Daomu Biji Volume 8 Chapter 58

The size and scale of the stone chamber were very common, without any polis.h.i.+ng or relief. My obvious first reaction was to use my flashlight to find a way to move on, while Fatty's flashlight was looking at what was inside.

There were wooden boxes all around and if you didn't look carefully, you'd think they were short coffins. In the middle of all these boxes, however, was an actual coffin that looked very strange—not appearance-wise, but as if it shouldn't be here.

The area around the boxes was very messy, and it felt like someone moved them to make room to put the coffin here. The problem was that the coffin wasn't even properly placed and was lying at an oblique angle.

Fatty was particularly interested in the boxes and kept telling me to look at one, but I firmly stopped him. We reached the side of the coffin and saw many strange tools lying beside it that had been completely rusted, but we knew at a glance that they were modern.

“Someone's been here, but not Little Brother and the others. These tools seem to have been here a long time." Fatty kicked several of them and when I looked closer, I found that they were small accessories used to make brackets for lifting, sliding, and supporting the transport of the coffin.

“It should all belong to the archaeological team that came at the end of the 1970s. It seems that they carried this coffin from somewhere.”

Fatty picked up a small tool from the ground, blew the dust off, and said, “Did they want to take this coffin out?”

I looked at it.

The coffin was made of wood, with iron sheets wrapped around its four corners to protect it. It wasn't opened and was left there almost intact.

“Why?” I asked. “This coffin isn't very impressive, and they didn't even take it out!”

“Don't say that, we can't guess what was on the archeological team's mind. If you try, you'll just get a headache.” Fatty said, “Don't worry about it. Keep going. You'll know what G.o.d wants you to know. If we know where the coffin was carried out, there will be more clues."

“Wait!” I said. I suddenly saw a strange phenomenon on the coffin, “Do you think we've seen the pattern on this coffin somewhere before?”

“Where have you seen it?” Fatty was puzzled.

I said, “We saw the same pattern on the coffin upstairs in Zhang Qilin's tomb. Is this also a generation of Zhang Qilin?"

“It it's here, then it would be the first generation of Zhang Qilin” Fatty said, then he looked at me, gave a tsk, grabbed my hand, and said, “Wait a minute, Mr. Naive, I want to remind you of something.”

“What?”

“Could this coffin be what the archaeological team wanted to transport out of the tomb because it may be the first generation Zhang Qilin? If so, do you think there are any key secrets hidden in there? Of course, all this is just my speculation, but think about your past entanglements. At this point, we'll never come in again after we leave. I'm putting myself in your position and thinking about you. Do you want to open this coffin and have a look?"

“You want to do it yourself, don't you?” I asked him.

Fatty shook his head seriously: “No, I just want to safely leave now. Thinking of your past, though, perhaps the answer is in this coffin. Just open it, Mr. Naive. It will only take three minutes. Since you want to know, you should try."

I looked at his expression and realized that he didn't seem to be joking. However, everything he said was indeed right and his conjecture was reasonable.

“You're right.” I looked at the ceiling above my head, but there didn't seem to be any movement. “f.u.c.k, let's do it. Let's have a look.”

Prying open coffins without tools was a ha.s.sle. We took out the iron pick but found that the top of the wooden coffin was so tight that even a crack couldn't be found. Finally, Fatty had a sharp eye and looked down and said, “Reversed reversed! The coffin was placed upside down. They really don't respect people! “

I looked down—sure enough, the entire coffin was upside down, but because it was a square coffin, it didn't seem strange how they placed it.

Fatty and I studied it and found it was impossible to turn over the coffin with just our strength and at this angle, it was impossible to pry open the lid. Fatty said, no matter what, we'll just punch a hole in the back part of the coffin and pierce through the bottom.

We used our iron picks as hammers and beat at the coffin bit by bit. Fatty made a determined effort to follow what he said was a three-minute agreement. He soon smashed a crack in the coffin's base, and with that, it was easier to handle. We stuck the iron picks in and started prying. After a while, we managed to pry out a crack at the bottom of the coffin that was as long as an arm and as wide as a c.o.ke bottle.

Fatty inserted the iron pick into the crack and moved it around. I said, “Shove everything that's in there aside. I want to see the genealogy behind the coffin lid.” Fatty said, “There's no way to set it aside, we have to get it all out!”

Fatty is truly an opportunist. I didn't care about him and let him do it quickly. He put on gloves and stuck his hand directly into the coffin. Soon he caught something and started to pull it out. When he was only halfway there, he gave a loud shout.

What he pulled out turned out to be a wet corpse's hand.

“Don't be surprised, it's not like you haven't seen it before!” I said.

“No, look at the fingers.” He said.

I saw that all the fingers on this hand were wearing rings that had a very strange glow, unlike a gem or metal. Moreover, the shape of the rings was very strange—with only a glance, I knew it couldn't be the style of the Central Plains, but maybe something from the Western Regions, or even something from Nepal at that time.

The fingernails of the wet corpse were very long, but there didn't seem to be any danger. Fatty took the rings off one by one and put them directly into his pocket, saying, “I was startled by the wealth of this hand! I thought the Zhang family was a very simple and low-key ethnic group, just like Little Brother, who only needs to breathe and drink dew every day."

I said in my heart, it's very valuable to feed Little Brother! Even for such a big shot, the phone bill for calling the Public Security Bureau to report his disappearance was far higher than that of a few antiques. We're friends with Little Brother—I heard some other people say that the price to hire Mute Zhang for a tomb robbery was too high to be true. The appearance fee alone was definitely higher than Jay Chou, even though he couldn't sing.

Fatty handed me the last ring after removing it: “Come on, Mr. Naive, look at it. Just give an estimate.”

“Didn't you say you don't want money?”

“I didn't say that, I said you should open it. But I didn't say I wouldn't steal anything. Open the coffin for three minutes and lead the sheep for only a few seconds. It won't delay you."

I glanced at it. It was a jade ring, the value of which couldn't be estimated, so I said: “It can fall anywhere between garbage and a national treasure. When we go back, I'll ask for you. Now hurry up and continue."

“You don't have to say it twice.” Fatty said. Directly holding the wet corpse's hand, he pulled the whole body out of the coffin bit by bit. When the head was pulled out of the gap, I couldn't help letting out a gasp.

“This corpse had such long hair?” I asked. The hair grew so long that it enveloped many parts of the body.

Fatty took a deep breath, pretended to be calm, and said, “The ancients had long hair, the so-called long hair fluttering and disheveled. You haven't seen many ancient plays in which the prisoners had hair like this and could all be in a Sa.s.soon commercial."

I shook my head and whispered, “But it's not that long. This hair is long enough to hang yourself without bothering others. It's probably enough to jump rope."

Fatty said: “It's not surprising that many people have long hair after death.”

How was it possible? With the length of this hair, it must've grown for hundreds of years, like f.u.c.king kelp! I didn't want to think about it anymore and said, “Yes, forget it and hurry up!”

Fatty first touched the body with an iron pick and found that there was no sign of any change. He immediately searched the whole body and when he found nothing else, he threw it aside. After the body fell to the ground, it seemed to have been oxidized and smashed into several pieces—it had shrunk so much that it fell apart.

My heart said it was disrespectful and I apologized immediately. Fatty paid no attention and said: “Dead bodies that don't change into moving corpses aren't good. There's no need to be afraid of such people who don't make progress.” As he said this, he continued to look in the coffin with his flashlight.

“This is the ancestor of the Zhang family, after all.” I said.

“Cut the c.r.a.p, have you found what you're looking for?” Fatty asked me.

But this time, I found something was wrong. I pulled Fatty over and said with horror, “s.h.i.+t! Why is the liquid inside the body green? Was it a miluotuo's body?"

The dismembered body was lying on the stone, and the clothes covering it had decayed into lumps of rotting matter so you couldn't tell what it looked like when originally worn. There was liquid flowing out from the inside, which was too green to be human. The hair covered almost all parts of the body, and only the wide mouth on the face could be seen. There was quite a lot of liquid, which continued to spread on the stone floor.

This was the first time I had seen such a situation, and I could feel myself covered in a cold sweat. Fatty said, “It doesn't make sense! The body was wet, and all the body fluids should be mixed with the liquid in the coffin. Where did this green liquid come from?"

“In the bones.” I said, “There was green fluid in the bones—probably in the bone marrow.”

However, what made me worried was that a wicked man like Fatty, who wasn't squeamish, was obviously uncomfortable and shrinking back. The arrogance from just now had vanished.

I slapped Fatty and said, “Do you want to give me an explanation or give me a suggestion—what should we do now?”

Fatty said, “Don't joke. This isn't the time to joke. I'm thinking of a painful past!”

I asked, “What past? Is this your old lover?"

“This kind of old lover is what your family's old lover was like!” Fatty said, “I have a very good friend who died exactly like this corpse.”

Fatty pressed the body's chest with an iron pick and tried to lift the body's hair—a collar appeared on the neck in front of us.

“Sure enough.” Fatty said.

“Spit it out, we still have business!”

“This man died of very serious corpse poisoning. This ancestor of the Zhang family must have died miserably. He should've been interred alive after drinking traditional Chinese medicine and his corpse showed signs of change after death. This green body fluid should be caused by the corpse poisoning reaching the bones. Because he was interred alive and had cartilage at that time, these body fluids were sealed in the bone marrow." Fatty said, “I've only seen this neck collar once. It was used to prevent the corpse from changing. You see, there's a lot of ancient jade on it."

“Is there any danger now?” I asked.

Fatty shook his head: “No, I don't think so since it's like this. Even if it was a zombie, it would be a disabled one. We don't need to be afraid of that, but I am afraid that these things are poisonous. If inhaled, our nasal cavities will be in even more trouble considering our respiratory tracts were already damaged. It's easy to have an accident. But it seems that this was definitely not the first generation of Zhang Qilin."

“Why do you say that?”

“He had no precious blood, and Zhang Qilin wouldn't be affected by corpse poisoning.”

“Then why was the pattern on his coffin the same as that on the other Zhang Qilin's coffin?” I asked.

Fatty said: “Maybe the design doesn't mark his ident.i.ty, but marks his death by accident.”

This was beyond our ability to judge, and no one knew what the situation was like.

I looked around—on our way in, we didn't find any signs of a coffin being carried so this coffin must have been transported from inside. They took the coffin from inside and left it here at random. The project was quite huge and consumed a lot of energy. If this thing really wasn't important, why would they spend so much effort to lift something that didn't seem to be particularly important?

“Mr. Naive!” Fatty called from behind me. I turned my head and asked, “What?”

“I was wrong.” Fatty said, “This thing is still dangerous.” When I turned my head, I saw that the body on the ground had grown an inch of black hair. At first glance, it looked like a big hedgehog.

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