Chapter 140: The Stone Coffin

While everyone was retreating in awe and dread, Zhang Qinglin noticed that those white-seeking ants were bypassing the stone coffin as they spread outward. There had to be something inside that stone coffin.

Zhang Qinglin walked over to the stone gate to inspect it; the gate was sealed shut and could not be opened. The crack that Wu Gangen had discovered was still continuously spewing out white-seeking ants. Zhang Qinglin walked back to Chi Tan's side and stared intently ahead.

Jiang Xinyue had already lost her composure. She grabbed Zhang Qinglin's arm, her eyes wide with panic, and said, "How can there be so many white ants? What should we do?"

Zhang Qinglin patted her hand to comfort her. "Don't be afraid. Come, go over there first. Cheng Che, help Chi Tan over there as well."

Right now, this was the only area where the white-seeking ants had not appeared. Then, they saw the circular hole that had previously emerged from the wall erupting with countless white-seeking ants, surging toward the center of the burial chamber like a fountain.

Those countless white-seeking ants all gathered in front of the stone coffin, piling up layer upon layer from the ground, getting higher and higher, forming a hill-like mound in just a few minutes.

Cheng Che glanced at Hu Geming, who was standing there in a daze, and asked, "Do you have a way to wipe them out?"

Hu Geming stared at the white-seeking ants, which were now right near his feet, and leaped up with a start. He hurriedly turned and ran toward Zhang Qinglin and the others.

Muttering under his breath, he said, "Who would know? I know ants are afraid of fire and water, but who knows if these damned things are afraid of them too?"

In that instant, the gathering speed of the white-seeking ants on the ground became faster and faster, and almost the entire floor was covered in a thick layer of white.

Wu Gangen and his subordinates were swatting at them with the clothes in their hands, but the terrifying thing was that whenever they brought their clothes down and lifted them back up again, the garments were covered with a dense layer of white-seeking ants. Abandoning their efforts, they threw the clothes away and stumbled toward the stone gate where Zhang Qinglin was.

One of Wu Gangen's subordinates had a layer of white-seeking ants crawling up his arm, making him cry out in pain.

Seeing that the white-seeking ants were about to attack the steps, Cheng Che found a box of matches from somewhere, took out a handful of matchsticks, and prepared to light them and throw them onto the ground.

At a glance, Zhang Qinglin immediately stopped him. "Cheng Che, don't use fire under any circumstances, or none of us will get out of here alive!"

"Why can't we use fire?" Cheng Che stared at the white-seeking ants in confusion.

"These white-seeking ants are poisonous, and their numbers are staggering. If you burn them with fire in this enclosed space and we can't get out, we will either be suffocated by the smoke or burned to death," Zhang Qinglin said, turning his head to look at Cheng Che.

Cheng Che's face sank, and he immediately put the matches away, saying, "Then we can't just wait here for them to crawl up to us!"

Hu Geming lowered his head in deep thought for a moment and said, "I remember now, this thing needs to be frozen."

"Frozen?!"

Hearing this, Zhang Qinglin and Cheng Che looked at Hu Geming in astonishment.

Hu Geming continued, "Right, it has to be frozen. We must freeze them inside to completely kill them."

Bai Weiwei said, "This can't be the only way; there must be other ways. Otherwise, how did Xiaolin's father get out of here?"

"Perhaps they never entered this burial chamber at all," Wu Gangen said, leaning against the stone gate.

Zhang Qinglin shook his head. "No, they were here."

He then turned his gaze back to the front and took two more steps back. If this continued, the advancing white-seeking ants would soon be right at their feet. If they couldn't think of a way out, they would all be poisoned to death by these ants.

Just then, Zhang Qinglin raised his gaze upward and spotted the top of the burial chamber. He discovered that right in the center of the ceiling, there was a circular carved design with a protruding round stone. No white-seeking ants were crawling anywhere around this round stone.

Looking at the white-seeking ants that had nearly filled the entire burial chamber, with only that spot on the ceiling and the stone coffin free of them, Zhang Qinglin guessed that it might be a mechanism button. He immediately asked Hu Geming and Cheng Che to come over and look.

That round stone was positioned directly above the stone coffin. As long as one stood on the stone coffin and figured out a way to press that round stone, it might be possible to kill these white-seeking ants. However, figuring out how to get over there was also a problem.

"Fine, I'll go over and take a look. It's better than sitting here and waiting to die," Hu Geming said.

He retrieved a long rope with an iron hook attached from his pack, glanced at the top of the burial chamber, found a spot where the hook could catch, and threw it up to anchor it near the round stone.

With a firm grip on the rope and a push from his feet, he leaped onto the stone coffin and climbed upward along the rope toward the ceiling. Hu Geming stayed there to observe for a moment, then forcefully pressed the round stone. The moment he pressed it, a rumbling sound echoed out, and all the surrounding walls shook, rising upward with a series of rustling sounds.

The sight before them left them utterly dumbfounded. This had essentially unearthed all the white-seeking ants hidden behind the walls! Hu Geming hurried back toward the stone gate.

The next second, however, the newly revealed stone walls stopped moving, and cold mist slowly began to spray out. The white-seeking ants that were hit by the mist all instantly stopped moving.

The entire burial chamber was suddenly filled with cold air, and in less than ten minutes, it had become as freezing as winter.

The few of them leaned against the stone gate, trying to warm themselves while watching the white-seeking ants that had been frozen to death.

"Unbelievable! To think that back in ancient times, they could research such advanced technology!" Cheng Che exclaimed with a shiver of awe.

Could there be a refrigeration unit? Impossible. Even if there were blocks of ice, they couldn't last for a thousand years unless there was a massive ice cellar here, but this still left Zhang Qinglin baffled.

He looked at the entire burial chamber, which was now completely frozen over, with only the one-meter space around the stone gate remaining unfrozen. The cold grew increasingly severe, biting and freezing like a snow-covered winter landscape. Looking around, everyone was rubbing their hands and shivering incessantly as the temperature dropped lower and lower.

Jiang Xinyue turned her head and softly whispered to Zhang Qinglin beside her, "We aren't going to freeze to death here, are we?"

Zhang Qinglin stared at the white-seeking ants frozen before him, suddenly feeling his head grow heavy and his vision blur.

Suddenly, the frozen ant mounds in front of the stone coffin cracked from bottom to top, shattering onto the ground with a series of sharp snaps.

Meanwhile, that stone coffin remained unfrozen, which struck Zhang Qinglin as extremely strange. He slowly stood up and said, "There is something wrong with the stone coffin!"

The special nature of the coffin lid itself and the operational relief carvings on the walls of the coffin body both indicated that this stone coffin had been crafted for a different purpose.

Treading across the squeaking layer of ice on the floor, Zhang Qinglin walked back to the stone coffin and bent down to examine the relief carvings on its walls.

This time, however, the patterns were not the designs he had seen previously. The relief sculptures on all four sides of the stone coffin actually depicted the images of the Four Divine Beasts: the Azure Dragon on the right wall, the White Tiger on the left wall, the Vermilion Bird at the front, and the Black Tortoise at the back.

Zhang Qinglin stared at the Azure Dragon carved into the wall of the stone coffin, unsure whether the image before him was merely a hallucination.

At this moment, his entire body was extremely cold. He exhaled a puff of frosty air, reached out to touch the stone coffin wall, and said with a shudder, "Hurry over here, everyone, and help me open this stone coffin."

Aside from the injured Chi Tan and the two young women, the rest of the people moved into action when they heard Zhang Qinglin's trembling words.

Cheng Che placed a hand on Zhang Qinglin's shoulder and shook his head. "There is definitely something wrong with this stone coffin, Lao Zhang, but we'd better not open it. If we trigger some other dangerous mechanism, we'll really be done for here. We should go back and see if we can force the stone gate open instead."

Hu Geming said, "The stone gate is jammed shut. Besides, that corpse-specter is outside—going out there is certain death."

Zhang Qinglin glanced at the wall of the stone coffin and pointed to the Azure Dragon on it. "Besides being hailed as the deity of the East in ancient mythology, the symbolic meaning of the Azure Dragon also encompasses vitality, the heavenly stems *Jia* and *Yi*, and benevolence and virtue. Although this is from the Sui Dynasty, this is likely a decoy tomb. Also, the arrowhead left behind by my father was found here—perhaps they escaped through this very place."

"Enough, stop wasting words! Open it first!" Wu Gangen glared, gesturing to his subordinate A-Dong to help push the coffin lid.

However, the coffin lid was extremely heavy. The two of them gave it a push, but it didn't budge an inch, perhaps because they had been drained of strength by the cold.

Zhang Qinglin had read in ancient texts that there were three rather absurd cautionary maxims regarding coffins in burial tombs:

First, severing the falling coffin startles the eight directions;
Second, shaving the *qilin* head leaves no heavy skull;
Third, raising the forbidden light avoids all impurities.

He could roughly understand the first two lines, but the last line completely baffled him.

"Avoid impurities" referred to unclean or filthy objects, which here meant malevolent spirits and ghosts. This implied that opening the coffin would likely unleash terrifying things, such as a corpse undergoing strange transformations or hidden mechanisms. But why would one need to "forbid light"?

Zhang Qinglin pushed against the stone coffin lid with all his might, exerting almost every ounce of his strength, yet the lid stubbornly refused to move at all.

Seeing that forcing the coffin open this way was getting them nowhere—and with everyone freezing like dogs and likely to pass out if they wasted any more energy—Hu Geming let go and said, "Let's find some tools to pry it open!" With that, he walked off to the side.

Wu Gangen and his men also searched around for suitable implements. Normally, they had a whole set of tools specifically for opening coffins, but all their equipment had been lost during their desperate flight along the way.

A-Dong found a golden-iron rod from somewhere, which proved to be quite helpful. Combined with the tools Hu Geming had gathered, the five of them exerted their strength together and finally managed to pry open the lid of the stone coffin.

The coffin lid crashed onto the ground with a loud bang, and a burst of white mist billowed out from inside. Hu Geming shouted in alarm, thinking it was poisonous smoke, but within a minute, the mist gradually dissipated.

The few of them stood by the edge of the stone coffin, staring into the interior in utter bewilderment. Puzzlingly enough, there was no corpse inside the coffin!