A falling sensation was enough to wake someone up from a nightmare. It could cause the heart to constrict, the limbs to go numb, and the person to scream. The strange thing was, when the two fell, only Laughing Soul was screaming…
Xiao Tan, the fellow who was easily spooked normally, was unusually calm in this moment. In the blink of an eye, he twisted his wrist to grab Laughing Soul. Then, with a pull in midair, he yanked the girl above him. In that desperate moment, his first instinct was to protect his teammate. He would use his body as shield to cushion the fall, this proved that he was a good guy. Of course, if this was a great fall, his movement would be pointless, and it would just be a difference of dying on top or below. Thankfully, the fall only lasted several seconds. Then, there was a splash as they landed in water.
In the dark, the falling stopped. Xiao Tan felt a chill from his back, followed by the intense pain and oppressive feeling. However, he was glad that they had hit water. It meant that they were alive for now. The two faced a large impact as they landed on water. They started to submerge after breaking through the surface. Xiao Tan knew that they had not escaped danger. He held his breath and gathered his strength. Then he started to kick. He had not let go of Laughing Soul. When they moved upward, he used his left arm to hug Laughing Soul and his right arm to push them toward the surface. Not long after that, their heads burst through the water, and instantly, they sucked in deep breaths.
“I know how to swim!” This was the first thing Laughing Soul said after she got a few gulps of air.
“You should have told me that soon. I’m so tired.” Xiao Tan then let go of Laughing Soul to put some distance between them and used both of his hands to swim.
“Tell your head!” She whacked him on his head again. “Did you give me a chance to speak?”
“Ouch…” Xiao Tan yelped from pain. “Why didn’t you struggle or move when I grabbed you and swam to the surface?”
“You were volunteering as the lifeguard, so I was merely playing along,” Laughing Soul replied. “If I struggled and increased the weight on you, wouldn’t we both drown?”
“Oh, oh…” Xiao Tan nodded. “By the way, are you okay?”
“Not okay,” Laughing Soul replied. “I want to punch you.”
Xiao Tan thought that she was blaming him, so he said, “You can’t really fault me on this. How could I have known the beam would split and the floor would crack?”
“Haha…” Laughing Soul chuckled drily as a response. There was nothing she could argue about. After all, she was the one who grabbed Xiao Tan’s wrist, and that was why they both fell. If her first reaction was to jump backward, perhaps she would still be up there. Then she could have gone to look for a rope or something to save Xiao Tan. It would have been better than having both of them trapped in this godforsaken place.
At that moment, there was no light source near Xiao Tan and Laughing Soul. There was just a bit of light coming from above them, from the hole that they had fallen through. Unfortunately, the hole was indoors, so that bit of light was unable to shine so deep underground. Even though they were conversing, the darkness was such that they could not see each other. With the sound of paddling, they could not tell where the other was either. Laughing Soul had only aimed roughly at the place where she thought Xiao Tan’s head would be earlier.
“Damn, my flashlight in the previous scenario…” Xiao Tan was about to say that his light source had been destroyed when he felt something placed on the top of his head. With a click, a light source appeared. A yellow miner’s hat appeared on Xiao Tan’s head.
“Huh? You still have this?” Xiao Tan asked. He remembered that Laughing Soul wanted to trade this with his flashlight when they first met.
“Yes,” Laughing Soul replied. “I remember wanting to exchange this for your flashlight, but you chose to give me one to me and told me something like… ’wearing this looks funny, so you keep it’.”
“Then why did you keep it until now? This kind of equipment is not worth much, right?” Xiao Tan asked.
“I dislike being rejected by others,” Laughing Soul said as she tapped on the miner’s hat. “Look at you, wearing this kind of silly equipment. It matches perfectly…”
“I miss the you from when we first met.” Xiao Tan revealed a vengeful face. “The Laughing Soul who called me Brother Xiao Tan and politely traded item with me has long disappeared…”
Laughing Soul felt like she was being mocked, so she quickly changed the topic from shame. “Stop grumbling! Quick, turn around and see if there’s any land. Do you wish to exhaust our Stamina Points in the water?”
Xiao Tan curled his neck back and stopped talking. He slowly turned in the water to shine around and above them. No matter what, miner’s hat was quite useful in that situation. At least it was something that he did not need to constantly hold.
As the light moved, the two could see around them clearer. The underground pool was not big. There was a rocky shore was about ten meters away. There was a vertical, circular tunnel above them. It was what they had fallen through. The entrance was the hole at the empty house’s kitchen, and the bottom of the tunnel widened up.
Overall, the area above the pool was like an inverted funnel; going back that way was impossible. The pool was surrounded by rocky walls, and only one side had a shore. Xiao Tan and Laughing Soul had no choice. Their most urgent task was to find a place to land. The two swam over, and when they got on dry land, they were tired and sat on the ground to rest.
The series of changes happened in just a few minutes, but they had exhausted plenty of Stamina and Life points. The fall had cost Xiao Tan sixty-seven percent of his Life Points, while for Laughing Soul, it was fifty-nine percent. Of course, that was not that serious. In real life, if they had fallen from the same height, they would have died when they hit the water. They had survived because they were in-game, and floating in water and swimming to the shore exhausted about three hundred Stamina Points. For level seventeen players, that was about twenty percent of their max Stamina Points.
“I say… are we in some kind of ancient tomb?” Xiao Tan raised his head to look around. There was a dark path behind them, and it was unclear where it led.
“What? Are you thinking about me shedding my clothes to train my swordsmanship with you?” Laughing Soul answered. Actually, she was the one with the shamelessness.
“Hmm… I just wanted to say, perhaps we can find equipment, skills, or hidden quests here,” Xiao Tan said, “but since you brought that up…”
Before he finished, there was another whack on his head. Even though he was wearing the miner’s hat, it was quite painful.
“So, your mind also wandered to dirty thought?” Laughing Soul scolded.
“The use of the word ’also’ means that… Ouch… Fine, everything is my fault, okay?” Xiao Tan was being bullied. Poor thing.
The underground pool was as cold as ice. They were soaked, and that caused the chill to heighten. After sitting for a while, they started to shiver. Since they had not recovered too many points, they tried their best to wring out the water from their clothes and get some rest.
After the lethargy disappeared, they stood up to walk down the only path. The rocks in the tunnel probably had absorbed light because they walked for a distance and discovered that, even with the miner’s hat, they could only see a blank shadow further ahead. About ten meters away, the light would be consumed entirely.
The other thing worth noting was that the path was not sloping upward. It was steeping downward. The pool was already quite deep, but the path led them deeper. What kind of situation was this? They were heading toward San Paolo?
After walking for ten minutes, the steep leveled out until it became a plateau, and the tunnel opened up. Without realizing it, the height and width of the tunnel was large enough to fit an underground train.
“Do you smell that?” Laughing Soul suddenly asked. The air was wet and collected into a mist. About one minute earlier, she had smelled something weird in the air. That was not a good sign.
Xiao Tan looked at Laughing Soul strangely. “You are not telling me that you have… that… I don’t even know you can far…”
“Your head!” Laughing Soul’s face was red. She yanked on his hat and scolded him harshly as she whacked his head.
“Fine, I misunderstood…”
“Idiot! Dummy! Scum!”
“Hey… how come those words aren’t blocked?”
“Hmm… Huh…” Laughing Soul took a deep breath and tried to calm down. “I have to go and check if the shop sells paper fans, or else my hand is going to get so sore.”
“I’m sorry,” Xiao Tan said. “My head to is too hard.”
“Is that what I need you to apologize for?” Laughing Soul slammed the hat back on his head.
“In any case… it’s all my fault, okay?” Xiao Tan sighed. “You don’t need to beat me every time. Couldn’t we have discussed this with words?”
“Brother Xiao Tan…” Laughing Soul interrupted with a smile. Her tone was friendly, but her eyes were filled with vengeance. “Could you please turn around and throw yourself back into the water?”
“You’d better hit me then…”
Roar!
Suddenly, a roar that was definitely not made by human interrupted their conversation.
It was unclear whether the creature was annoyed by their words or had sensed the presence of prey and sought food. In any case, the sound of a large creature crawling on the ground came from the hole before them.
And it was moving swiftly toward the two players…