CHAPTER 501: CHAPTER 479: WET STONE CHAMBER OBSERVING THE CORPSE

"Boom!"

Amidst the loud crash and rising dust, the staircase beneath the stone coffin finally appeared before their eyes.

Pinching his nose and waving away the dust with his hand, Horn showed a smile on his face.

He didn’t know the mechanism of the stone coffin, but knowing that there was a passage underneath was enough.

After having someone smash the altar in the hall with a sledgehammer, the mysterious tunnel Aijia Lang mentioned was now visible.

On the slippery grey brick walls hung iron-black torch holders, and the dark hole obscured the scene below.

On both sides of the walls, there were faint niches, and rotting wooden tools and various debris were scattered along the sides of the steps.

It seemed that this tunnel had been here for some years.

Judging by the design and the chiseling of the stone, it was not originally part of the palace but was constructed later.

Horn could guess that this was probably the tunnel Favalari used to escape.

Although it might be too late to catch him now, at least collapsing this tunnel would prevent any more Demon Hunters from coming through.

A Guard Holy Gunman took a torch and probed twice at the entrance, seeing the torch extinguish, he immediately shouted back: "Get a Miracle Priest, we need wind."

Two Miracle Priests toiled for half an hour before finally dispersing the suspicious gas in the stone chamber ahead.

Several Guard Holy Gunmen, with ropes tied around their waists, cautiously went forward with torches, while Horn waited by the door for almost half an hour before he could wander near the staircase entrance.

Bored, Horn began to look around and feel at the staircase entrance, trying to find a new mechanical path.

Unfortunately, after a long time of groping, he only got a handful of dust and nothing else.

Bored, he lowered his head and saw a stack of neatly squared stains stuck at the base of the wall beside the steps.

Just from the shape alone, Horn could deduce—

They were probably a few scattered pieces of paper that accidentally stuck to the wall and, over time, got covered in dust, gradually forming square stains.

Hmm... Is there a white scratch nearby the square stain?

Raising the fluorite lamp, Horn started examining the damage on the wall.

The sharp scratches on the wall extended all the way down the staircase, probably left by something scraping the wall.

Squatting on the ground, Horn reached out and touched both the steps and the scratches.

An illumination glittered on his fingertip, consisting of tiny black powder and fragments. A flash of inspiration struck his mind—could this be remnants from that Obsidian Pyramid?

If those Demon Hunters from back then didn’t take the main road, they probably came this way, leaving some traces perhaps.

Holding the fluorite lamp, Horn’s heartbeat quickened. He immediately stood up, "Go, search around the area, see if there’s anything unusual."

The gendarmes immediately dispersed, searching along the stairs’ niches and ground cracks.

The niches were piled with many sheets of paper, but they were either blank or drafts of transcribed scriptures.

The caught-in-place papers were too damp and stuck together, rendering the text too blurry to discern, leaving the gendarmes flipping for a long time with only a few parchment books as their rewards.

These books were still well-preserved, after all, they were parchment.

Picking up the first parchment book, Horn couldn’t wait and began flipping through it by the firelight right on the stairs.

In the flickering firelight and fluorite lamp glow, Horn frequently nodded while reading the book.

The yellowed pages did contain a few illustrations with strange geometric shapes, but the rest was completely unintelligible to him.

Horn’s literacy wasn’t low, and though he didn’t understand the meanings, he could recognize most of the languages within the Empire.

But he couldn’t recognize the text in the book at all; they were horizontal phonetic letters with upright alphabets.

These wyrm-like letters twisted and meandered like black snakes crawling over the book, making one’s scalp prickling at a glance.

This should be some sort of cypher or text from a small Norn tribe, but if it was left by Hilov, perhaps she could translate it or have some clues.

Hopefully, these truly were clues left by Hilov back then.

"Check these books for any danger, then send them to Hilov and see if she recognizes them."

After instructing the gendarmes, the people below in the stone chamber finally climbed up to the stairs and reported: "Confirmed safe, your Grace."

Following behind the Guard Holy Gunman, Raphael excitedly said, "We found the corpses of Favalari and the Beastman Queen, just down below."

Horn hurriedly pulled Jeanne down the stone steps, reaching the lowest level of the stone chamber.

This stone chamber was not large, about twenty to thirty square meters, more like a corridor hallway than a stone chamber.

Jeanne sniffed, and indeed, the air carried a faint stench of decomposed corpses.

Stepping onto the stone tiles of the chamber, Horn looked down to see the body of a Beastman lying prone near the entrance.

Further away on the opposite side of the steps was another human corpse.

The graying-haired middle-aged Demon Hunter lay on the cold and damp stone tiles, sitting against the wall with a twisted posture, his nails filled with stone chips and dirt.

His eyes were wide open, deep-set eye sockets, his mouth agape like an "O," and his wrinkled face bore an expression of disbelief and despair.

In front of him lay a stone door covered in claw marks, with a forcefully chiselled hole in the middle.

Loose soil spilled out from the hole, covering his legs and dirtying his previously clean and tidy trousers with mud.

Was this Favalari?

"How did he die?"

"Your Grace, he suffocated," whispered Raphael after consulting with the gendarmes before reporting to Horn.

Suffocated? It had only been two days, could the oxygen run out that quickly? Why didn’t he open the stone coffin above?

"Call those two Demon Hunters here to see if it’s him." Horn snapped his fingers behind him, and two Demon Hunters appeared at the staircase entrance.

The elderly Demon Hunter walked in with schadenfreude, followed by Aijia Lang, whose swollen eyes could barely open, with bloodstained cuffs, collar, and lips.

His feet bore three shackles, hands were manacled, and his neck was bound with an iron collar, allowing only a half-step movement at a time.

Raphael made way, pointing to the middle-aged man’s corpse by the wall and asking, "Do you recognize him?"

Seeing Favalari’s corpse, the old Demon Hunter was first stunned, then ruefully shook his head: "I know him, he’s Favalari, ha, I knew it..."

Aijia Lang slowly approached from behind, yet unlike the old Demon Hunter’s calmness, his emotions were much more agitated.

"Impossible, this, Favalari, there was a passage here, there was a tunnel." Aijia Lang, taking half-steps forward, was stopped by two gendarmes.

Looking at the corpse on the ground, disbelief filled his eyes, Favalari was dead just like that?

"There was a road here, there was a road here," muttering incoherently as he gazed at the back of the stone door, Aijia Lang shouted, trying to move towards it as he spoke.

"What madness?" A nearby Holy Gunman smacked him in the stomach with a stick, making him fall sitting down.

But he still muttered in disbelief: "Why is there no road? There was a road when we came before, right?"

The old Demon Hunter, being stared at by Aijia Lang, sneered, "I guess someone messed with the stone coffin’s mechanism, then the Church outside removed the tunnel supports, trapping those inside."

"Why?"

The old Demon Hunter wanted to retort but, seeing the swollen, tear-filled eyes before him, recalled shades of himself and sighed: "The Church didn’t want us back, we were just lucky. If we’d followed Favalari, we’d all be dead here."

"Master Pierre was there too, how could he allow the Church to do this? He was a guarantor," Aijia Lang still couldn’t believe it, "Just for a few dozen gold pound residual payments?"

Pierre, as the Broken Stone Plain Wolf Castle’s Demon Hunter master, was virtually a father and idol to the younger generation of Demon Hunters, even having his own "Demon Hunter Tales" book.

Even Aijia Lang joining Favalari’s professional team was introduced by Pierre.

"Who knows how many pounds, dozens, hundreds, or thousands?" the old Demon Hunter chuckled bitterly as he looked at the earth-blocked tunnel and the despaired and dead Favalari, "If Master Pierre was really kind, why introduce you to assassination missions rather than hunting demons?"

To be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised by such things happening in our line of work, rather it’s you, Aijia Lang, was this your first day in the Empire?"

Slumped to the ground, gazing at the grotesque corpse, Aijia Lang stayed silent.