The fat man frowned and said, "But why would they go to all the trouble to live underground?"

His words made Zoe and Han Yu think deeply. This strange behavior was indeed puzzling. Most importantly, how long would it take to carve mountains and rocks to build what they were seeing now?

Han Yu seemed to notice something, and she interrupted the fat man and Zoe's association with "farming," saying, "Have you noticed that there are no more of those holes we saw before?"

The fat man and Zoe looked around and confirmed again and again that this seemed to be the case.

Without holes, it meant the passages here would be relatively simpler, without complex, up-and-down tunnels.

Behind a patch of abandoned farmland, directly opposite the bronze door, the three clearly saw a semicircular opening, almost wide enough for ten people to pass through side by side.

Led by the fat man, they entered the opening.

At first, the space was still quite spacious, but the further they went, the narrower it became, eventually turning into a narrow passage that could only accommodate one person at a time.

The fat man was in the lead, followed closely by Han Yu, with Zoe behind, holding onto me as we headed deeper into the passage.

The passage wasn't long, and soon they arrived at another space. However, this space was only illuminated by four faint light sources on the walls, making everything around them appear blurry and unreal.

After a period of adaptation, everyone's eyes gradually adjusted to the dark environment, and the outlines of nearby objects could be distinguished.

In this space, the height from the floor to the ceiling was only about two meters, giving a feeling of cramped oppression, but looking into the darkness, there seemed to be a longer extension ahead.

The four of them carefully walked forward in the dark. The fat man, with the best eyesight, discovered that not far away, there were many neatly arranged stone platforms, spaced about thirty centimeters apart, extending into the darkness further away. The stone platforms were regular cuboids, about half a meter high, two meters long, and one meter wide, looking a bit like simple stone beds.

The fat man was puzzled. He seemed to have seen this kind of layout somewhere before.

Han Yu suddenly startled and hid behind the fat man, pointing at a stone platform with a trembling voice, saying, "It... it looks like there's someone..."

The fat man looked in the direction Han Yu was pointing—

At first glance, it did look like someone was lying there, with their back to them, but their posture was a bit abnormal.

The fat man mustered his courage, drew his military knife, swallowed, bent over, held the knife in reverse grip, and cautiously approached the stone platform, highly alert.

When he reached the edge of the stone platform, he saw clearly that it was not a living person, but a human skeleton, dressed in coarse linen clothes. The clothes were tattered and riddled with holes, already decayed into rags.

In the dim light, and with the clothes covering it, it was indeed easy to mistake the skeleton for a living person lying there when viewed from behind.

It turned out to be a false alarm. The fat man put away his knife, preparing to tell Han Yu and the others what he had actually seen.

Just as he straightened up and was about to turn back, something caught his attention out of the corner of his eye.

He curiously turned his head to take a look, and then froze in place as if petrified. A deep sense of fear suddenly rose in the fat man's heart, and sweat broke out on his forehead.

—Those dense stone platforms were all covered with such skeletons. This place was like a long-abandoned, neglected morgue, where corpses slowly rotted on the stone platforms, eventually turning into dry bones.

Zoe and Han Yu were also deeply shocked by this horrifying scene.

A chill ran down Zoe's spine, and she asked, "Could this be a morgue?"

The fat man shook his head and said, "This should be a barracks."

Then, he pointed to a skeleton on a nearby stone platform and said, "Look at what's under his skull."

Zoe and Han Yu walked closer and saw that there was a stone under the skull.

"This is a stone pillow," said the fat man. "If you were putting a corpse here, there would be no need to put a pillow here unnecessarily. And look at the different shapes of these skeletons. Clearly, they weren't moved here after death."

"When I was in the army, our unit was once stationed in the field during an operation. We temporarily built a camp and made many simple beds to put inside, and we slept on the beds in the camp at night. The arrangement of these stone platforms is very similar to the layout of our barracks at the time." The fat man rubbed his temples, recalling past events.

"They don't seem to be soldiers," said Zoe. "Look, they're wearing tattered clothes, barely covering their bodies, and they don't have any weapons... they feel like slaves from ancient times."

The fat man and Han Yu nodded, agreeing with Zoe.

The life experiences of these skeletons were puzzling, and the terrifying, eerie environment made them feel extremely uncomfortable. At this moment, the fat man, Zoe, and Han Yu just wanted to escape this place as quickly as possible.

So they quickened their pace, passing through rows of gloomy stone platforms, walking quickly towards the opposite side, while I, dragged by Zoe, walked in an extremely uncoordinated manner.

After passing hundreds of stone platforms, the four of them once again arrived at a semicircular opening, the same one they had seen earlier in the farming space. Without hesitation, the fat man led everyone straight into the opening, entering a narrow, short passage.

After passing through the passage, everyone arrived at a bright, circular room. The room wasn't large, empty, and the circular walls around it were evenly distributed with nine archways. Except for the archway directly opposite the passage exit, which was larger, the other archways were all the same size.

The other side of the eight small archways were eight different functional areas, the space of which was significantly larger than the circular room.

The fat man casually walked into one of the archways, and the others followed closely behind.

The other side of the archway seemed to be a kitchen. There were many stone water tanks and stoves in the room, and the stoves were piled with various iron and stone knives, as well as stone mortars and stone pots and other cooking utensils.

The fat man murmured, "At this scale, it can feed at least two hundred people."

The fat man noticed a huge iron rack in front of a wall in the room, and it seemed to be hanging with various animal skeletons and remains.

Curiosity attracted the fat man to go over. After getting closer, the fat man instantly suffocated—this wasn't an animal skeleton at all, it was a human skeleton.

Iron hooks were inserted and fixed from below the maxilla of the human skull, and people were hung on the iron rack like animals. Some iron hooks only had a head hanging on them, and the rest of the body had fallen to the ground and shattered into bone fragments due to the neck being broken; while most of the human bones on the iron hooks had not fallen off, but were missing some parts of the bones, and some skeletons only had the parts above the abdomen left.

Move your fingers and cast your precious gold and silver tickets, thank you!