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

Chapter 497 The Nest of Ten Thousand Birds
As Wu Xie and the others slowly climbed down, Zhang Haixing was already waiting for them in front of the bronze chains.

"You are too slow."

Zhang Haixing leaned against the stone wall with her arms crossed, her tone clearly dissatisfied.

"No hurries."

Wu Xie plopped down on the stone platform beside the chains, panting heavily. He stared at the familiar bronze chains in front of him, which crisscrossed like a spider web, and his expression was momentarily dazed.

In that instant, his mind seemed to be filled with many thoughts, yet also seemed to be filled with nothing at all.

He quickly regained his composure and continued, "Anyway, it's been thousands of years, and the thing has always been there. It can't possibly run away."

Upon hearing this, Zhang Haixing pursed her lips and didn't bother to say anything more.

After Fatty and Feng came down, the group rested for an hour, ate something to replenish their energy, and then grabbed the chains to continue climbing down.

Wu Xie and his group walked through the mountain crevice for a full five days, changing their gas masks three times, and finally saw the bottom of the huge crevice only at the maximum distance that their fog lights could illuminate.

After climbing down for nearly half an hour, I finally stepped onto solid ground.

Wu Xie looked around. The distance between the two sides of the mountain was at least as wide as a bridge. At the bottom were countless rocks, big and small, uneven. They should all be fragments that broke off from above when this crevice was formed.

Looking up through the gaps in the chains, you can see many caves of varying sizes on the mountain walls on both sides. Although they are not very clear, you can clearly sense that something is hidden in the shadows inside.

Wu Xie's heart tightened, and he immediately changed his position. After quietly reminding everyone to be vigilant and safe, he carefully shone his lamp on the things inside the cave.

The fat man had sharper eyes than him. After a careful look, he said, "Don't worry, it's not one of those ghost birds, but there are definitely things in there, and they all look quite big."

"It's an inanimate object, probably a statue or something like that."

Zhang Haixing, who was standing to the side, took out her binoculars and saw the true appearance of the things in the cave. She couldn't help but wonder, "They look all kinds of strange. They are all carved directly into the cave. The patterns look like... birds... but it's strange. Why do these birds all have two heads?"

"Let me see."

Wu Xie took the binoculars from her and looked closely. He discovered that the dark figures in the caves were indeed various kinds of birds carved out, with all sorts of strange postures. There were flying parrots, sparrows flapping their wings, and owls with their necks tilted as they stood on the rocks.

However, compared to the live birds we see every day, these statues are much larger and more exaggerated in overall shape, and the lines of the carving are quite rough.

As he looked at them, Wu Xie suddenly noticed that these bird statues had a common feature.

Although they vary in posture and species, they do indeed have two heads growing on each side of their necks, just as Zhang Haixing said, as if they had mutated due to nuclear contamination.

Furthermore, the extra heads all share a common posture; regardless of whether they are on the left or right side of the cliff, they all turn their heads in unison to look towards the inward direction of the rocky beach.

It was pitch black there, and the area outside the light's reach resembled a dark beast with its jaws wide open.

The fat man even ran to the side of the mountain wall, grabbed it and climbed up. He looked closely at the cave and suddenly exclaimed, "Holy crap? Tianzhen, come and see! The two eyes on this perfectly normal head are blind. It looks like someone gouged them out later."

"Could there be gemstones embedded in here?" the fat man thought to himself, then immediately started cursing, "Which bastard beat me to it and pried all the treasures out of here?"

Hearing this, Wu Xie quickly ran over, climbed up one of the grottoes closest to the ground, and shone his flashlight on the head of the statue. He immediately noticed that the eye sockets of the bird head facing him were indeed empty.

However, he could tell that the eyeballs were not gouged out later. When these statues were first made, the craftsmen did not carve the sclera and pupils into the eye sockets. Instead, they simply and crudely poked two rough holes in the eye sockets to serve as eye sockets.

This is so strange. Why make their eyes look like this? Why make these birds blind?

Is the reason we don't give them eyes because we're afraid these statues will see something?

A chill ran through Wu Xie's heart. Just then, the flashlight's beam flickered a few times before slowly dimming, as if its light source had been suddenly sucked away.

Wu Xie pressed the switch a few times, but the light bulb was still flickering. It looked like it was about to run out of power, and he would have to use a hand-cranked generator to charge it when he went downstairs.

The dim light was barely enough to see his fingers, so Wu Xie simply turned off the flashlight, took out a lighter from his pocket, lit it, and then tilted his head to look at the other head next to him. The flame could only illuminate a limited area, and the reflected light and shadow flickered with the airflow.

Wu Xie squinted to examine the extra head closely. He discovered that the head was the most meticulously crafted part of the entire statue, while the lines in other parts only roughly outlined the shape of the object.

The feathers in this section are almost perfectly distinct, lifelike, and layered like a crown of flowers, very regular in their arrangement. However, the shape of the feathers looks a bit strange; they are not pointed, slender, oval fans, but rather resemble leaf-like thorns.

The feathers near the neck could be described as short, but those higher up towards the top of the head actually look more like scales.

Wait, scales?!

In a flash, Wu Xie suddenly understood something.

The extra head turned out to be a snake's head twisted and expanded from a bird's head, and the intricate, overlapping, sheet-like carvings were not feathers at all, but actual snake scales.

The eyes on either side of the snake's head are bulging grayish-white spheres, looking very much like Angong Niuhuang Wan wrapped in wax, only a size larger than those pills.

Wu Xie felt that this thing had appeared in his memory before, but he couldn't recall the details for the time being.

"Naive!" the fat man called out to him from the side. "This place is probably a snake pit too, isn't it? It looks a bit like the Kingdom of the Queen Mother of the West back then."

"What are those losers looking at over there?"

The fat man muttered to himself, glanced at the gravel beach, and, finding nothing unusual, tried poking the white of the snake's eye with his finger.

With that touch, the white ball in his hand suddenly wobbled and almost fell out of its socket.

"You could gouge those eyeballs out, huh? Their eyes are rolled back, it looks pretty creepy."

The fat man exclaimed "Eh!" and was about to take one down to examine it closely.

Wu Xie hurriedly reminded him not to move around, "These eyes give me a very strange feeling, it's best not to touch them carelessly."

Although these bird statues are inanimate objects, they give off a very unsettling feeling, just as creepy as the human-faced birds he had seen in Changbai Mountain.

After Wu Xie's reminder, Fatty had no choice but to give up his idea of ​​gouging out a few eyeballs and putting them in his pocket. He climbed down from the cave, and since there was nothing to see up there, he called Wu Xie to come down as well.

As Wu Xie walked along the rocky beach, he kept a close eye on the statues. He noticed that the further he went, the larger the statues in the grotto became, and the birds represented by the carved patterns gradually changed from small birds to birds of prey such as eagles and roc.

The fat man looked at the statues and clicked his tongue. "Although the occasion may be a bit inappropriate, I think the scene here can be described with a very appropriate word."

"What word?" Wu Xie asked.

"A hundred birds paying homage to the phoenix, oh no, it should be ten thousand birds paying homage to the phoenix," the fat man replaced a word to describe it.

There are so many grottoes on the mountain walls on both sides that they are countless.

Wu Xie suddenly turned his head to stare at him, and Zhang Haixing, who had been walking ahead, also stopped and turned to look at him.

Seeing everyone looking at him with astonishment, the fat man gestured around and said, "We must have seen at least a hundred kinds of birds along the way, and some of them are even the same ones."

"The bottom of this entire crack is like an enormous nest of thousands of birds, and there must be quite a few stone caves extending into the other side of the crack."

"And the most crucial and strangest thing is that their heads are facing the same direction, just like elementary school students listening to a lecture."

The fat man narrowed his eyes, his tone somewhat elusive, "Who knows, there might be a super big phoenix waiting for us in that direction."

Good night

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(End of this chapter)