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

Chapter 325 Watertight
But what they need to do now is figure out how this thing works.

Because the iron plate did not have a pattern similar to that in the photo, the three sides of the cave walls were covered with rough pits for placing bamboo slips.

"What should we do?" Xie Yuchen asked.

"First, let's push it clockwise according to the direction it's rotating, and see if we can make the iron plate spin faster," Wu Xiaoxie said.

Once you start using it, you'll find that it's very easy to push, but there's no machine expansion activation.

The two pushed against the current again and immediately felt resistance. Although it was difficult, they could clearly feel that when they applied force, it was like winding up a chain.

The two men exchanged a glance, then simultaneously increased their strength, struggling until their faces turned red and their necks bulged, until the iron plate finally started to rotate in the opposite direction. At the same time, a dull whirring sound of iron chains and gears rubbing together came from below.

Unfortunately, before he could even turn 90 degrees, Wu Xiaoxie felt that he couldn't exert any force no matter what. He looked at Xiao Hua on the other side and saw that she was in a similar situation, with the veins in her arms bulging, but the iron plate seemed to be stuck and didn't move at all.

Xie Yuchen gave up first, saying, "We don't have enough strength; you'll need to get an ox."

Wu Xiaoxie was exhausted and collapsed onto the iron plate, which was turned clockwise. He was panting heavily and it took him a long time to get up.

Xie Yuchen was about to toss him a bottle of water when he suddenly paused and asked, "What's that on your chest?"

Wu Xiaoxie looked down in confusion and discovered that a large patch of black coal dust had suddenly appeared on his chest. Because his protective suit was green, the patch looked very dirty. He then noticed that there was also some on his gloves.

Wu Xiaoxie was stunned for a moment, then immediately realized what was happening and turned to look at the large iron plate. He rubbed it with the back of his clean glove and saw that the back of his hand had indeed turned black. He frowned and said, "Why is the paint peeling off this thing?"

Upon closer inspection, it was discovered that the black substance contained many small particles, which turned into powder when rubbed between the fingers.

Wu Xiaoxie suddenly felt something was wrong, so he immediately used his dagger to scrape a small amount, about the size of a fingernail, from the grooves in the iron plate, crushed it, walked over to Xie Yuchen, put it on the ground, and asked him to unscrew the bottle cap and pour water to rinse it.

Although Xie Yuchen didn't understand why, he did as instructed.

Soon, the black powder was soaked in water, and Wu Xiaoxie stirred it with his dagger, turning it into a pool of blackish-red viscous liquid.

"Take a closer look." Wu Xiaoxie dipped the tip of his dagger into a little water and showed it to Xie Yuchen.

Xie Yuchen frowned as he glanced at it, his expression immediately changing. "This is...blood?"

“That’s right, it’s blood.” Wu Xiaoxie nodded. “Someone poured a lot of blood onto the iron plate, and more than once.”

“The dried blood layer on it is very thick, and the patterns on the iron plate are not patterns, but blood-drawing grooves,” Wu Xiaoxie continued. “Therefore, this is not an ordinary iron plate, but a sacrificial plate.”

Xie Yuchen poured some water onto the iron plate, and sure enough, he saw water stains spreading along the patterns on it.

As if it were alive, it slowly flowed to the edge of the iron plate, but instead of dripping to the ground, it flowed along the side of the iron plate to the bottom, and then began to flow towards the bottom pattern, gradually converging towards the axis.

Xie Yuchen was also a little surprised, then laughed and said, "So that's how this thing is used. It seems we really need to get a cow."

Wu Xiaoxie's expression was a little strange. "You said, is the blood on this human blood? The people of the Nine Gates shouldn't be that perverted, right?"

Upon hearing this, Xie Yuchen fell into an odd silence for a moment, then said, "It's hard to say."

Wu Xiaoxie grinned, "Then what should we do? I think it's going to be tough if we have to bleed. With our small builds, we'd be lucky to get enough blood for one cup."

"Forget about your cow's blood, it's too thick. Why don't we try pig's blood first?" Wu Xiaoxie suggested. "Pig's blood is most similar to human blood. I don't think that ancient machines could be so precise as to be able to distinguish such subtle differences in the types of blood."

Xie Yuchen nodded, "Getting blood is too much trouble, let's just bring up a pig."

Wu Xiaoxie wholeheartedly agreed. Directly using pig's blood would be too irritating to the hair on the outside, and might lead to some uncontrollable situation. Using a whole pig would be easier and would also ensure that the blood wouldn't coagulate.

But the problem is, how do we get the pigs in?

Wu Xiaoxie looked at Xie Yuchen, compared their arms, and immediately gave up the idea of ​​carrying the pig.

At this moment, he missed the fat guy who was the team's stamina provider, and the two guys who carried ancient swords weighing over 100 pounds and ran faster than rabbits in the ancient tomb.

He was acutely aware that without those three guys, his only redeeming quality was that he was still quite quick-witted.

Since that's the case, let's use the method that mental laborers are best at: come up with ideas. He looked at Xie Yuchen and said, "We need to drive a row of rock spikes into the top of the tunnel and use ropes and pulleys to bring the pigs in."

Xie Yuchen immediately agreed. The bloodstains he had smeared on his body had dried, and he was unsure if the effect would be reduced. So the two of them smeared blood on themselves again and went to the cave entrance.

Xie Yuchen used a walkie-talkie to notify his subordinates.

When the waiter first heard that his employer wanted them to find a way to hoist a pig up, he almost thought he had misheard.

After confirming it several times, and still full of questions, he bought a large pig from the nearest village.

Fortunately, one of the local workers had previously herded pigs in the mountains and knew how to herd them so they would behave and not run away. Otherwise, transporting a pig to the deep mountains would have been a difficult task for most people.

While waiting for the pigs, Wu Xiaoxie and his companion moved most of the equipment from outside the cave into the cave after setting up the rock bolts and transport equipment.

Then they cleaned away the original bloodstains on the sacrificial plate, making the patterns on the iron plate clearer. It looked like the shape of an unknown flower and showed signs of repair.

Unable to figure it out at first, Wu Xiaoxie took a picture with his camera, intending to send it to Xiao Ge and Mu Yu in Banna for them to see.

The next day, the sound of pigs grunting came through the walkie-talkie.

Wu Xiaoxie and his companion also set up a pulley system on the edge of the cliff above.

The workers below were worried that the pig would struggle and be difficult to handle once it was up high, so they used anesthesia to temporarily knock it unconscious, then tied its limbs and hoisted it up.

Upon reaching the cave entrance, an unbearable stench assaulted their senses, causing them to roll their eyes.

The two men put their gas masks back on and carried the pig into the cave like cargo. There was already a stone hook on the cave ceiling directly above the iron plate, and the two men hoisted the pig upside down onto it.

The ceiling of the cave wasn't very high to begin with, so once it was hung there, the pig's head was very close to the iron plate, so it could be eaten directly.

Watching the pig roll its eyes in a daze, Wu Xiaoxie raised and lowered the short knife in his hand, then handed it to Xie Yuchen, saying, "It's too bloody. I'm still a child, I can't do it. Why don't you do it?"

Xie Yuchen didn't take it, but smiled and took a step back. "You're more suitable. This knife is very sharp. Just slit it across your neck and blood will come out."

After the pig was hung up, the effects of the anesthesia gradually wore off. When it saw two men sharpening knives standing nearby, it immediately screamed in terror, its voice sharp and piercing, and struggled incessantly.

Xie Yuchen nudged Wu Xiaoxie from behind and teased, "Let's finish this quickly, Third Master."

Wu Xiaoxie was furious, "If you're so experienced, why didn't you come?"

Xie Yuchen smiled gently, "I usually don't make the other person bleed when I fight, I'm not used to it."

When Wu Xiaoxie saw the guy's unwavering expression, he knew that it was impossible to get the kid to make a move.

The pig was squealing like it was being slaughtered. Wu Xiaoxie gestured a couple of times on its thick neck, feeling a bit exasperated. He thought to himself that if Fatty were here, he would be fine, but he wondered if Fatty would actually kill his own kind.

But since the fat guy likes braised pork so much, he probably won't mind.

After a brief standoff, Wu Xiaoxie still couldn't bring himself to do it and asked, "Among your men, does anyone know how to butcher a pig?"

Xie Yuchen clicked his tongue in disdain, "How can you be so useless?"

Wu Xiaoxie said confidently, "The dignified Ninth Master of the Xie family, a well-known figure in the underworld, dares not even kill a pig. You have no right to criticize me."

Xie Yuchen gave him a strange look, shook his head with a smile, and went out to inform the workers below.

Wu Xiaoxie was left in the cave, facing the poor pig.

Upon hearing the request, the worker who had been herding the pigs volunteered to be hoisted up.

The guy was ruthless. Without saying a word, he chopped off a wine bottle, cut off the bottom, and then cut a sharp angle at the mouth. He found the right spot and stabbed it. Crimson blood flowed down the bottle onto the offering plate, and countless bloodstains began to crawl rapidly across the pattern.

The pig squealed for several minutes, but as it lost blood, it no longer had the strength to struggle and closed its eyes, barely clinging to life.

After the patterns on the sacrificial plate were completely filled with blood, three or four minutes later, the rotating iron plate suddenly jammed, and a series of "crackling" sounds of iron chains rubbing and dragging came from below.

Immediately afterwards, after a few muffled thuds, the sound of friction began to appear on the walls of the cave.

Wu Xiaoxie and the others gripped their knives and looked around warily, ready for any unexpected changes. Suddenly, the expressions on their faces turned somewhat astonished.

On the cave walls in three directions, the pits that were originally filled with bamboo slips suddenly began to move. All the bamboo slips were pushed out from inside, revealing strange protrusions that filled the cave walls into complete walls.

The object protruding from the cave wall looks like part of some kind of relief sculpture.

Wu Xiaoxie immediately took out the photos for comparison and carefully examined them. He found that the relief module in front of him had many similarities with the details in the photos, but obviously, the relief in front of him was more exquisite. However, the key parts of the stone wall had been knocked off by human hands.

Clearly, the iron plate in front of us is the mechanism that drives the reliefs to appear on the three walls.

The three holes in the photo, in order, seem to represent the opening behind him.

After carefully comparing the blood-stained iron plate with the photo, Wu Xiaoxie immediately noticed the problem.

At the intersection of the two largest patterns on the iron plate, there is a cross-shaped protrusion, but the position of this protrusion is different from that in the photo.

He hurriedly told Xie Yuchen about his discovery.

Xie Yuchen frowned upon hearing this. "It seems that the photo from Guangxi is an instruction manual, indicating how to proceed with the next step. If we treat that protrusion as a pointer and push the iron plate to the same position as in the photo, it may trigger the next mechanism."

Wu Xiaoxie nodded, "But we've already activated the mechanism once, and the iron plate can rotate. So even without this photo, randomly moving the iron plate would easily reveal the location in the photo. If this is some kind of secret clue, it would be too easy to figure out and has no practical significance."

Xie Yuchen agreed with his view: "The reason why a code is called a code is because it is complex enough. No matter what this iron plate is, if it is combined with the reliefs around it, then there are only four possible combinations. Anyone can figure it out."

"Have you heard of the contraction principle?" Seeing Wu Xiaoxie shake his head, Xie Yuchen patiently explained, "When you don't have many choices, in order to ensure the effectiveness of something, you will reduce the number of times you choose."

"Take defusing a bomb as an example," Xie Yuchen explained. "When you only have red, yellow, and green fuses in front of you, you can probably only cut them once, because if you cut the wrong one, it will explode."

After listening, Wu Xiaoxie looked at the four walls around him, then at the iron plate, and gasped. "You mean, if we want to turn this iron plate, we might only have one chance!"

He suddenly remembered that the Nine Gates had suffered heavy losses here before, and it was very likely that they had made a mistake, thus triggering an unimaginable deadly mechanism.

The danger wasn't the hairs outside that were attracted to human blood, nor the swarm of corpse beetles inside the pottery jar, but something else entirely that even the well-informed members of the Nine Gates found difficult to comprehend.

After all, their team was incredibly large, with no shortage of manpower and resources. They could have easily burned off the hair or used special techniques to move all the pottery jars away without alerting the Corpse Beetle King, given enough time.

Clearly, having the ability to scale walls and leap across rooftops like Xiaohua is a basic survival skill for the Nine Gates, so they don't care about the things outside and don't take them seriously at all.

Xie Yuchen said in a heavy tone, "If we turn the wrong way and the mechanism is activated, we can't predict what will happen next. More than one tragedy has happened here. We don't have the right to make mistakes without being absolutely certain and well-prepared."

Wu Xiaoxie stared blankly at Xie Yuchen, whose expression had suddenly turned cold and seemed like a completely different person. "Do you often solve problems in such a meticulous tone?"

"This is the code of conduct for the Xie family. Rigor is a family tradition ingrained in our bones from childhood." Xie Yuchen looked calmly at the iron plate covered in blood.

Wu Xiaoxie suddenly remembered that his grandfather had told him when he was a child that Master Xie Jiu of the Nine Gates was the most meticulous among them. He seemed to be able to see through things in advance, and his actions were completely watertight and incredibly cautious.

Thank you so much to the generous donors: [Dessert Shop Manager], [Shadow Guy y], [Dali Chen], and others! Sending you a huge heart!

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(End of this chapter)