I tumbled from the massive wooden beam, left dangling in mid-air by the rope like an empty garment, head down and feet up. Just as I considered that the mercury mechanism in the rear hall must be intended to preserve some secret within, I felt a tightening around my waist—Shirley Yang and Fatty were working the rope, slowly hauling me back toward the beam.

My mind raced, watching the mercury in the hall rise steadily, already submerging the belly of the six-legged bronze tripod. In moments, it would completely cover the painted wall and the stone stele—the very spot that, if touched, triggered the mercury mechanism—must be where that "secret" was hidden. It had to be somewhere among the murals, the stele, and the black bronze tripod. Where exactly?

Perhaps some important item or remains were concealed among the numerous corpses of the Yi people inside the bronze tripod? No, all the bodies in the tripod were instantly reduced to a pot of foul oil by fierce flames the moment the lid was opened. If anything critically important had been there, it would have long since vanished. Why then bother with the elaborate mechanism of the hollow mercury dragon?

Time ticked by, second by second. Fatty and the others gradually pulled me higher. Due to the reversal of blood flow, the scene in the hall looked different from how it appeared when I was upright. Yet, in this moment, my mind was exceptionally clear. Because my head was down, looking up meant my view settled on the floor of the hall. From this mid-air vantage point, the most prominent features were the several walls of murals arranged in the pattern of the Bagua (Eight Trigrams) and the Nine Palaces.

The Bagua-patterned mural walls flashed before my eyes, and one section stood out remarkably. A "Zhongren" figure had been crushed against the wall by the tripod lid; the resulting bloody pulp splattered the white background of the mural like overturned ink, leaving the entire wall smeared with pitch-black, dark-green gore and flesh. Furthermore, due to the immense weight of the lid, that section of the wall was breached with a gaping hole, from which several cracks radiated outward.

The eight brick walls held numerous murals, but only one was truly unique, depicting various bizarre shamanistic rituals of the Dian Kingdom. It was precisely the one struck and broken by the tripod lid. Once this wall broke, the short corridor in the hall was immediately sealed off, and a massive amount of mercury poured from the dragon's mouth. All this indicated that something vital was hidden within the wall, and its violation by external force triggered the mechanism in the hall. Those unable to escape would be swallowed by the mercury, their bodies turning black as they died. If the intruder was agile enough to escape through the ceiling, the mercury could still fill the rear hall in that brief window. It was highly unlikely outsiders would ever discover what was hidden in that wall.

This object must be incredibly important. The reason it wasn't secured with a trap that destroyed everything might be that it was intended to be retrieved later. Yet, for some reason, when King Xian was interred, he didn't take this item into the underground Xuan Palace but hid it atop the Ming Lou structure. The immediate priority was to retrieve whatever was inside before the mercury flowed over the crack in the mural wall.

I didn't think that deeply at the moment; rather, in that instant, relying on a "Mojin Xiaowei" intuition, I simply knew something was in the wall. So-called "intuition" is merely the synthesis of numerous memory fragments and sensory data processed in the brain, bypassing logical steps to reflect the resulting combined information directly into thought. The accuracy of this result largely depends on one's own capacity for judgment.

Ignoring my predicament dangling in the air, I immediately roared, "It's in this wall!" My sudden outburst startled Fatty and Shirley Yang, who were pulling the rope on the beam. Confused, they both demanded, "What's in the wall?"

I realized the concentration of mercury vapor in the hall was growing too thick to remain there any longer. With no time for detailed explanations, I ordered them to stop pulling me up; I needed to descend to the broken mural wall to see if there was still a chance to retrieve whatever was inside. Additionally, I told Fatty to use his lighter to burn that cursed "shaman's robe," specifically emphasizing that no matter how strange the garment seemed, he was to ignore it and just set it alight.

Then, I instructed Shirley Yang to climb quickly to the highest point and blast open the roof tiles. With the three of us acting separately, we needed to escape this "Cloud Palace" in the shortest time possible. Otherwise, further delay—not just because of the potent mercury, but simply because night was falling and we remained trapped in this haunted palace—would be disastrous.

Although Shirley Yang and Fatty didn't fully grasp my immediate plan, having been together for so long, they understood I must have my reasons, and explanations could wait until we were out. So, they split up from the main beam.

Fatty, relying on the darkness inside the hall to obscure the distance to the floor, was able to move. I watched him bravely edge from the beam to the "shaman's robe" hanging near the corner of the hall. Trembling slightly, he took out his lighter. Knowing that a reckless brute like him could scare ghosts and demons into submission, I stopped watching him and instead pulled the pulley attached to my waist, using a nearby stele as leverage to swing my body toward the mural wall.

As I swung across the air, my climbing helmet even scraped the mercury covering the floor. As soon as my hands grasped the mural wall, I quickly climbed half a meter upward to avoid the rising mercury below. The advanced techniques for heating mercuric sulfide during the Qin and Han dynasties were all thanks to the relentless efforts of Emperors Qin Shi Huang and Han Wudi in their pursuit of alchemy and eternal life.

At the spot fractured by the tripod lid on the mural wall, half of a jade casket was indeed visible, wrapped with several coils of gold rope. The rising, flowing mercury was about to submerge the crack in the wall. In my haste, I didn't dare look closely; I first flipped my inverted body upright and immediately began hacking at the wall with my ice axe. I was already adept at tearing down walls from my days as a combat engineer. Enduring the choking stench of mercury, I swung the ice axe relentlessly, widening the fissure in the wall structure.

The entire mural wall was constructed from "Tupian bricks" (using the pronunciation tian for ), with no stone, making it far from solid. There were likely a few special, movable bricks intended for hiding things. However, due to the massive external impact, the joints of the moving bricks were somewhat deformed, making it impossible to distinguish which bricks were fixed and which were loose. There was no choice but to chisel the entire area open.

The jade casket hidden in the wall was not small; it required me to chisel away a rather large section of the Tupian bricks to retrieve it. As I labored, a deafening crash echoed from above, and a shower of tiles fell, letting a blinding shaft of sunlight pierce the gloom of the hall.

I looked up at the ceiling and saw that Shirley Yang had successfully punched a skylight through the roof. However, the glass-like roofing of the Celestial Palace wasn't thick; they hadn't needed explosives, using only the entrenching tool and ice axe to punch a large hole. The sunlight slanted into the hall, falling directly onto the "shaman's robe" tucked in the corner. At the exact same moment, Fatty successfully ignited it. The scarlet "shaman's robe," which looked stained with fresh blood, burned down, collapsing into a pile of ash, which was instantly covered by the rising mercury.

Seeing that both of them had completed their tasks, I poured all my remaining strength into chiseling away the last two obstructing earth bricks and reached in to pull out the jade casket hidden within the wall. I weighed it—it wasn't particularly heavy. I had no time to speculate on its contents; I tucked the casket securely under my arm and pulled the pulley to ascend back to the main beam. By this time, the mercury being spewed from the several animal heads in the hall had already risen past the level where the object was hidden in the mural wall. If I had been half a minute slower, I would never have gotten this jade casket.

As soon as I reached the main beam, I quickly met up with Fatty, and we scrambled along the wooden rafters to escape the perilous Celestial Palace through the "skylight" Shirley Yang had cleared.

Outside, the sunlight was already slanting low. Due to the unique topography, the depths of the "Insect Valley" receive direct sunlight for only a very short period each day. Once the sun dipped, the valley would quickly fall into darkness. Standing on the slippery expanse of glazed tiles, I watched the "Dragon Halo" beneath the Celestial Palace shift from its sun-drenched rainbow hues to a dim, hazy gold. Farther in, the funnel-shaped pool had grown so dark that the surface was invisible, seeming to merge seamlessly with the black vortex at the bottom of the deep pool.

Recalling the sequence of events in the Celestial Palace, what perplexed me most were still those bronze beasts and figures. The strange hanging garments filling the hall, the icy, frosty woman’s laughter, the massive outpouring of mercury, and the jade casket hidden in the mural wall—none of these currently occupied my thoughts. My mind was filled only with the fierce flames rising beneath the great tripod and the bronze statues whose demeanor and attire were utterly bizarre. There had to be something extraordinary I hadn't grasped yet, but the harder I thought, the less substantial any clue became.

It was then that Shirley Yang gently nudged me, pulling me back from my intense contemplation. I steadied myself, took out the jade casket retrieved from the mural wall, and showed it to Fatty and Shirley Yang, briefly recounting the circumstances.

The jade casket was wrapped with several coils of gold rope. The jade possessed an ancient patina, marked with faint, reddish scars, clearly an artifact thousands of years old. However, the casket was flat and rectangular, suggesting it was not the container for the "Phoenix Gall." Given the secrecy of its hiding place in the rear hall of the Celestial Palace, the item inside must be of immense importance. I immediately wanted to open it, but the casket was sealed extremely tightly. Without specialized tools, the only way to open it would be to destroy the ancient jade casing itself.

Shirley Yang said, "The ancient jade is minor; what's inside is major. Let's wait until we get back to examine it properly. Time is critical now; there's no point in rushing to look."

I nodded in agreement. I told Fatty to wrap the casket up and place it in his backpack. I then asked Fatty, "When you burned that red dress, did you notice anything strange about it?"

After packing the casket, Fatty set his large backpack beside him and complained to me, "You have the nerve to ask! That dress was truly damn cursed. If Fatty here had an ounce less courage, you’d be counting my corpse right now. Next time there's such a deadly chore, Commander Hu, you'd better handle it yourself. Even that blind fortune-teller said you have a massive destiny."

Seeing that the sky was darkening, our next step was to immediately descend to the bottom of the pool to locate the passage to the tomb. So, while busy checking our gear with Shirley Yang, I asked Fatty, "Didn't that blind man say something about you too? That you were the reincarnation of Lü Bu Fengxian from the Three Kingdoms period, possessing insurmountable martial might. What could possibly scare you? Tell me in detail—what did that half-female corpse inside the dress look like?"