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

Chapter 391 Blood Relatives' Support

Zhang Wuxun took off his gas mask and sniffed carefully. Yes, that was the smell.

Something seemed to get stuck in his throat, and Zhang Wuxun gagged reflexively before quickly putting on a new gas mask.

Help! I really can't take it anymore!

Zhang Wuxun quickened his pace; he needed to find Xiao Ge quickly and then burn the whole place down to the ground.

The passageway here is built like a spiral shell on a snail's back. Zhang Wuxun can feel himself going in a clockwise circle, and the number of turns is getting fewer and fewer, while the rotation is getting larger and larger, which means that he is moving towards the center of the spiral.

The space in front of them suddenly expanded, and Zhang Wuxun immediately saw the young man standing in the center of the stone chamber, holding a tinderbox.

Just as Zhang Wuxun was about to speak, the young man suddenly turned to look at him, putting his index finger to his lips in a "shh" gesture.

Zhang Wuxun immediately fell silent, cautiously walked to his side, and glanced in the direction the young man was staring at, and was immediately startled.

There was an enormous yellowish-gray cocoon hanging in mid-air.

Ma Chongshan, who had just run away, was also here. He was completely bald, and it was unclear whether his clothes had been worn away when Zhang Wuxun was chasing him.

At this moment, Ma Chongshan was kneeling prostrate beneath the cocoon in an extremely humble posture.

Zhang Wuxun looked around and saw that it was an oval-shaped stone chamber, with many wooden beams and pillars crisscrossing around it, forming a lattice and pavilion shape. The cocoon that Zhang Wuxun had just seen was hanging on the carved wooden pole in the center of the pavilion.

The surrounding walls were covered with fluffy filaments, like a carpet.

Beneath these silk threads are many smaller square wooden grids, each containing a ball of silk the size of a millstone.

These chessboard-like grids are essentially magnified dozens or even hundreds of times the squares used by silkworms to spin silk.

Zhang Wuxun stared in disbelief. It turned out that what was underneath wasn't a moth at all, but a gigantic silkworm!
Ma Chongshan lay prostrate on the steps beneath the enormous, truck-like cocoon, his posture extremely humble, muttering something that sounded like a spell.

Because he was facing away from Zhang Wuxun, Zhang Wuxun couldn't see his mouth and therefore couldn't read his lips.

Zhang Wuxun peered at the scene, but couldn't figure it out. He then leaned close to the young man's ear and whispered, "What is Ma Chongshan doing? Could it be that he's gone mad from inhaling too much of the black cocoon flour outside?"

"Dead," the young man said softly.

"Huh?" Zhang Wuxun was a little confused. Wasn't he still chanting incantations? How could he have died? Could the one speaking now be the ghost of Ma Chongshan whose obsession hadn't been eliminated? That's too far-fetched.

Zhang Wuxun gestured to the young man, indicating that he would go over and check what was going on.

After taking a couple of steps, he noticed that the young man had followed him, staring at the scabbed bite mark on the back of his left hand, his brow furrowing slightly.

Zhang Wuxun casually waved his hand and said with a silent smile, "It's nothing, I didn't feel anything unusual."

The young man led him to the side of the pavilion, gestured for him to squat down, and pointed to Ma Chongshan's thin, bony abdomen.

Zhang Wuxun's gaze immediately froze upon seeing this.

Holy crap! What the hell is that? When did Ma Chongshan turn into a big, grayish-brown silkworm?!

Several pairs of abdominal feet had grown from Ma Chongshan's chest to his abdomen. His skin was empty and limp, hanging limply to the side. His head also seemed to have become an empty shell, with two rows of fine jaws protruding from his throat, which were his mouthparts.

So this is what bit Zhang Wuxun's hand earlier.

Zhang Wuxun felt a chill run down his spine. He finally understood that there must have been a silkworm living inside Ma Chongshan's body before. However, after entering the well, for some unknown reason, the silkworm inside him suddenly lashed out and devoured him, eating all his internal organs and leaving him with an empty shell.

The murmuring sound was actually the large silkworm's mouthparts still gnawing at Ma Chongshan's empty shell.

The reason why Ma Chongshan's skin suddenly started peeling off in large patches was probably because his insides had been eaten away, and his body was starting to shed and molt under the corrosive effects of the silkworm's saliva. No wonder his crawling movements were so insect-like.

Judging from the length of its abdominal legs, the silkworm hidden inside Ma Chongshan's shell must be over a meter long.

Thinking of this, Zhang Wuxun's expression changed. He looked at the largest cocoon above, and his bad feeling intensified.

Good heavens, if that's the case, then if the silkworm moths inside those giant cocoons hanging above were to emerge, wouldn't they be able to blow him and his brother away with a single flap of their wings?

As Zhang Wuxun got closer, he saw a large area behind the pavilion, piled with many large, blanket-like, dried, yellowish-brown old silkworm molts, the color of which looked very ominous.

Zhang Wuxun narrowed his eyes, pulled out several large bottles of alcohol from his spatial storage, held a lighter, looked at the young man, and said in a deep voice, "Start burning it directly?"

The young man pressed his hand down, staring intently at the large silkworm still hidden inside Ma Chongshan's belly, and said, "Wait a little longer."

Zhang Wuxun asked in confusion, "Waiting for what?"

The young man said casually, "Waiting to mate."

"Cough cough cough..." Zhang Wuxun almost choked to death, and took a difficult breath. "Brother, do you mean that after Ma Chongshan's silkworm hatches from its cocoon, it will mate with the giant moth that emerges from the cocoon?"

The young man nodded without saying a word.

Zhang Wuxun thought to himself, "Wow, I've really learned something new today."

Since the young man said he would wait, he must have some concerns. Maybe by puberty, the fighting power of these two big-headed silkworms will be a little weaker.
Judging from the size difference of the cocoons, the last one to emerge from the upper cocoon should be the female silkworm moth, while the one that emerged from Ma Chongshan's body is the male silkworm moth.

"How long will it take?" he asked.

The young man shook his head, indicating that he didn't know either.

Zhang Wuxun counted on his fingers. It usually takes ten to twenty-four hours for an ordinary silkworm to go from spinning silk to emerging from its cocoon and becoming a moth. These two giant silkworms might take even longer. Well, this time we'll have to wait.

He was about to take out a handful of sunflower seeds and wait leisurely when the young man suddenly reached out and pressed on the scar on the back of his left hand, saying, "Pry it open, there's something inside." Zhang Wuxun's expression changed, and he immediately took out his medical kit, disinfected it, and used a scalpel to peel off the scab and cut open the skin.

The sharp tip of the knife easily plucked several shriveled eggs from the bright red flesh. The yellowish-white eggshells had rings of black spirals on their surface. Each egg was only the size of a sesame seed, extremely tiny, but they didn't look like silkworm eggs.

However, due to the special nature of Zhang Wuxun's blood, these parasitic eggs were killed under his skin before they could hatch.

Zhang Wuxun cursed himself for being careless. These small parasitic eggs must have been transmitted to him through the mouthparts of the large silkworm inside Ma Chongshan's body. He thought that he wouldn't be poisoned if the blood in the wound didn't change color, but he didn't expect that the flesh worm had this trick up its sleeve.

Zhang Wuxun painily used tweezers to carefully remove all the small eggs from the wound, totaling seventy-six. He then had the young man examine the flesh with a magnifying glass to make sure there were no more eggs inside before he was relieved.

Because the wound was cut open and they searched through the flesh, blood had flowed down the back of their hand, dripping onto the ground and spreading out.

Zhang Wuxun frowned with heartache. He had finally managed to raise such a tiny little thing, but that damned big bug had made him waste so much.

It was inconvenient to operate with one hand, so Zhang Wuxun stretched out his hand and watched the young man carefully apply medicine and bandage him, feeling very happy.

The giant silkworm inside Ma Chongshan's body stayed under the pavilion for half an hour. The upper half of the human skin shell on its back had been eaten away, and Ma Chongshan's head was still on the silkworm's head. It looked like a monster with a human head that had only partially transformed was lying there.

The brain-eating silkworm, carrying the remaining half of the human skin, slowly crawled onto a wooden shelf to the side.

"It's about to spin silk, it's about to spin silk." Zhang Wuxun looked at the place where the brain silkworm had crawled over, where there were many neatly arranged, millstone-sized, beige cocoons on the wooden grid.

A thought suddenly occurred to him, and he whispered, "Hey bro, those big cocoons in those wooden lattice boxes, could they all have been made by people who ate silkworms?"

The young man was also staring in that direction, his expression indifferent. "Perhaps."

Zhang Wuxun clicked his tongue inwardly. This damned Ma Chongshan had done a lot of harm. What exactly was he trying to do by raising so many silkworms with human flesh here?
He carefully considered in his mind all that had happened since he entered the ancient well, as well as all that Ma Chongshan had said.

Apart from the sudden appearance of the Wang family, who seemed to be very aggressive, there was nothing else that seemed to be connected to the ancient city of Sizhou. He also did not see any patterns related to the Scorpion Tomb here.

No, if these things really had nothing to do with the ancient city of Sizhou, the young man wouldn't have traveled all this way here. He clearly knows something, which is why he came to deal with it before going to Changbai Mountain.

The eggs that entered his wound through the mouthparts of the brain silkworm were also strange in appearance. He had previously thought they didn't look like silkworm eggs, but rather like the eggs of some kind of moth.

Based on Zhang Wuxun's limited experience in silkworm raising, silkworms only mate and lay eggs using their tails after they emerge from their cocoons and become moths. Before that brain-sized silkworm was in the form of a silkworm egg, where did the eggs in its mouth come from?

Not to mention that the silkworm that ate Ma Chongshan might have been male.

From this perspective, the black lumps hanging in the outer passage are not the same species as these silkworms. Therefore, they must have a symbiotic relationship of predator and prey. The pupae outside are the reserve food for the giant silkworms living here.

These giant silkworms enter their mating season in winter, while the ghost moths outside happen to be dormant in winter, making them easier to eat, since the dormant moths won't struggle or resist.

The silkworm parasitizing Ma Chongshan's body was eating the pupae when Zhang Wuxun got angry and bit him, or perhaps it wanted to eat Zhang Wuxun as well, thus getting its eggs into the back of his hand.

So the question is, where did Ma Chongshan get this giant silkworm that could grow into a behemoth?

Was it given to him by the Wang family, or did Ma Chongshan get it from somewhere else?

Or perhaps, Ma Chongshan was raising this silkworm on behalf of the Wang family.

The Wang family is using Ma Chongshan as a tool for experimentation!
From this perspective, those two members of the Wang family were actually sent to silence them.

Zhang Wuxun chuckled. He had to admit that there were quite a few twists and turns in this, and he almost got caught up in them himself.

The most important thing now is to figure out Ma Chongshan's purpose in raising these silkworms, and the origin of these mutated silkworms.

What exactly was the reason that made Ma Chongshan work so diligently for the Wang family, a purpose so important that he was willing to sacrifice the lives of his family members for it?

Zhang Wuxun frowned slightly, habitually tapping his knees absentmindedly, gathering all the clues in his mind and carefully considering their connections.

Supplies of flesh and blood, the flesh and blood of the Ma family...family...flesh and blood...supplied—a silkworm, a gigantic mutated silkworm...

...The silkworm inside Ma Chongshan's body suddenly erupted, devouring its master...devouring...devouring—raising silkworms...raising...

Medog, in the southern part of Tibet, in the Himalayas!
Zhang Wuxun's eyelids twitched slightly, and something flashed through his mind.

He immediately looked at the young man, his mouth moved, but before he could say his guess, the young man seemed to sense something, turned to look at him, his eyes calm.

Zhang Wuxun silently chuckled to himself. No wonder, no wonder. Now everything makes sense.

It seems that the sudden change in Ma Chongshan's life is related to the Wang family's silencing of him and his brother coming to his door.

Ma Chongshan probably realized that the Wang family wanted to discard him after using him, and because the Zhang family's blood was special and would affect the silkworms, he secretly swallowed the silkworm eggs he had been hiding on his body behind Zhang Wuxun's back in a moment of desperation. That's why he was eaten by the silkworms and left with only a bare skin in the ancient well passage.

In fact, if the Evil-Trapping Formation is done well, with slight modifications to its interior, it can achieve both suppression and nurturing, which is the so-called corpse-raising. The Wang family built a corpse-raising formation here to raise silkworms, which is quite an ambitious undertaking.

Having figured out the key to this, Zhang Wuxun kept a straight face, raised his bandaged hand, and gave the young man an OK sign, indicating that he understood and that his hand was fine.

The young man nodded, then turned back to watch as the man climbed onto the wooden frame and began spitting silk from his mouthparts.

Silk is initially a translucent liquid, but it quickly solidifies into soft threads upon contact with air.

The brain silkworm, with Ma Chongshan's head on its head, kept circling in a figure eight shape, as if it were drunk. Its head swayed and its body kept crawling in the wooden grid, and soon it formed the prototype of an oval cocoon.

Zhang Wuxun and Xiao Ge sat quietly in the corner and waited. The speed at which the brain silkworm spun silk was faster than expected. In just four hours, the silk it spun had already wrapped its entire body in layers.

The large cocoon was still wriggling inside, and it took another two hours for it to finally quiet down.

Thank you so much to the generous donor [Lost Memories, But Not You]! Sending you lots of love!
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(End of this chapter)