At that moment, I vaguely heard strange noises coming from deep within the cave again, and this time, it was clearly much closer than before. The sound was like the whispering of countless little ghosts, making everyone extremely uncomfortable. Everyone fell silent, and the atmosphere instantly became eerily intense. Suddenly, all my attention was drawn to that sound. I tried several times to pull my mind away, but was immediately drawn back in. I thought to myself, this is bad—there’s something strange about this sound! Even though I realized it, I just couldn’t snap out of it, and for a while, my mind was filled with nothing but that noise. Just then, I don’t know who gave me a hard kick, and I lost my balance and fell into the water.

Immediately, the sound in my head vanished, and almost at the same time, I saw Peter Clark fall in as well. Then came Uncle Samuel and Quentin Carter, and finally that Silent William jumped in too, carrying a miner’s lamp. In the water, the sound was much more muffled, so it didn’t affect us much, but it was very hard to see anything clearly with the naked eye underwater. I squinted and could only make out vague shapes. Silent William pointed to something underwater, then shone his lamp. The water wasn’t very deep, and we could see a layer of white sand at the bottom. He swept the light around—there were no plants, no fish or shrimp. I couldn’t hold my breath any longer, so I surfaced to take a breath. Just as I shook the water from my eyes, I suddenly saw a blood-soaked face hanging upside down above me, its eyes staring dead at me.

I stared at him, and he stared right back at me.

I recognized this person as the middle-aged man who had rowed the boat for us. Looking up, I saw that only his upper body remained, and a huge black bug was gnawing on his intestines on the cave ceiling, occasionally flicking them around. I was instantly petrified—wasn’t this a terrifyingly huge corpse-eating centipede? My god, how many corpses would it have to eat to grow this big?!

Just then, Peter Clark’s head popped up on the other side. Unfortunately, he wasn’t as lucky as me. Before he could even figure out what was happening, the bug let out a screech, flung the corpse aside, and pounced straight onto his head, raising its huge pincers and snapping them right into Peter Clark’s scalp.

But Peter Clark was quite something. In that situation, I saw his left hand flip over—somehow he already had his military knife in hand—and he pried the blade under the base of the bug’s pincer, digging one of them out. If it had been me, just one hit from that monster and I’d be reporting to the King of Hell. The bug let out a shrill screech from who knows where, and its other pincer lost its grip. Peter Clark took the chance to punch it away. All of this happened in a flash, and Peter Clark didn’t even see me—he just pressed the bug right onto my face.

I cursed Peter Clark in my heart—how could he be so shameless? He always said he’d look out for me, but now, in a crisis, he just threw this deadly thing at my face. He still had a military knife, but I only had my bare hands—this was the end for me. The bug didn’t hold back, either—it immediately used its sharp claws to slice a piece of skin off my face. I gritted my teeth, trying to shake it off, but its claws all had barbs, hooking tightly into my clothes, and some even dug straight into my flesh, hurting so much that tears came to my eyes.

At that moment, Silent William surfaced as well. Seeing that I was about to go under, he rushed over, stuck two fingers into the bug’s back, pulled hard, and yanked out a white, noodle-like thing. The poor bug, which had just been dominating, was finished in less than a second. I tossed the bug’s corpse onto the boat, feeling like I’d just woken from a nightmare.

Quentin Carter gave Silent William a thumbs up and said, “Little William, I, Quentin Carter, salute you! You actually pulled the guts out of such a huge bug. I have to hand it to you!”

“Come on,” Peter Clark said, with two bloody holes in his head—thankfully not too big—gritting his teeth as he spoke, “look at your education. That’s called the central nervous system. He just paralyzed the bug with that move!”

“You mean the bug isn’t dead yet?” Quentin Carter had one foot on the boat already, but after hearing that, he put it back in the water.

Silent William flipped himself onto the boat and kicked the bug aside. “We can’t kill it yet. We need it to get out of this corpse cave.”

“Do you think that sound earlier was made by this bug?” Uncle Samuel asked him. The bug had made a few noises just now, but they didn’t seem quite the same.

Silent William turned the bug over, and we saw that on its tail was a fist-sized, hexagonal, bronze-sealed bell, which had been embedded at some unknown time and was now covered in verdigris. Each of the six sides of the bell was engraved with dense incantations. As Peter Clark was wrapping a bandage, he kicked it with his foot, and the hexagonal bell suddenly started moving on its own!

The sound it made was exactly the same as what we’d heard earlier, though before it had sounded ethereal, as if drifting from the underworld, while now it was much more distinct. It seemed that this bell was the source of the sound, but it only had its bewitching effect when combined with the echo in the empty space. There must be some extremely intricate mechanism inside this hexagonal bell, and for it to last a thousand years without decaying, it was probably made of gold or silver. But how could it ring on its own?