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

Chapter 377 After the End

The icy water jolted Pan Zi out of his dazed state of mind. Seeing the large red stains spreading in the water, his brain told him that the wooden fish was injured and he needed to save it quickly. However, he couldn't move anything from the waist down.

He stretched out his arm to grab the hand hanging in front of his eyes in the water, but his fingertips brushed past it three times in a row. He could only watch helplessly as Zhang Wuxun gradually sank to the bottom of the water.

He struggled to swim and pull Zhang Wuxun out, but he could only move one arm and couldn't keep up with the speed at which Zhang Wuxun was falling. The water was deep and dark, and he couldn't see where Zhang Wuxun had fallen.

How to do?How to do?
An overwhelming despair welled up inside him, and the suffocation in his chest threatened to drown him. He couldn't grasp the wooden fish, just as he couldn't grasp the squad leader's hand back then. There were things in the swamp, dragging the squad leader down. The squad leader was still alive, but he couldn't hold on...

With a loud bang, the squad leader detonated the grenade, and black, foul-smelling mud covered the ground. He was thrown away by the blast and crashed into a hard stone slab.

All the light before my eyes disappeared in the end, and the wooden fish also disappeared.

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"Haven't found it yet?"

Amidst the rumbling thunder and rain, Xie Yuchen stood at the tent entrance, his brow furrowed, the phone in his hand already quite hot from overuse.

"Send another batch of engineering teams."

After saying that, he hung up the phone and walked straight into the rain. His subordinates quickly followed and held an umbrella over his head.

The rain was heavy; the hunters who had been hired to come up the mountain all said it was the heaviest rain in Banna since the beginning of autumn.

People were constantly going in and out of the mountain pass crevice, carrying stones, with members of the Wu and Jie families helping out.

The passage has completely collapsed, and large excavating machines cannot be transported here; they can only dig by hand.

Rainwater poured into the cave along the shallow slope, and the people inside were completely soaked in mud and water, exhausted, but no one gave up, they dared not give up.

"Quick!" someone exclaimed, "Someone here has been knocked unconscious by a rock! Carry him out!"

After the chaos, a quarter of the people in the cave were gone.

When Xie Yuchen arrived, another batch of men were replaced. The new men collapsed on the ground and were carried by the others to a tent to rest.

"Young Master Jiu!"

A servant of the Xie family steward stepped forward and said, "Sir, be careful, this side has collapsed again."

Xie Yuchen nodded, walked to the other side of the cave and looked down, "Wu Xie and the other guy haven't come out yet?"

"No." Xie wiped the rain off his face and said, "I've tried to persuade them several times, but they refuse to come out. Master Pan went down just now too."

“Sir, this can’t go on. The rain shows no sign of stopping. In less than half an hour, the water will fill the entire cave.”

Xie Yuchen frowned and said to the shop assistant, "Give me a set of equipment, I'll go down and persuade them."

The manager was alarmed and hurriedly tried to stop him, saying, "No, sir, it's too dangerous in there. I'll go down myself."

Ignoring the warnings, Xie Yuchen went into the tent, changed into his diving gear, and then slid down the rope into the cave.

The cave's interior slopes downwards, forming a straight tubular stone passage.

Xie Yuchen swam more than twenty meters into the water, surfaced, and passed through the crowd.

The cave ceiling was only half a meter above the rippling water. He saw Wu Xiaoxie and Fatty covered in mud, diving into the water again and again, digging with their bare hands to remove the collapsed rocks that were blocking the passage.

Wu Xiaoxie's shoulder had been scratched by sharp pebbles at some point. The blood had long since been soaked away by water, and the wound was bluish-purple and white. His eyes behind his goggles were bloodshot. He was on the verge of a mental breakdown and had completely fallen into madness.

The fat man was also dressed in tattered clothes, shirtless and soaking in the water, with cuts and scrapes all over his arms and stomach, but he seemed not to feel any pain.

Knowing that the two were in no condition to communicate, Xie Yuchen swam over and knocked them unconscious. He then called over the managers and employees who had followed him to take the two men out, while he went to persuade Pan Zi.

“This place will be flooded soon. Wu Xie, you’re impulsive. You can’t be like him. You have to be responsible for the lives of the guys behind you. They can’t just die here with you.”

Xie Yuchen's tone was cold; he knew that such words were most effective against someone like Pan Zi.

Pan Zi paused, looked up, and Xie Yuchen couldn't tell whether the water on his face was mud or tears. His expression was one of extreme sadness, his eyes were broken, as if something had been reassembled at this moment and then collapsed again.

In less than two days, most of his hair had turned white.

Despair and grief spread silently, and everyone stopped what they were doing and watched him in silence.

Pan Zi slowly raised his hand to cover his face, a suppressed sob escaping his throat. He couldn't cry; countless voices exploded in his mind, telling him, "The wooden fish is dead—"

"The wooden fish is really dead—"

He killed the wooden fish!
"It was I who killed the wooden fish..."

My mind, which had been in a daze for so long, clearly conveyed this fact at this moment.

In his search for Third Master, he caused the death of Third Master's brother.

The dull rumble of thunder echoed in the cave, and the rain continued to pour in, soon reaching chest height.

Everyone remained silent, none of them moving, all waiting for instructions.

"Get out of here," Pan Zi said in a hoarse voice. "Everyone get out of here and wait for the rain to stop before you start digging again."

Everyone evacuated the cave.

On the third day, the torrential rain finally stopped.

Wu Xiaoxie and the others didn't believe that Zhang Wuxun would be in trouble.

"How could he possibly die? He's a member of the Zhang family! He's Zhang Wuxun!"

"Brother, don't you think so? How could Muyu possibly die? He's so powerful; he even managed to escape from Miluotuo's encirclement. How could he possibly drown so easily in a pool of water..."

The young man remained silent, neither denying nor affirming.

Wu Xiaoxie felt a chill in his heart, because it meant that Xiao Ge couldn't be sure.

Even Xiao Ge couldn't be sure if Zhang Wuxun would have survived under those circumstances.

Mu Yu's current situation is definitely very dangerous. The engineering team that Xie Yuchen brought has been pumping water since morning, and Wu Xiaoxie and the others are waiting on the side. Everyone is anxious. The longer it goes on, the less hope Zhang Wuxun has of surviving.

Even if they didn't believe it, they had to admit that Zhang Wuxun was still just a mortal, and he would die from excessive blood loss.

What Wu Xiaoxie and Fatty found most unacceptable was that they returned to the cave after waiting outside for Zhang Wu to come out, only to find Pan Zi in the water.

But they didn't see Zhang Wuxun. The water was too dark, and none of them saw that Zhang Wuxun was underwater at that time.

They missed their last chance to save Zhang Wuxun.

"Just before we came out, someone ambushed the wooden fish," Pan Zi said in a low voice. He had completely hidden the grief on his face and became terrifyingly silent.

"Who is it? Which son of a bitch?" the fat man asked him, his eyes bloodshot, looking like he could pounce on him and kill him at any moment.

"I don't know, I only saw that the wooden fish was bleeding a lot, and the water was all stained red." Pan Zi tried his best to remain calm as he recalled that part.

“It was a gun. Someone shot Muyu. Muyu was carrying me on his back and was completely unprepared. That shot must have been very serious. Muyu… Muyu carried me into the water, but he didn’t surface again because of blood loss.”

This memory overlapped with a certain moment in his past life. Panzi closed his eyes, overwhelmed by a sudden sense of powerlessness, and his hands trembled slightly uncontrollably.

"Didn't you grab him?" His hand was suddenly gripped tightly. The grip was strong, and Wu Xiaoxie's vision had blurred. He could only hold on to Pan Zi tightly, as this was the only way he could grasp the last glimmer of hope.

"Young Master... I'm sorry..." Pan Zi lowered his head, his face pale.

Wu Xiaoxie shuddered, as if he had finally accepted the fact. He squatted on the ground, a mix of complex emotions welling up inside him, and tears finally fell. His mind was filled with the last few words Zhang Wuxun had said.

"I should have realized something was wrong sooner..." he lamented.

Perhaps it was the sheer power that Muyu had always displayed that made him complacent, thinking that there was nothing Muyu couldn't solve. So when Muyu said those words, he didn't realize at all that Muyu was saying goodbye to him.

It turns out that miracles in the world are not eternal, or rather, there are no miracles at all, and everything is just a coincidence. Now, the coincidences are finally over.

The fat man suddenly cursed, "I know who it is!"

Wu Xiaoxie belatedly turned her head to look at him.

"It's that deformed man!" the fat man shouted. "He said that only he can move freely in the ancient building. Before we went in, he said that he wouldn't let anyone take the secret out of here alive. But Muyu saved us all. That guy must have been furious, so he sabotaged the water-filling mechanism, trying to poison us with alkaline gas. Muyu was the one who ambushed us in the end. He hid a gun in the cave. He stole my little Doraemon."

“Come on, Tianzhen, let’s go to the back mountain and catch that deformed man. He’s been here for so long, he must have a way to get back into the ancient building.” Fatty said, reaching for his gun, and said to Xie Yuchen, “Dahua, lend me one of your guns.”

Xie Yuchen didn't dwell on the issue of his form of address, but simply frowned, "Are you sure you can find him? The area behind the mountain is so large, he could easily hide anywhere, how are you going to find him?"

"What else can we do?" the fat man roared. "Am I just going to sit here and wait like this?"

After saying that, he turned around and pulled Wu Xiaoxie up, "Come on, Tianzhen, let's go to his lair and wait for him. He'll be back sooner or later."

The young man pursed his lips, took one last look at the cave, and then turned to walk with them.

Pan Zi was about to follow when he suddenly remembered something and hurriedly called out to Wu Xiaoxie, "Third Master, wait, Muyu has something for you."

The fat man was about to explode at the mere mention of the word "wooden fish," thinking that Pan Zi was trying to use it as an excuse to stall them. He was instantly enraged and turned to start cursing.

Pan Zi anxiously said to Xie Yuchen, "Please trouble Master Hua to have your men retrieve something from Third Master Xiao San's Wu Shan Residence as soon as possible."

"What is it?" Xie Yuchen asked him.

“It’s a white wooden box with carvings. Muyu left it with me before. He said that after Young Master San returns from Mount Siguniang, I should find a time to give the box to him,” Panzi said.

Seeing that he spoke with such conviction, not like he was making it up, the fat man pulled Wu Xiaoxie back, "What box? When did the wooden fish leave it to you?"

“Just recently, Muyu said that you and the Huo and Jie families were cooperating to capture lamas, and that you were splitting up. Muyu suddenly came to see me and left me a white wooden carved box. He also said at the time…”

"What did you say?" the fat man hurriedly asked.

"Why didn't Muyu give me the box himself?" Wu Xiaoxie pressed, and upon hearing that Zhang Wuxun had left a message beforehand, he suddenly had a very bad feeling.

"He said he has to go to Motuo in southern Tibet, and time is very tight, so he entrusted..." Pan Zi paused, realizing something was wrong, "Third Master, could it be that Muyu had a premonition of something, and that's why..."

Xie Yuchen's mind was clearer than theirs at this moment. "Have you seen what's in the box?"

“No, the box has a lock,” Pan Zi said. “Because I was coming to Banna, I was worried something might happen on the way, so I asked Jin He to send the box to Wu Shan Ju and give it to Wang Meng to keep safe.”

Xie Yuchen immediately called his men and asked them to pick up the box.

Even with the efficiency of Xie Yuchen's men, it would take at least three days to get from Hangzhou to Banna.

The excavation of the collapsed cave continued, and Wu Xiaoxie and his two companions went to the back mountain to look for the collapsed shoulder, only to find that there was no trace of life there anymore, and the rain had also submerged the cave of the collapsed shoulder.

"Damn it, that bastard never came back at all." The fat man gritted his teeth, coughing and cursing.

The remaining toxins in his lungs hadn't been completely cleared, and the fat man was so anxious that he couldn't stay in his hospital bed any longer.

He dared not rest. As soon as he stopped, he began to feel unwell, as if his whole body was strapped with detonators and could explode at any moment.

The young man waded into the cave and searched it out. "This place has been abandoned for a long time."

In other words, after Wu Xiaoxie and the others entered the cave, the man with the collapsed shoulders, who had initially said he wouldn't go in, followed them closely, determined to ensure that they all died inside the ancient building.

There are too many caves nearby that could hide people, and the rain has long since washed away all traces. The young man led them to explore all the mountains in the vicinity, but they found nothing. Even the army of lynxes that the man with the hunchback raised had not reappeared.

The slumped shoulders seem to have truly vanished from the face of the earth.

Meanwhile, Jude Kao's team had already withdrawn from Banna. He had gotten what he wanted and could now be completely free from this world.

The Huo family's ranks had also undergone a major change. When Wu Xiaoxie and his group came out, the ranks outside the sealed gate had been completely occupied by Huo Youxue and Huo Daofu.

Huo Zhizhi was placed under house arrest, Huo Qiji died, and Huo Xiaojiu disappeared.

It turns out that Huo Zhixing had always been Huo Youxue's man, and it was he who had been secretly sending messages, which is why Huo Youxue and the others reacted so quickly.

Although Huo Zhizhi was imprisoned, his life was not in immediate danger. After all, he was his younger brother, and even though they belonged to different factions, he still saved Huo Zhizhi's life.

The chapter on the Hidden Sea Flower will follow later.
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(End of this chapter)