A farming master in Stardew Valley

Chapter 942 Curse
Although he had doubts, Lyon still remembered that he had to kill.

After clearing out the four rock crabs, not a single crab was left, which made Leon fully aware of his luck today.

But as the saying goes, since you are here, if you are unlucky, then it is bad. At most, you just have to put in a little more effort and it will be over.

Without staying on this floor, Lyon went down the stairwell to the next floor.

He didn't stop along the way. He cut the stones when he saw them and drew his sword when he encountered monsters. He killed his way to the 23rd floor with unstoppable momentum.

When he reached the 24th floor, Leon stopped temporarily, because this floor was also a small room. There was no treasure chest, nor rock crabs disguised as stones. There was only a golden stone tablet and a carved painting embedded in the wall.

The painting depicts a street scene. The buildings on both sides, outlined with golden silk threads, are all triangular in shape, like small pyramids. On the street in the center of the picture, pedestrians have gloomy faces and are walking in a hurry.

Everyone was dragging a box in their hands, and some people had tied up the elderly and children with ropes. Because their clothes were of the same style, Lyon guessed that they were their family members, not slaves.

It looks like they are rushing on the road, but also like they are fleeing. However, these people are rushing in different directions. If they are fleeing, these people should be rushing in one direction, instead of running around like headless flies as shown in the picture.

Thinking back to the painting he had seen before, Lyon didn't see any connection between the two. He could only confirm that the people in it were the same group of people because their clothing styles were the same. As for the order in which the recorded images were taken, that was unknown.

But it wasn't a complete failure. At least some details on the screen made Leon understand why he encountered rock crabs in the desert mine.

Because there are some rock crabs in some corners of the picture, but they are not the reason for the crowd to flee.

The shells of these rock crabs in the picture basically have a common feature, that is, a collar is hooped on the shell, and the collar is connected to a long rope. The rope is either held in people's hands or tied to the corner of the small pyramid building. It seems that rock crabs were pets in the era depicted in the picture.

"These people from the Golden Dynasty are playing some tricks."

After complaining about the fate of the rock crab in the picture, Leon stopped paying attention to the painting and turned to look at another golden monument in the room.

It was still in the shape of a triangle, and was connected very tightly to the floor at the bottom without any cracks. Lyon tried to shake it twice, but there was no feedback at all. Obviously, the idea of ​​moving it away was not feasible.

However, although he could not take away the golden monument itself, Lyon could take away the inscription on the golden monument.

Of course, keep it in mind.

Although the fonts on these inscriptions were of a type that Lyon was completely unfamiliar with, in Lyon's eyes, he was able to understand the meaning of this unknown text.

The text was long and involved, but in Leon's eyes, the translation meant: "We are cursed with too much iridium!"

It was a very simple sentence, but the content left Lyon confused.

In Leon's opinion, iridium ore is an alien metal with extremely strong strength and unique metallic properties. It has extremely advanced effects and application range in processing and production. But it should be just metal, a dead object, so how can it be related to the curse?
Could it be that the appearance of iridium ore came from meteorites, and in order to obtain more iridium, the people of the Golden Dynasty found a way to attract meteorites containing iridium ore, which attracted a large wave of meteorites to fall on the Golden Dynasty and caused a huge disaster?

Or was it because he encountered the same fate as Leon before, where a large number of meteorites were mined and a large number of giant purple slimes were released, leading to him being involved in a tragic battle? But these were all physical injuries and had little to do with the curse.

Could it be a plague caused by a virus from outer space, carried by a meteorite? Because there's no scientific way to explain this highly contagious and lethal phenomenon, is it defined as a curse?

But this also cannot explain other unreasonable things, such as those mummies that have a certain immortality.

Are these mummies the product of a curse?

But why does it rely on bandages to move instead of using iridium ore, which is closely related to the curse, as a carrier?

Or perhaps these beings, without bodies or willpower, were actually the cursed descendants of the vanished Golden Dynasty? This would explain why Leon heard wailing after the mummies were completely killed.

The more Lyon thought about it, the more excited he became. However, the information available at the moment was too little to connect them together and infer a development pattern that fits the actual situation, which made Lyon feel a sense of urgency.

He wanted to know what had happened to the Golden Dynasty and whether the so-called curse of iridium was as he had guessed.

This gave him more motivation to continue going deeper underground. His intuition told him that there should be similar murals or golden tablets in the subsequent mineral layers to provide him with more information.

"Going down into the mines and studying the reasons for the fall of a dynasty—this journey is much more interesting than I imagined, Mr. Qi. Is this why you initiated this challenge? What do you want to tell me through these things?"

Lyon, who already had some vague guesses in his mind, thought of the conversation between him and Mr. Qi when he came to meet him specially.

For example, it's up to you to discover it, and now all you have to do is go in and explore, and words like "I'll wait for you on the 100th floor, and I hope you'll be as optimistic as you are now" seem to have a meaningful meaning when I think back on them now.

Moreover, Mr. Qi seemed to be quite disdainful of the Golden Dynasty. After all, he reminded Lyon that this was the mausoleum left over from the Golden Dynasty, but he also made it very clear that Lyon should not pay attention to this.

Leon suddenly felt interesting and curious after thinking about it. He couldn't wait to stay here any longer and went straight to the stairwell in the corner, trying to enter the next floor.

But at the entrance of the stairwell, Lyon paused and became confused when he looked at a dark vertical shaft more than one meter wide and bottomless at the side of the stairwell.

This vertical shaft should be the same thing as the vertical shaft in the desert mine in the game, which can cross several or even more than ten layers of depth by jumping into it. It can allow Leon to jump over several layers and reach deeper mine layers faster.

Lyon's hesitation was not because of the physical damage he might suffer if he used this vertical shaft to go deeper quickly, which would be equal to the number of layers he fell * 3, but because he was hesitant about missing the information hidden in the skipped ore layer if he used this vertical shaft to descend quickly.

This is a conflict between efficiency and details. The former will allow Lyon to reach the 100th floor to see Mr. Qi earlier, while the latter will enable Lyon to not miss any information about the Golden Dynasty that may appear on every floor.

In the end, Lyon chose the former, because Mr. Qi should know everything he wanted to know, and he could just ask Mr. Qi about the details when they met later.

Although he had lost the joy of exploration and discovery, Leon didn't care. All he wanted was an answer. The process wasn't important. Wouldn't it be nice to just enjoy the end result? Even if it was fed to him by someone else, was it really not happy to get something for nothing?

(End of this chapter)