Dao Qi Wu Zang Guan Guan: I became a Daoist Master in the 1990s

Chapter 179 Overseas evil cultivators
The passageway was cold and damp, filled with a mixture of stale, earthy smells and an indescribable sweet and pungent odor.

Zhang Guisheng's bald head steadily swept across the stone walls on both sides. Under the dim light, the originally rough stone surface gradually revealed large areas of blurred colors and engravings.

“There are murals!” Old Jin said in a low voice.

The crowd immediately gathered around, their flashlight beams crisscrossing and focusing.

On the walls, large areas of murals have become mottled and faded due to age and water erosion, with many details blurred, but the main narrative structure is still discernible.

The murals are simple and archaic in style, even exuding a strange and vivid charm.

The poem begins by depicting a ragged man, holding simple tools, digging a solitary grave deep in the mountains. When the coffin is opened, what is revealed is not a corpse, but a seated, mummified body with several bamboo scrolls underneath.

The tomb raider's face lit up with ecstasy.

The style of the following scenes changed abruptly.

The man seemed to have studied what was recorded on the bamboo slips, and various bizarre scenes began to appear on the screen:
They set up evil formations under the moonlight to extract the essence of living creatures; they soaked themselves in secret medicines, causing twisted runes to appear on their skin; they even commanded blurry black shadows to harass mountain villages, often leaving behind withered livestock or human-shaped traces.

The brushstrokes became increasingly unrestrained, and the colors were mostly dark red and deep black, vividly portraying a kind of madness and malice.

The further you go, the more disturbing the content of the murals becomes.

Numerous symbolic sacrificial scenes appear: distorted symbols, piles of bones, and bound and struggling creatures...

All of this demonstrates the cruelty and malice of cultivation methods.

The image of the tomb raider in the mural gradually changed, his eyes became sinister and greedy, while his figure became increasingly emaciated, exuding an inhuman evil aura.

"Damn... this tomb owner is a bastard who practices evil magic!"

Lei Bao felt a chill run down his spine and spat, the sound carrying clearly through the passageway.

Qi Yun looked at each item calmly, his fingers unconsciously stroking the scabbard of Cheng Yun sword.

These murals confirmed Lao Jin's guess: the tomb owner was by no means kind; his cruelty and wickedness far surpassed that of ordinary haunted tombs.

Zhang Guisheng's expression was solemn, and he gestured for everyone to proceed cautiously while watching.

The murals extend all the way to the end of the passageway.

However, the expected passage did not appear. Instead, a cold, hard, and seamless natural rock wall completely blocked the way.

Behind them lay the massive, weightless stone that had fallen silently.

They were completely trapped in a closed passageway.

"A dead end?" Xiao Zhou's voice trembled slightly, almost imperceptibly. The readings on the detector became unusually stable here, but even more unsettling.

Old Jin stepped forward, carefully touched and tapped the rock face, and repeatedly checked the walls and ground on both sides. Finally, he shook his head with a grim expression: "It's not a mechanism door. It's solid rock."

This passageway... is like a dead end.

It seems we can only wait for the entire structure to rotate again and connect to the new channel.

"When will we ever see the monkey and the horse?" Lei Bao grew impatient, patting the backpack behind him. "I brought some 'hard stuff'! Forget about clever traps, let's blow the hell out of the way!"

"Absolutely not!" Old Jin shouted, sweat beading on his forehead. "This kind of interconnected mechanism is both ingenious and fragile!"
A brute-force blast could cause a chain reaction of collapses due to the resulting vibrations!
"At that point, forget about finding our way; we'll all be stuck here, buried with this evil cultivator!"

He took a breath and forced himself to calm down: "Find the weak point first! Carefully control the dosage, detonate at a fixed point, there might be a glimmer of hope!"

After saying that, despite his exhaustion, he took out his tools again and carefully tapped and listened to every inch of the ground and the walls on both sides.

The dull, solid echoes shattered Lao Jin's hopes time and time again.

Finally, Old Jin, panting, looked up at the top of the tomb, where it was also built with blue bricks and looked no different from the other parts.

He gestured for Lei Bao to crouch down, step on his shoulders, and laboriously reach the top, tapping carefully and rhythmically with his knuckles.

"Thump...thump thump..."

The sound remained muffled.

Old Jin didn't give up; he moved his position and continued hammering.

It was in a corner near the junction with the rock face.

"Click..."

A very faint, yet distinctly different, sound, carrying a hint of ethereal resonance, reached the ears of everyone below!

"Here!" Old Jin's voice was hoarse with wild joy, "The voice is different!"
The back might be empty, or the structure might be thin!

Lei Bao immediately put Lao Jin down and, without saying a word, took out a small drilling device and carefully wrapped plastic explosives from his backpack.

His movements were extremely professional. He first drilled a small hole at the location marked by Lao Jin, and after checking and confirming it, he carefully embedded the strip of explosive into the hole and the surrounding gaps, and then connected the fuse.

"Retreat!" Zhang Guisheng shouted in a low voice.

The group quickly retreated to the other end of the passageway and pressed themselves against the wall.

Lei Bao installed the time-delay fuse and quickly ran back.

"Boom!!" The first explosion was muffled, and rubble fell in a flurry. Only a shallow crater was blasted open at the top, revealing the darker, bluish-black rock inside.

"Damn it, it's so thick!" Lei Bao cursed, and stepped forward again to install the explosives.

The second blast widened the crack, but still failed to penetrate it.

The atmosphere grew increasingly tense.

Lei Bao's forehead was sweating. He increased the dosage of the medicine slightly for the third time and made precise arrangements.

"Boom!!"

After the loud noise, smoke and dust filled the air.

As the dust settled, an irregular hole, barely large enough for one person to squeeze through, was finally blasted open in the top of the tomb!

The smell of gravel and gunpowder filled the air.

The flashlight beam shone upwards, revealing a dark, gaping hole inside, with another passage vaguely visible.

"It's a success!" Xiao Zhou exclaimed in delight.

Lei Bao was the first to be lifted up. He carefully observed for a moment to make sure there was no immediate danger before lowering the rope.

The group climbed up one by one with great difficulty.

The new passageway was indeed much more spacious, allowing two people to walk side by side. The ground was flat and the stones were neatly laid, a stark contrast to the eerie passageway below filled with murals.

The walls on both sides were bare, without any decoration or carving, just cold stone, stretching into the endless darkness ahead.

Dead silence is the only theme here.

Only the suppressed breathing and footsteps of the crowd echoed hollowly.

Everyone was on high alert, proceeding cautiously, fearing they might trigger some deadly trap.

The time it takes for an incense stick to burn slowly passed in extreme tension.

Qi Yun and Zhang Guisheng, who were walking at the front, stopped abruptly at almost the same time, raised their arms, and clenched their fists in a gesture of greeting!

Everyone froze instantly, holding their breath.

In the dead silence, a faint, almost imperceptible rustling sound drifted from the deep darkness ahead.

The sound was extremely soft, like fingernails scraping against stone, or like many people whispering in hushed tones.

Everyone's hearts clenched, their weapons were silently drawn, and the muzzles were slightly raised, aimed at the darkness ahead.

Qi Yun's eyes were sharp. He made a gesture, and the group crouched down, forming a battle formation, and moved forward with utmost care and slowness.

The sound gradually became clearer as they approached.

It was no longer just background noise, but... human voices!
Although I couldn't hear it very clearly, there was definitely someone speaking!

His tone was rapid, with a distinctive Cantonese accent.

The group finally reached the end of the wide passageway without making a sound.

Before them was another solid stone wall, and the clear voices of the conversation were coming from behind this stone wall!
Everyone pressed themselves against the stone wall, listening intently.

A slightly younger voice rang out with a complaint, its Cantonese accent thick: "You bastard!"

Those loud bangs just now must have been from those 749 cops sneaking in again!

"Use explosives to clear the way, but don't let the tomb collapse and get us caught in the crossfire!"

Another voice rang out, slightly more composed: "Shut up! Keep your voice down! Won't you disturb us?"

Those incompetent bunch in front of us did a terrible job, and we're the ones who have to clean up their mess!

"I should have just killed those three idiots a long time ago. Why did I have to ask them? Now look what's happened, I've brought a ghost into the house!"

The young voice retorted, "Can you blame us? Who would have thought that our ancestral graves would be vandalized by a few low-level thieves?"
What terrible luck! Dad, are you sure the original manual of our family's martial arts techniques is still down there?

At that moment, an old voice rang out, speaking slowly.

"The family genealogy records are accurate."

Our ancestors took the original complete manual into their tomb; what we, their descendants, have in books are all copies.

Having returned from this adventure, they retrieved the original text and restored the long-lost lineage of the Dharma.

If we succeed, our family will be able to reclaim everything we lost, and even... reach new heights!

"Those people from 749, if they're smart enough, they shouldn't get in the way, otherwise..." The old man snorted coldly, his unfinished words filled with chilling intent.

On the other side of the stone wall, Zhang Guisheng, Qi Yun, and the others exchanged an extremely serious look.

The person behind the wall turned out to be a descendant of the tomb's owner!

Moreover, they came from overseas, sneaked back to the mainland, and intended to unleash their ancestral evil martial arts!
The deaths of the tomb raiders and the disappearance of Liu Song's team must be related to them!
(End of this chapter)