Chapter 76: Entering the Den of Thieves

Why on earth would I step on a crab in such a dry place?

Driven by this question, I couldn't help but kick the crab again with my foot.

With this kick, to my utter surprise, that thumb-sized crab was actually nothing more than an empty shell.

The shell was still greenish, but the meat inside had completely vanished, as if someone had eaten it raw.

In bewilderment, I slowly raised my phone and began scanning my surroundings.

Soon, I spotted the remains of even more creatures scattered throughout the tomb tunnel.

Wherever the light fell, there were all sorts of carcasses. A quick glance was enough for me to spot cow horns, pig intestines, dog bones, and rat heads?!

Along this long and narrow tomb passage, animal remains of various sizes were strewn about irregularly. Their states of decomposition varied; some were reduced to bare, bleached bones, while others still clung to fresh blood and flesh.

Although the species differed, they all shared one striking characteristic: they had all been consumed "raw," and bore unmistakable traces of being bitten by human teeth.

Looking at this chaotic sprawl of debris, combined with the distinct marks of human bites and cat scratches, I instantly realized a deeply terrifying truth.

All of this was the leftover food of Master Duan and his feline progeny and descendants.

This meant that Master Duan really did live on a diet of raw, living flesh, just as Little Ah Si had described!

There was simply no other explanation; otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to convince myself otherwise.

The image of Master Duan in my mind was shattered and rebuilt once more.

Originally, I thought he was merely a con man, a money-grubbing scoundrel, a charlatan, and nothing more.

Yet this time, he had become entirely synonymous with a "cat demon."

Weren't his so-called "Six Meridians Divine Sword" just razor-sharp cat claws? The ability to speak with cats, the "magic arts" that could make corpses rise from the dead, coupled with his habit of eating raw meat and the cat's tail hidden in his trousers—didn't all of these point directly to feline traits?

Was Master Duan a "man" transformed from a cat, or a "cat" turned into a man? I could not understand it, nor was I capable of comprehending it.

If I wanted to uncover the truth, I had no choice but to push deeper into the tomb.

Just as I was reeling from all these shocks, Zhao Shuihe and Little Ah Si also made their way down through the robber's tunnel one after the other.

Taking in the "scenery" before her, Zhao Shuihe looked just as astonished as I was. At the same time, she murmured to me in a low voice, "I never expected things to have escalated to this extent!"

Sensing hidden meaning in her words, I pressed, "To what extent? What on earth do you know?"

Instead of answering me immediately, Zhao Shuihe pointed toward the flickering firelight at the end of the tomb tunnel and leaned close to my ear. "Let's get over there first, subdue Master Duan, and then we can talk."

Catching her drift, I glanced up at the firelight, nodded hurriedly, picked up a brick from the ground, and drew my military knife from my pocket to take the lead.

With that, the three of us inched our way step by step toward the illuminated section of the tomb passage.

As we drew closer, we held our breath and focused our minds, stopping after every single step for fear of making too much noise or triggering some horrifying trap.

I don't know how much time had passed when I finally reached the illuminated part of the burial chamber.

The tomb tunnel curved here, and the turn still retained the stone bars and fragments used to seal the burial chamber back in the day.

I could tell that there had once been a stone door blocking the main tomb chamber, though it had long since been blasted apart by explosives.

A "masterpiece" courtesy of the Japanese, and now the lair of Master Duan.

As we were about to enter the tomb chamber, my anxiety spiked abruptly. I adjusted my breathing, pressed my back against the wall, slowly poked my head around the corner of the tunnel, and peered inward through the shattered remains of the stone door.

The brightly lit stone chamber instantly came into view.

At that moment, my field of vision suddenly opened up.

The tomb chamber at the end of the passage was roughly the size of an ordinary bedroom, and it was empty of people. In the center sat a stone coffin that had been repurposed into a table, piled high with various canned goods, clothing, luggage, banknotes, and flashlights.

The light we had seen earlier emanated from the flashlight resting on the head of the coffin.

Clearly, this was undoubtedly the lair where Master Duan had been hiding. Yet, despite this discovery, my gaze was quickly drawn more heavily to the stone coffin itself.

The stone coffin was ancient and elegant, imbued with an inexplicable sense of mystery that easily stirred the imagination.

From my angle, the stone coffin sat at a very crooked angle, evidently having been shoved aside by external force. Moreover, based on the textured patterns carved into its uneven surface, the occupant of the coffin was clearly someone of high status.

Having lived this long, I had never been in such close contact with this type of coffin, so a wave of intense curiosity washed over me, and I couldn't resist running my hand across the coffin lid.

A strange, unusual texture immediately transmitted straight into my palm.

I suddenly realized there were characters carved onto the coffin lid!

Driven by curiosity, I hurriedly snatched the flashlight off the coffin lid and shone the beam onto the words my fingers had brushed.

Inscribed upon it was an "epitaph."

Because of the passage of countless years, the epitaph was somewhat indistinct. Coupled with the fact that ancient classical stone inscriptions rarely featured punctuation marks, although I could recognize the individual characters, I had virtually no grasp of their actual meaning.

Even so, I immediately knew whose stone coffin this was, because I could understand the very first sentence, and within that single sentence lay the name of the tomb's owner.

It read: "In the seventh year of the Yongli Emperor of the Great Ming Dynasty, Zhao Huo, a sixth-rank senior official serving in the Bureau of Imperial Delicacies of the Court of Imperial Sacrifices, native of Yimeng, Shandong."

I could understand every single piece of information contained in that sentence.

My veteran squad leader had once told me that in ancient times, the so-called "imperial chefs" were merely a generic term used by commoners for official court cooks. These chefs held highly specialized titles and distinct duties within the imperial palace, with the most formal designations being "glycine artisan" or "palace provisioner."

These individuals all fell under the jurisdiction of a specialized agency responsible for organizing banquets for the imperial court—an institution known as the "Court of Imperial Sacrifices."

The squad leader had also mentioned that his ancestors, starting with Zhao the Chicken Slaughterer, had served continuously within this "Court of Imperial Sacrifices" institution for over five hundred years from the Ming to the Qing dynasties, never breaking the lineage, even if the lowest rank they held was merely that of a hearth-tender.

Among these generations of Zhao ancestors possessing superb culinary skills, many "entered officialdom through cooking" and served as legitimate imperial court officials. Although these posts were minuscule, peanut-sized positions like "Bureau Chief" or "Imperial Dietary Inspector," they were nonetheless proper "civil servants" and held leadership ranks.

It was precisely because of this imperial background that the Luannan Zhao family earned their renown within the culinary realm and established their own historical legacy.

And the stone coffin before my eyes was clearly the resting place of Zhao Huo, the very last imperial palace chef of the Zhao family during the Ming Dynasty.

Consequently, I turned my head back and said to Zhao Shuihe, "This is the coffin of your ancestor, Zhao Huo! Is he the same Zhao Huo who cultivated the very first cat demon, Fire-Tail Lian?"

Upon hearing my words, Zhao Shuihe hurried over. Staring at the first line of text on the stone coffin, her face registered sheer astonishment and a sense of grief.

After a brief moment, she let out a soft sigh and murmured, "It seems the legends are true. Right before his death, Zhao Huo felt he had no face left to meet his ancestors in the afterlife. He buried himself inside this stone coffin, and buried along with him were all the taboos of the Zhao family regarding the cultivation of cat demons."

"What legends?" I asked, baffled.

Zhao Shuihe pondered for a moment before telling me, "Legend has it that after Zhao Huo successfully refined the cat demon, he gradually realized he had committed a grave and terrible mistake! And this mistake would sooner or later lead to the extinction of the Zhao family's bloodline."

Without missing a beat, Zhao Shuihe began to recount the second half of the legend of Zhao Huo.