Chapter 34: CH 32

“You!” Oswald’s mind went blank at the oncoming wave of heat.

The moment he looked at Kevin amid the fire waving his hand at him, he was near bewildered, yet soon a wave of anger more powerful than the fire in front of him swept over him instantly. When one’s anger had reached its peak, one’s mind was almost disconnected; he could not even utter a complete sentence.

As Kevin turned and disappeared, Oswald subconsciously reached forward and drew a hand towards him.

“Your Majesty!” The Wujin Iron soldiers caught up behind him, not even seeing Kevin’s face in their haste, only a remaining vague shadow, and the Emperor was so angry he almost rushed into the fire.

The first few men lunged forward and grabbed Oswald to pull him back so he wouldn’t get caught in the fire. However, when they reached him, they realised to their horror that the young Emperor was not almost, but already had a hand in the fire.

“Oh my God! Hurry!” Someone howled, “The hand! Your hand, Your Majesty!”

One always had a big gravity when they lost their senses. At that moment, Oswald was so angry that he became in this state. He did not even react to whoever was stopping him or pulling him backwards. The scarlet fire had burned right through his eyes and brain.

Most of the people in the Wujin Iron Army knew that the Emperor was skilled in both close and long-range combat. His fists were as hard as iron when he punched people, and his strength was terrifying. But they never knew that the Emperor’s strength could be so frightening when he lost control ……

In the end, it barely took seven or eight people to stop him, and the one closest to him was almost thrown into the fire.

Oswald was forced to stagger backwards a few steps away from the tongues of fire. The noise of people around him finally drifted into his ears and bored into his head.

“Where’s the physician?! Call the physician! Your Majesty, your hand! Your hand must be – eh?” The yelling man abruptly stopped mid-sentence and turned into a questioning cry as he muttered in a tone of incredulous bewilderment. “I clearly …… saw your hand go into the fire. How could, how could it have been unharmed?”

Oswald’s original light-coloured eyes were bloodshot and covered with veins born of anger and anxiety. It took him several beats to react to the meaning of the words, finally releasing his gaze to look at his hands.

There was barely even a trace of fire on his hand, let alone a wound.

But he did have his hand in the fire, and no one knew that better than he did.

Oswald gasped heavily and stared unblinkingly at his right hand, his wandering sanity finally returning and his rage slightly subdued.

He gave his arm a cold tug and yanked his hand out of the Wujin Iron soldier’s grasp before taking two steps forward.

“Your Majesty!” The men behind him tried to grab him again, but he stopped them by raising his hand.

The anger was slightly suppressed, but he still could not say anything.

The heat, so real it bordered on burning, pelted his face again, and he grimaced. He simply thrust his whole arm into the fire with a heavy gasp.

The crowd behind him burst into a gasp.

Oswald even stayed in the fire for a moment before pulling his arm back. After a couple of cold looks, he raised it to gesture at the crowd and said in a deep voice, “False fire.”

The fire couldn’t burn at all, despite the ghastly look and the heat rolling in.

Oswald took almost no hesitation in striding into the fire. For a few moments, he waded through the scarlet tongues of flame but never touched anything resembling an entrance.

As if to confirm the Emperor’s suspicions, the fire came and went so suddenly that it was almost over in the blink of an eye, and the tongues of fire went from high to low and soon disappeared. And when the fire faded, the high wall of thorns that had stood there still had its branches facing the sky, and the vines twisted around it still had their broad leaves in all their layers, as if the fire had been a figment of everyone’s imagination.

The only remnants of the fire were the ghostly howling sounds that were so distant and close that they gave people goose bumps.

Oswald scanned the wall of thorns with his body full of tension, only to find no sign of any entrance, let alone any sign of Kevin. His bloodshot eyes slowly disappeared, but his eyes were still too cold for anyone to speak or approach him.

He was silent for a moment, then suddenly kicked the square tablet hard.

“Bang…”

The bronze tablet, which had been mostly dug up, flew completely out of the mud, crashed hard against the wall of thorns, and rolled back down to the ground, falling sideways.

The crowd cowered and fell silent.

After a while, someone finally tried to speak up and reminded him. “Your Majesty, the top and bottom of that earth tablet …… are not quite the same colour.”

Oswald closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them again, his heavy breathing soon subsiding as if he had forced his anger from the surface and pushed it inward.

He walked over to the tablet and crouched down, reaching to touch its surface.

Just as the Wujin Iron officer had said, there was a clear division in colour and rust between the top and bottom halves of the tablet. Oswald remembered the square tablet that had just stood upright was indeed not quite the same as what he had seen before and seemed to have been dug through a thick layer of earth.

It could not have been done by anyone else but Kevin, who had just disappeared.

He wouldn’t have to dig up this tablet unless it had a message related to the entrance. On the lower half of the side hidden by the layer of the earth……

“Lights,” Oswald said without looking back, reaching behind him.

An army general froze and handed the Emperor the insect lamp he had improvised to carry.

Oswald took the lamp and shone it carefully against the tablet’s surface – the newly excavated half was so badly rusted that the writing was barely visible. Not bothering with the layer of mud still on it, he simply reached up and touched it.

After running the tips of his fingers over that side repeatedly for a while, he finally felt the broken sentence: Only when…..open up a path…..else, the tomb’s door will forever…..

Oswald frowned, his expression worsening: the keyword was almost rusted out!

The word after “forever” could be guessed as “closed,” but the words before and after “open up a path” could not be guessed.

He touched the spot repeatedly until his fingertips were almost numb.

Suddenly he felt the slightest trace of something that was not there.

“Departed spirit!” Oswald finally felt the first part before the word “open up a path.”

The full meaning was “only when the departed spirit opens up a path”? Where would the departed spirit come from ……

As he pondered, the faint howls that seemed to come from the depths of the earth reached his ears again.

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Could it be –?

Oswald’s eyes fell on the muddy ground before the thorn bush. Then, he patted the mud from his hands and stood up, barking at the men behind him, “Where are the others? Are they awake yet? Go and get them all here.”

The two generals responded and hurriedly returned down the path.

Within moments, everyone stood there, even the physician.

All of them carried weapons in their hands; the wisps of blood in their eyes had not yet faded. A few still had water droplets on their faces, having obviously just forced themselves to come to their senses.

“What’s going on here?” Nick wiped a bead of water from his face and shook his head vigorously.

The physician explained hesitantly from behind, “I think a handful of drugs were added to the fire. Probably got it over from me if I’m not mistaken ……”

At this point, Oswald was too distracted to care about how everyone had fallen asleep and where the medicine had come from. He had only one thought: that bastard Kevin had said he was going into the tomb alone before he left. After going around in circles, he did it anyway, just because he thought he wasn’t going to die at all ……

Fuck no dying!

Oswald stood up calmly, “A simple division of labour. Nick, you order five men over to cut down all the thorns and vine stems on this side. As for the rest –”

He lifted his foot, stomped on the wet mud-covered ground, and said word by word, “Turn this whole place over!

The men didn’t ask any questions and set to work without saying a word.

Soon, one of the men ran into a problem.

“Your Majesty! There’s no way to cut through these vine stems …….” Nick said, finding himself a little confused.

Oswald cast a glance over. Nick raised his sword, cut viciously across the vine stems, and landed a very deep slash; a few thinner ones broke straight off.

In the next instant, the horizontal cuts on the sturdy stems came back together, and the thinner ones drew new branches.

Apart from the rapidly decaying vines that littered the ground, the wall of thorns did not change in the slightest.

Oswald wasn’t much surprised. In fact, it was pretty much what he had expected.

He had never expected the wall of thorns to be any ordinary thing, let alone to split them open to reveal the door to the tomb of the gods.

But one had to give it a try, right? What if the ghosts come out of it.

Nick’s cutting team turned around and merged into the digging team, using all the strength they could muster to dig, and the ground was practically tumbling.

It didn’t take long for the ground to go down nearly a metre.

“Click!”

A faint crunch sound stood out above the clashing metal sounds, and the men stopped moving in unison.

One of the army generals crouched and picked at the dirt in front of his feet several times, revealing what had just been accidentally hacked off beneath the layer of dirt.

It was a bone.

A bone that had been buried for who knows how many years but was still as good as new, even with a thin layer of webbed blood clinging to it.

Finding bones in a graveyard wasn’t unusual, but the crowd still felt a chill run down their backs.

“Go on,” Oswald said.

The crowd simply dropped the swords and bent down to dig with their bare hands.

But after about ten minutes, the crowd had to stop what they were doing because there was hardly any room to stand.

Except for where they stood on their toes, all the wet mud that had been dug up was littered with skeletons, furs and pieces of flesh that looked incredibly fresh, as if they had just been buried.

Without exception, all these crumbling corpses came from fierce beasts.

The entire Giant Beastmen didn’t feel good! Even if it was a fierce beast that couldn’t turn into a human form, the visual impact was still huge for them!

There were almost a hundred corpses in the top layer alone, and new ones were dug out below, presumably buried in several layers. The crowd simply gave up. Otherwise, they would be buried alive by the piles of corpses and bones.

“Is this a beast ritual?” Nick exclaimed, “Never seen a beast ritual on this scale before……”

The Beast Ritual was a form of prayer witchcraft passed down in the ancient days of the Mainland.

Because people from long ago felt it was a sin to hunt fierce beasts for food, they would bury their heads, skeletons and inedible pieces of internal organs and flesh into the ground after every hunt, believing that this would cause the hunted beast to keep its soul intact and then be reborn.

It slowly evolved into a form of ritual and prayer in which the bones of the fierce animals were buried in front of the graves of the dead, protecting them to rest in peace.

“After all, it’s a god’s tomb. It’s normal…..for it to be bigger,” another army officer murmured.

“No!” Oswald stared at the fierce beast corpses for a moment, then suddenly frowned harshly, “This isn’t a beast ritual.”

“Huh?” Nick failed to react.

“The premise of a beast ritual is to put together the heads, furs and pieces of flesh as if the fierce beasts were alive. But here……”

The fierce beast carcasses were cut up into pieces, scattered and mixed. None of them was intact like they had been deliberately mangled to look like this!

“A complete corpse is a blessing. Meanwhile, the bones of a beast in such disarray –” Oswald said word by word, “are clearly a curse!”

The crowd was filled with surprise and horror: a curse was buried here? A curse on whom?

Could there be anyone else here but Phae, the god of light, who was supposed to be sleeping in his tomb?

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