(This chapter ends with memories of the ancient city of Sizhou, and the follow-up of Hidden Sea Flowers will begin tomorrow)
Zhang Haike took out a horse leg scissors from the package, stuck the hole, and asked, "How many inches are left?"
The child had taken off his coat and exposed his entire arm. He said solemnly, "One palm at most."
After saying that, he put his hand into the hole and started groping.
Everyone held their breath and did not dare to speak. This was a very dangerous move. Once something unusual happened in the cave and affected the Zhang family's children, Zhang Haike would immediately press down the horse's leg scissors and cut off the child's hands to save his life.
This is a very wise way of abandoning pawns to save the rook.
But after groping for a while, nothing dangerous happened.
"How is it?" Zhang Haike asked him softly.
"Wait a minute."
The child shook his head, then frowned and stretched his whole little arm in. He didn't know what he touched. His expression changed several times. He immediately retracted his arm, pulled something out of the hole, and threw it away.
on the ground.
Everyone took a closer look and saw that it was actually a blackened hand bone, covered with black-green soil. The inside of the wall seemed to be very damp.
"There are corpses inside?" someone asked in surprise.
The child looked very unhappy and said, "Take a closer look."
Zhang Haike picked up the hand bone and found that the joints were still very flexible. What was more shocking to him was that the index and middle fingers of this hand bone had grown half a knuckle.
This is the hand of the Zhang family!
Everyone was extremely surprised. They never expected that some Zhang family members would have died here before them, so the exquisite and exquisite mechanism outside must have been the work of the Zhang family members.
"What else is in there?"
"There is also this, in the arms of the corpse." The child opened his palms, and in his palms was an unknown object wrapped in black and green mud.
"What is this?" Zhang Haike put away the scissors, took out the water bag, "wash it clean and take a look."
After rinsing it with water, they discovered that it was a pocket watch. It was very worn and worn, with half a rusty chain attached to it. It was completely broken.
Zhang Haike shook off the water stains on it, turned the pocket watch over, and saw a unicorn embossed on the rusty steel cover at the back.
Several people frowned at once. Every child in this family knew what Qilin meant to them. This should not be a coincidence. The Zhang family members had been here before them and died here unexpectedly.
The front cover of the watch was also rusted and stuck to the dial. Zhang Haike scraped it around with a small blade, then inserted the tip of the knife and pried it open with force.
The hands inside have stopped long ago, and there is a black and white photo stuck on the inside of the watch cover. It is a strange man, very young, and he looks like he is no more than twenty-five years old.
"What does that corpse you are talking about look like?" someone nearby asked.
The child replied, "Sit against the wall with your face facing in."
"That's good." The child who just asked the question said happily, "It means he wasn't sealed alive inside."
"What a fart!" Zhang Haike cursed and said coldly, "Not only was he sealed inside alive, but he was not the only one inside when they were sealed. There was something chasing him behind him, so he
Sitting with my back against the wall, I was sealed in with all my thoughts."
"Then what should we do? Is this wall still open?" someone asked.
The treasures hanging in front of the cards are enough for them to evenly split the difference.
"Open!" Zhang Haike put the pocket watch into the treasure bag, "The people who died here are the Zhang family. Even if we can't figure out the cause of their death, we have to take their mounds back."
The ancestral motto of the Zhang family is that whenever you encounter remains belonging to the Zhang family outside, you must find a way to bring their graves back, and finally let Zhang Qiling take the graves home.
The rest of the people nodded, "Okay!"
Destruction is always more efficient than construction, but within ten minutes, they had already opened an opening large enough for their size to pass through.
Zhang Haike and others filed in with torches, but after entering, they found that the situation inside was completely different from what they thought.
First there is mud. After the brick wall is a large stone hall filled with mud. There are many murals carved on the four walls, but they have fallen off and become so rotten that they cannot be seen clearly.
There was only a very sloping edge around the mud pool, so you could barely walk on it, and the body was sitting on the stone edge of the entrance.
When they came in, they pushed the corpses, and a series of them fell into the mud. There were many such corpses in the mud pool.
Everyone carefully walked around the edge of the mud pool and found no other openings for passage.
Someone wondered: "What's going on? Is it sealed up like the outside?"
Zhang Haike said: "This pool should be in the shape of a funnel. You see, the people on the edge are submerged in the mud, and the people in the middle have even their upper bodies sunk."
"Besides, I think there should be an opening underneath this mud that leads to other places."
The corpses in the mud were all wearing goggles and something to protect their mouths and noses. Even if there was no opening below, they should be salvaging something inside, but Zhang Haike preferred that there was a passage below.
A child used a pickaxe to dig into the mud and stir it up a few times. He picked up a long green thing, which was almost rotten. "It looked like a rope."
He tugged toward him again, and a corpse in the pool moved a few times. He exclaimed, "The ropes are tied to these corpses."
"It seems that our judgment just now was wrong. It was not the people outside who wanted to seal it, but the people inside who had to seal themselves here for some reason. The traces of sealing are still there."
Zhang Haike said.
Someone answered, "You're saying that there might be something strange in the mud. The Zhang family didn't want this thing to get out and harm others, so they sacrificed themselves."
Zhang Haike raised his lips and sneered, "I never think that our profession is so noble. There are bricks on the ground outside, which shows that when terrible things happened, people inside kept blocking them, and people outside were very
Maybe they don’t know what’s going on inside, and they keep trying to dig in.”
This chapter is not over yet, please click on the next page to continue reading! Everyone became nervous at the same time, how terrifying it must be to kill so many Zhang family members at once!
Someone asked, "I don't know how many family members' bones there are here, and there are things in the mud. How do we hook them up one by one?"
Zhang Haike waved his hand and said: "Don't worry, I suddenly discovered something more terrifying than the possibility of danger in the mud."
Everyone looked at him in confusion. Zhang Haike took a deep breath, took out the pocket watch again, opened the cover, and showed everyone the photos inside, "Do you know who this person is?"
Everyone shook their heads. Since he could carry a pocket watch engraved with unicorn, he must be a member of the Zhang family.
But there are so many members of my family, and apart from the elders who teach homework and a few close elders, most of the people they see every day just look familiar.
Zhang Haike lowered his voice and said, "This man is Xiaogui's father. I met him when I was a child."
"What?!" Everyone was shocked. Suddenly they remembered that the kid was following them when they came down, and they immediately turned around to look for the kid.
There was a flash of fire, and he was caught off guard by a pale little face at the entrance of the cave. Zhang Haike's heart almost stopped, and everyone fell silent for an instant.
The younger brother stood quietly where they had just come in, looking at them.
After a long stalemate, Zhang Haike said, "You arranged for us to come here, why?"
He suddenly recalled that the clues along the way were all provided by this kid, but before that, none of them noticed anything was wrong.
At such a young age, they had such deep scheming thoughts. They suddenly felt frightened and shuddered all over.
Zhang Haike calmed down quickly. The only exit was now occupied by this kid. The slope under their feet was very steep and they would slide down if they were not careful. They were not sure whether there was a killing move in the mud, so they could not act rashly now.
Better find out what this kid is trying to do.
The younger brother asked, "Do you know how these people died here?"
Zhang Haike and others looked at each other, and someone immediately pulled a rope out of the mud to fish out a corpse, only to find that the head of the corpse was tilted. He held it with his hand and twisted it gently, and the head of the corpse was pulled off very easily.
.
Zhang Haike and others immediately understood what was going on, and went to check a few more corpses. The necks were all severed, and there were many obvious fight scars on the bodies.
These people were murdered, and the method used to kill them was the Zhang family's usual method of killing people. In other words, they were killed here by other Zhang family members!
This is a scene of infighting within the Zhang family!
The hand holding the body trembled uncontrollably. They had heard about the internal strife in the family, but they never expected that it would be in this place.
So how did this kid know about it?
"Are you investigating the cause of your father's death?" Zhang Haike asked him.
The younger brother shook his head and looked at them silently.
Zhang Haike gritted his teeth and continued to speculate: "Your father was murdered here by some of our fathers? So you brought us here just for revenge?"
The younger brother shook his head again, "I have no idea who your father is. The father you think is my father is actually not my father."
"?" Zhang Haike and others looked at each other, "Then why did you trick us here?"
The younger brother looked at Zhang Haike and said, "I was also present when all this happened."
Zhang Haike subconsciously wanted to ask something, but when he was about to blurt out the words, he suddenly realized and immediately shut his mouth.
"I want to come down to this place." The little brother said calmly, "But I am still too young now, and I can't do many things, so I need your help."
"What are you doing here? What's under this quagmire?" Zhang Haike asked.
"What I do next has nothing to do with you."
The boy explained: "Under this mire, there are corridors like spider webs, all of which are filled with silt. However, each section of the corridor is connected to various rooms where you can rest and breathe air. Some of the rooms have many
For what you need, you can use these dead men's equipment and advance four to five rooms to complete the test."
"After you get the things, you should leave here as soon as possible, otherwise things will change if you wait too long."
"What about you?" Zhang Haike felt strange in his heart.
"I have to go very deep." The boy said.
Zhang Haike vaguely touched the strange point just now, "What exactly is this place?"
"It's a long story. This is the site of the ancient city of Sizhou." The younger brother told them briefly, "There are at least four layers of rocks buried under our feet, and we are only on the first layer."
"The Zhang family has been running this ancient city. Because of a flood, the ancient city was buried in the mud and disappeared. So there are too many good things in it. What I want is in the deepest place."
Zhang Haike didn't understand how a young child like him could remain calm when faced with so many corpses of his own family members. Even a few of them still couldn't digest the scene at the moment.
Later, after understanding some things, he realized how much pain a child had to go through before he could calmly face the darkness and loneliness of being with corpses, because this child had no idea what loneliness was after being deliberately destroyed by those people.
Although Zhang Haike no longer dared to look down on him, looking at his thin body, he still couldn't help but feel a little worried, "You don't need help?"
"You can't help me." The little brother slowly walked in from the entrance of the cave and looked at them and said, "I have lived here for a long time, and you don't understand anything here."
"You should go back as soon as possible after taking the things. If the Zhang family knows that you are here, you will not end well. Even your parents can't protect you."
After saying that, before everyone could react and ask questions, the little brother had already jumped into the mud and flipped in.
This chapter is not over yet, please click on the next page to continue reading! Several bubbles emerged from the mud and fluttered a few times. The little movement of the little brother jumping quickly disappeared without a trace. Zhang Haike and others looked at each other again.
.
"How to deal with it?" Someone said after a while, "Is what that kid said true?"
"It doesn't matter whether it's true or not. Anyway, I don't want to fail this time." Another person answered.
"Do you really want to listen to him?" Someone said angrily, "Why should you listen to him? There must be more precious treasures deeper in the place. The wild time is about to end. I don't want to lose to this little bastard. We have enough
It’s such a shame, I can’t swallow this breath anyway.”
The air was silent again. The man looked left and right, cursed "coward", then grabbed the equipment of the dead man next to him, put it on, and jumped into the mud.
When the others saw this, they no longer hesitated, quickly packed their equipment and jumped off.
Zhang Haike had no time to stop him. The key is that no one would listen if he did.
The bad feeling in his heart was getting stronger and stronger, but he had no choice at the moment, so he jumped into the mud with the other children and dived downwards.
After swimming in the mud for about three minutes following the corpse tied to the rope, they got out of a wellhead, but there was no trace of the little brother.
A few people had no time to pay attention to the surrounding scene, and hurriedly followed the small mud footprints on the ground. They saw two holes under a collapsed wall, one big and one small. They couldn't get into the small one no matter what.
of.
"It seems that the kid entered into a small hole. No wonder he said that only he can go in." Someone said.
The hole was surrounded by bluestone slabs and could not be expanded. They had no choice but to crawl into the larger hole.
They couldn't figure out why Zhang family children who were not old enough came here to fight. It was against the family rules to let such young children go to the ground.
They thought that the two cave entrances would lead to the same place, but in fact they did not. After walking for a long time, they realized that they and their brother were separated.
At the same time, Zhang Haike and others also noticed something strange about their bodies.
At some point, an unknown red rash broke out on everyone's body. It was extremely itchy. The most severe case was a child who fell to the ground and started convulsing.
Zhang Haike hurriedly gave him some egg white to induce vomiting, and found that there were very small things squirming in the sludge green water after vomiting.
He took a closer look and found that they were actually countless tiny leech eggs, wrapped in a white translucent egg membrane, as densely packed as sesame seeds in a broken glutinous rice ball.
Zhang Haike looked at his skin carefully, and cold sweat suddenly broke out. In the thin layer under his skin, there were countless small ridges, and they were shaking and crawling all over his body.
He used a dagger to prick the skin, and with quick eyesight and quick hands, he picked out what was inside, and it turned out to be a leech.
This kind of leech is several times more difficult to deal with than ordinary leeches. Ordinary treatment methods are of no use at all. Instead, they will encourage the leech to burrow deeper into the body.
Zhang Haike saw the corpses of three Zhang children lying on the corner in front of him, and suddenly understood what the younger brother meant when he said that he had lived here for a long time.
That kid, and these children of the Zhang family who are less than ten years old, they are all orphans of the Zhang family.
In this dark underground ancient city, he was forced to become a tool for those adults to collect blood and avoid trouble.
——
Zhang Haike felt a little thirsty and paused.
Wu Xie was fascinated by what he heard. He quickly poured him a cup of tea and asked, "Then, how did you survive?"
Zhang Haike finished the drink in one gulp, then added another glass, and then said: "Later we realized that only the child's blood could help us get rid of the leeches on our bodies, but we didn't know where he was. In order to lure him out, we started to
The second level involves destruction.”
"You can probably guess what happened next. We brought explosives, and the structure of the ancient city is very unstable. If he doesn't want to give up his goal, he will definitely come back to stop us."
However, the reality is always cruel. After the ancient city was flooded, the local government not only did not dig, but instead built a lake and embankment on the ruins of the ancient city, and poured a large amount of mercury into the mud above the ancient city to seal it. The behavior was very strange.
Some people speculate that the sudden flood that hit the ancient city was not a natural disaster, but someone wanted to bury some secrets in the ancient city forever.
There was a layer of Sanhe soil above the mercury that completely surrounded the place. Zhang Haike and the others knew nothing about it at the time. After a series of bombardments deep underground, the structural balance inside the ancient city was destroyed, and a large area of the ancient city collapsed.
The Sanhe soil covering it developed cracks, and mercury vapor leaked out, poisoning all the crops in this area on the ground.
The little brother had already got what he wanted and left the ancient city. When he discovered this situation, he knew that something happened to Zhang Haike and the others down there, which was why the story about the Scorpion Tomb that Jin Wantang later told. (End of Chapter)