PD -Chapter 98 Entering the Cave Alone

When the foundation collapsed, two workers were just nearby doing their job, and both of them fell straight into the pit.

A cloud of dust immediately rose from the construction site. Fortunately, the collapse happened in the daytime; the site was full of workers, so their cries for help were quickly heard.

Everyone immediately organized a rescue. But when the crane and ropes were finally prepared, the cries suddenly stopped. After a brief silence, screams once again echoed from the dark hole.

In an instant, all the workers present froze in fear. The ropes thrown down were pulled back up several times, but there was nothing on them. After a few minutes, the cave fell into dead silence again.

Realizing something was wrong, they immediately called the police. When officers arrived, they organized a team to descend into the cave and eventually hoisted the two fallen workers back up… but by the time they were brought out, both were already dead—blood seeping from all seven orifices.

However, the autopsy quickly revealed something strange: these two workers did not die from falling.

“So how did they die?” Liu Xiaopeng asked, looking at the screen toward Li Zi.

“The brain… their brains were gone,” Li Zi said after a pause, frowning. “I don’t really know how to explain it, but the forensic report said there was severe loss of brain tissue.”

“To put it simply, their skulls were empty. The brain matter had been eaten away by something.” Li Zi tapped his own head to illustrate.

“Eaten away?” I frowned. “Are you saying there’s some creature in that hole that eats human brains?”

Li Zi hesitated, then shook his head. “But there were no external injuries. When they were brought up, their heads were intact. Even if it was a zombie eating brains, it’s not like it could stick a straw through the nose and suck it out, right?”

I froze for a moment, almost amused despite myself. Just as I was about to scold him for his nonsense, he continued, “So I think this thing is really strange. That hole has been there all along, and we don’t dare touch it easily. The project has already been delayed for nearly a month. If this keeps going… my uncle’s savings are going to be wiped out.”

“You mean… you want me to take a look?” I asked.

Li Zi immediately nodded. “Big brother, you’re the best. Don’t worry, we’ll pay you properly. We’re brothers—you know that.”

I frowned and hesitated.

After the incident with the mad Taoist and the Yin entity, we still hadn’t obtained any new clues about the Ghost Emperor or Lucifer, so I had been feeling a bit discouraged and wanted to change plans.

Originally, I planned to go directly to that mountain cave where ten thousand ghosts were released, the deep pit where the Ghost Emperor and Lucifer had jumped together. But I had no leads, so the search had stalled completely.

Now it had already been more than a month since the Ghost Emperor’s emergence and Tang Shanshan’s body being fully taken over, and I wanted to focus more on finding that location and speeding things up.

“Brother Heng…” Liu Xiaopeng suddenly interrupted Li Zi and asked in a low voice, “Didn’t you say before that you saw the Ghost Emperor and Lucifer jump into a deep pit? Could this case be related to that?”

I thought for a moment, then shook my head. “The pit they jumped into is hidden deep in a mountain range. It probably has nothing to do with this.”

But as soon as I thought of the hole Li Zi had just shown us, I felt a faint, indescribable sense of unease. After thinking it over, I decided to take the case.

Directly finding the place where the Ghost Emperor and Lucifer had jumped was simply too difficult. Apart from Di Ting, we had no clues at all—and worse, even Di Ting refused to tell us where it was.

Another reason was that this job could help expand our search range. It would allow us to investigate other places for clues instead of being stuck in the office every day searching through computer data, which was even harder than finding a needle in the sea.

After thinking it through, I agreed to Li Zi and booked a flight with Liu Xiaopeng for the next morning to a small county in Hunan Province.

This time, we did not bring Zhu Zhu. It wasn’t that we were trying to exclude her, but because we had given her an important task: during our absence, she would use the full resources of the Zhu family to help us search desperately for any information about that deep cave.

We soon boarded the plane. Two hours later, we landed at an airport about 50 kilometers from the small county. Li Zi was already waiting for us. As soon as we arrived, he picked us up, treated us to a big meal, and then drove us to the county town, where we checked into a small hotel not far from the accident site.

It was afternoon. Since we were being paid to solve a problem, we didn’t waste any time. After resting for half an hour, we asked Li Zi to take us directly to the construction site.

Li Zi prepared safety helmets for us and led us into the site, bringing us to the collapsed hole we had already seen in the video.

I walked around the cordoned-off area, then bent down with Liu Xiaopeng and crawled inside, standing at the edge and looking down.

Liu Xiaopeng picked up a stone and threw it in. It rolled downward, and under the flashlight beam I thought I could glimpse the bottom of the hole.

It turned out the cave wasn’t as deep as we had imagined. That was both good and bad news.

Good news, because if there was a bottom, then investigating it wouldn’t be too difficult.

Bad news, because I felt a little disappointed—part of me had hoped it was a bottomless pit, connected to the place where those two had jumped. That way, I could just jump in myself and find them directly.

I sighed and forced those unrealistic thoughts out of my mind, then looked at Liu Xiaopeng. “Go down and check it out?”

His expression immediately turned ugly. “I… we don’t even know what’s down there. Isn’t it dangerous to go in blindly?”

“Look at you, such a coward!” I couldn’t help but laugh. “And you still call yourself a sword-blooded inheritor? You’re afraid of a hole this shallow?”

As I spoke, I asked Li Zi—who was still standing outside the caution line—to hand me a rope. I tossed one end to Liu Xiaopeng.

“You don’t have to go down. I’ll go myself.”

“Brother Heng!” Liu Xiaopeng clearly didn’t feel at ease and looked very worried.

Li Zi also gathered his courage, climbed over the caution line, and came over to try to stop me.

I shook my head. I was confident about this. I had already checked the cave—there was nothing unusual visible to the naked eye, and my spiritual sensing hadn’t detected anything abnormal either. That was why I dared to take the risk.

“You just hold the rope tight up there. When I give the signal, pull me up.”

With that, I took off my jacket, secured the rope around my body, and attached the action camera to my helmet.

Once everything was ready, I slowly slid into the hole.