Chapter 892 Mausoleum of An Imperial Lord
The severed hand hopped around like a bunny and magically shrunk in size. With its middle and index fingers as legs, it scampered towards Li Mu and Wang Yanyi and stood there like a curious child observing them. Then with its thumb and pinkie acting like arms, it began gesticulating at them both as if it was trying to convey a message.
Li Mu and Wang Yanyi exchanged dubious glances.
“Huh.
What the hell is he trying to tell us?!
Or is there something wrong with this thing?!”
“Wait,” Wang Yanyi said suddenly, rubbing his temples like he was trying to solve a mathematical problem, “Is this thing asking us to come with him?”
He lifted Li Mu up.
And he was right. The severed hand turned around and began leading them like it wanted them to follow it.
Evidently, the severed hand knew its way around the deserted city. It took Wang Yanyi through a string of bends and curves, notwithstanding several remote alleys and paths that lay hidden around corners that seemed like dead ends from outside.
What was more baffling was the fact that this severed hand possessed the skill and privilege to control and use several of the Celestial Court’s magical waypoints that it had used to transport them around the city with tremendous efficacy.
They came to a round circular building. Unlike most of the tall and towering spires that loomed over it, this structure looked relatively ordinary, except for the fact that it was painted rather flamboyantly compared to the rest of the other alabaster-white buildings in the city.
A long carriageway intersected through the building with sculptures of scholarly mandarins and trained military officers flanking it. The marble depictions of the former were all clutching a hu ritual baton which was customary to all court officials, while the latter toted swords and other personal side arms. The lines of sculptures would end halfway, giving way to rows of commemoratory columns and obelisks of stone and marble–twelve on each side–that lined all the way up to the entrance of the building’s main hall.
They followed the carriageway and headed inside the main hall.
Where they were greeted by an eerie and dark silence.
Carving and engravings adorned the walls inside like the scribing of ancient civilization, portraying various events of the gods: heavenly banquets, deities traveling to and from in the skies, the battles waged by the celestial armies, hunts conducted by the gods, sacrificial rituals, the control of floods, as well as cultural entertainment such as dances and music. Put together, the carvings would have looked like the recorded annals of the Celestial Court.
Li Mu was so drowsy that he could barely keep himself conscious, let alone take a good look at the engravings.
An anxious Wang Yanyi asked aloud, “Is it safe here? Do you know any ways that we could save him with?”
The rusty sword tremored faintly, resonating with Wang Yanyi’s emotions.
The severed hand stepped into the deeper vestibules of the hall.
At first glance, this looked like where a king or an emperor would handle and manage his state affairs. At the end of the great hall was this throne, ornate and gilded, where the golden sculptures of nine five-clawed dragons festooned the back and the arm of the chair. The mythical beasts looked so lifelike that they looked like they were really slithering and coiling around the furniture, basking in a pale majestic glow of gold.
The severed hand must have done something, for all of a sudden, a tidal wave of golden brilliance surged and the dragons came to live. They took off into the air, flooding the entire hall with their golden luminescence in full display.
In the meantime, right where the throne had vanished, was a pitch-black hole with stairs leading underground. Just standing at the top of the secret stairway one could feel a creepy gust of wind coming from inside the hole that no one could tell to whence it led.
Snap!
The severed hand made a snap to get their attention before hopping towards the yawning mouth of the hole with a beckoning gesture.
Wang Yanyi gulped hard with apprehension. Gripping his rusty sword firmly while still struggling to hold up a fainted Li Mu, he stepped down into the darkness.
Out of ideas and options, he could only take a gamble and put his faith in this bizarre thing. All the way here, the severed hand had shown itself to be incredibly knowledgeable as to the geography of this place.
The secret passage leading down was so dark that Wang Yanyi could only wonder if it could lead straight into the underworld.
The darkness-infested stairs kept leading down deeper and deeper into the ground.
One could barely keep track of the time before they found themselves arriving at what seemed like the entrance of a subterranean palace.
A pair of menacing statues, faceless and depicted wielding maces and nooses, stood guard just outside the gates.
“What’s this? The Faceless Keepers of the Underworld?!”
Wang Yanyi gasped with such awe as he stared at the imposing statues that his knees could shake.
He turned around to look at the severed hand and growled, “What is the meaning of this?! The statues of the Faceless Keepers of the Underworld are only usually present outside the doors of a mausoleum, which I’m sure is what this place is!”
The severed hand frantically mimed an explanation, which Wang Yanyi could barely understand, except for a final unmistakable indication of “welcome”, motioning for them to step inside.
Wang Yanyi stood there and wondered skeptically, “Is it trying to say that there is something inside that could cure the poison of the Sea of Godly Demise?”
But they have come too long a way to turn back and pressing on seemed more like a plausible option than going back outside to face Lazulum’s wrath.
Wang Yanyi stepped inside with the severed hand leading the way and what he saw, the interior’s vastness and expansiveness, far outstripped his expectation and comprehension. He had entered a wholly different world as soon as he stepped through the threshold of the gates.
Hanging over their heads were ornaments portraying celestial bodies furnished from metal that he could only guess was something exclusive to the Celestial Court. Like quicksilver, the metallic lines swirled and undulated like the Milky Way. Beneath his feet, the floors of the mausoleum were tiled with the same metal used above with illustrations of fields, mountains, and rivers carved in bas-relief fashion. Upon closer observation, the peaks of snow-capped mountains in the carvings were tipped with a strange kind of silver, and the wavy patterns of the bodies of water were lined with a special variety of metallic liquid…
Everything about all these embellishments screamed extravagance.
Even Lazulum himself, a pre-Emperor Realm Cultivator, would exhale with amazement if he were here.
Wang Yanyi’s heart thumped wildly beyond belief.
Not a stranger to the life of the affluent and the privileged, even he could barely confess to not feeling agog and breathless by the sheer indulgence and excess.
They continued deeper inward. All the way, they passed by heaps and mounds of dazzling treasures and jewels, notwithstanding an army of preserved animal hides–mythical beasts that stood in rows, their skins desiccated, stuffed, and mounted so that these noble animals could be kept for all to see with their former glories intact. Despite their ferocious exterior, one could barely miss the fact that they looked old and ancient. These animals must have been skinned after they perished out of old age and moved here.
“Wait a minute. This is no ordinary mausoleum! This is an Imperial Mausoleum! One belonging to an Imperial Lord?!”
Wang Yanyi uttered, aghast with astoundment when the revelation finally occurred to him.
“This is a real Imperial Mauso–No, this is like a real palace fit for an Imperial Lord!
But which Imperial Lord?!
The primogenitor of the Celestial Courts, Dragon Scorpion?!
But rumor has it that he retreated into hiding, not dying!”
Wang Yanyi reeled with the shock and bewilderment of trying to process the facts.
But he swiftly calmed down.
For he realized that Li Mu, whom he was still carrying, was only getting weaker that his vitals were beginning to fade.
“Quick!” Wang Yanyi urged exigently.
Although he himself wondered if the severed hand could really understand what he was saying.
Finally, they came to a shadowy and somber burial chamber.
The modest-looking and solemn burial chamber was a stark juxtaposition to the ostentatious and profligate ornaments outside, with nothing beyond eighteen ordinary-looking life-size statues that ringed around a three-story-tall dais where a gilded horse wagon sat. Instead of horses, a pair of rocks stood under the carriage limbers.
It was a wagon, not a carriage and upon it was a sarcophagus.
A meticulously-chiseled sarcophagus made of a white nephrite-like stone that exuded an eldritch presence.
But that was not all the sarcophagus gave off. The stone casket radiated a soft, cream-white glow that saturated every inch of the burial chamber with an ethereal atmosphere that deprived the chamber of the sense of ghastly creepiness endemic to most tombs and crypts and instead replaced it with an ambiance of solemnness and dignity.
Crrruuncch!
As soon as he approached, all eighteen statues swiveled their heads in unison to look at Wang Yanyi, the groaning crunch of stone sounded like an echo that had harked back from thousands of years ago.
The severed hand of a god hastily gave a few hand signs before trotting around, giving one of the statues a pat before touching on another, and so on. Then it leaped into the air and went into a flurry of gesticulations that Wang Yanyi could barely understand, although it seemed like it was giving the statues some sort of directive.
Almost a quarter of an hour passed by.
Crruunch!
The heads of the statues all rotated back to their original positions.
The severed hand then came back to him and made a gesture that looked awfully like it was patting its “chest” confidently before beckoning Wang Yanyi to follow once more. It leaped up to the horsedrawn wagon and slowly pushed open the lid of the sarcophagus.
Grrooaan!
The ponderous lid slid back heavily. and more brilliant lights poured out from inside in pulsing waves.
With the dying Li Mu still in his arms, Wang Yanyi flew up to the dais too. Gripped by burgeoning curiosity himself, he peered inside the sarcophagus, eager to find out who it was that was interred here.
To his astonishment, the sarcophagus was stark empty.
There was nothing inside.
Tiny and unrecognizable glyphs garnished the inner walls of the sarcophagus. Wang Yanyi would have thought that those were ants if not for the neatly-arranged array but looking closely at them somehow left him nauseous and dizzy.
“Is this the fabled Epode of Emperors?!”
He almost gasped aloud.
The severed hand ignored him and pointed to the inside of the sarcophagus, meaning that he should place Li Mu inside.
Wang Yanyi was stunned. With a hint of indignation in his voice, he said, “So you brought us all the way here because you think he’s gonna die and you’ve found him a coffin?!”
The severed hand leaped up and frantically swung its arm-like fingers by way of an explanation but Wang Yanyi couldn’t understand it at all.
Still, Wang Yanyi relented and placed Li Mu inside the sarcophagus as he was bidden to.
“Maybe the sarcophagus has some special functions,” he thought. “After all, this is an ancient relic that sits right in the middle of the mausoleum of an unknown Imperial Lord. For all we know, the Imperial Lord in question might have taken a nap in here and some vestiges of his divine properties might still linger inside…”
More blood trickled out of Li Mu’s wounds.
It was a miracle itself that Li Mu was still alive, despite his dire situation. Underneath the surface of his recovering exterior, much of his insides were already crumbling. Such were the poisonous effects of the Liquid of Godly Demise that one single drop could cause fatal injuries even to a god.
Blood spread across the smooth stone inside the sarcophagus, soaking into the minuscule grooves that formed the strokes of every single glyph. But the blood did not stop there; it began magically climbing up the inner walls as if the deep scarlet liquid had gained a life of its own. Within just seconds, the blood coated virtually every inch of the sarcophagus inside casting a veil of morbid red over the bright golden luminescence.
“What on Earth…”
Wang Yanyi could have sworn that his heart was threatening to jump out of his mouth in his trepidation to see what would happen.
“So it’s true?! The sarcophagus really has rejuvenating abilities?!”
He began hoping that this was true.
Grrooaan!
The severed hand tugged at the weighty lid, trying to shut the sarcophagus.
“Wait a minute,” Wang Yanyi called.
The severed hand paused and gave him what looked like a puzzled look.
Wang Yanyi stepped closer to the sarcophagus and gazed at the unconscious Li Mu, whose blood was still pouring out of him. He stared at him then he exhaled and bend down into the nephrite coffin…
The severed hand stood there for a couple of seconds before it realized what was going on and it quickly raised its thumb and pinkie like a person covering his eyes.
Then, they closed the lid.
“What now?” Wang Yanyi asked, “We just wait here?”
The severed hand motioned for Wang Yanyi to follow it. From the looks of it, they had to leave this place. It pointed at the eighteen statues before they strode out. It would seem that the eighteen statues could not suffer the living being amongst them.
Wang Yanyi stood there for one second, gazing at the inside of the burial chamber before he left, peeling after the severed hand.
They stepped out of the subterranean mausoleum and headed back the same way they came in, passing through the long, dark passage and ascending the secret stairs to return to the round palatial hall. The dragons were still flying around the boughs of the hall when they came back and they flew back and magically transformed back into the throne that sat just over the hole of the secret passageway.
