Starting from Tunnel 16, the doors were no longer locked, and the true abandoned mine shafts began.
From the web of indicator maps at the tunnel entrance, it was clear that everything worth extracting had been very thoroughly extracted.
Whatever remained was simply too little to justify the cost of bringing in large machinery.
That was left to private exploration crews to salvage by hand.
And even that had been picked over for so long that it was like a pot of egg-drop soup where even the single egg had been consud down to the last drop.
Anything worth earning now ant going deeper into the mine pit, into zones prone to cave-ins and other associated geological hazards.
Li Qiuchen took Hu Caiyi through a quick circuit of the area, and if he was being candid, he felt it was genuinely not as interesting as going back to the museum to study the old exhibits.
There was truly nothing left here.
The museum, by contrast, had its chanical models, operating manuals, and ancient magical treasures, all well worth examining.
The two of them had just made their way back to the central hub when a woman's piercing shriek cut through the air.
Hu Caiyi's hair and tail stood on end. She locked both arms around Li Qiuchen's and refused to let go.
"Are there really ghosts here?"
Li Qiuchen said helplessly, "How could there be ghosts anywhere the City God Office oversees?"
"But... isn't the City God Office specifically responsible for overseeing the underworld?"
Well. Put that way, it did have a certain logic to it.
When they drew closer and he saw what was there, Li Qiuchen's brow furrowed imdiately.
This was an exploration crew that had just returned from underground.
The faces were unfamiliar, not Chen Baishan's group. Almost every one of them was injured, and the worst cases had faces blackened from burns, heads split and bleeding.
Suddenly noticing strangers approaching, a woman who had been clutching an injured companion and weeping wiped her face and ca running over. "Help! Please help soone! There's been an accident below!"
Li Qiuchen raised a hand and stopped her. "Take a breath, don't panic. What happened down there? A collapse?"
"No, we ran into monsters... young friend, please help us open the lift... no, I an go down. Go down to save them! Please save the people down there!"
The woman was clearly in a state of ntal collapse, her words scattered and contradictory, barely coherent even to herself.
Li Qiuchen frowned. "Can't you operate the lift? Where's your work badge?"
"The work badge is with the crew chief. The crew chief is still down there. And our people... our people are still down there too!"
Does each exploration crew really only have one work badge?
Li Qiuchen narrowed his eyes and took stock of the equipnt this crew was carrying.
Chen Baishan's exploration crew, for all that it was a family operation with n, won, and elderly mbers all together, had everyone outfitted in proper protective gear, most of which qualified as genuine antiques.
You might not know exactly what it did, but just looking at it made you feel safe.
This crew, on the other hand, had suffered serious losses, had no work badge, and their equipnt looked noticeably incomplete.
It was possible, of course, that things had been dropped and lost in the panic.
"Take a breath. Let's get the injured settled first, and then we'll work out how to contact the surface."
Li Qiuchen spoke calmly to settle the woman down, while at the sa ti directing the others who were still mobile to carry the severely injured into Tunnel 1.
The shelter there had so ergency dical supplies.
Once the injured had been moved, Li Qiuchen produced a small dicine vial from his pocket, gave it a shake, and passed it to the woman. "This is a pain-relief dicine. Give everyone a sip. It should ease so of the discomfort."
It was actually expired black nightshade jam.
Carrying so degree of numbing effect, or hallucinogenic effect if you preferred that description.
With so many strangers watching, Li Qiuchen wasn't comfortable demonstrating his healing arts openly.
Helping people was simple enough in itself. The misunderstandings that could arise from letting others witness his thods were a different problem entirely.
He had scanned the injuries briefly. Fortunately nothing was life-threatening. The worst of it was burns and broken limbs. As long as the bleeding was stopped there was no serious cause for concern.
The woman grabbed Li Qiuchen's arm and pleaded desperately, "Young friend, you're a student from an academy, aren't you? I know you can use spiritual arts. Please, I beg you, go and save the people down there. Any condition you na. Whatever we can give you... no, anything you want at all!"
"Let's not do it like this. Let's talk calmly."
Li Qiuchen carefully removed the woman's blood-covered hand, and asked in a low voice, "What exactly is the situation down there? I can't help you if you don't tell
clearly."
"I don't know. We all went down following the crew chief and the young boss. It was terribly hot down there, the ground was hot enough to blister your feet through your boots. And then those creatures just appeared..."
"What kind of creatures? What did they look like?"
"I don't know. It was completely dark and I couldn't see clearly. They didn't look human, that's all I know."
"You made it back up. Why didn't the others co with you?"
"The creatures separated us. We were closer to the lift. The others are trapped inside, we don't know what's happened to them..."
So she knew nothing about the first thing and nothing about the second.
Complete blank on everything. Thoroughly frightened out of any ability to reason.
Understandable, of course. These were ordinary people.
The great mine pit had been abandoned for thousands of years. The museum hadn't ntioned anything about creatures. Perhaps there had been sothing in the past, but it would have been dealt with long ago, with no need to record it in the main historical text.
Who knew what forbidden zone these people had managed to breach in their digging?
Looking at the fact that they had all managed to escape more or less in one piece, though, suggested the creatures weren't particularly dangerous.
A quiet stirring of compassion moved through Li Qiuchen's chest.
The dicine Master's way was to be unable to stand by and watch people suffer and cry for help.
But he didn't act on impulse. He was neither a specialist nor an actual divine being.
"Take
to see the situation first. Then we'll discuss what to do."
The woman's face lit up with overwhelming relief. She dropped to her knees on the spot and knocked her head against the ground in a deep bow.
"Thank you, benefactor, thank you!"
"No need for that. Let's go look first."
While the woman led the way ahead, Li Qiuchen said quietly to Hu Caiyi, "Go and wait sowhere out of the way for now. If there's any real danger, head straight for the surface."
"Wait sowhere? Where exactly?"
"Do you rember the large lift we ca down in?"
"Yes, but I don't have a work badge."
"You don't need one. There's a safety passage on the side. Follow the green indicator lights and you can get back to the surface."
"Oh! I didn't notice that at all. How did you spot it?"
Li Qiuchen thought to himself that this was simply basic industrial safety knowledge. A construction of this scale simply could not exist without a safety passage built in.
If there hadn't been a safety passage, relying on a single lift to go up and down, would he really have brought her wandering around here so casually?
"Never mind how I found it. Go and find sowhere to stay out of sight. If anything goes seriously wrong, don't worry about these people. Get yourself out first."
"What could go seriously wrong?"
"What if they've dug through into the underworld, and a flood of spirits and ghosts cos rushing out..."
"Ugh! Then let's both run!"
"I said what if. And I have ways to protect myself. I can't just stand by and watch people die. Word would get around."
Hu Caiyi looked at Li Qiuchen for a long mont, then said quietly, "Then please make sure you keep yourself safe."
"Of course. You know how fast I am."
And with that, Hu Caiyi slipped away as quietly as she could manage.
Li Qiuchen followed the woman into Tunnel 18, glancing up at the indicator map above the entrance.
Tunnel 18 was the last mining shaft, with over fifteen hundred years of excavation history.
The people who built it had apparently refused to give up, convinced there must be sothing left to find in the great mine pit.
Reality had been swift and harsh in correcting that belief.
There were resources, but the returns truly could not cover the costs.
The tunnel had been dug to a depth of roughly two thousand zhang before being abandoned.
At the bottom of the shaft, small private mine holes, roughly constructed and clearly dug by hand, appeared at intervals of several hundred zhang, burrowing down toward even deeper levels.
In geological terms, the substrate at that depth was almost entirely solid rock, extrely difficult to cut with ordinary tools.
But according to popular legend, or mythology if you preferred that framing, in the very distant past, those ancient beings of great supernatural power routinely had the ability to move mountains and fill seas. Wherever they clashed, the earth itself would be rent into chasms ten thousand zhang deep. So of the great saints would even uproot mountain peaks to use as weapons against their opponents.
Through all of that back and forth, the terrain was constantly reshaped, and it was entirely plausible that certain ore veins had ended up buried far deeper underground.
This was not as far-fetched as it might sound. Historical records confird that the Emperor Lord himself had used precisely this thod to permanently extinguish the thousand-year underground fire in the mine pit.
The woman led Li Qiuchen to one of the more out-of-the-way shafts, where the blood on the floor of the lift had not yet dried.
"Is this the one?"
"Yes, that's it. The lift hasn't gone back down yet, which ans they haven't been able to get out!"
It also ant they might all be dead.
Looking at the woman's state of frightened anguish, Li Qiuchen decided not to voice that out loud.
He pressed the button. The lift descended slowly.
Li Qiuchen counted the depth in his head as it went.
By the ti the lift ca to a stop, it had descended approximately a hundred and twenty zhang.
Just under four hundred ters.
A wave of scorching air hit him.
From sowhere in the rock walls he could faintly hear the deep rumbling of magma flowing and shifting under pressure.
The temperature here was above sixty degrees. Ordinary people simply could not survive in this environnt.
Li Qiuchen put on the breathing mask and picked up the lantern, both pieces of equipnt left by the woman's teammates. They offered essentially no protection against the heat, and he still couldn't understand how the crew had managed to co down here in the first place.
"Go that way... cough, cough."
The woman was gulping down air while still forcing herself to point Li Qiuchen in the right direction.
The mine shafts down here were far more primitive and crude compared to those above, clearly dug by hand.
Narrow, uneven, and difficult to navigate.
After only a few hundred steps, though, the passage opened up unexpectedly.
Before them was a bottomless underground chasm stretching as far as the eye could see in both directions. Below, magma flowed slowly. On both sides of the chasm, the rock walls had been carved into a narrow path just wide enough for one person to pass, and not far ahead an iron chain bridge connected the two sides of the cleft.
Iron chains. Those were probably hot enough to fry an egg on.
Beside the chain bridge lay two bodies. By their equipnt, they appeared to be the woman's teammates.
[NEXT CHAPTER]
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