Tomb raider: You're going to extract my alien bloodline?

Chapter 38 Untitled

Wu Xie woke up amidst a violent coughing fit.

The icy river water seemed to still be stuck in his trachea, each breath burning with pain. He opened his eyes and saw Lao Yang's anxious face, and Liang Shiye beside him, looking shaken as he adjusted his glasses.

"Wu... Wuxie! You... you're awake!" Lao Yang's voice trembled noticeably, whether from the cold or lingering fear, it was hard to tell.

"Cough cough... I... Where are we?" Wu Xie propped himself up and looked around. They were on a shallow beach of pebbles, with a roaring waterfall and deep pool behind them. Uncle Tai and his group were nowhere to be seen, and all around them were jagged rocks and bottomless darkness.

"I...I fell down," Lao Yang explained simply. "I...I woke up and looked for...I found you and Master Liang floating nearby."

The clerk, trembling, added, "Master Tai and the others... might have been swept away somewhere else. This place... is very eerie."

Wu Xie rubbed his still-aching head, his memories gradually becoming clearer. The white jet of water, Er Mazi's horrific scalding, the weightlessness of falling down the waterfall… He shivered, forcing himself to stop thinking about it. "I have to find a way out." He struggled to his feet, his soaked clothes clinging to his skin, cold and heavy.

The three of them, supporting each other, explored upstream along the underground riverbank. They hadn't gone far when a precipice appeared ahead, revealing a dense array of wooden coffins.

"Where...where is this?" Liang Shiye's voice changed.

"Coffin...coffin array." Lao Yang squinted his triangular eyes, his fingers unconsciously touching the bronze bell on his earlobe. "I...I heard that old man from Jiangxi mention...mentioned it once, saying that there is a dark cave deep in the Qinling Mountains, which is...suppressed by a thousand coffins. I didn't...I didn't expect it to be true."

Wu Xie's alarm bells rang loudly. A coffin array of this scale was definitely not an ordinary tomb. He hesitated whether to take a detour, but then he heard chaotic footsteps and heavy breathing behind him.

"Damn it...we finally found the way!"

It was Uncle Tai! He emerged from another side passage with his two remaining men. All three were soaking wet and disheveled, but they still gripped their homemade weapons tightly. Uncle Tai spotted Wu Xie and the other two at the edge of the cliff immediately, and a sinister glint flashed in his eyes when he saw Lao Yang.

"Kids, you two go scout ahead." Uncle Tai pointed his gun at Wu Xie. "Since you dared to come to this godforsaken place, you must know the way!"

Wu Xie inwardly groaned; how could he possibly know which way to go? But with a gun pointed at him, he had no choice.

Wu Xie and Lao Yang stepped into the coffin array. The icy aura emanating from the wooden coffins seemed to penetrate their clothes, and Wu Xie felt as if countless eyes were watching him in the darkness. The ground beneath their feet was uneven, and they could vaguely feel some of the stone slabs loosening, with some black, viscous liquid at the seams.

Suddenly, Lao Yang slipped as if he had lost his footing. He quickly took a few steps forward to Wu Xie's side and then did something that surprised everyone.

He suddenly pulled a gun from his pocket and fired a flare at the ground.

"Are you crazy?!" Wu Xie and Uncle Tai roared at the same time.

But it was too late; the burning flare traced a blinding arc and fell into the oil.

"boom--!!!"

The orange-red flames, like a giant beast awakening, shot into the sky in an instant! The flames spread along the pre-designed grooves at an astonishing speed, turning most of the coffin array into a sea of ​​fire in the blink of an eye!

"Run!!!" Uncle Tai shouted hoarsely.