The Informal Tomb Raiding Diary: She is the occupant of the tomb!-Chapter 163: Maybe the Battlefield Really Was Here
I responded with a sound, then moved the water bottle back a bit, drew my dagger, and walked into the passage with renewed alertness.
The walls on both sides of the passage were also embedded with glowing stones, which were better than electric lights since there was no worry of a power outage.
Bi Shi had already walked over ten meters away, and upon hearing me follow, she glanced back at me but didn’t stop to wait.
Other than the bones she had crushed underfoot, the rest were well-preserved, with all the skulls intact and undamaged.
Bi Shi once heard He Su say that the undersea civilization was destroyed by war, but looking at it now, it didn’t seem that way. Of course, their weapons of war might have left no trace of their killing.
The mummified bodies we saw earlier had intact limbs, frozen in their pre-death stances. They weren’t gunned down or blown apart.
The time of their death appeared consistent; I don’t think they died from disease either.
I stepped where Bi Shi had walked, considering it safer. Bi Shi looked back to mock me, saying I’d become more cowardly.
I didn’t care what she said—I didn’t want any trouble; it’s not that I feared death, but if something happened to me, no one would bring water back to Qinghan and the others.
I’ve seen similar sentiments in many movies; they call it a sense of responsibility.
Honestly, such a concept had never occurred to me in the past few millennia, but no Tomb Raider ever counted on me to find water for them.
"Hey, zongzi sister, bring me a jug of water, love you~" Such an absurd request, he probably couldn’t have thought it up.
And I lack the initiative, seemingly never asking them, "I’m heading outside the tomb to scavenge, need water or food?"
"We’ve reached the end; it’s stuck from the outside," Bi Shi suddenly said ahead.
She kicked at the door a few times. It was the same kind of metal door, stuck from the outside just the same. Bi Shi motioned to me, "Try using that little knife of yours."
Lu Xiaodao’s knife, which he lent me, was still on me. It was sharp enough to slice through iron like it was mud. If I could insert it through the door gap, it might cut the outside door bar.
Bi Shi pressed her shoulder against the door as I slid the knife up and down through the seam. It did cut into something, but the door was too thick, and the knife, lacking length like a throwing knife, couldn’t completely sever the bar.
"Leave the rest to me," said Bi Shi, taking a few steps back before charging forward.
I quickly stepped aside to avoid anything that might fall in.
But when the door burst open, only Bi Shi, due to inertia, collided with something, causing a muffled thud.
I seemed to have forgotten to tell her that the door bar was already almost severed, so there was no need for that much force...
"Pfft... spitting..." 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚
I heard her spitting and hurried out to find her upper body buried in a pile resembling sacks.
The sacks were decayed and filled with sea sand. Bi Shi must have bitten into some sand, extracted her top half, and kept spitting it out.
The sandbag wall, built perfectly for her to collapse into, revealed a gap.
"Isn’t this a makeshift barricade?" I’ve seen many old war films where soldiers pile sandbags for cover.
The sandbags were two meters from the door and not as tall as it, so they weren’t meant to block the door.
"Look at this." Bi Shi, having stopped spitting, retrieved a white object from under the collapsed sandbags.
It had a silver-white metallic shell, much like the door, but part of it was transparent, containing a deep blue liquid—very little, not enough for a sip.
"Do you think this looks like..." Bi Shi raised an eyebrow at me.
"A Water Gun?" I cooperatively picked up her words.
"Let’s try it!" Bi Shi aimed the "gun barrel" at the nearby sandbags, her index finger on the "trigger."
I quickly ducked back inside the door, hearing her curse "coward," followed by a bang and then her coughing.
Peeking out, I saw her covered in sand. The sandbag stack she’d aimed at now had a nearly one-meter-deep, two-meter-wide crater.
"Thank you for your courage to experiment; now we know they weren’t fighting a civil war," I applauded Bi Shi.
"This thing’s small but packs a punch." Bi Shi brushed the sand off her head and pocketed the palm-sized "Water Gun."
"Careful it misfires, lest you blow yourself to bits~" I kindly warned.
"Out of water, how’s it gonna misfire?" Bi Shi rolled her eyes at me, "Who do you think they were fighting? Mantis shrimp? Seaweed spirits?" At the mention of war, Bi Shi’s eyes lit up, her gossip-loving soul burning brightly.
"The gun’s here, no corpses, and the barricade wasn’t breached, uh... until you crashed into it. I guess the enemy they faced wasn’t on the same level."
"How do we compare to them?"
"Hard to say."
"Tsk, you forgot our clan’s motto? Oh right, you probably forgot."
"Undefeated across the world."
"That’s right!"
"So juvenile~"
We teased each other as we walked past the barricade. Ahead lay a large bridge; we were just at its entrance.
The silver-white metal bridge was about fifteen meters wide, and though its length was hard to judge, it had to be over a thousand meters. There were buildings at the other end, and even farther, some structures were barely visible in the distance.
The lighting here came from those glowing stones, but only where there were buildings. Without them, it was quite dark.
The bridge sides were lined with glowing stones, making the surface shine like a mirror, and like the Shell Ship, it was immaculately clean.
If Shell Ships were mass-produced, then Water-Repelling Pearls and dust avoidance beads were likely common parts for the Undersea People, significantly reducing their cleaning workload.
The metal bridge looked sturdy, and Bi Shi and I stepped onto it. On the bridge, there were various sizes of transportation tools—like cars, but these giant shells had no wheels.
Bi Shi crawled into them, trying to figure out how they moved, but after looking at several, they didn’t budge an inch.
"That blue liquid is definitely fuel. Did you see that? It’s the tank. Damn, they’re probably fingerprint or palm print activated." Bi Shi pointed to a spot inside the giant shell and then kicked it.
I glanced at the spot; indeed, there was a transparent canister inside the shell, holding blue liquid.
But the liquid in this canister was a much lighter shade, unlike the deep blue in the gun.
The liquid in the gun seemed potent; perhaps they diluted it for use as fuel, or they’re entirely different substances.
Bi Shi was quite disappointed not to advance by vehicle. The bridge was long; it took us half an hour to reach the other end.
A traffic accident had occurred on the bridge, a chain collision eerily similar to scenes from disaster films.
People had driven onto the bridge to flee something, only to crash in their haste. They ran out of time, forced to abandon their cars.
I presumed the ones who stacked the sandbags hadn’t stopped them, as there wasn’t just one Shell Ship in the dock back then.
