Transmigrated as an Ignored Crown Princess

27 - The Artifact

The party of three walked through the wide tunnel of limestone, on all occasion Yamato and Baili Haoyue always sandwiched Qing Youya in the middle to provide him best protection.

However from midway in the tunnel, an odor of a burnt and spoiled putrescent flesh gradually assaulted their nose. Yamato quickly brought everyone to a stop and asked Baili Haoyue for his half damp robe. He immediately ripped his robe right after receiving it, then tied the thrice folded cloth onto the lower half of Qing Youya's face to provide him an emergency mask.

"I'm sorry for the filthy inconvenience your highness, but please bear with it for a while," then Yamato tied a cloth to himself as well, followed by Baili Haoyue.

They continued to walk, and when they almost reached the end of the tunnel, this time Baili Haoyue was the one to bring them to stop. The man walked ahead to inspect if there was anything dangerous and came back, thus he reported, "There are no living things ahead."

Yamato frowned, "Means it's all dead?" because such strong putrid smell was impossible to produce without a fair amount of organic substance.

Baili Haoyue nodded with a rare solemn mien.

Capturing the rough outline of the situation ahead, they exited the tunnel, and was greeted by a horribly nightmarish, gruesome, and macabre scene.

The place clearly looked like it was on fire just recently. There were several piles of barely recognized rotten and burnt human skeleton littered all over the place. In the middle of the cave was three conspicuous seven feet tall stone cross stood erect, and in front of the cross was an empty small cage with iron bars. And on one side of the cave wall was again a barely visible knee high passage opened. The black skeletons, the ashes filled ground, the stained dark stalactites and stalagmites, the peculiarly striking cross, the empty iron cage, accompanied with an unaffectedly twinkling ceiling of beautiful gems, it was a bizarre scene no one there ever imagined. Though the lethiferous booby traps in the cave was clearly manmade, the morbid scenery in front of them was still extraordinarily incongruous.

Coming from a peaceful modern world, Yamato have never seen anything like this. He have seen gory movies, animes, and comics, however it couldn't hold a candle with the real thing. Because not only the sight, but the whole atmosphere, the aura, the silence, the smell, everything was extremely dreadful, sinister, and heavy. Yamato did not vomit nor faint, but from the moment he set his eyes upon the place, chills immediately ran down his spine while his heartbeat was thumping very loud. His entire body was chilled with a pale face that has made no movement ever since.

On the other hand, Baili Haoyue and Qing Youya only furrowed their brows in displease, but was not shaken even the slightest. Because Baili Haoyue have been in a battleground where thousands of corpses emerge, and Qing Youya have been in situations way worse than that.

Qing Youya was displeased because he didn't see such occurrence in his past life. He was considering whether it was a new incident on a parallel world, or was it just an incident that happened in the past that he didn't encounter. If it was past incident, then now he might be able to found out about what had happened to the artifact before it fell to his hands in the past.

The boy strode towards the pile of corpses and was hurriedly grabbed by Yamato.

Qing Youya gently fend the hand away from his shoulder, "It's alright sister-in-law," he unsheathed a small intricate knife from inside the robe's pocket on his chest, it was a pair with the knife Qing Lian has. Using the knife, he then carefully poked, sliced, gouged, and moved something that seemed to be a ribcage from the pile. On the ribcage sticks an unevenly distributed burnt meat which were crowded by maggot, and inside it was an intact charcoal like internal organs.