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

Chapter 428: Fighting with Snakes
The fat man chuckled upon hearing this, "Then what are we waiting for? We need to hurry!"

As he spoke, he had already dived into the water and swam deeper into the cave.

The water in the pool is flowing water, and when you swim in, you can clearly feel the water washing over your skin.

Wu Xie followed behind the fat man with half-closed eyes, passing through the stone door that was slightly ajar. Nie Xiaoba and the others quickly followed behind.

The swimmer, who was in the last position, was about to pass through the iron gate when the rope hanging on his backpack suddenly came undone and, by sheer bad luck, got caught on a rock inside the gate.

As the boatman swam further in, he felt a pulling force from behind. Turning around, he found that the rope was tied to him. Without thinking much about it, he pulled hard, but unexpectedly, he moved the small stone and the large stone pillar that was originally supporting the stone gate immediately loosened.

A series of tugging sounds were heard as the stone door began to slowly close, while the back half of Ban Tou's body was still stuck in the crack.

Just as the boulder was about to be clamped down on its waist, the man on the board was frantic. He kept spitting out bubbles and turned around to pull the rope even harder. With this pull, the boulder lost its bottom support and rolled to the side, pinning the rope underneath.

When he went into the water, he couldn't hold his breath any longer. He felt a suffocating sensation in his lungs, and in his panic, somehow one of his legs got tangled in the water.

At this critical moment, Wu Xie, who was in front, noticed that the number of people was not right and went back to check. Seeing this, he immediately stepped forward, took out the big white dog leg, cut the rope, and pulled the board out a second before the stone door closed.

With a muffled thud, the heavy stone door slammed shut, stirring up a large amount of silt from the bottom of the water.

Wu Xie gripped his backpack and, with his back to his hand, dragged the nearly unconscious Ban Tou forward, swimming continuously. Finally, after advancing more than ten meters, the light of a flashlight appeared on the water ahead.

Wu Xie immediately surfaced and forcefully dragged the plank to the riverbank, where Fatty quickly pulled him ashore.

"Are you alright, Tianzhen?" The fat man reached out and pulled him. "What just happened?"

Wu Xie grabbed the fat man's hand for leverage and climbed up, catching his breath. "Thank goodness, the rope just got tangled."

Ban Tou quickly choked on water, coughed, and slowly woke up, saying, "Thank you, Third Master."

Wu Xie waved his hand, signaling him to slow down, and got up to observe the cave. It was the same stone niche as before, with mummies covered in mud inside.

However, these are from a much earlier era than the previous ones.

Wu Xie climbed up the niche, carefully cut open a clay sculpture, and took off a piece of the shroud cloth, which was made of very rough Qing Dynasty cotton and linen summer cloth.

There was a half-meter-wide crack in the rock wall of the cave. Wu Xie shone a light into it and found that there was another cave inside.

Upon entering, you'll find that this is still a cave space that has been artificially carved.

In the center of the ground was a blackened ebony coffin, its body narrow and long, at least half again as long as a normal coffin.

Ebony, also known as submerged wood, is formed when ancient forests are buried in the low-lying depths of ancient riverbeds or in silt due to natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and mudslides caused by crustal changes. Under the combined effects of oxygen deficiency, high pressure, weak acid, and microorganisms, its original physical properties are altered, and it slowly carbonizes over thousands of years.

This type of wood is fine-grained, smooth, dense, and rot-resistant, and has a special fragrance. As the old saying goes, "Even a chest full of gold is not as good as a piece of ebony."

Although petrified wood is rare, it is relatively abundant in the Sichuan, Chongqing and Guangdong regions.

The owner of the coffin must have been someone of extraordinary status to have such a precious wood used for burial.

The fat man squeezed in through the mountain crevice and started shouting when he saw the coffin, "Hey, there's a coffin here, and this is a small coffin chamber."

"What's so surprising about that? Haven't you seen plenty of coffins?" Wu Xie said, shining a flashlight on the carvings on the wooden coffin.

The pattern on the coffin lid features a totem of a scorpion sitting on a lotus, depicted in an exaggerated manner. The scorpion's eight legs are extremely long, extending down from the coffin lid like an octopus to the side of the coffin, and even crawling along the edge into the bottom of the coffin, as if a giant hand descended from the sky and grabbed the coffin.

The scorpion's tail transformed into the wrist of that giant hand, which was raised high.

The entire design gives the impression that, in the hearts of the people of this land of immortality, the scorpion is their national deity.

So what is the meaning behind their depiction of this scene? A scorpion god descending from the sky? Or is the owner of this coffin a sacrifice offered to the gods?

Wu Xie looked around but didn't see anything like the sacrificial plate he remembered. The cave was empty except for this dark wooden coffin.

The fat man eagerly leaned closer and asked in a low voice, "Want to open the coffin and take a look? I've never seen a coffin this long in my life."

"That big guy isn't outside right now. Let's move quickly and have Nie Xiaoba and the others keep watch outside. Nothing will happen."

Wu Xie glanced at the fat man, and under his expectant gaze, slowly nodded, "Then let's open it. But there shouldn't be any valuable burial items inside, unless you carry the whole coffin out."

The fat man said, "I'm not opening coffins to make money," rubbed his hands together, got into a horse stance, and went to push the coffin lid.

The coffin was not nailed shut, as if it were ready to be opened at any moment, and the fat man easily pushed the coffin lid aside.

When the contents inside were first revealed to the world, Wu Xie and his companion gasped in shock.

"Mermaid!" the fat man exclaimed, then immediately corrected himself, "No, it should be called Beautiful Bird Snake."

Inside the coffin lay a strange corpse. Unlike the monkey-snake mummy, this one had a human-faced bird head. The body was dressed in an elaborate black and red sacrificial robe. The torso was clearly human, but it had four arms, and the lower body was shaped like a python.

This is a composite corpse made up of three different kinds of creatures; no wonder the coffin was made in this way.

But why did they make the corpses of the Changsheng people look like this?

The Queen Mother of the West's original splicing experiment failed, so she switched to refining the Corpse-Eating Pill. Don't the people of the Longevity Kingdom know how to learn from the lessons of their ancestors?

The fat man reached out to check if the human-faced bird's head was still attached to its neck, but he accidentally used too much force and ripped the fluffy head off. The human-faced bird's dark eyes met the fat man's, and then an awkward moment ensued.

Fatty coughed and, taking advantage of Wu Xie's attention being focused on the pattern on the clothes worn by the corpse, quickly pieced the head back together.

"Hey, you naive girl, what do you think those immortal monkeys are trying to do with this? They can just piece things together, but why did they have to replace perfectly good human heads with bird heads?"

"Could it be that those people from the Immortal Kingdom, after years of repeated defeats, have suffered a mental breakdown and become abnormal?" The fat man gestured at the strangely shaped corpse.

Wu Xie shook his head. "I don't know, but I have a feeling that this must be some kind of special sacrificial ritual."

By piecing together different creatures, there must be a meaning they want to express.

Wu Xie thought of the guide figurines they had seen in the Snake Cave Tower, which were in a welcoming posture. Could they be welcoming the scorpion totem on the coffin lid?
As the fat man looked at the body, he noticed something was wrong. "Tianzhen, look at the middle section of the corpse. The shape of the four arms on it looks like they were originally attached to the body, not pieced together later."

"Really?" Wu Xie looked at it, then took out two pairs of rubber gloves from his backpack and handed one pair to Fatty. "Come help me take off his clothes and take a closer look at what's going on."

The two men worked quickly and carefully peeled back the cloth, which was already soaked with bodily fluids. The skin of the corpse inside was also covered with strange tattoo patterns, and like the sutures from an autopsy, these patterns were raised, resembling a long, bluish-black centipede crawling on it, with countless tentacles spreading outwards, which was terrifying to look at.

"Come and turn it over." Wu Xie lifted the stiff arm and placed it on the fat man's abdomen so that the fat man could grab it, while he went to lift the corpse's shoulders and hips.

The two men worked together to turn the body onto its side and discovered that an arm had indeed grown out from below the shoulder blade, resembling an angel's wing. In terms of length and thickness, it was almost identical to a normal arm that connects to the shoulder joint.

The two looked at each other, both seeing disbelief in each other's eyes.

"What's going on? This thing is an angel descended to earth! Did God and Nuwa get married?" The fat man exclaimed in disbelief. "This is terrifying!"

Wu Xie didn't speak, but reached his fingers under the corpse's shoulder blade and felt around. He found that the bony joint that protruded from the lower angle of the shoulder blade was very similar to the original shoulder joint. The humeral head on the extra arm grew out from there.

“He’s a deformed person,” Wu Xie said. “He must have looked like this from birth.”

"Is it the conjoined twins you mentioned before?" the fat man asked.

Wu Xie nodded, and Fatty added, "Then the legend of the Gu King that Cai Lao Jiu mentioned must be true."

Wu Xie turned the body back over and tidied it up. "Let's make an assumption. If the so-called Kingdom of Immortality built by the Gu King is real and not a prank by the Zhang family, then the two-headed, four-armed snake-man in the story is real."

"The reason why he grew two heads and four arms is that he was born as a conjoined twin due to some reason. Such cases are not isolated. I think I know why the wild lama in the cocoon we found in the ancient temple had his shoulder blades removed."

The two restored the coffin to its original state, exited through the crevice in the mountain, and continued walking along the river.

Inside the stone walls on both sides of the river, there are many similar small coffin chambers, each containing a long, dark wooden coffin.

An hour later, they emerged from the cave and were greeted by an enormous, towering ancient banyan tree, its canopy spreading outwards, creating a miniature forest.

It has no independent trunk; its body is formed by countless large aerial roots. Because these aerial roots are thicker than ordinary trees, the gaps between them are very narrow, and when they are put together, they look like a single tree.

Thick roots rise from the ground, covered with lush green moss and vines, resembling the Hulk's house.

The water flowing from the riverbed flowed directly into the hollow under the banyan tree, forming one swampy pool after another overgrown with aquatic plants, swarming with frighteningly large mosquitoes.

Wu Xie and the others stood on the rock, listening to the chaotic buzzing of the insects, as if they could hear their blood being drained in the next second.

Ah Zhai's legs were trembling, and his voice was so soft it was almost inaudible, "Third Master, what do we do? There are so many bugs, we'll be sucked dry before we even get over them."

Wu Xie took a deep breath, turned around and instructed, "The five of you wait at the cave entrance. If anything seems wrong, run back immediately. Fatty and I will go over there."

“Young Master, this won’t do. How can you use the tip of a chopstick to clear a path for the servants?” Nie Xiaoba and the others immediately objected.

Wu Xie raised his hand slightly to stop them from speaking. "It's not that I don't want you to go, but it's unnecessary. This battle is different from the ones you've taken before. There probably aren't any treasures inside. If you're stubborn enough to insist on going in and dying in this life-threatening situation, I won't stop you."

Having said that, Nie Xiaoba had no choice but to grit his teeth and nod, saying, "Alright, we'll listen to Third Master."

After saying that, he divided the food in his backpack into two parts, put the extra portion into the backpack and handed it to Wu Xie, saying, "Third Master, you and Fatty must come back safely."

The fat man grabbed his backpack and slung it over his shoulder. He stepped onto an aerial root with one foot, tilted his head toward the banyan tree, and said, "Tianzhen, let's go."

After waving goodbye, Wu Xie and his companion put on protective suits, wrapped themselves up, put on headlamps, and climbed up the tree roots.

Less than ten meters in, it was pitch black under the cover of branches and leaves. The dense foliage prevented any light from penetrating, making them feel as if they were crawling into the gaping maw of a huge green monster.

The two cautiously advanced through the tree trunks, surrounded by the stench of the swamp and the buzzing of mosquitoes, making them feel extremely uncomfortable, as if the noisy sounds were piercing their eardrums and being etched directly into their brains.

Soon they were completely engulfed in darkness, all the light around them swallowed up.

The two carefully gripped every possible spot to climb; the moss was very slippery, and one wrong step could send them tumbling into the swamp below.

Completely absorbed in their work, they were unaware that their bodies were now covered with countless dark insects. With each step forward, the insects would rise up in a swarm due to the vibrations, resembling two small black tornadoes skimming the ground from a distance.

Wu Xie crawled at the front, squeezing through a gap in the intersecting aerial roots. He looked up and saw that the banyan tree trunk was full of holes, dug out by some animal with its claws, and filled with many green bones.

Thank you so much to [昧袪] for the generous donation! Sending you love!

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(End of this chapter)