Chapter 25: Lost (5)

“What’s wrong?” the Old Man asked, confused.

“I said earlier that the reason the stone chamber had light while the corridor did not was because the builders of the labyrinth wanted us to ignore the situation in the corridor,” Zuo Qingcang walked up to one of the Eternal Lamps and continued, “I was wrong.”

“What they really wanted to hide were these things right here.” Looking at the Eternal Lamp before him, Zuo Qingcang used his Dagger to pry open the lamp’s cover. Seeing what was inside, a look of surprise appeared on his face.

In this very spot that the two of them had constantly overlooked, inside the cover of the Eternal Lamp, the light did not come from any flame at all, but from a strange electric glow, or perhaps… a kind of light.

Silver liquid swirled beneath the Eternal Lamp. It was a conductive liquid metal transmitting an electric current.

“Actually, if you think about it carefully, there’s a big problem here. What kind of fuel could keep a lamp burning continuously, even for over two thousand years?” Zuo Qingcang said slowly, “Before the earthquake, this labyrinth should have been sealed, right? If burning consumes air, then how did these lamps keep burning until after the earthquake, until now?”

As Zuo Qingcang gazed at the Eternal Lamp before him, he thought silently, ‘Is this liquid mercury? I never expected this. Even though I suspected something was wrong with these lamps, I never imagined they were powered by electricity. The so-called fuel is actually a conductive medium…’

Just as Zuo Qingcang was thinking this, a trace of confusion suddenly flashed in his eyes. He began to overlook or forget the issue with the Eternal Lamps again.

‘There really is something strange going on!’

Thinking this, Zuo Qingcang’s right hand moved first. The sharp Dagger shot out like lightning in the night sky, leaving an afterimage as it cleanly cut the lamp tube in half before him.

But it wasn’t just this lamp tube. After a moment of dizziness, Zuo Qingcang’s mind grew hazy, almost unable to recall exactly what was wrong with the Eternal Lamps. The only thing he held onto fiercely was the determination to destroy all the light sources before him.

Swish, swish, swish, swish!

In the Old Man’s eyes, Zuo Qingcang seemed to have gone mad, holding his Dagger and destroying one Eternal Lamp after another. The Old Man rushed forward and grabbed his arm, trying to stop him.

“What are you doing! We’ll be plunged into complete darkness!”

“Let go!”

Zuo Qingcang ignored him and continued destroying all the Eternal Lamps one by one. When the last Eternal Lamp on the wall was finally severed, the entire stone chamber once again fell into complete darkness. Only the faint glow of the Luminous Pearls each of them carried provided any light.

In the darkness, both men crouched down, each holding their foreheads as if some piercing scream was churning inside their brains. After a moment of sharp, intense pain, they slowly opened their eyes.

“Illusions… was it because of those Eternal Lamps?” the Old Man murmured.

“Exactly.” Zuo Qingcang rubbed his still-throbbing forehead and said slowly, “Actually, when ordinary people enter a labyrinth and see dark corridors, they typically wouldn’t think to extinguish the only light source in the stone chamber. It’s a kind of psychological loophole.”

“But what’s truly crucial is the illusion-casting ability these Eternal Lamps possess once lit. Not only did they trap us here, but they also made us subconsciously overlook them.”

This was why every time Zuo Qingcang entered the stone chamber and saw these lights, he felt like he remembered something but couldn’t recall what exactly it was. He had been curious about the Eternal Lamps from the very beginning, but due to their overlooking effect, he never investigated further.

It was only through continuous thinking, constantly stimulating his memory, and with the Old Man’s reminder, that he managed to deal with the Eternal Lamps through remarkable willpower.

Of course, Zuo Qingcang kept some guesses to himself.

‘Were the Taoist Priests of the Western Wei period already capable of using electricity? Is this illusion created through magnetic fields generated by the electric current, affecting human senses?’

‘Even in the most advanced armies of my previous life, such weapons probably only existed in concept drawings. Yet the Taoist Priests here were already using them to build mechanisms…’

The two then relied on the faint light of their Luminous Pearls to carefully examine the now-darkened stone chamber around them.

But after their investigation, a slight look of disappointment appeared on the Old Man’s face. Even with the lights gone, the architectural structure around them remained completely unchanged—still the same-sized stone chamber, still four corridors in different directions.

“Has the illusion not been lifted yet?”

“No,” Zuo Qingcang touched several scratch marks on the wall and said calmly, “The illusion has been lifted. These are marks we left earlier.”

“It seems the function of this illusion was…”

The two then proceeded through the stone chambers, destroying the Eternal Lamps within to dispel the illusions, and began gradually mapping out the entire labyrinth’s structure by making marks. Without the interference of illusions, a simple stone chamber labyrinth was naturally no longer unsolvable.

In their exploration, Zuo Qingcang and the Old Man discovered there were exactly forty-nine stone chambers in total, divided into upper, middle, and lower levels, each with different numbers of rooms. Due to the illusions, they had actually been circling within these forty-nine chambers the whole time.

‘So the reason the Corpse Fiends came to the Tomb Robber’s Tunnel earlier must be because the illusions didn’t work on them. Is it because human brains and their organ structures are different?’

‘And just a labyrinth of this level, while difficult, might not necessarily trap experienced tomb robbers. It’s likely that due to the earthquake, some mechanisms in this labyrinth failed to continue operating.’

Zuo Qingcang wasn’t mistaken. Because of the earthquake, the flow of Spiritual Power within the labyrinth had been disrupted, causing many Dao Arts mechanisms to cease functioning. When fully operational, there would have been internal Dao Arts interference, external stone chambers and corridors that could even shift, plus countless deadly traps.

If Zuo Qingcang and the Old Man had faced the original labyrinth that the fully-equipped tomb robbing team with dozens of Taoist Priests encountered, they probably wouldn’t have survived a single day.

Just as Zuo Qingcang was pondering some details about the labyrinth, he and the Old Man arrived at the final stone chamber of the labyrinth. Besides the path they came from, this last stone chamber had only one remaining corridor, clearly the exit from the labyrinth.

“Finally out. To be honest, at the final moment I had already given up hope,” the Old Man sighed. “I thought I would starve to death inside and then be eaten by Corpse Fiends.”

“We’ve only left the labyrinth,” Zuo Qingcang’s expression remained as stern as ever. “We don’t know what we’ll encounter next. Don’t let your guard down.”

As he spoke, their figures gradually moved into the corridor until they were completely swallowed by the darkness and disappeared from sight.