Chapter 077: Underground Construction

Unable to pinpoint the problem for the moment, Bai Yuxi could only shake his head, place his palm against the barrier wall, and begin to slowly apply pressure. A thin layer of energy spread upward, enveloping his hand, then his wrist and arm, and with a slight exertion, he passed through entirely!

After crossing the barrier, before he could even take in his surroundings, he nearly stumbled over something beneath his feet. Looking down, he broke out in a cold sweat.

The scene visible from outside the barrier was entirely different from that inside. The exterior showed a frozen moment—the instant the barrier formed—while, after its formation, no matter what changes occurred within, none would be reflected outside.

Thus, before Bai Yuxi now lay a massive sinkhole, dozens of meters across. He stood on a narrow ledge at its edge, barely a foot wide, surrounded by scattered broken bricks, and behind him, a section of earthen wall violently smashed apart.

Nearly losing his footing, Bai Yuxi instinctively stepped back and pressed his back against the barrier, gripping the invisible energy wall for support.

He surveyed his surroundings. The sinkhole was roughly a dozen meters deep, occupying the entire drying yard of the ancestral hall. Its shape was funnel-like—wide at the top, narrow below—circled by crumbling earth and stone. Even the timber-and-earth ancestral hall had partially collapsed, with most of its structure left precariously suspended above the pit.

At the bottom, a black SUV lay at an angle against the wall of the pit. The vehicle itself was largely intact, suggesting it had simply slid down the sloped wall and become lodged in the soft earth.

In the center of the sinkhole yawned a dark, gaping hole, its depths unknown, yet no extraordinary creatures or superhuman warriors could be seen.

Bai Yuxi's expression changed. He had no idea what had occurred, but judging from the traces left behind, it seemed that Su Xiaoke and Jason, left behind as sentries, had crashed their vehicle through the earthen wall of the ancestral hall to support their companions. Yet why was there not a single person at the scene?

He instinctively glanced at the sinkhole beneath his feet and swallowed hard.

Could it be that after just one day in the Seventh Squad, he was about to witness the tragedy of total annihilation?

Bai Yuxi jumped from the ledge and cautiously slid down the sloped wall of the sinkhole, trying to approach the trapped vehicle to see if any wounded comrades remained inside.

But to his disappointment, the SUV, with its damaged front end, held neither Jason nor the brilliant Su Xiaoke. The doors were open, as if they’d left of their own accord.

This left Bai Yuxi baffled—the vehicle remained, and the barrier was intact. If Jason and Su Xiaoke had not been injured, they should have been trapped here. Was it that, fearing the sinkhole might collapse again and drag the vehicle down, they’d immediately abandoned it? Or perhaps… they had already fallen into the pit?

Before he could find any clues, he heard faint sounds from the direction of the hole, just five or six meters from the stranded vehicle.

Bai Yuxi carefully crept to the edge of the hole and peered downward. Compared to the collapsed earth above, the space below was not very deep, nearly filled with fallen soil and rubble, barely five or six meters from the edge.

To his surprise, within the fault below the hole lay the remnants of a man-made underground structure. A half-buried concrete passageway, broken and exposed beneath the earth, was the source of the faint noises.

Gritting his teeth, Bai Yuxi braved the risk of further collapse and leaped into the hole, crawling over the protruding mound of earth into the half-buried corridor.

The deep-set concrete tunnel was actually quite spacious, about six meters high and seven or eight meters wide—clearly not the village’s sewer. Strictly speaking, urban sewers in Yan Country were rarely so large. People certainly couldn’t move freely within them, unlike in Western countries, where horror films set in sewers abound.

A structure of this scale was usually a relic of wartime—the “dig deep, store grain” era, when air-raid shelters were built. The concrete corridor, buried deep and sealed for years, was unusually damp, whether from rainwater seeping down or the rise of groundwater.

Judging by the watermarks, two to three meters high on the walls, before the sinkhole collapsed and the tunnel broke, a large amount of water must have been pooled here; even the ceiling was covered in slimy, thick moss.

A pungent stench filled the murky air, but Bai Yuxi, wearing a simple face mask, could barely tolerate it. The mud beneath his feet was one or two feet deep, making his progress slow and arduous as he followed the faint sounds further into the passage.

Winding through the labyrinthine corridors, turning time and again, he walked for an indeterminate distance before the space suddenly opened up, and the scene before him made him pause in astonishment.

This underground structure, its origins unknown, had clearly been forgotten by the local residents. Even the entrance to the surface had vanished over decades of expansion in the village, becoming a mysterious, hidden realm beneath the earth.

Perhaps only a handful of elderly survivors still knew that such a vast cavity lay beneath their feet; needless to say, there had been no maintenance or repair.

Years of groundwater erosion had caused much of the structure to collapse and become blocked. In some places, the water had hollowed out massive pits, forcing Bai Yuxi to detour—no wonder the sinkhole appeared above.

Before Bai Yuxi now was an enormous hollow eroded by water, swallowing a large swath of the underground works, with dammed water forming a subterranean pond.

Around the “pond” were several broken concrete passages, just like the one Bai Yuxi had traversed, but their entrances were now crowded with people!

Perhaps due to the earlier collapse, the pond’s water had drained through some ruptured fissure, revealing the uneven rubble at the bottom—the remnants of walls left behind after the structure’s collapse.