"Shen Le!"
"Shen Le!"
"Shen Le!!!"
Professor Guo threw back his head and shouted in terror. Shouting as he ran, he burst forward at a speed utterly unbefitting someone on the verge of retirement:
His eyes had been hit by the intense light. In the less than one second it took him to blink, Shen Le had vanished!
Not even an alien tractor beam could have been that fast!!!
Ignoring the armed threat posed by the armored soldiers, he charged straight to the front of the carriage, bent down to look beneath it, then gritted his teeth and hauled open the carriage curtain, peering inside.
He lunged forward, nearly burying his entire upper body inside the carriage, before reluctantly accepting a fact:
There was no one inside. No one outside, either, and no one beneath it. Shen Le had not hidden in the carriage, nor had some armored soldier abducted him into it. Wait, I was practically climbing into the carriage—where were all those armored soldiers?
Only after accepting the truth did Professor Guo have the presence of mind to worry about his own safety. He pulled his head and upper body out of the carriage, braced himself against the shaft, and looked around.
At some point, the white light had completely faded. The entire cave had sunk into darkness, and only the faint glow of phone screens made the surroundings barely visible;
The armored soldiers stood in neat ranks against the cave walls. The cavalrymen riding Tang Sancai warhorses had dismounted and returned to formation.
The cold, eerie sheen on the surfaces of the stone figurines, Mud Figurines, and pottery figurines had long vanished. Their wide-open eyes had dulled, and the paint that had once covered them had already faded away.
The armor worn by the soldiers and the