I tore off the towel around my waist, wrapped it around my hand, and went up to pull the shuikao off him. But before I could, Fatty pushed me down, stood up, and ran into the dark depths of the tomb chamber. After chasing him a few steps, I realized that he was running in the direction of the tomb gate, which Poker-Face had told me not to go near.

I only hesitated for a moment. If it were the me from before, this kind of incident would have me on the brink of collapse. Fatty was running into the darkness and acting strangely, while my only weapon was a sweat-stained towel. I only had the dim light of the rhinoceros horn candle to light my way and I was trapped in this burial chamber under the rock stratum, seemingly surrounded by mysterious creatures.

But now I came to an immediate decision. Fatty was here because I was here—although he had his own motives—so I had to save him. But with all those fingernails I had seen in front of the tomb gate, there had to be a lot of zombies where Fatty ran off to. I was sure to die without a weapon.

I searched around, picked up a rock from the ground, and weighed it in my hand. I felt that it wasn’t good enough, so I picked up another rock and weighed it again. This one was better, so I tied it to the equipment belt and made a meteor hammer. With the candle in one hand and the meteor hammer in the other, I quickly ran after Fatty.

As the candle illuminated the places we hadn’t checked out before, I saw more stone boats of varying sizes, all with gorgeous leather figurines on them. When I only saw those three stone boats earlier, I didn’t seem to comprehend how terrifying these leather figurines were. But as I ran among them and saw them up close, I found that they all looked like living people, which made my hair stand on end.I took a deep breath and slowly moved forward, only to be met with an amazing sight. There were countless leather figurines practically stacked on the tomb chamber’s gate. They were the same as those figurines I had seen in the tunnel. Their heads were hanging down and it seemed like they wanted to rush out of the tomb chamber, but they had been blocked by the stone gate and died.

Fatty was digging into this pile of leather figurines with the same kind of movements.

I took a deep breath, cautiously went up, and grabbed his feet to start dragging him back. He completely ignored me as he tried desperately to join the pile of leather figurines.

I put down my weapon and dragged Fatty out with both hands. He was very heavy, so it took me a long time before I finally pulled him out. But when I did, I noticed that I had dragged some other things out as well. Fatty's hands were held by more than a dozen figurines with freakishly long fingernails.

As soon as I saw them, I picked up my meteor hammer and began frantically smashing them. I was surprised to find that these hands almost looked as if they were fresh. It only took a few strokes to smash them to a pulp and then I quickly dragged Fatty out.

Fatty's head was completely in the shuikao now and he kept trying to push me away. I went up, sat on his back, and used my towel-wrapped hand to tear the shuikao off with all my strength.

The shuikao was already very brittle, so once I used all my strength, I was able to tear it off and see everything that was on its back.I saw that there were a lot of "little hands" with long fingernails attached to the back of the shuikao. They were densely packed together, just like a bunch of shellfish.

I immediately understood that these leather figurines hadn’t come alive; it was their hands that were living!

Their hands and fingernails were something else!

It looked like some kind of shell, so maybe the person who had made these leather figurines—knowing that human hands were difficult to preserve—created the hands using this shellfish that looked similar to human hands.

No wonder those leather figurines in the tunnel were crawling with their hands.

At this time, I saw those “human hand shellfish” covering Fatty's ears. His eyes had rolled into the back of his head and he started convulsing, so I threw the shuikao away and started smashing the shellfish with my meteor hammer. As I began tearing them off with my towel-covered hands, I found that their feet had penetrated deep into Fatty's ears.

Those “hands” had gathered around Fatty's ears in such a way that it looked as if he had many strange ears. If the fingernails weren’t there, it would look very similar to the corpse of the South Sea’s King Zhi that we had seen in the Yang family’s ancestral tomb before. 

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