White Bone Inheritance (2)
An explosion blows open the wall behind Fang Yuan and Bai Ning Bing, and the Bai clan pours into the first hall. Tie Dao Ku, accompanying Bai Clan Leader, identifies it at a glance as an inheritance ground. Furious at having been outwitted by two youths, and with her clansmen clamoring for the chance to hunt them down, Bai Clan Leader grants an elder’s plea to lead a group forcing a path through the sealed tunnel ahead. Tie Dao Ku wants to study the mechanism first, but the elder, thinking only of the missing young masters, refuses to wait. ch. 223
Underground, Fang Yuan turns the rank three Bone Spike Gu over in his hands. A thousand points of damage dealt to an enemy costs the user eight hundred of his own, so neither he nor Bai Ning Bing, who already wears ice muscles, wants it. He refines it anyway and the pair descend a long, narrowing stairway, at least around a thousand meters of it, to a door marked Flesh Sac Secret Chamber. ch. 223
Above them, after fifteen minutes spent hacking the passage only half open, the mechanism suddenly releases on its own, and Tie Dao Ku works out that the spiral bone spikes needed to be pulled, not twisted, leaving the elder who insisted on forcing it visibly embarrassed. They pass through the first hall, now littered with the corpses of the Gu worms Bai Ning Bing killed, then the pillar hall, where the leftover Ribcage Shield Gu and Arm Bone Wings Gu are collected, then the hall of the seated skeleton, where an elder confirms the inheritance is a righteous one. Tie Dao Ku alone senses something is wrong with the arrangement. After they take the rank three Gu from the smashed skull, a new tunnel opens from the skeleton’s hall and the group presses into it. ch. 223
Fang Yuan and Bai Ning Bing reach the door first and push it open onto a small chamber walled entirely in warm, faintly throbbing flesh. Countless mouths crack open in the walls, baring teeth, and fill the chamber with layered, unsettling laughter. ch. 223
