Chapter 87 The Guardian of the Tomb

The steps weren’t very high, and soon we reached the top—a small platform with a massive coffin at its center. There was nothing else around it. But as I looked more closely, I realized that something resembling a monkey was crouched atop the coffin. Could it be the faceless monkey from earlier?

Yet, upon closer inspection, I saw that this monkey wore a mask of stone. But hadn’t that mask, the monkey-faced one, been smashed earlier? Did it somehow put on another one itself?

Still, the more I looked, the less this monkey resembled the one from before. Could there be more than one monkey here? At that moment, Black Sunglasses spoke up: “It seems my guess was right—this is a tomb guardian beast.”

“Tomb guardian beast?” I looked at him in confusion.

Black Sunglasses stared intently at the monkey sprawled atop the stone coffin and said, “Yes, a tomb guardian beast. In fact, many mausoleums have such creatures. Their duty is to guard the tomb, living within it and establishing a clan that breeds and passes down the role of guardian from generation to generation.”

“What do they eat? How do they survive?”

He explained that these guardian beasts have their own dens, patrol in shifts much like humans, and are highly disciplined. They even have their own unique exits, usually leading to the outside world so they can find food. However, some guardian beasts have more peculiar lifestyles. For instance, some tombs have mass graves, and the beasts survive by feeding on corpses. In such cases, the bodies are astonishingly well-preserved and don’t rot, but these tombs are generally built in cold places. The guardian beasts that live off corpses are often extremely sinister and vicious. For the most part, though, guardian beasts live in a more ordinary manner, forming clans that dwell within the tomb for generations.

He recounted that in the 1970s, tomb robbers unearthed a mausoleum that contained dozens of giant pythons. The snakes devoured all the robbers who entered. Later, the tomb was blown open, and the pythons fiercely attacked despite the threat to their own lives, but in the end, they all perished. Archaeologists learned of the tomb and found it already ransacked, but they uncovered this secret—countless snake bones proved that it had been a nest for giant pythons for thousands of years, dating back to the same era as the tomb itself.

The tomb walls were carved with images of pythons, suggesting the tomb owner’s family revered the giant snake as a totem or faith, and after death, they raised pythons within the tomb to guard it.

The stone-masked monkey before us was likely a similar kind of guardian beast. Using monkeys as tomb guardians was considered advanced, for monkeys are innately intelligent, with high IQs, but are also notoriously difficult to tame. We’d already witnessed the combat prowess of these monkeys—each one terrifying in its own right. If there truly was a whole group of them here, it would be an utter nightmare for us.

With that thought, I exchanged a glance with Black Sunglasses. He nodded and said, “Open the coffin.”

He wanted to do it before Old Ghost and his group arrived, but what then? Once they got here, they’d surely deal with us first. But after some consideration, it hardly mattered—Old Ghost and his men wouldn’t let us go anyway. At worst, we’d fight it out. The space here wasn’t that large; if things came to blows, who could say for sure who’d have the upper hand?

Cautiously, Black Sunglasses and I approached the black stone coffin, keeping a wary eye on the monkey lying atop it—only to discover it was already dead, a dried-up corpse.

I probed it with my entrenching tool to be sure. It was indeed dead. Still, I didn’t know if it might spring back to life, but after all this time, it seemed unlikely.

“If we brought this monkey mummy out, it’d be a priceless treasure. The mummy trade is booming these days,” Black Sunglasses joked, then used his entrenching tool to push the monkey carcass aside. The lid of the black stone coffin wasn’t exactly light, but it wasn’t too heavy either. The two of us, using crowbars and other tools, finally managed to pry open a crack. Shining my flashlight through the gap, I couldn’t help but feel, perhaps it was just my imagination, that the coffin was completely empty.

But in the next instant, I thought I glimpsed a vaguely human shape inside. Just as I tried to see more clearly, I sensed something approaching from behind. I instinctively dodged, only to discover that three monkeys wearing stone masks had appeared behind me. They were all powerfully built, each over a meter tall, crouching silently about three meters away.

Black Sunglasses whispered, “This is bad.”

I knew what he meant. We’d already seen the fighting strength of these creatures—the single one earlier had left Old Ghost’s group battered and cost them lives. Now there were three, each larger than the last. If it came to a fight, I doubted we could handle more than one at best. Wild beasts are different from people; they attack with brutal ferocity, at blinding speed, and make full use of their bodies in relentless assaults. Even if wounded, their instincts would drive them to keep attacking.

Black Sunglasses and I stood frozen, not daring to move. But in the next second, a gust of wind swept past my back. I dodged instinctively, realizing that the shadow’s target wasn’t me but Black Sunglasses. He wasn’t caught off guard, though—he spun and parried with his weapon, a strange-looking folding knife over a meter long, shining with a faint light, obviously no ordinary blade.

At that moment, the other three monkeys finally moved. My scalp tingled. These monkeys, perhaps through generations of inherited experience, displayed advanced combat skills—far beyond mere animal instinct. Their attacks were sharp and extremely swift.

One monkey lunged straight at my chest, claws outstretched in a deadly strike. I dared not be careless and blocked with my short knife. Meanwhile, another monkey had somehow circled behind me and raked its claws down my back in a flash. A burning pain shot across my back—the fabric torn, my skin scratched raw.