Tomb raiding: Trying to become a little painter

Changsha is located in a lush, verdant mountain.

The sounds of shoveling and scraping echoed through the dense forest, while the fragrance of grass and earth shifted in a parabolic arc. In the brown mud pit stood three men, each holding a shovel, laboriously digging into the pit beneath their feet.

"Hey...Hey Boss, will what we're doing really help Third Master?"

"What if Third Master is still not doing well? Could you talk to the higher-ups and let me go see him again? By the way, is the food there good? Are the guards easy to talk to? How much credit can I get this time?"

In the mud pit, a muscular figure was working hard, beads of sweat the size of soybeans dripping from his forehead. Panzi couldn't help but ask the question that had been on his mind for a long time.

Previously, while Wu Sanxing and Jie Lian were being arrested, Pan Zi was also arrested on the spot while following the clues. He finally met Wu Sanxing, whom he had been looking for for a long time, in an underground detention cell. Originally, Pan Zi wanted to help Master San guard his gambling den, help Master San take care of his eldest nephew, Little Master San, and also help Master San cover up his lies on the surface. But he didn't expect to be tricked and then be brought to this detention cell, where he met his Master San in such a whimsical way...

Then they were set up by the big shots above! He and his two third brothers were sold to the state for life…

"No! Panzi, what are you worried about? If you ask me, with what we've done over the past few decades, we should have been shot hundreds or thousands of times over. Isn't it enough that we're still alive?"

"Since they were able to find me, you, and them, do you think they're pushovers?"

Hei Xiazi found Pan Zi's words amusing. "You've already embarked on this path, do you think you can turn back?"

Their lives are now in someone else's hands. They can do whatever they want to them, and they have no way to resist...

Although he and Zhang the Mute are different from them—if this were ancient times, he would be considered to have "reached the ears of the heavens"—laws and regulations are based on the human level. He's not even human anymore; he might as well just give up!

"this…"

"Brother Hei, you're right! I was overthinking it."

Pan Zi wasn't stupid, so he naturally understood what Hei Xiazi meant. Yes, he was now no longer in control of his own destiny.

Huffing and puffing...

The shovels dug into the soil, the rhythmic clatter echoing through the woods for days and months. The rubble outside the pit piled higher and higher. Three thick hemp ropes, each as thick as a wrist, were tied to a large tree trunk at the edge of the woods, looped around the waists of the three people in the pit…

Clang!

After several days of digging, Hei Xiazi and Pan Zi, along with a fellow worker, had finally broken through a hole fifty or sixty meters deep, their shovels struck a stone wall made of remnants...

Huff... huff... huff...

Three deep breaths echoed in the deep cave.

"Finally, we've dug this far! Damn it! Which bastard blew up the mountain back then, making me dig for so many days now?!"

Seeing that they had finally cleared a passage through the rubble of the tomb, Hei Xiazi, who had previously worked with Pan Zi to dig out a path, looked down into the pitch-black interior and leaped inside.

Thick dust rushed towards him. Black Bear raised his hand and waved the air in front of him, looking around.

The tomb passage was littered with rubble, with piles of debris from the explosion decades ago scattered everywhere. After the two people behind him entered the tomb passage, Hei Xiazi took out a glass bottle of red spray from his bag, pressed it and sprayed it on the three people, then sprayed it on the three of them. With his other hand, he turned on his flashlight and shone it into the passage next to him.

"Hey, what's the purpose of this spray? It smells so fishy!"

Pan Zi had a keen sense of smell. Although he had just waved away the dust that had hit him, he still smelled a fishy odor. He twitched his nose a couple of times and realized something was wrong. He turned to Hei Xiazi and asked him.

"Wow, Master Pan is quite something! This bottle of mine is filled with a lot of Zhang Nabao's blood, the mute, and also with a lot of insect-repelling herbs. It's really effective!"

Hei Xiazi first put on a "you're amazing" look and praised Pan Zi, then explained what he was holding.

"Master Zhang's precious blood! That's indeed formidable, but Master Hei, you've already brought out such a valuable item, doesn't that mean there are many more in this tomb..."

Pan Zi didn't finish his sentence, but his meaning had already shifted to something else.

"Yes! There are lots of little cuties waiting for us in this tomb right now~"

"Let's go, let's set off and explore this tomb thoroughly. Maybe we can find something useful while we're investigating it."

The smile on Hei Xiazi's face grew wider, and his eyes behind his sunglasses pierced through the layers of stone walls in the tomb passage, looking at the densely packed, different little creatures.

................................................... .............................................

On the other side, beneath the mudflats of Pingxia, the two groups separated in the darkness, one heading left and the other right.

Qin Henian, Zhang Qilin, and Wu Xie headed towards the left passage as a group. After walking for a short while, they gradually noticed that the murals on the stone walls on both sides of the passage were becoming more and more vibrant, which also caught Wu Xie's attention.

"This mural seems to depict fragments of stories recorded in the materials He Nian gave us. However, this mural does not depict the clouds in the sky, nor does it show the appearance of the Thunder God. But the mural next to it depicts a small island on the ground, with a rugged-looking man looking up at the sky. This man is most likely the tomb owner, the King of the South Sea, Zhi."

"The other picture next to it shows Zhi's outfit on the street. She looks quite gorgeous, and she's holding something in her hand, but I can't see what it is. However, Zhi's face is drawn more clearly, but Zhi has six ears?"

Do you have many ears, so you like listening to thunder?

Wu Xie was very curious about what the King of the South Sea in the mural was thinking at the time, but the two were separated by many years, and this thought only lasted for a moment.

"Never mind how many ears it has. Oh, Wu Xie, we came here to look for meteorite jade."

Qin Henian didn't want to know the stories of the dead; he just wanted to find what he was looking for. He then spoke up somewhat eagerly.