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

Chapter 316 Find the entrance
Actually, Zhang Wuxun was also quite frustrated. If it weren't for these burdens, he and his brother wouldn't be licking candied hawthorn-flavored energy gels every day.

There are so many delicious things in the room, but I can't eat them. Isn't that infuriating?

Huo Zhixing was unaware of Zhang Wuxun's frustration. He distributed the energy gels to Huo Xiaoli and the only remaining young Huo family servant, and whispered encouragement to them, "Did you hear what Master Yu said? Since he said so, we will definitely be able to get out if we follow him."

Zhang Wuxun had just raised his eyelids to look over when he heard Huo Zhixing deliberately say in a voice that he could definitely hear: "A kind person like Master Yu would definitely not abandon us, even if it's just for the sake of the family head."

Zhang Wuxun chuckled, then shook his head helplessly. "Let's all take a break. The terrain here is uphill. I feel that if we go a little further, we should be able to get close to the surface."

“If all else fails, I have other ways to get us out,” Zhang Wuxun said.

"What's the solution?" Another young man named Huo Xiaojiu was more composed than Huo Xiaoli and was also calmer in the face of the current situation.

Zhang Wuxun clenched his fist and then opened it, uttering an onomatopoeic word, "Bang! It exploded. I brought explosives."

This method should not be used lightly unless absolutely necessary, because explosives cannot distinguish between friend and foe, and the heat generated by the explosion will attract more Miluot.

After resting for half an hour, Zhang Wuxun and Xiao Ge led the way, guiding the three newbies forward along the jade vein.

As Zhang Wuxun had said, the road ahead was indeed ascending, and rocks were gradually appearing around them. These were genuine mineral rocks, not jade veins disguised as such.

The air seemed to become humid, and the young man suddenly stopped, reaching out to wipe the stone walls on both sides, his fingertips getting some black water stains.

He whispered to Zhang Wuxun, "Listen carefully, there's the sound of water."

Zhang Wuxun also heard the faint sound of flowing water not far away, and nodded. "It is indeed the sound of water. There must be a stream nearby, or it must be raining outside and the water is seeping in through the soil."

Upon hearing this, Huo Zhixing and his two companions became excited. They leaned closer to the stone wall and discovered that water droplets were seeping out from the upper part of the wall. They cheered with joy, "Where there is water, there is hope! We've found our way out!"

After shouting, Huo Xiaoli felt her throat was extremely dry and hoarse, so she reached out to catch the water droplets falling from above. Soon, a small puddle of water gathered in her palm, and as if possessed, she lowered her head to lick it to quench her thirst.

But Huo Zhixing stopped him with lightning speed, "What are you doing!"

Huo Xiaoli was startled. When she came to her senses, she realized that her hands were in great pain and the back of her neck was also sore.

Zhang Wuxun and the others were staring at him with serious expressions. "How is he? Has he woken up?"

Huo Xiaoli was a little confused. When she looked down, she realized that her hands were covered in blood, and the bloodstains had flowed down her wrists to her elbows.

"What... what's wrong with me?" Huo Xiaoli asked, looking completely bewildered.

Zhang Wuxun took out hemostatic gauze and Yunnan Baiyao from his backpack and asked Huo Zhixing to stop the bleeding for the silly boy.

“The minerals here are a bit strange. You just licked one and suddenly went berserk, trying to crawl into the wall with your hands and feet, lunging and slamming at it, and we couldn’t stop you.” Zhang Wuxun pointed to the two large blobs of blood on the wall in front of him. “Oh right, you were also like a puppy, sticking out your tongue and licking the dirty water on the stone wall. I had no choice but to knock you out.”

After hearing this, Huo Xiaoli subconsciously looked at Huo Zhixing and saw that he nodded as well. Only then did she believe that she had really been poisoned and hallucinated after licking the water on the stone wall.

Huo Zhixing smiled and comforted him, "Once we get out, we'll have the doctor with us take a look at you. It should just be simple hallucinogenic poisoning, like eating undercooked poisonous mushrooms. Find a place to sit down first, and after I bandage you up, we'll continue on our way."

Huo Xiaoli nodded, bent her knees and sat down, then realized something was wrong with the sensation under her buttocks. Looking down, she exclaimed, "Holy crap! Why is it wet here?"

Zhang Wuxun rolled his eyes, ignored him, tore the cloth he had cut from Huo Zhixing's body in half, gave half to the young man, and then carefully wiped the stains off the skull knife.

Huo Zhixing smiled and explained to him, "You've been unconscious for over an hour. Master Yu guessed it must have been raining outside. The rainwater seeped in through the cracks in the rocks and gathered into small streams on the ground. You didn't look closely and just happened to sit on a puddle."

"Oh, I see." Huo Xiaoli smiled sheepishly.

After waking up passively, the kid's previous energetic state returned.

"Brother Zhixing, just wrap me up however you like, let's hurry up and get out of this hellhole as soon as possible."

Huo Xiaojiu opened an energy gel and stuffed it into his mouth, saying irritably, "Shut up already, save your energy. If it weren't for you delaying us, we might already be out of here."

After wiping the knife, Zhang Wuxun sheathed it. "Alright, alright, stop nagging. Let's walk as far as we can while we still have the strength. We've been trapped here for five days now, and those people outside must be getting really worried."

﹉﹉﹉

outside world.

On the second night after Zhang Wuxun and the others were trapped underground, Fatty led his men to search the mountain but to no avail. Urged by the Huo family, they had no choice but to temporarily descend the mountain and wait until dawn.

For the next three or four days, the fat man led his men to search for people all over the mountain. He transformed into a furious lion, and a single word from someone could ignite his powder keg.

Grandma Huo, who was initially calm, gradually became a little anxious.

She wasn't sure if those people had perished on the ground or had stumbled upon the entrance to the Zhang Family Ancient Building by accident, a thought that made her extremely uneasy.

On the fourth night, a torrential rainstorm caused the lake to swell and a landslide occurred on a nearby mountain. The exploration work had to be put on hold, and all personnel were evacuated to a place a little further away from the lake to set up camp.

The signal was also poor during the thunderstorm, and Huo Xiuxiu and the others at the foot of the mountain lost contact.

Huo Xiangu knew her days were numbered. This time, she had spent a huge amount of manpower and resources. If she still couldn't find the Zhang Family Ancient Building, then everything she had done over the past ten years would be in vain.

"No!" Huo Xiangu gritted her teeth. "I will never give up until the very last moment, even if it costs me my old life."

On the other side, the fat man sat at the entrance of the tent with the curtains up, listening to the pounding of rain against the tent fabric, his face full of melancholy, sighing repeatedly.

"Damn it, if I had known it would turn out like this, I would have gone into the water with Muyu and Zhang Qiling. It would have been better than staying in this shabby tent and worrying all the time."

Just then, a dark shadow suddenly appeared in front of me.

"The old lady invites you over." Huo Zhizhi stood in front of him, holding a black umbrella.

The fat man found everything about the Huo family members displeasing, snorted, and turned away, not wanting to acknowledge them at all.

Huo Zhizhi patiently said, "My grandmother invites you over to discuss the search for people on the mountain tomorrow."

Upon hearing this, the fat man finally looked at him properly, stood up, patted his butt, folded up his stool, and cursed, "Where the hell were you all this time? You only think of finding a toilet when you're desperate to poop. Coming up the mountain in this heavy rain, are you looking for someone or going to your death?"

Huo Zhizhi remained silent. "Alright, what nonsense are you spouting, you're like a damn gourd with its mouth sawed off." The fat man went back to the tent, put down his small stool, and followed Huo Zhizhi to Old Madam Huo's tent.

Huo Xiangu sat in a chair, wrapped in a thick blanket, drinking cup after cup of medicinal tea, but her complexion did not improve.

Upon seeing the fat man enter, he didn't waste any unnecessary words and went straight to the point: "Regardless of whether the rain stops tomorrow, I will send people up the mountain to search the areas that have not yet been explored."

The fat man looked at her and sneered, "What? You even went out of your way to personally inform me, Fatty?"

Huo Xiangu raised her eyelids slightly. "If you want to come up the mountain with me, I will naturally not stop you. If you don't want to go, no one will force you."

"I don't have time to waste with your nonsense right now. We agreed to go up the mountain tomorrow morning, so don't go back on your word," the fat man said coldly.

Huo Xiangu said calmly, "Of course not."

Although the rain didn't stop the next day, the intensity of the rain decreased significantly.

Fatty and his friends braved the drizzle to climb the mountain, and this time Huo Zhizhi followed along.

The grass on the mountain was slippery and muddy, and one could easily slip and fall. Everyone walked with trepidation.

Around noon, the nearby mountains suddenly shook violently, and the birds living in the treetops cried out and fluttered their wings and flew around.

At first, everyone thought it was a mudslide and hurriedly climbed up the high slope in front of them.

However, the aftershocks lasted only a few minutes before the activity ceased.

The fat man sensed something was wrong and quickly asked Huo Zhizhi for binoculars to look into the distant mountain valley.

He noticed that a large plume of smoke was rising from the ravine in the misty, damp air, as if someone had set fire to the dead tree roots below.

"Wait a minute!" The fat man realized there might be people in that ravine. He immediately connected the violent tremors with the fact that they were caused by someone. He hurriedly threw the binoculars back to Huo Zhizhi and pointed there, shouting, "Quick, let's go over there! There's smoke over there. They've probably already come out from underground!"

Upon hearing this, Huo Zhizhi hurriedly told his staff to speed up and head over there.

Just over ten minutes ago.

Following the sound of the flowing water, Zhang Wuxun and his companions finally found a crevice in the mountain rock that was emitting light.

However, the crack was too narrow, less than a hand's breadth wide, so even if one shrank their body, their head couldn't fit through.

Furthermore, the distance between Zhang Wuxun and his group's location in this sunlit crevice and the outside was at least two meters, making it impossible to dig by force.

Zhang Wuxun had no choice but to use his backpack as a cover, and then selected two slightly more powerful time bombs from his spatial storage, placed them near the crevice in the rock, and detonated them after a countdown.

This is the reason for the violent shaking of the mountain just now.

A large arched hole, about two people wide, was blasted open in the rock crevice. Zhang Wuxun and his group of five crawled out one after another and found themselves on a sloping cliff. The surrounding area was full of bushes and shrubs about one person tall. However, what shocked them even more was a huge ancient tree that stood in front of them, half withered and rotten and half lush and verdant.

The ancient tree was covered with dense vines, and its thick root system stretched out in all directions, extending directly to the slope beneath Zhang Wuxun and the others' feet.

Zhang Wuxun recalled the ancient tree that blocked the entrance to the ancient building in the original plot and immediately associated it with the tree in front of him.

The group slid down the slope, grabbed onto the vines, and climbed up to the trunk of the ancient tree.

Zhang Wuxun pulled out the short knife from his combat boot and called Huo Zhixing and the others to cut the vines that were wrapped around the withered part of the tree trunk. Sure enough, they found a gap behind it that they could squeeze through sideways.

Zhang Wuxun jumped down, and the young man followed closely behind.

Huo Zhixing and the other two were still nervously watching the two jump down, not understanding why Zhang Wuxun would suddenly do such a thing.

After crawling into the crevice and descending five or six meters, the crevice gradually widened and showed obvious signs of human repair and reinforcement, which proved that Zhang Wuxun's conjecture was correct.

Zhang Wuxun's face lit up with joy as he turned to the young man following behind him and said, "This is clearly a man-made tunnel. We may have already found the entrance to the ancient building."

The young man reached out, touched the dry rock wall, nodded, and said, "Go back."

"Alright, this passage is still too narrow. Go back and tell Grandma Huo to send someone to fix this place." Having finally found the entrance to the ancient building, Zhang Wuxun breathed a sigh of relief. Now it was up to Wu Xiaoxie and the others.

The two quickly returned the way they came. Huo Zhixing and the other two had been waiting anxiously outside. When they finally saw the two emerge, they were so happy that they almost cried tears of joy. They quickly dropped the thick vines and pulled the two up.

"Judging from your expressions, have you made some unexpected discovery?" Huo Zhixing asked, puzzled.

Zhang Wuxun chuckled and patted him on the shoulder, "We've searched high and low, but suddenly found a new path. Our mission is complete."

Huo Zhixing stared wide-eyed in disbelief. "You mean... you found the entrance?"

Zhang Wuxun chuckled, "Why would I lie to you? But six times is still a bit low. If your old lady doesn't raise my commission, all the suffering I've endured these past five days will have been for nothing."

Huo Xiaoli was still a little stunned and hadn't come to her senses. "No way, it's already found? So easy... Damn, that's incredibly difficult!"

Huo Xiaoli shouted excitedly, startling the birds that had just landed, causing them to fly away again.

Huo Xiaojiu couldn't hide his joy, but he remained relatively rational. "Master Yu, we don't know how far this place is from the lake. We're lost in the jungle and won't be able to find our way for a while. Why don't we light a fire and let the smoke rise? That way, when people down the mountain see the smoke, they'll definitely think of us."

Zhang Wuxun snapped his fingers. "Good idea. There's firewood here, let's just start a fire."

Huo Zhixing and his two companions immediately sprang into action, prying open the outer layer of the ancient tree that had been soaked by rainwater, and using a flint to start a fire directly from inside the rotten, hollow trunk.

The fire quickly grew larger, and the thick smoke from the fire, combined with the moisture rising from the damp tree bark, turned the entire valley into a white expanse, resembling a fairyland.

It's a bit too pungent, so I'll give it a bad review!

Thank you so much to the generous donor 【年少时最是天真】! Sending you a huge heart! ヾ(▽)ノ

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(End of this chapter)