Chapter 416: Stone Shadow: Relief Completed

Instantly, all the holes on the three walls in front of me were filled, the walls becoming a single continuous surface, and the things protruding out from the holes bulged from the wall surface, looking like parts of some relief carving.

The whole process was very fast; we stared dumbfounded at the changes around us, none of us speaking, because in that instant all the openings simultaneously grew "something," and they instantly grew into such things—the process was actually extremely shocking.

I even had the illusion that something was about to burst out of the wall.

Shining my flashlight on the things that had emerged from the holes, I found that they were all carved from the same stone as the cave walls; each carving protruding from a hole was different, and I could tell at a glance that they were indeed various parts of a certain relief.

Stepping back to the entrance and looking at the entire wall, I immediately understood what was going on: originally this cave wall should have been covered with relief carvings, but now they had all been chiseled away, leaving nothing behind.

And these pits were holes dug into the relief, like a jigsaw puzzle—they had removed a piece here, a piece there. All the removed parts were actually embedded deep inside those holes, driven by a mechanism. Once triggered, they would be pushed out by the internal machinery, filling the openings, and only then would the full picture of the relief puzzle appear.

Truly ingenious. With such a setup, the most crucial parts of the relief were hidden away, and only when the relief was restored could they be seen.

However, looking at the wall, I was speechless again—all the reliefs except the key parts had been knocked off. That was why the wall looked so rough.

This was very easy to deduce. Xiao Hua and his men almost simultaneously reached the same conclusion. For a moment, no one paid any attention to the pig. Everyone walked toward the wall to look at the pieces that had been pushed out.

With difficulty we discerned that the relief fragments were carved with different things. The most obvious ones depicted human hands, but they were small and blurry, clearly hands of figures in the distance. Some fragments had hard-to-identify lines, but with details. I saw one piece with an eye carved on it, so it must have been part of a face, but that eye was not human—I couldn't tell what kind of face it was.

There were distant views and facial carvings—this must be a narrative or scene relief. Thinking of that, I suddenly remembered the photos sent from Guangxi. The reliefs in those pictures seemed somewhat similar in detail to the ones here.

I immediately wanted to ask Xiao Hua, but saw that he had already taken out that photo to compare. After checking several details, we found that indeed, in the three reliefs around the circular disk pattern in the photos from Guangxi, we discovered details identical to the broken relief pieces here.

Those hands were exactly the hands of the figures in minority costumes in the earlier photos, and that eye was exactly the same as the eye of the "Hou" in the photo.

It seemed that the reliefs on the stone wall in Guangxi in the photo should be exactly the same as the original reliefs on this cave wall—they were identical.

"So that's how it is," I thought to myself. Although the reliefs here were only in fragments, the carving technique was extremely skilled and smooth, and the knife edges were rounded—clearly carefully crafted masterpieces. However, I had just noticed that the reliefs in the Guangxi photo seemed to be a perfunctory work by an expert, so it was very likely that the Guangxi reliefs were copies or imitations of the originals here. But what was the meaning of such a setup? I thought, if, as Xiao Hua said, the Guangxi reliefs were actually a hint about this place, then what were they hinting at? I tried hard to think, comparing the photos with the surroundings, hoping to find something suspicious. But after looking for a long time, I found nothing enlightening.

Around me, if I stood with my back to the entrance, then on the wall to my left was that "Hou." If those reliefs hadn't been pried off, the shape of that "Hou" would certainly have been spectacular. On the wall in front of me should be those people without right hands, and on the wall to my right were the ambushers of the minority group.

The three holes in the photo seemed to represent the entrance behind me, with the exact same arrangement.

No one spoke in the entire cave; everyone was carefully examining the photos. I sat down, took a sip of wine, and felt something was wrong.

Because the patterns in the photo, I could tell, were all very simple, not complicated at all. This was not a very detailed relief carving, and from simple carvings it is difficult to glean any special information.

So I shifted my attention to the iron disk. As soon as I looked, I immediately understood the problem.

The iron disk was covered with countless complex patterns, but two large patterns formed a cross on the disk. At each tip of the cross there was a nipple-like protrusion. And the protrusion at the twelve o'clock position was very large.

In the photo of the disk, this protrusion was at the mouth position, while the disk in front of me had this protrusion at the entrance position. If this protrusion represented the directionality of the disk, then the pointer of the disk was pointing to the wrong position.

I called Xiao Hua over and told him, and he also frowned. I said, "It seems the pattern captured in this photo is a diagram. It tells us how everything here should be arranged. This iron disk can be rotated. If we push the disk to the same position as in the photo, it might trigger the next mechanism."

Xiao Hua touched the iron disk, looked at the photo, and thought it made sense. "Should it be turned clockwise or counterclockwise?"

"Generally speaking, it should be counterclockwise, but we just triggered the mechanism with pig blood, so the direction of the machinery might have changed. We'll only know by trying it." As I spoke, I moved to go up.

This time Xiao Hua grabbed me and said, "It's better not to rotate it anymore."