"It was a pair of eyes."
"!!??"
Cheng Shi's whole body shuddered, and he blurted out, "Gaze of Mockery?"
Skalt, inside the coffin, froze in confusion.
"What's that?
I don't know anything about Gaze of Mockery. I only know that what I threw out was my eye..."
"Huh?"
Cheng Shi blinked, unable to process it. "Your eye?
You gouged out your eye and threw it out?
But weren't you trapped in the coffin, barely surviving all this time? How did you manage to throw your own eye out?
If you could throw out your own eye, then couldn't you dig out..."
Cheng Shi stopped halfway through, because he had remembered the small hole in the idol's eye socket. It looked as though it had been drilled out through years of friction. So was Skalt the one who had made the hole?
"I was indeed digging, but I could only dig that much.
I knew that simply absorbing blood energy wasn't safe, so every time I regained some strength, I would let a little of my blood. Then I tore the mourning clothes on my body into thin strips, soaked them in blood, and used them as tools to carve into the coffin.
The Scarlet Hunter was naturally attuned to blood. Once the clothes were stained with blood, they became as hard as rods. But to avoid alarming the Folly believers outside, I could only absorb a tiny amount of blood energy each time, and could only work for a short while.
Still, I wasn't short on time. So over the course of a hundred years, whenever I woke up, I would carve for a little while, until I had dug a small hole in the hard coffin and, following the only ventilation shaft inside the idol, drilled a crack into