Chapter 145: The Terrifying Scarabs

This corridor was about a hundred meters long and lined with roughly thirty Anubis statues. Besides the statues, there were also some strange murals and large bronze artifacts. Had these murals and bronze artifacts not caught the expedition team's attention, this hundred-meter corridor would probably have been crossed long ago.

"Click-clack, click, click!"
"Swoosh!"

An unfamiliar sound echoed from behind the group. Looking back toward the entrance, pitch-black darkness met their eyes; the stone mechanism must have risen back into place.

"What's that sound?"

Someone spoke up in the dark, their tone heavy with fear—after all, this was only a normal person's instinctive reaction to the unknown and to absolute darkness.

"Argh!"
"It's, it's, it's Anubis! They, they've all come alive!"

The person walking at the very rear suddenly let out a miserable scream, followed by ragged, heavy gasps that signaled his impending death.

Faced with this sudden crisis, twenty-three intense beams of light simultaneously converged on the last man in the column. A two-meter-long spear was now pierced through his chest, and he was kneeling on the ground with his head bowed, clearly already dead.

Looking even further back, the Anubis statues that had previously stood motionlessly on both sides of the corridor had somehow all repositioned themselves at the very rear of the group!

One of the Anubis statues was slowly pulling its sharp spear out of the expedition member's chest, every movement chillingly mechanical.

"Run! Run toward the end of the corridor! Anubis's spears are cursed by the dead; touch one and you die!"

Who knows who had shouted the warning, but upon hearing it, everyone scrambled forward. Along the way, some pulled out firearms and began firing at the Anubis statues.

A few supernatural beings among them also unleashed their powers, their dazzling green elemental energies illuminating the entire hundred-meter corridor in a blinding glow.

"Rat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat-tat!"
"Bang, bang, bang!"

"Crackle, pop!"

Chaos erupted within the hundred-meter corridor, filled with the sounds of submachine guns, handguns, and supernatural abilities.

I was utterly dumbfounded at the time. Good grief, were they here for an archaeological expedition or to wage a war? Could it be they had known all this beforehand?

No wonder Uncle Ma had told me to stick close to him no matter what. He must have anticipated that these people might resort to violence against their own. After all, the journal they were searching for was worth a king's ransom—something anyone would kill to possess.

Fortunately, these Anubis figures were merely stone statues. The bullets and supernatural attacks shattered them directly into countless fragments.

The animated Anubis death statues were swiftly cleared out. Aside from the single casualty, everyone else remained unharmed, though every single person was drenched in cold sweat from the overwhelming tension.

Once all the moving Anubis statues were smashed to pieces, we finally escaped that terrifying corridor. What greeted our eyes next was a magnificent golden hall!

However, the golden hue was only revealed under the illumination of the searchlights. In the center of the hall stood three gigantic sandstone gates, with a towering, solid-gold Sphinx standing guard before each one.

Following the direction of the three pairs of eyes belonging to the Sphinxes, we discovered another flight of stairs leading deep underground. Flanking the stairway stood two massive stone pillars, both covered in incomprehensible, ancient patterns.

"This is the entrance!" Ismail said to the bald-headed leader of the expedition team, before stooping down to crawl through the narrow basement opening.

Because the basement passage and stairs were extremely cramped, we could only descend two people at a time. Little did we know, this was merely the beginning of a true nightmare!

The murals along the basement passage were covered in dust, but even so, I could easily discern their content. Although I could not read the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the general theme of the murals was still understandable.

The walls were covered with depictions of people and objects, but suddenly, among some of the murals, I spotted things that looked suspiciously like beetles.

This discovery gave me a severe jolt. Back then, I had watched the movie *The Mummy Returns*, in which the scarabs were flesh-eating monsters; anyone who touched them was destined to die, though these creatures only traveled in straight lines.

"My friends, the death god Anubis devised the methods for preserving corpses, but his father Osiris created flesh-eating creatures. Since ancient times, we have called the entities created by Osiris scarabs, and they are right near us!"

The leader Ismail broke the initial silence. His words instantly confirmed my suspicions—meaning these flesh-eating insects genuinely existed.

Old Ma and I closely followed the expedition leader, but I noticed this man was a smiling tiger; though he looked amiable on the surface, he was utterly ruthless when executing tasks.

Trudging with bowed heads through the basement corridor for about ten minutes, a completely different scene unfolded before our eyes. It felt as though we were deep within the interior of a pyramid, entirely unimaginable that a team of people had now reached a depth of a hundred meters underground.

"Hark, what is that sound?" someone whispered in the illuminated darkness, their voice trembling violently, evidently still traumatized by the Anubis statues.

"Rumble, swish, swish!" A sound resembling rushing water echoed in everyone's ears, growing rapidly from faint whispers to a deafening roar!

"Oh no! It's scarabs! Everyone, find a place to hide!" Old Yi shouted, swinging his head-mounted searchlight toward the source of the rushing sound. What he illuminated was a tide of scarabs surging out from a cluster of holes—a pitch-black, writhing mass charging directly toward their large group!

Upon hearing this, naturally, everyone scrambled for their lives. Two of the guides even plunged recklessly down the corridor stairs, while others sought refuge as far away from the path of the scarabs as possible.

"Hajik, Kulis! Scarabs only travel in straight lines! The path you're running down is their exact route—you're going to die!"

Old Yi screamed at the top of his lungs, but his cries failed to pull the two men back from their blind panic.

The sea of scarabs numbered at least ten thousand, aggressively surging toward the path the two had taken.

In less than a minute, miserable shrieks echoed from the passage. Ismail swept his searchlight beam toward the noise, capturing a horrific silhouette on the wall.

"Ah, ah, ah!"

The shadows of the two men were cast with terrifying clarity against the tunnel wall. Their screams were quickly swallowed by the advancing tide of scarabs, which tore through their skin, burrowed into their bodies, and devoured their flesh and blood with horrifying speed!

Once the swarm of scarabs had passed, nothing remained in the corridor except two completely stripped skeletons, clean of any flesh, making anyone who looked upon them shudder in revulsion.

"Let's go. Leave them be. We must climb through this tunnel at maximum speed!" Old Yi said, shaking his head as he gazed at the two interlocking skeletons before him, then leading the twenty-one surviving members toward the very hole from which the scarabs had emerged!