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

Chapter 420 The Land of Immortality
The fat man spat in the direction the mandrill had left, "Damn it, those bastards are pretty smart, they know how to use a sneaky trick to scheme against people."

Wu Xie breathed a sigh of relief, put the small remote control back into his pocket, and said to Dafu, "Let's collect Brother Tietuo's body. Feel free to make any requests. I'm sorry to Brother Tietuo."

Dafu choked with grief and said, "Thank you, Third Master. Tie Tuo's family has a younger brother who is in junior high school and seems to be taking the high school entrance exam soon."

Wu Xie nodded, "Okay, I'll talk to Master Jiu and give him the compensation he deserves, and support him through university."

Dafu exclaimed in gratitude and thanked him repeatedly, "Brother Tietuo, if he were alive, he would be very grateful to Third Master."

Wu Xie waved his hand, said "Please accept my condolences," and said nothing more.

Nie Xiaoba patted Dafu on the shoulder and went with him to collect Tietuo's mangled corpse.

In the sweltering heat of summer, in such a desolate place, a corpse will rot and become infested with maggots in no time. To prevent both the living and the dead from suffering, the remains need to be burned immediately.

But when they pieced the scattered bones together, Dafu was shocked to discover that the body was not made of iron!
"What...what's going on? Tie Tuo is still alive?" Da Fu couldn't believe it and quickly peeled back the remaining half of the corpse's face to confirm.

Upon hearing this, Wu Xie immediately grabbed a water pouch, unscrewed it, and poured water onto his face to rinse it off. "Take a closer look, is this person really not Tie Tuo?"

Dafu quickly wiped the blood off the corpse's face with water, and after confirming several times that there were no familiar black moles near the hairline of the person's temples, he burst into tears of joy.

“It’s not a lump of iron, it really isn’t a lump of iron. We grew up playing in the mud together, sharing the same pants. He has a sparrow here. It’s from when he was a carpenter’s apprentice and got pricked by a flying nail. The wound healed and left a small black mark. I remember it very clearly.”

The fat man also came over to look and asked, "If it's not Brother Tietuo, then who could it be? And where did Brother Tietuo go?"

Then he exclaimed, "Damn it! Did those monkeys take Brother Tietuo back to their lair as food supplies?"

Wu Xie immediately said, "Everyone, spread out and search. If they left the iron block here, it must not be too far from the camp."

The group split into two groups and searched the vicinity, but found no trace.

"Damn it," the fat man couldn't help but curse, "In the end, we still lost out."

After Wu Xie calmed everyone down with a few words, Luo Wenbing, who had fainted from fright earlier, slowly woke up, rubbed his head and sat up. He looked at the mangled, unidentified corpse by the fire, rolled his eyes and was about to faint again.

The fat man pinched the man's Hegu acupoint between his thumb and forefinger with one hand and his philtrum with the other, pressing hard. "Damn it, you better wake up right now, or I'll slap you across the face."

Luo Wenbing inhaled a sharp cold air into his trachea and immediately woke up.

The fat man roughly dragged him to the corpse and urged, "Open your eyes and look, do you recognize this bastard?"

Luo Wenbing came face to face with the bloodied and mangled face. The overwhelming smell of blood hit him, and his stomach churned. His previously limp body suddenly regained strength. He immediately pushed the fat man away, ran to a tree, squatted down, and began to vomit. He vomited up all the mutton he had eaten that evening that was not fully digested, leaving only bitter sour water in the end.

When Nie Xiaoba handed over the water, she saw Luo Wenbing squat down and sob softly, "Mommy, you're such a good person. I don't want to go and make a fortune anymore, I just want to go home..."

Nie Xiaoba patted him heavily on the shoulder and comforted him, "Alright, stop crying. We've already come this far. How are you going to walk back by yourself? Aren't you afraid that big black monkey will carry you away halfway?"

Luo Wenbing paused in his sobs, then his wailing grew louder. "So I'm going to die no matter what, then I'd rather die somewhere close to the house. Maybe some kind soul will find me and give my skull and bones a good thrashing. They're too hard for the big monkeys to chew."

After saying that, he turned over and got up, wiped his tears haphazardly with his sleeve, patted the dirt off the Kexiboling'er, and was about to leave with his things.

Wu Xie waved his hand, and Nie Xiaoba and the others automatically surrounded him.

Luo Wenbing tightened his backpack straps in fear, and shouted in a bluffing manner, "What do you want? Get out of my way, I'm breaking up with you!"

"Don't you understand what breaking up means?" Seeing their indifference, Luo Wenbing said angrily, "Get out of my way. I don't want to talk to you anymore. We've come out of this mountain valley today. You don't know me, and I don't know you. Let's pretend we've never met."

Wu Xie raised his eyelids and looked at him gently, but the words that came out of his mouth sent chills down one's spine, "I'm afraid that won't work. At least until we come out of the tomb, you can't leave. Either you continue with us and we will do our best to protect you, or you will only turn into a handful of ashes here. People outside will never know that you died here. At most, they will think that you have disappeared."

Luo Wenbing was terrified, his lips trembling uncontrollably. He wanted to say that they wouldn't dare do such a thing, because murder is illegal.

But when he met Wu Xie's cold gaze, he immediately realized that these people were not joking. If he did not follow their wishes, he would really die silently here, with the pile of rotten flesh on the ground still bloody.

Even though he felt incredibly aggrieved, Luo Wenbing dared not act rashly. He could only silently weep, wondering what sins he had committed to deserve encountering such a group of despicable scoundrels who treated human life like dirt.

Wu Xie patted his shoulder kindly, "That's more like it. Oh, by the way, I was just joking with you earlier. I hope you don't mind. After all, we are law-abiding citizens. We're here just to find something."

Luo Wenbing forced a stiff smile, "I know, I know everything. If you guys cause any trouble, I'll pretend I didn't see it."

Wu Xie smiled mysteriously, pointed to the corpse on the ground, and said, "I'm sorry to trouble you to suffer with us. I'll also trouble you to identify this person. Make sure you look carefully."

What else could Luo Wenbing say? He could only nod in agreement, suppress his nausea, cover his nose, and get closer to the corpse to take a look.

The fat man next to Wu Xie secretly gave him a thumbs up and said in a low voice, "You've learned a lot from that blind man. The intimidating aura you just exuded was so powerful that even I, Fatty, didn't dare to say a word."

Wu Xie waved his hand indifferently, "Compared to a blind man, I'm far inferior. I'm only useful against people like him who have little knowledge and experience."

On the other side, Luo Wenbing suppressed his nausea and carefully examined the corpse's face. As he looked, he said with some doubt, "This person looks a bit like Li Shengbao. Let me take a closer look."

He picked up a stick from beside his feet, poked at the other, swaying arm on the corpse, and turned it over.

Upon closer inspection, everyone noticed that the little finger of the left hand on that arm was missing at the base.

Luo Wenbing pointed to the missing gap and said, "His face was so rotten that I couldn't see clearly, so I don't know if it was him or not. But if you can see that his thumb is missing, then it's probably him. Li Shengbao was a scoundrel when he was a young man. He got involved in all sorts of messy and troublesome things. I heard that his thumb was chopped off with a woodcutter's knife when his father forced him to quit gambling."

It seemed that the group of wild lamas who had entered the den earlier, led by Li Shengbao, had met with misfortune. Dafu and another man put the bodies into body bags and carried them to a distance to be burned.

The two watched from a distance, waiting until the last embers disappeared before pouring water on the ashes to extinguish the fire completely. Then they buried it in the ground to prevent it from reigniting and burning down the forest, which would be a terrible sin.

To make a long story short, Wu Xie and his companions did not encounter any more monkeys during the next three days of their journey, as if the mountain demon had truly kept its word and had not bothered them again.

They climbed to the mountainside of Jigongliangzi, where the scenery was indescribably beautiful.

The meadows covered with yellow wildflowers are vibrant and boundless. I used to think that such a dense natural sea of ​​flowers only existed in cartoons.

Then came the sea of ​​clouds. All the flowers bloomed in the clouds, which swayed with the wind. When the wind blew by, the entire sea of ​​flowers resembled Silent Hill, eerie and ghostly. The visibility in the entire sea of ​​flowers below the clouds was less than three meters. If people were a little too far apart, they would be swallowed up by the clouds.

As the clouds dispersed and the sun shone through, sunlight poured down like a waterfall, unleashing an endless golden sea of ​​flowers. All the flowers instantly became vibrant and dazzling, as if bathed in divine light.

The fat man marveled at the wonders of nature and asked Wu Xie for a camera to take pictures of everything.

Wu Xie asked him, "Why are you filming this?"

Without hesitation, the fat man said, "Take pictures and make them into a photo album for them to look at later. We'll name it, 'I've Taken Pictures of All the Scenery You Should Have Seen But Haven't Seen Before'."

Wu Xie took out the camera and handed it to Fatty, silently watching him frolickly taking pictures among the flowers.

Everyone got tired and stopped to rest.

Wu Xie sat in the gap between the flowers, quietly looking up at the sky. One after another, the golden flower crowns blurred the outline under the sunlight, separating the sky from the mountains and the earth.

Looking from this direction toward their final destination, dark clouds hung low over the mountaintop, and thick fog shrouded the mountain where the monkeys raided the tomb. The mountain didn't even have a name, and it was only raining within the area of ​​that mountain.

The sea of ​​flowers is on the mountainside. Going down from the mountainside, you enter the valley, where a continuous primeval forest appears. As evening approaches, the calls of night owls rise and fall.

Fatty returned excitedly and told Wu Xie that he had found a strange hill in the woods by the river valley, which looked like a local temple from a distance.

That direction was exactly where they were headed, so without further hesitation, they shouldered their gear and quickly headed there.

Upon approaching, they discovered an old grave. It couldn't be considered an ancient tomb, but it must have been there for a long time. Wu Xie looked at the tombstone standing beside the grave, which was covered by weeds and fallen leaves. The inscription on it was so blurred that it was barely legible. He could only roughly guess that it was from before the liberation.

The surface of the burial mound is made of many irregularly shaped stone slabs, which are covered with moss.

The fat man shone his flashlight on the grave and muttered, "A lonely grave haunts the dead. So, there really are lonely graves in the world."

Wu Xie thought to himself, "This is too damn lonely. Who is this person and why is he buried here?"

Humans are social creatures, and so are burial sites. It's rather strange that such a strange grave would suddenly appear in a remote place where you can't find a single human being.

The fat man had no interest in the old grave and went straight to the ancient temple behind it, whose edges he could vaguely see before. He had only taken a couple of steps when he suddenly twisted his ankle and almost fell flat on his face.

"What the hell hurt my foot?" The fat man muttered, leaning on a straw mound with one hand.

Nie Xiaoba hurriedly came over to help him up, and the two of them took off their backpacks and squatted down to look at the thing.

The fat man recognized it at a glance: it was a petrified bone, and judging by its regular round shape, it was probably a skull.

"Fatty, what did you find?" Wu Xie walked over as well.

"Found something good." The fat man chuckled, took the entrenching tool off his backpack, and started digging at the spot.

After digging for a few minutes, with a clang, the shovel hit something hard.

Seeing this, the fat man moved back a little and continued digging, with Nie Xiaoba helping him from the side.

A dozen minutes later, they stood in a large pit with a diameter of two meters. In the center of the pit was a stone tablet that looked like a door. The top of the stone tablet was triangular and protruding, and the skull that the fat man had found was stuck on it.

The stone tablet is about one meter tall, with a circle of relief carvings around it like a door frame, and in the very center is a scorpion with a lotus-shaped tail that has been corroded and blurred.

The fat man took the skull off and weighed it in his hand. "Tianzhen, this thing doesn't look like a human head. Look at those big front teeth, they're as sharp as awls."

Wu Xie took the skull, examined it, and nodded. "It's from a monkey."

Generally speaking, monkeys have a more convex skull structure and facial structure, while humans have a flatter one. Monkeys have lower and wider nasal bones, while humans have higher ones. The mandibles of monkeys and humans are also very different; monkeys are rough and wide, while humans are relatively narrow.

The fat man speculated, "Could it be that the old grave doesn't actually contain a person, but a monkey?"

“If it is a monkey, the key question is, who buried that monkey here?” Wu Xie said slowly. “Although this stone tablet is very close to the old grave, it has obviously been standing here for much longer than the old grave.”

The fat man still found it a bit strange. "Why would you put up a stone tablet here out of the blue?"

Wu Xie pointed to a line of small characters at the very bottom of the stone tablet, "Look at this, it says, 'Land of Immortality'."

The fat man suddenly realized, "Did we stumble upon the entrance to the Gu King's Burial Temple by accident? Could the ancient temple we just saw be the place we're looking for?"

Thank you to [Yue Yuze] and other generous donors for the generous donations! Sending you love!
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(End of this chapter)