Dragon Vein Storyteller

Chapter 14 Raising Dragons

Ahead, a dense forest of steles stood. The bluestone steles, of varying heights, were scattered about; some stood upright, others were bent, half-buried in the black mud. The steles were covered with inscriptions, blurred and indistinct by the dampness of time. In the firelight, only a few broken strokes were barely discernible. Behind the steles lay even deeper darkness; nothing could be seen except for the long, haphazard shadows cast by the firelight, piled haphazardly on the ground like a pile of nailed ghosts.

"How come there's a graveyard underground?" Liao the Bald's voice was a little weak.

Sanjin's grip on the shovel tightened, his knuckles turning white. Feng the Cripple slammed his cane heavily on the ground, his brow furrowed. The little chick shrank behind me, burying its head even lower, its breathing becoming softer.

Just as I was about to speak, I caught a glimpse of something amiss with Baldy Liao.

He didn't wait for us, nor did he look at the words on the monuments. Instead, he walked straight toward a stone wall. His steps were slow, but his direction was clear. It was as if something had drawn his gaze to him, and he didn't even glance down when he tripped over a protruding tree root.

"Baldy?" I called out to him. He didn't answer.

Feng the Cripple and Sanjin also sensed something was wrong, exchanged a glance, and followed. I grabbed the little chick and hurried to catch up. When we got closer, the torchlight finally illuminated the base of the stone wall in front of Baldy Liao.

A person was leaning against the stone wall.

Calling him "relying" is an understatement; "paralyzed" is more accurate. Not a single bone in his body seemed intact; he lay like a pile of mud against the stone wall. One leg was gone, the cut jagged and uneven—not from a knife, but from being torn away piece by piece by something, the flesh rolled up to reveal the white bone beneath. His body was even more gruesome, covered in countless bite marks of varying sizes, some resembling human bites, others enormous, as if crushed by the teeth of some beast. All the bleeding wounds had been branded with red-hot iron… the charred, curled flesh emitted a burnt, raw meat smell mingled with the blood from the wounds, making one's stomach churn.

The man was still alive. His chest was rising and falling slightly, and he was breathing hoarsely like a bellows.

Judging from its appearance, anyone would see it as a corpse that hasn't died yet.

But Baldy Liao recognized him. He stood before the man, stunned for a moment, then subconsciously touched his lower back… an old scar from when he was hit by flying rocks during the bombing of the tomb raiders' tunnel in Lama Gully, which still ached on rainy days. Then suddenly he chuckled, his voice carrying a tone that was hard to decipher—a mix of mockery and surprise: “Isn’t that the Heavenly Official of the Tomb Raiders! Cui Dake, what kind of disguise are you wearing?”

Cui Dake.

The moment I heard those three words, all the blood in my body rushed to my head.

Cui Dake, a notorious lone tomb raider in western Sichuan, has long used the name "Heavenly Official of Tomb Raiders," acting all high and mighty. What has this guy done? Let's not talk about anything else, just the last time in Lama Valley in the southwest… this old bastard teamed up with us to go tomb raiding, promising everyone a share, but once we entered the main burial chamber, while we were scouting ahead, he turned around and blew up the tomb raider's tunnel. If it weren't for the ancestral jade incantation I carried, which pointed us to a way out of the ruins, the five of us would have suffocated underground and become tomb robbers.

This is a blood feud.

Feng the Cripple's face immediately darkened. He slammed his cane heavily into the ground and said nothing. Sanjin took the shovel off his shoulder, gripped it tightly in his hand, and his muscular face taut. Little Chick poked half its head out from behind me, glanced at Cui Dake, and then withdrew its head again... not out of fear, but because it didn't want to see.

Cui Dake clearly recognized us too. He forced an extremely ugly smile onto his face, which was badly bitten, and after a long, gurgling sound in his throat, he managed to squeeze out, "Cough cough...you fucking...you've been arrested too..."

"Well, this is all muddy." I squatted down, stuck the torch in the mud beside me, and examined Cui Dake's beyond saving injuries. His life wasn't a question of how many breaths he had left, but when those breaths would come. Too much blood loss, too many wounds; the fact that he'd survived this long was a miracle.

"What's wrong? Judging from your condition, you're probably not going to make it." I said casually, as if I were talking about something completely unrelated to myself. "Shall we lend a hand and bury you?"

This may sound cold, but in our line of work, grudges aside, the principle of respecting the dead is ingrained in our bones. No one can guarantee they won't die somewhere underground. Today you bury someone, tomorrow someone else will collect your body—this is an unwritten rule among tomb raiders. Even if you've fought, killed, or blown up tunnels on the surface, when someone is truly about to breathe their last, you still have to lend a hand.

Cui Dake clearly understood this principle as well. He struggled to lift his eyelids, and a glint flashed in his single eye... not gratitude, but shrewdness, the old fox's last calculation before his death.

"It's...very dangerous up ahead." He was panting heavily, blood starting to seep from his broken leg wound again, the charred marks spreading with fresh blood. "If you...are willing to bury me alive, I'll tell you...what I know."

The moment those two words were uttered, we all fell silent.

Laymen would probably be completely baffled by these two words, but in our line of tomb raiders, these two words carry more weight than a grave mound.

To put it bluntly, almost everyone in our line of work dies in the ground. Few die peacefully, and I've never even heard of anyone dying of old age. Because of this, burial for us falls into two categories. The first is on-site burial…you're buried wherever you die. If you can even get a mound of earth to cover your face, you're lucky. Many elders have simply rotted away quietly underground, without even a tombstone. The other type is the traditional burial ceremony.

The rituals of a hundred burials are numerous. First, the head must be cut off, the body discarded, leaving only the head. The entire head is then covered and tightly sealed with wet mud, and finally wrapped and secured with the deceased's hair… this is called sealing the soul. Once sealed, it is taken away. Afterwards, carrying this sealed head, one goes from house to house asking for food, collecting one copper coin and a handful of grain from each family—eating from a hundred homes and using a hundred families' money. Then, a skilled old carpenter is found to carve a body out of willow wood, and the real head is attached to the wooden body. At the burial, the food and money from a hundred families are scattered on the corpse; only then is it considered to have been laid to rest.

This funeral practice relies on the good fortune and luck of many families to settle the karmic debts of this life and accumulate blessings for the next. But doing this kind of work is too troublesome; nobody wants to go to the trouble of doing it unless they're family. Not to mention, this person in front of us has a grudge against us.

"This is a bit troublesome for you." I squatted on the ground, neither agreeing nor refusing, but just looking at Cui Dake's almost bloodless face. "Why don't you tell me first?"

Cui Dake glanced at me, his eyes showing no hesitation or intention to bargain. A man on his last breath no longer had the strength to struggle with a living person. He spoke slowly, his voice growing softer and softer, as if he were squeezing out the last bit of air from his lungs. With each word he uttered, the white, thread-like substance on his neck would pierce out a little, like countless fine needles pushing out of his flesh.

"They're raising dragons here..."

Cui Dake had barely uttered those five words when he suddenly coughed violently, his throat rattling as if blood and froth were blocking his trachea. His body convulsed violently, and the wound on his broken leg instantly reopened, dark red blood flowing down the charred marks, making the soil beneath him sticky and shiny. I instinctively leaned forward and saw that beneath the skin of his neck, the tiny white, thread-like things were wriggling even more violently, and the edges of the scabbed bite marks were now tinged with a faint silvery-gray... the color only found on the scaled people of the river.

"How do you raise him?" I asked in a low voice, my fingertips already pressed against the short dagger at my waist. I knew his time was running out, and every word he spoke could be a life-saving clue.

Cui Dake gasped for breath, his chest heaving as if it were about to explode. His fingers dug deep into the black mud beneath him, his fingernails filled with grime and blood. "Eat...eat the White Tai Sui...wash...wash the River of Oblivion..." He coughed again, spitting a mouthful of dark red blood onto the back of my hand, sticky and cold. "Then...then...go to the Stele Forest...the stele...has ancient stories on it...you understand...go and see..."

As he spoke, he slowly raised his left hand. Thin, white, thread-like substances seeped from between his fingers, his skin taut, as if something was growing beneath. He stared at his hand, his single eye filled with fear and despair, his voice hoarse and almost inaudible: "I...I'm almost there too...I don't want to become...become that thing...Give me a quick death..."

My heart sank as I looked at the strange changes happening to him... those white, thread-like things. So "raising dragons" wasn't just a legend; it was a terrifying reality unfolding in his body, the desperate situation we were about to face.

"Behind the Stele Forest... there's a statue of Nuwa..." Cui Dake gritted his teeth and squeezed out another sentence, his body trembling even more violently. The white, thread-like things on his neck had already emerged from his skin, thin and gleaming coldly. "They... will... form flesh cocoons there..."

"What comes after the fleshy cocoon?" I pressed, my tone filled with an undeniable urgency.

"The cocoon...the cocoon fell away...and they became earth dragons..." Cui Dake's voice grew softer and softer, his one eye becoming glazed over. "They bit anyone they saw...they tore apart any living thing they saw...but their purpose...wasn't to eat people..." He paused, as if using his last bit of strength, "Deep inside the Nuwa statue...there's a deep pit...they all went in...biting each other...devouring each other...the one that survived...ate everything...and then...went to the cave..."

After saying this, he collapsed against the stone wall like a deflated balloon, with only his chest rising and falling slightly, and the light in his one eye flickering on and off, as if it might go out at any moment.

"That's all I knew..." He looked at me, forcing a smile. "If you think it's useful... take my head out... if you think it's useless... bury it on the spot... I'll thank you anyway..."