Chapter 65: I Remembered What Happened Twenty Years Ago…..
Lin Yan felt greatly wronged. Hearing Fatty’s direction, he wanted to kick him: “You’re the zombie!”
Wu Xie hurriedly pulled him back—he had sharp eyes. When he had just stepped into the water, he looked down and discovered that the bottom was full of bowl-sized pits. He didn’t know what they were for, but he knew it was best not to step on them. What if they were mechanisms? Lin Yan didn’t even look and was still messing around with Fatty. If he wasn’t careful, he wouldn’t even know how he died! Wu Xie felt a bit tired in his heart. He thought he was leading two oversized children! The kind whose ages added up to only 6 years old!
Hearing the sound, Fatty swung his flashlight and came over: “Who told you not to answer? I just felt something brushing past me. Who knew it was you guys?” He looked around: “Where’s Xiaoge? Did you catch up? Which direction did he go?”
Lin Yan rolled his eyes: “This bottom isn’t that big in total. If worst comes to worst, just search around? But I guess he’s heading to that stone tablet in the middle. That’s the only place down here worth figuring out.”
Fatty tilted his head and thought: “Yeah. Alright then, let’s go?”
Damn, Fatty was even acting cute! But wasn’t the term “acting cute” not a thing yet? Lin Yan thought about it while being reminded by Wu Xie to watch his step. The three slowly groped toward the center of the pool.
As expected, after a few steps, they saw the stone tablet in the center of the pool. This stone tablet was over two meters tall. No wonder it was visible from above looking down. By this calculation, didn’t this pool have to be seven or eight meters deep?
There were also four squatting stone statues around the stone tablet. Lin Yan leaned in for a look: “Wu Xie, does this look like a sea monkey to you?”
Wu Xie shuddered. These past few days, he had really been scared by sea monkeys. If he saw a few more, he might get PTSD!
“Where? Where are you?”
The fog down here was extremely thick. After two meters, you couldn’t see people. Wu Xie hurriedly shone the searchlight randomly around, afraid a sea monkey would lunge from some corner and bite him.
Lin Yan excitedly said: “Here! There’s a statue of it here! Tell me, is this sea monkey kept by the tomb owner? But why was it locked on the ghost ship? Could it be that after it broke out of the tomb, it happened to run into them? Did your Third Uncle and the others abandon the ship to trap the sea monkey on board?”
Wu Xie thought about it and felt it made sense—everything matched! If his Third Uncle had run into the sea monkey and temporarily locked it in the bow of the ship, but didn’t know when it would get out, so they decided to abandon ship entirely. In the emergency, they didn’t have time to notify A Ning and the others and went straight down into the tomb!
So had they… come out?
Thinking of the limited air at the bottom of this tomb, he became anxious. Although there were no signs now that his Third Uncle was here, what if?
They hadn’t found any traces of people in the places they passed earlier, which meant his Third Uncle was deeper in the tomb! With this thought, he began to focus on observing this piece of green stone tablet. This was the only clue here. If there was a mechanism, this stone tablet must have a hint!
While he was focused on deciphering the stone tablet, over there Lin Yan sneaked up to Zhang Qiling: “How about it? Remember anything? What exactly did you encounter after coming down here twenty years ago?”
Zhang Qiling glanced at him: “What do you know?”
Lin Yan shook his head: “Not much, just that scheming old fox Wu Sansheng’s notebook said you came down here twenty years ago, but it only wrote the beginning, nothing after. Did you carve that string of foreign letters outside?”
Zhang Qiling was stunned for a moment, then shook his head: “I can’t remember.”
Lin Yan wasn’t expecting him to actually remember anything. After all, he would later claim to remember something but actually remember nothing, just have some vague impressions. The real clues would still have to come from those old foxes. So he shrugged and let it go.
Wu Xie had already deciphered the small seal script on the stone tablet: “The tomb owner says a heavenly palace was built here. The path to the heavenly palace is inside the stone tablet. If you’re fated, you can… ascend to heaven?”
“Ascend to heaven?” Fatty’s eyes lit up: “Then there must be lots of treasure behind this? Comparing himself to a heavenly palace, there must be plenty of treasures! Figured out how to get in yet?”
Lin Yan gave Fatty a sympathetic look: Even if there was treasure, you needed hands to take it! If he wasn’t wrong, Fatty probably hadn’t brought anything into this tomb? Sigh, reaching the treasure vault but leaving empty-handed— for a money-grubber like Fatty, he’d probably faint from crying in the bathroom! Wait, no—ascend to heaven? Why did those two words feel so inauspicious? For a living person to ascend to heaven wasn’t that a dead end?
Wu Xie shook his head: “What the stone tablet says is a bit like Zen talk. Probably the stone tablet itself is a hint. If you’re lucky, you find the mechanism and get in. If not, you don’t.”
Hearing what he said, Lin Yan went to his side, pulled him toward the stone tablet beside it: “Come on, come on, you have good luck, you fiddle with it. I believe you’ll definitely find where the mechanism is!”
What a joke, how could Wu Xie have bad luck? He had to go through the entire tomb, right? If he couldn’t activate the mechanism, how could he explore the whole tomb? After the ghost ship incident last time, when he couldn’t find the notebook and it later drifted to Wu Xie by itself, he now had extra trust in Wu Xie’s protagonist halo. Anyone else might not find the mechanism, but Wu Xie absolutely would!
If Wu Xie couldn’t find it, that meant it was time for Fatty to accidentally trigger it!
Wu Xie was forced to circle the stone tablet with him, only fishing up some discarded oxygen tanks and junk: “Alright, stop looking. Didn’t it say only the fated can enter? I think we’re just not fated. Let’s first look for any clues my Third Uncle and the others left. Huh, Mung Oil—where’s Zhang Qiling?”
He looked up and saw that Zhang Qiling, who had been dazed in front of the stone tablet, was gone.
“Right, where is he? He was just here.” Lin Yan’s heart skipped a beat too. Don’t go far— if something came, their few weaklings couldn’t handle it!
After searching a few circles in the fog, they finally found Zhang Qiling in front of a pool wall. At this moment, Zhang Qiling looked completely different from his usual detached-from-the-world self. His always straight back was slightly hunched, like he had suffered a major blow, the whole person exuding an aura of dead silent despair.
Seeing them come, Zhang Qiling’s mouth twitched, as if trying to make an expression, but he failed: “I remembered what happened twenty years ago.”
Seeing him like this, no one felt good. Although Wu Xie really wanted to know why his Third Uncle, who never talked about it, had rushed over, and why Zhang Qiling hadn’t changed much in twenty years, seeing Zhang Qiling like this, it probably wasn’t a good memory…
Lin Yan knew he must have remembered something, but making that expression… wasn’t easy, right? Yes, with his magical lie detector-like bug skill, he saw through it—he was lying! Remembering something from twenty years ago was probably true, but that expression was definitely fake! Pretending like this, he must have remembered some scheme he made with Wu Sansheng and the others, and was about to deceive Wu Xie!
He quietly glanced at Wu Xie and, seeing the conflicted expression on his face, understood: Damn, this kid was about to be led astray by these scheming old foxes again!
