The compass spun, and the needle eventually stopped at a certain direction.

I did the calculation, and it matches my prediction of south perfectly, which means the compass is working correctly.

The statues in the room were arranged haphazardly, but they varied in height and the color of their clothing.

After roughly determining the location, I confirmed that this was a feng shui arrangement using the "Five Horses Returning to Their Stables" method.

"Five Horses Returning to Their Stable" is a feng shui term that generally refers to five mountain ranges shaped like horses, all pointing towards a burial site.

Within this formation, there are five stone statues that correspond to it.

I walked around the stone statues, roughly estimated their height, and said to Song Laosan and the monkey, "Come and help us change the direction of these stone statues, so that they are all facing the exit."

With the combined efforts of the three of us, the stone statues were slowly rotated and all aligned with the direction of the exit.

After waiting for about a minute, apart from our breathing and the shouts of the people below, there was no other response from inside the room.

"Young Master Duan, could it be that something went wrong in one of the steps?"

The monkey looked at the stone statues in front of it and asked me with a puzzled look, "When I turned the statues just now, they were lighter than I expected, which means they can indeed move. Could there be other mechanisms in this room?"

"It's unlikely. Ancient feng shui techniques are not something that ordinary people can learn. Ashiyi's application of feng shui techniques in the mechanism is a brilliant move. Moreover, judging from the scale of the above-ground buildings, there should have been soldiers guarding this place. Therefore, this mechanism for protecting the courtyard should only be to prevent laborers who do not understand feng shui. There is no need to go to such lengths."

I held up my flashlight and carefully examined the room, then shook my head: "There are no other mechanisms here, only this 'Five Horses Returning to the Stable' setup. The only possibility is that due to its age, the mechanisms here have become ineffective!"

Upon hearing this, the monkey scratched its head anxiously: "If that's really the case, then we're in big trouble! I should have tricked those people downstairs into bringing their explosives up too, so we could blow this door open."

"No way, this space is too cramped. If it explodes, the shockwave will kill us!"

Song Laosan turned his gaze to me: "Xiao Duan, could it be that we turned the stone figures in the wrong direction, or that A Shiyi made other changes when designing this mechanism, such as changing the orientation of one or two of the stone figures?"

"Give it a try."

Hearing what Song Laosan said, I did not refute it, and began to call on them to adjust the positions of the other stone figures.

In reality, the situation described by Song Laosan will not occur, because the arrangement of mechanisms in a tomb is also part of feng shui and must complement the overall layout of the tomb.

Ashi Yi came from a prestigious family and even left his name in his tomb.

It's like a fashion designer from a major international brand exhibiting a collection full of loose threads—it's inherently unlikely. But given the inevitable predicament, even if Song Laosan's claim has only a one percent chance of being true, we have to try.

As soon as the three of us moved the first stone figure, we heard a dull thud under our feet.

The monkey was startled by the sound: "What's going on? Are the people down below going to blow up the wall and take us all down with them?"

"No! This is the sound of a mechanism being triggered!" I looked at the stone figure in front of me and couldn't help but feel a little happy: "It's because the mechanism here is old, and it didn't fully reset when we moved the stone figure!"

Song Laosan shone his flashlight toward the exit: "Doesn't that mean we can leave this godforsaken place?"

"Bang!"

Just then, a heavy thud was heard from behind the stone door. Immediately afterwards, the stone door sealing the tomb chamber fell down into the corridor as if it had been kicked over, with one corner wedged against the wall, creating a tilted space.

The monkey stared at the tilted stone door, somewhat bewildered: "Young Master Duan, didn't you say this mechanism could be opened repeatedly? Now that the door is like this, how can it be closed again?"

I hurried to the door, looking at the broken iron chains in the corridor, and felt a sense of relief: "The mechanism has indeed failed, but we're lucky that the parts not exposed to the air are still functioning properly! According to my analysis, the group below must have taken the wrong path, which is why they ended up here. If we go back in the opposite direction, we can find the tomb passage!"

"Then what are we waiting for? Let's hurry up and go!"

Old Song had no desire to linger here any longer. After hearing what I said, he was the first to step onto the stone slabs and crawl into the tomb passage. Monkey and I quickly followed him out.

Just as I expected, the door led to the main tomb passage. The sides were reinforced with blue bricks, and the soil seeping out from the brick joints was not rammed earth, but simply yellow mud.

After walking about twenty meters further, we crawled into the tomb passage through a hole about half a meter high.

Outside is a dead end, decorated in a style that imitates wood and stone carvings. The corridor is decorated with carved beams and painted rafters on both sides, and at the end is a dragon wall screen.

The hole we came out of was on the left side of the dragon wall. It was clearly smashed open, and the stone fragments on the ground were a darker color, which was obviously different from the other walls.

After analyzing the situation, I concluded that after Jiang Man and her group entered the tomb passage, they must have chosen the path on the right at the fork in the road. Some unexpected events occurred along the way, resulting in the death of the feng shui master in the group. Meanwhile, the apprentice with the Tianjin accent led everyone deeper into the tomb, eventually arriving here.

Any experienced tomb raider knows that if the main burial chamber cannot be found in the tomb, the first thing to do is to check if there is an entrance to the underground palace under the dragon wall.

However, the apprentice didn't seem to have learned this point yet. Instead, he noticed that the wall on the left was a different color, so he had someone break down the wall and led people inside. Actually, the reason the wall changed color was simply because it led to an underground river, where the humidity was quite high.

"Bang! Bang!"

I raised my shotgun and smashed it against the wall with the butt. All I heard were dull thuds. When I smashed it against the stone slab at my feet, it made a hollow "thump-thump" sound.

The monkey took out an iron rod with barbed grooves on the stick from the travel bag, inserted it into the gap between the stone bricks, and examined the soil it had brought up: "This stone slab is only ten centimeters thick. If we make a groove on the side, we can open it with a crowbar."

"I'll do it!"

Song Laosan took the hammer and iron pestle and soon dug a hole two centimeters in diameter. Then the three of us pressed down on the crowbar at the same time.

"One! Two! Three! Go!"

After I finished shouting the slogan, I put all my weight on the crowbar, and I could even feel the blood gushing out of the wound on my arm.

A screeching sound rang out, and the floor tiles beneath their feet were slowly lifted.