Chapter 2712 — A World of Its Own

This was especially true of that earlier record of strange tales. Wei Zhao had been on the verge of leaving with White Leader when Yu Xiaoke spotted something unusual. Clearly, Yu Xiaoke was a true professional—no wonder Old Black had paid so handsomely to bring along such a skilled breaker of mechanisms.

"Exactly. I thought we'd be opening some secret passage, but instead I found a lift. There's a whole hidden world down there—lots of women's things!" Yu Xiaoke said.

"Oh? Then shall we go down and take a look together?" Wei Zhao was intensely curious about the space beneath the ancient tomb, yet he worried White Leader might not want to go exploring, so he posed it as a question.

"All right, let's go down together." White Leader was in fact quite curious as well. That solid stone coffin had aroused his suspicions too. If Wei Zhao's guess was right and Zhang Lifeng had never died—could he be down there?

If he could see Patriarch Zhang Lifeng with his own eyes, White Leader would surely be overcome with excitement.

"Then let's all stand on top of the coffin, and I'll trigger the mechanism," Yu Xiaoke said with a nod.

So Wei Zhao, White Leader, and Yu Xiaoke, together with the Thunder Pig, stood atop the stone coffin. Then Yu Xiaoke reached out and pressed a spot on the wall, and the coffin began to descend rapidly—though its descent was perfectly steady, with none of that jolting sensation, and utterly silent, so that one could not even feel the coffin moving.

This left Wei Zhao clicking his tongue in amazement. The design of this ancient tomb was truly a masterpiece.

Earlier, Wei Zhao had examined the spot Yu Xiaoke pressed quite carefully: there was no unevenness on it at all, nothing that looked remotely out of place. He had no idea how Yu Xiaoke had ever discovered what was different about it.

The coffin soon came to a stop. The three of them stepped off, and they now found themselves in another empty stone chamber. Yet at a glance it was clear this chamber differed from the previous one, for the walls bore no carvings of text about Zhang Lifeng.

Watching the Thunder Pig hop down from the coffin, Wei Zhao frowned slightly. This creature—did it seem entirely unsurprised? Could it be...

"Thunder Pig, did you know all along that there was another underground level here?" Wei Zhao looked down at the Thunder Pig and demanded.

"Squeak, squeak..." The Thunder Pig looked somewhat helpless, but nodded to say that it had known.

"Then why didn't you say so earlier?" Wei Zhao glared at it in fury. Wasn't this making him do everything twice over? Had he known, he would have explored this place thoroughly on their first visit to the tomb—why wait until now?

"Squeak, squeak..." The Thunder Pig gestured aggrievedly with its two front paws, as though defending itself.

"Write it out on the ground with your claw!" Wei Zhao could not understand what it was trying to say; the meaning was too complicated for him to guess.

"My master said to let nature take its course." Those were the words the Thunder Pig traced out on the ground.

"Let nature take its course..." Wei Zhao pondered a moment and understood Zhang Lifeng's meaning. It seemed Zhang Lifeng wished everything to follow fate. That someone could open the tomb and inherit his legacy was itself a matter of destiny; as for everything else, it was better to let nature take its course and not force anything.

And since the Thunder Pig had merely obeyed the will of its former master and not told Wei Zhao about the level beneath the tomb, that was only natural—Wei Zhao had no grounds to blame it.

"Never mind. Let's take a look around. Xiaoke, there's no danger here, is there?" Wei Zhao looked to Yu Xiaoke and asked.

"No." Yu Xiaoke shook her head. "But I didn't go far—just looked around nearby, then came back."

"Huh? The coffin's vanished again... that's all right, isn't it?" White Leader suddenly pointed in astonishment at the corner of the wall, where the coffin had originally rested.

"The coffin's gone back up on its own. It's fine," Yu Xiaoke said with a shake of her head. "There's a mechanism over here—we can bring the coffin down to fetch us whenever we like."

"Oh..." White Leader nodded. That made sense—otherwise, how would Yu Xiaoke have gotten back up afterward?

The three of them left the stone chamber together. Wei Zhao insisted on taking the lead, because his jade pendant had a warning function: if danger arose, he would know at once and could respond.

"Little Pig, you come with me. If there's danger, you deal with it ahead of time—you don't want me to die, do you?" Wei Zhao gave the Thunder Pig a kick. "Let me tell you something: I'm now at the peak of the mid Earth-rank, and reaching the Heaven-rank is only a matter of time. When that happens, I can raise you to a spirit beast at the peak of the late Earth-rank. If you don't want that power, then pretend I never said it!"

"Squeak, squeak..." At Wei Zhao's words, the Thunder Pig drooled and nodded again and again, signaling that it was all on him.

The Thunder Pig's attitude was satisfactory enough. So the man and the pig took the lead scouting the way, with Yu Xiaoke and White Leader following behind, and the three of them left the stone chamber together.

Beyond the stone chamber, a vast hall opened up before their eyes—spacious and empty. A hall it was called, but it more resembled a martial training ground. Along the sides were places to rest, and around the hall, apart from the stone chamber they had just emerged from, there were three more rooms.

"This place... is this all there is?" Wei Zhao said in astonishment, glancing at the empty hall, for what he saw exceeded his expectations entirely. The layout was completely different from the first level of the tomb—this place was more like an enlarged version of a four-room, one-hall dwelling!

"Yes, this is all there is," Yu Xiaoke said with a nod. "I went into the nearest room—it looked like a woman's chamber."

"Oh? A woman's chamber?" Wei Zhao was taken aback. "No way. Zhang Lifeng was quite the romantic, wasn't he? Living here in the ancient tomb with a beauty?"

"Ahem, ahem..." White Leader's old face flushed red as well; he felt it was hardly proper to slander their patriarch behind his back.

"Thunder Pig, what's going on here?" Wei Zhao turned to the Thunder Pig. "Who is this woman?"

Zhang Lifeng had said to let nature take its course, but now that Wei Zhao had discovered the problem, and the Thunder Pig, eager to level up, could not be bothered with such scruples, it eagerly recounted the story of this place as though offering up a treasure: "Zhang Lifeng had two wives in his lifetime—the Ice Fairy, mistress of the Ice Palace, and the Snow Fairy, mistress of Snow Valley. They were senior and junior disciples..."