figure using mountains as a seat, holding a stone chisel, carving a circular platform before them with the eight trigrams arranged around it and a yin-yang fish taiji symbol in the center – this must be… Is Fuxi creating the eight trigrams?
This aligned with the primitive understanding of the world in Yu the Great’s era.
However, the taiji symbol reminded Yi Sa: “The ancestor tablets are usually embedded in reincarnation clocks, there must be one here too?”
There should be, probably higher up on the circular platform, visible only after climbing the steps. Zong Hang eagerly volunteered: “I’ll go look!”
His long legs proved advantageous again as he excitedly bounded past Ding Yudie, taking at least two steps at a time, quickly reaching a height of three to four meters. He peered toward the top, nodding repeatedly: “There seems to be something up there…”
Before he could finish speaking, several whooshing sounds suddenly erupted in midair. As Yi Sa looked up urgently, she saw over ten fierce-looking flood dragons, teeth and claws bared, swooping in rapidly from all directions. Their tails seemed to still be embedded in the stone walls, but their bodies twisted and rolled, at least several dozen meters long, completely disproportionate to their head size. Their ferocious momentum was like a group of eagles hunting a rabbit.
Yi Sa shouted: “Get down, dodge!”
Before she finished speaking, the lead dragon was already upon them. Thanks to Zong Hang’s diligent practice these days, he managed to dive sideways – the dragon’s claw tore through his backpack, scattering cotton walnuts, jujubes, and two bubble-wrapped bottles of Shanxi aged vinegar that fortunately didn’t break as they tumbled down the steps.
Ding Panling was truly stingy – making a fake treasure, he could at least have included some gold or silver for appearance’s sake, but instead, he was so frugal he only packed Shanxi local specialties.
In the brief moment, Yi Sa was distracted, the situation above had become increasingly dire. Zong Hang was rolling and dodging on the steps, unable to go up or down, his body almost lost among the chaotic tangle of dragon heads and bodies. The dragon claws seemed exceptionally sharp – when they missed and struck the stone steps, stone chips flew everywhere.
Yi Sa grew anxious. She drew her Black Ghost dagger from her waist and started rushing up, but after just two steps, she suddenly noticed: the flood dragon nearest to her seemed to instantly receive some command and abruptly turned its head in her direction.
In a flash, Yi Sa realized something and quickly retreated, snatching up a bottle of aged vinegar that had rolled to the bottom of the steps, and hurled it forcefully toward the high platform.
Quick as lightning, another dragon’s body rose, its claws catching the vinegar bottle with perfect accuracy. There was a loud “bang” as the bottle exploded, showering down glass shards amid the pungent vinegar smell.
This was the right approach! There was a way!
Yi Sa quickly unfastened her backpack and made a long cut with one stab: “Zong Hang, roll down!”
As soon as the word “roll” left her throat, the opened backpack went flying through the air.
Sure enough, this bag also contained local specialties. Yi Sa caught a glimpse of dates, chilies, millet, lilies, dragon’s beard noodles, and instead of aged vinegar, two bottles of Fenjiu liquor.
The tangled dragon bodies instantly exploded apart, like dragons chasing pearls as they darted in all directions to grab the items. Zong Hang seized this momentary opportunity to tumble down the steps, though Yi Sa thought he wasn’t moving fast enough and rushed forward to yank him down.
Perhaps using too much force, she lost her footing, and both of them tumbled to the ground together.
Nearby, Ding Yudie was unhurriedly and respectfully placing his backpack on the altar, even performing a proper bow with perfect posture. His complete composure was entirely disconnected from the heart-stopping drama around him.
Yi Sa quickly rolled over and got up.
Her hand felt sticky and warm – clearly blood. Yi Sa’s scalp tingled and her voice changed as she asked Zong Hang: “Where are you hurt?”
Everything had happened so suddenly and chaotically that Zong Hang wasn’t sure himself. As he tried to look up, countless items showered down from above – millet and noodles pelting his head and face.
Zong Hang ducked his head to avoid them, feeling that his breathing was normal and no part of his body had suffered serious injury: “Should be nothing major.”
During their exchange, Yi Sa had already seen clearly: he had claw marks on his back and arms, but fortunately not deep, though they were bleeding quite a bit. After checking his front and confirming no injuries there, she finally let out a long breath and sat down: the injuries weren’t serious, bandaging them could wait a bit.
Looking up, the flood dragons had stopped attacking and their movements were gradually slowing. Zong Hang, ever dutiful, ignored his pain and raised his camera, grimacing as he took two photos.
Only then did he notice these flood dragons had bluish-black bodies and rigid faces, made of the same material as the surrounding stone walls – after hovering in the air for a while, they slowly retracted back into the stone walls.
Breathing soil?
Zong Hang recalled the strange “heads” on the corridor ceiling along their way, and couldn’t help feeling scared: each one of them could probably break through the walls, yet he had thought they were just illuminating “lamps.”
After recovering for a moment, Yi Sa pointed at Ding Yudie: “We need to stay behind him. The area he walks through is permitted – that’s our safe zone. If we go beyond him on our own, there’ll be trouble, triggering this place’s… security.”
These flood dragons, immediately tearing apart any intruding objects, must be security measures.
Zong Hang wiped cold sweat from his forehead: “Why is security so strict here? At the Old Master Temple, we ran all around in the breathing nest, even climbed onto the honeycombs, and nothing… happened.”
Yi Sa pondered for a moment: “Not necessarily. It might have been just as strict there originally, but after Jiang Jun went in and embedded the ancestor tablet into the reincarnation clock, it essentially ended the Golden Pool cave’s full alert status and entered the operational phase.”
So, Ding Yudie was their safety line and protection here, but he wouldn’t climb the platform no matter what. After all, “locking the Golden Pool” wasn’t complicated – just storing some items – and from what they could see, this “locking” was nearly complete…
Sure enough, after bowing, Ding Yudie only stood briefly before walking around the altar in another direction – not returning the way they came, apparently the entrance and exit weren’t the same door.
Yi Sa reached out to “lead” Ding Yudie, trying to slow his pace as much as possible, hoping to delay each second to perhaps discover something crucial. Zong Hang also guessed they had no choice in leaving and, worried about not using up his film, frantically took photos as they walked, capturing the mythological paintings on the steps and then the surrounding stone walls.
As he photographed, he suddenly noticed something: “Yi Sa, looks like these walls only have flood dragons, nothing else.”
Yi Sa looked where he indicated.
It was true – no fish, water monkeys, turtles, or soft-shell turtles, just flood dragons densely covering the curved stone walls. Even stranger, looking carefully, these dragons all seemed to have two heads – a head where a head should be, and another head where the tail should be.
Having suffered from these creatures, Zong Hang couldn’t help but feel averse: “What kind of deformed flood dragon has two heads? Which way would it go? And with such a long body, like tentacles, coiling, and wrapping – just thinking about it makes me sick.”
Tentacles?
Yi Sa’s mind stirred: the breathing soil at the Old Master Temple also extended and retracted like tentacles at the lake bottom. They had previously guessed those tentacles would “collect” fertilized eggs floating with the current, stored in the breathing soil, bringing them into the breathing nest to graft with the stored corpses.
What if these flood dragons served the same purpose? Their bodies could extend indefinitely, so there was no question of “which way would two heads go” – one head would search and absorb at the river bottom, then through their long body acting as a transport tube, deliver to the other head for output.
The question returned to the beginning: they had the “fertilized eggs,” but where were the corpses?
Zong Hang was also puzzled about this: “This is just an altar, with no corpses – isn’t that wasteful? Could the corpses be stored somewhere else, not delivered yet?”
Stored somewhere else…
In the Yellow River, where else could things be stored? What had Ding Haijin said about the Yellow River during water ghost training?
— Half water, half sand – in many downstream sections, it had almost become an elevated river, with the water level higher than the roofs of riverside cities. They could only keep raising the levees higher and higher. Once the levees broke, it meant floods, course changes, and vast disaster areas…
— In the Yellow River, don’t think about salvaging treasures. In areas with steep shoals and rapid currents, valuable items would be swept dozens of li away as soon as they sank. Even without rapids, you couldn’t overcome the sediment – if you wanted to measure the river’s depth, you’d still be drilling through silt even after going down dozens of meters…
Yi Sa’s mind sparked: “The corpses must be wrapped in breathing soil, in the form of individual ‘breathing coffins,’ sunk in the silt, scattered in countless locations. This place is an assembly line – its scale isn’t smaller than the Old Master Temple!”
Simply put, it was like different storage concepts.
If the relationship between corpses and fertilized eggs was compared to phones and chips, the operation at the Old Master Temple was: to build a huge warehouse, set up rows of shelves, and have phones neatly arranged in lines, waiting for chips to arrive.
Here at Hukou, they used a different form, “streamlining” storage costs: this altar was a huge operation workshop, and when it started up, phones and chips would flood in simultaneously.
Once this point was clear, everything else fell into place. Yi Sa explained to Zong Hang: “These channels on the ground are entry passages for the ‘breathing coffins,’ and those flood dragons are like assembly workers in a workshop. When the coffins come in, the workers extend from the four walls to perform one-to-one grafting assembly.”
“When one round of assembly is complete, they move on to the next round, so although it looks much smaller than the Old Master Temple, its production capacity… is almost the same.”
As she spoke, she suddenly felt tension in her hand.
It was Ding Yudie struggling to leave, and though forced to mark time in place, his pace was getting faster and faster.
This reaction seemed odd, and Yi Sa suddenly thought of something: “How long have we been down here?”