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

Chapter 402 Deren's Corpse
There was no road connecting the temple to that uninhabited area.

There is only one place with a drop of more than 200 meters from top to bottom, so steep that it can be called a cliff. It is extremely dangerous and the most dangerous place near the entire Lama Temple.

The young lama naturally didn't believe it either, but he soon realized something was wrong, because where the person was standing, there was only a pair of lonely footprints, with no extension.

In such heavy snow, to achieve this effect, he would either have fallen from the sky or climbed down a cliff.

Although the young lama was surprised, his practice prevented him from asking too many questions about a matter, no matter how curious he was.

"Why did our distinguished guest stop at our door?" the young lama asked as usual.

The young man pointed to the charcoal stove and said, "It's warm here. I'll warm myself up for a bit and then I'll leave right away."

The young lama looked at him and suddenly had a strange thought: Could it be that the strange custom of this temple was so that every ten years, if someone passed by the door, there would be a place to warm up?
Or perhaps someone hopes that people passing by the temple gate will stop because of these three stoves.

Did the person who initially established this rule have a premonition of this after the temple was built? The young lama was a little afraid to think about it any further.

The person opposite was as quiet as a snowman, with the wisps of hair on his forehead ruffled by the wind, obscuring his eyes. His dark pupils seemed to absorb all the light that could shine through the wisps of hair into his eyes.

After standing on the wet snow for a long time, the young lama's feet began to feel cold, but he couldn't just turn around and leave, that would be too impolite.

The young lama was a little embarrassed, so he politely said, "It's warmer inside. Why don't you come in and rest for a while, and have a bowl of butter tea before you leave?"

It was just a polite question, but to my surprise, the young man nodded immediately and said, "Okay."

So the young lama led the young man into the temple, served him hot tea and food, arranged a room for him, and chatted casually for a while.

In the evening, the young lama carried an oil lamp and escorted the young man back to his room, but as they walked, he noticed that the guest seemed very familiar with the layout and layout of the temple.

Just as he was wondering to himself, he heard the young man ask him, "Does your Lama temple have a total of 127 rooms?"

The young lama paused for a moment, then turned his head and saw the young man looking up at the night sky. The night sky here was filled with stars, as beautiful as a dream.

He nodded in agreement, something he had known since he was very young when he first came to the temple. But the question was, how did this stranger know that? Was the brightest star in the sky exactly one hundred and twenty-seven?

The young lama couldn't help but look up at the sky, where there were countless stars of different sizes, making it impossible to distinguish between them.

Then the young man spoke up again, asking the young lama, "Excuse me, could you please let me see each room?"

The young lama's curiosity was almost overflowing, but the power of his spiritual practice restrained him, keeping him free from delusions and curiosity. He shouldn't have any extra interest in this matter.

The man before him was truly mysterious. Beneath his cool and aloof exterior lay many secrets. The young lama even wondered if he was sent by heaven to test his spiritual practice, and then nodded in agreement.

The Lama Temple hasn't had any visitors since the beginning of winter, so there's no need to worry about disturbing anything.

The young lama led the young man through the rooms one by one. After some time, when the young lama pushed open the door of a room that had been vacant for a long time, the young man hesitated slightly and stopped.

The young lama raised the hand holding the oil lamp over the door frame, shining the light inside. He knew that something in this room had touched the young man.

The young man went into the room, moved aside the messy books and clutter on the table, revealing a desiccated corpse underneath.

The corpse was seated, with its upper body lying on the table. It was dressed in a common lama robe. The moisture on the corpse had completely dried, and the skin and bones were corroded and decayed by the corpse fluid, sticking to the wooden table.

Clumps of blackened pupae piled up around the corpse. The corpse moths had multiplied for countless generations thanks to this rare nutrient supply, indicating that the person had been dead here for a long time.

The young lama was shocked; he never expected that there would be a corpse in this long-abandoned house.

However, there are only so many lamas in their temple, and everyone is there; it doesn't seem like anyone is missing.

Who could this person be? Could it be a lama from the temple who died here unnoticed?
"Who...who is this?" The young lama finally couldn't hold back and stammered.

“This is Lama Deren, my friend.” The young man lowered his eyelids slightly, walked around to the other side of the body to examine it, and found that the body’s cervical spine had been broken with great force.

The person who did it was very skilled and swift; there was not a trace of struggle on Lama Deren's body, and he was killed with a single blow.

The young man's eyes were indifferent as he began to tidy the table, then laid the body of Lama Deren flat. In his arms, he found a scroll of "The Repentance Text of the Eighty-Eight Buddhas," which had been soaked in bodily fluids and rotten into a heap.

A flicker of emotion crossed the young man's previously calm eyes. This thing shouldn't be in Lama Deren's hands; it was clearly something the person who killed him had intentionally placed on Deren.

Some parts of the scripture were illegible. The young man was silent for a few seconds, then turned to the young lama and said, "Please tidy up this room and properly bury Deren's body. I want to stay here."

The young lama's mind was almost blank. He mechanically walked out of the house and went outside. When he held the cold broom in his hand, he was jolted awake by the cold, and the broken string in his mind was finally put back in place.

He looked around and suddenly felt that everything here had become unfamiliar. He knew less about the temple than a temporary guest.

The young man stayed in the temple for several months, during which time they also researched a lot of information. The young lama discovered a phenomenon that made him even more distraught.

Deren Lama was registered from the very beginning of the temple’s establishment, and almost every generation of lamas had a lama named Deren, as if it were a special identity inheritance. It wasn’t until his generation that Deren’s name disappeared from the register.

The young lama didn't know how the last Deren died. When he returned to the house, the young man had already collected Deren's remains.

He later guessed that Deren's existence must be related to the three charcoal stoves that are placed at the temple entrance once every ten years. He also asked the young man about the truth of the matter.

The young man told him directly, seemingly without any intention of hiding anything.

The young man said, "I'm here to find someone."

The person he was looking for was named Dong Can. His original surname was Zhang, but Dong was a pseudonym he had chosen.

Zhang Wuxun remembered that when he filled out the list of outsiders in Banaiku Village, the young man wrote down a two-character name: Dong Nuo.

Dong Nuo—meaning "understanding promises"—in the young man's mind, promises are extremely important. He has a poor memory and doesn't want to forget unfulfilled promises when he loses his memory, so he never makes promises lightly. The young man says he has a condition where he forgets everything that happened before every so often, except for some childhood memories and past events; his brain can't retain new memories.

He did indeed come from the snow-capped mountains, and he brought out a secret from the depths of the mountains, but he would surely forget this secret soon.

Deren's existence is to meet him every ten years when he comes to the snow mountain and record everything that happened when he brought out from the depths of the snow mountain.

Several years ago, before he entered the snow mountain, he made a promise with the last Deren Lama that he would bring out a huge secret from the snow mountain, but when he came out, he may have completely forgotten the promise.

So Deren Lama will wait for him at this temple, and he will tell Deren everything he has said about what happened in the mountains before he completely forgets it, and Deren will record it.

In this temple, the existence of each generation of Naruhito is to wait for someone to return from the snow-capped mountains with a secret.

Unfortunately, this generation's Naruhito passed away before his brother returned from the snowy mountains, and he didn't even have time to find a successor for himself.

Perhaps knowing he would soon forget it again, the young man told the young lama everything he knew.

At this point, Deren pulled out a thick stack of scrolls from the carved box and handed them to Zhang Wuxun, saying, "The things you want to know are all in the writings of the previous Deren. The time I met him at the temple gate was his second time coming to this snow mountain."

"As for the other distinguished guest you want to know about, I will tell you after you have finished reading all these volumes."

Zhang Wuxun nodded gently, "Alright, thank you for your trouble, Master."

Deren smiled kindly, put his hands together in a gesture of respect, turned and walked out of the house. He instructed a young lama not far away to add a pot of butter tea to the house, and then gently closed the door from the outside.

Zhang Wuxun sat at the low table and, based on the Tibetan markings on the scrolls, found the earliest book in the stack and read it word by word from beginning to end.

Deren said that after becoming Deren, he knew that Zhang Wuxun would come here one day in the future, so he prepared everything in advance as the time he "saw" approached.

He didn't know if Zhang Wuxun's face was real or fake. When a high-ranking lama with profound Buddhist knowledge observes a person, he never looks at their appearance. What he sees is the future between that person and the lama temple.

The story begins in the early 20th century when Dong Can, a border merchant, leads a caravan to the Himalayas, intending to escort goods across the border.

The team ultimately failed to leave the snow-capped mountains, but several years later, two of the men who had died in a fight were found in Bangladesh. They were two of the four core members of that horse team. At the end of the same year, a third core member was recognized in Sikkim. Only the most crucial one, Dong Can, was nowhere to be found.

The only clue was a letter he wrote to a lama in Medog, namely Deren.

The letter contained a drawing with strange shapes on it; it was a star chart.

However, the letter was intercepted en route. The person who intercepted the letter could not understand its contents. They did not know that the location indicated in the star chart was the place they had been searching for all along.

Dong Can himself disappeared. The last letter he sent out was supposed to be delivered by De Ren through a special channel to a place in Northeast China where there was an ancient family. However, at that time, internal problems had already begun to emerge in that family, which was beset by enemies on all sides and had no time to attend to anything else.

So the elders of the family sent a young man to Motuo to investigate Dong Can's whereabouts, and Deren was the contact person there.

Zhang Wuxun speculated that the original Deren must have had a close relationship with the Zhang family, and later they gradually began to select ordinary people with good talents to be Deren.

All of the Zhang family's activities are very secretive, so the contact between the liaison station in Motuo and the main Zhang family is infrequent, basically once every ten years.

The young man ultimately failed to find Dong Can, but found an oil painting in the room where Dong Can had once lived.

Dong Can lived here for a long time, but now everything here has been moved away, leaving only the oil painting depicting a huge lake.

The lake's colors were exceptionally beautiful, and Deren was completely unaware that such a distant, mysterious, and isolated existence existed in the world.

Deren recognized the reflection in the lake; one of the snow-capped mountains projected onto the blue-gray lake was Mount Gangrengebo.

The young man gazed at the snow-covered mountains in the distance and asked Deren, "Where is that lake in the painting?"

Deren told him his deduction, and three days later, with Deren's help, the young man hired three porters willing to accompany him into the mountains with an attractive offer.

A week later, the young man, led by the three men, headed into the heart of the snow-capped mountains. Before leaving, he made a promise with Deren at the time.

Walking in the heavy snow was very difficult, especially since the snow was almost up to their thighs. They had no choice but to find a sheltered cliff and dig a hole in the snow on the cliff, intending to rest for a while and continue on their way when the wind and snow subsided.

Unexpectedly, as they dug, they discovered a relatively deep cave under the snow, and the group hid inside to rest.

In the latter half of the night, the wind and snow continued to howl. Inside the cave, Luogongbu, who was guarding the fire, was feeling sleepy from the flickering firelight. It wasn't time for his shift to change yet, so he pinched his eyelids and took a sip of mutton liquor to perk himself up.

In the instant he was distracted, the young man next to him suddenly stood up from the ground, walked to the cave entrance, and listened carefully with his ear tilted to the side.

Logombu had no idea what he could hear from the howling wind outside, and as their employer, he was not required to keep watch.

Just as they were wondering what was going on, they saw the young man's expression change. He went back into the cave and woke up the remaining two people, while urging them in a low voice, "Quickly back in, and be careful not to make a sound."

The three were puzzled, but they still moved more than ten meters deeper into the cave as instructed. Fortunately, the cave they found was quite deep, and there was a crack extending into the mountainside from the back.

Just as another hired porter, Laba, was about to ask a question, the cave they were in suddenly began to shake violently.

Large clumps of snow poured in from the cave entrance, spreading to within five or six meters of them in the blink of an eye before stopping.

Upon seeing the snow, the three of them went from being stunned to instantly realizing what was happening.

It was an avalanche.

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(End of this chapter)