Tomb Raiding: My Family's Last Clan Chief is Little Brother

Chapter 255 Test Specimens
Chen Wenjin looked around, walked to the stone platform, stared at the translucent sphere, and turned to the others, saying, "This is very likely the Queen Mother of the West's longevity laboratory. Look at the things inside these spheres; they are exactly the same as the engravings on the ground."

Upon hearing this, Zhang Wuxun and the others walked over, shone a light on one side of the sphere, and looked inside from the other side. They discovered that the things inside these spheres seemed to have been artificially connected.

Most of them were half-centipedes and half-snakes, cut off at the waist and then joined together, soaked in a special preservative liquid and sealed. Some had long since decomposed into an unidentified substance that looked like a clump of cotton.

The group looked at each other in disbelief. None of them had expected that the Queen Mother of the West would have such advanced technology, capable of turning the corpses of living beings into specimens in such an ancient era.

Wu Xiaoxie suddenly thought of a possibility and hissed, "This place may really be the place where the Queen Mother of the West conducted her longevity experiments in the early days. Human lifespan is too short. She may have wanted to combine the human body with other long-lived creatures, but the combined body should also have the original human thoughts. So the two carvings under the stone bricks are both human-headed monsters."

Chen Wenjin confirmed his guess, "However, it is clear that she failed, which is why she thought of using alchemy to continue searching for the way to immortality."

The fat man gasped, "So, according to you, it's possible that the Queen Mother of the West really created an elixir of immortality? If that's the case, won't we run into that old woman when we enter the real palace?"

Wu Xiaoxie chuckled and said, "The possibility of that is almost zero. If she really achieved immortality, there would definitely be relevant records in history. Don't forget that her old flame, King Mu of Zhou, failed to achieve immortality long ago and became a blood corpse, which was then beheaded by Xiao Ge and Mu Yu."

The fat man scratched his head and chuckled, "That's true."

After circling around a few times, seeing that they were still staring at those spheres and studying them, he said impatiently, "Forget whether it works or not, let's think about how to get out of here first."

Zhang Wuxun patted him with a smile, "Don't rush, we're studying it right now. The key to getting out must be in these spheres."

At this moment, the young man walked to the stone wall, gently tapped it, touched it, and said calmly, "There's nothing behind this wall."

"See?" Zhang Wuxun raised his chin. "Now there's a road."

The fat man eagerly pulled out detonators from his backpack, his face full of excitement, and urged, "Everyone get the hell out of here, I'm about to go on a killing spree!"

The young man reached out to stop him, shaking his head, "It can't be blown up."

Wu Xiaoxie disagreed, saying, "The structure here isn't particularly sturdy. If you blow it up, the entire stone chamber will collapse, and then we won't be able to get out."

The fat man reluctantly put away the detonator, and sighed dramatically, "My dear detonator is useless today."

Wu Xiaoxie smiled and put his arm around his shoulder, pulling him aside. "Alright, our tomb raiding king, move over so you don't disturb Muyu and the others from solving the puzzles."

The mechanism on the stone platform is very simple. Since the jade figurines are already dead, there is no need to worry about them suddenly attacking and hurting people. Just twist the balls at the four corners, and the stone wall in front of you will suddenly shrink inward by a distance of one person's width.

The fat man peeked over and immediately cursed, "This is discrimination against us fat guys again! They left such a small gap; if we squeeze through, I'll be a piece of burnt rice!"

The group burst into laughter.

Zhang Wuxun patted him on the shoulder, "Alright, stop complaining. It's good enough that you can walk. Just consider it a way to lose weight."

Just as Hei Xiazi picked up the unconscious man, he heard him groan and open his eyes groggily. Before he could even see who was in front of him, he was knocked unconscious again.

Hei Xiazi withdrew his hand from his neck and smiled innocently. "The best way to eliminate trouble is to cut off the source of the trouble."

“Very philosophical.” Zhang Wuxun gave him a thumbs up.

The group, carrying their equipment, traversed the crevice in the rock wall. The young man led the way, feeling around on the wall as he went. Suddenly, they stopped, and Zhang Wuxun quickly reminded the others to brake.

"What did you find?" he asked the young man.

"A mark," the young man replied casually.

With the young man's body blocking his view, Zhang Wuxun couldn't see clearly. He only felt the young man stab a spot with his dagger, followed by the sound of stones falling to the ground.

They quickly made a small hole, and the young man crawled inside first.

Zhang Wuxun quickly followed and crawled inside.

Wu Xiaoxie, who was behind him, asked in confusion, "How come there's a tomb raider's hole here?"

“It’s not a tomb robber’s tunnel,” Zhang Wuxun explained, turning around. “This is a pipe used to design mechanisms. If we continue forward, we might encounter the same mechanisms as that laboratory. This time, we’ve essentially taken a shortcut.”

They crawled forward for less than ten meters when the terrain suddenly turned sharply downwards, the passage becoming almost vertical. It was too narrow to turn around, so they had no choice but to continue crawling down.

I kept climbing until my head was throbbing with blood and I was about to faint when I suddenly heard the sound of water ahead.

The young man forcefully smashed aside the rocks blocking his way, making the sound of water even louder.

The young man peeked out to take a look, then jumped out first. The others, feeling stifled in the narrow passage, quickly followed him out. As soon as they stepped into the pool, something splashed out of the water and swam away to the distance.

The group was startled and all stared warily at the water.

However, it was soon discovered that it was just a small, shell-less, soft-bodied worm that looked a lot like a white blind shrimp, not a snake or anything like that. It would run away at the slightest movement of the water and posed no danger.

Looking around, it turned out to be a wide waterway with a gentle current, the water level only reaching a little above the knees.

Two steps upstream from them was a sluice gate, the iron gate as thick as a rolling pin. Because it had been submerged in water for many years, the half of the iron railing above the water was rusty and covered with broken branches and leaves washed down from upstream. Behind the gate was pitch black, and no one knew where it led.

The fat man gripped the iron bar and shook it hard, but found he couldn't budge it. "Hey, it's pretty sturdy."

“The water here is deep and the flow is large. Could it be the main channel leading to the reservoir at the bottom?” Wu Xiaoxie asked Chen Wenjin.

Chen Wenjin nodded, shone his miner's lamp downstream, and suddenly gasped, pointing, "Look there, a statue with a human face and a bird's body."

The group turned their heads and saw a gray-white statue standing quietly in the waterway downstream, exactly the same one they had seen when they entered the rainforest.

Before they could take a closer look, the young man suddenly lifted his foot and walked straight in that direction, and Zhang Wuxun and the others quickly followed.

As they waded through the water, the tiny, transparent insects at the bottom were startled and scattered in all directions.

The fat man quickly grabbed one and brought it under the light to take a closer look, but his hand slipped and the little bug fell back into the water and disappeared in an instant.

(End of this chapter)