Chapter 451: What Lies Inside the Mirror?

Fatty didn't dare do anything to that mirror, so he had to return the way he came. However, things weren't as smooth as he expected; he walked back for several hours without finding an exit.

The tunnel that had been very stable before was now impossible to finish walking through. No matter how he ran or shouted, there was always a pitch-black tunnel ahead of him.

At the time, he felt that the tunnel was alive, able to change its shape arbitrarily to toy with the people inside. Perhaps their actions had finally angered the tunnel, and it was using this method to make him die in despair.

Just as he was on the verge of running to despair, Fatty suddenly saw a savior. He saw on the stone wall ahead of the tunnel the deep pit he had blasted himself.

He remembered the location of this pit; it should actually be at the entrance end of the tunnel. The tunnel slanted into the mountain, and the rock on this section of the wall was not hard.

At this point, Fatty unleashed his ferocity. He divided all the explosives on him into ten portions, wanting to forcefully blast a path. He blasted inward to a depth of six or seven meters. Although he didn't blast a passage, he did blast the shadow of a person out of the rock.

He remembered our experience in the cave at that time. He directly smashed the outer stone crust, killed the person in the stone viciously, then squeezed into the crevices where the stone person moved, frantically crawling all the way. He crawled inside for several days and unexpectedly found the way out. But he hadn't expected the exit to be so small that he couldn't squeeze out. He had to wait there, waiting for four days until we appeared.

After listening to Fatty's account, I was a bit disoriented, and moreover, I felt an extremely uncomfortable sensation from the bottom of my heart.

It was a chill, an extreme chill.

I knew deeply where this chill came from. Fatty's entire narrative, including all the details, gave me a sense of déjà vu.

Actually, it wasn't just familiarity; I could even recite it backward.

All of Fatty's experiences in this cave were too similar to Third Uncle's experiences in the underwater tomb—almost exactly the same.

Back then, Third Uncle at the bottom of the sea also entered a very eerie environment. Then he woke up from a nap and found that everyone had disappeared and the place he was in had changed. He also noticed strange phenomena and then escaped that place by himself.

I was a bit flustered because I couldn't quite sort out these threads, but one thing I was almost certain of: whether in the underwater tomb, in Cloud Summit Palace, or here, the style of the "trap" was very similar.

According to previous investigations, these techniques almost all originated from the person known as the Ghost Hand Master Craftsman, Wang Zanghai.

In those days, Wang Zanghai first repaired Cloud Summit Palace, then built an underwater ancient tomb for himself, and finally, almost identical techniques appeared here again.

I had many fragmented judgments in my mind. I didn't know if Wang Zanghai was the origin of these techniques. If so, this person was truly formidable. But at the same time, it was also possible that he himself was a very talented craftsman. While helping the Dongxia people repair the imperial mausoleum, he learned many structural designs from that underground imperial mausoleum of the time, and then used them in the construction of his own tomb. Wang Zanghai couldn't still be alive. Did his techniques pass down to the Zhang family or to the Style Lei family? Geographically, the Zhang family is said to be a mysterious ethnic group from the northeast, very close to the location of Cloud Summit Palace, while the Style Lei family was located in the east, close to the location of Xisha.

There are two possibilities. The first is that when Wang Zanghai was active in Dongxia, due to an accidental opportunity, he left behind or spread these techniques. The other possibility is that these techniques were spread to coastal fishermen when Wang Zanghai built the huge treasure ship for the underwater tomb.

I lean more toward the first type. The Zhang family using these techniques near the Zhang Family Ancient Building is clearly more consistent with the entire background system. Regarding Style Lei, all our clues so far are only that they designed this Zhang Family Ancient Building. We have only found a large number of architectural drawings, but no mechanical drawings at all. This point is quite telling.

If one does not go back to that moment, no one can know the truth of history.

I also thought of Poker-face's extreme understanding of mechanisms, and various strange associations came to mind. Fatty said here, I already had a very definite intuition: the mechanical structure here must be huge and integrated, which was also the reason Poker-face didn't discover the mechanisms. Similarly, in the underwater tomb back then, the whole room moved as a whole, and Poker-face didn't notice either.

But I could almost be certain that with Poker-face's intelligence, even if he couldn't sense the operation of the mechanisms behind, he should have been able to guess the general situation based on his experience in the underwater tomb.

But why didn't he say anything at that time?

He always had his own considerations. This is the key. I think he could even completely guess the general mechanism of how the traps worked. He proposed to search in the outer cave because at that time, when he saw the cave, he already knew the way to solve it.

And he is not the kind of person who would stand by and watch people die. He must have come back to save everyone and brought them into the ancient building. But he alone did not take Fatty away; instead, he sent Fatty to another place. What was the intention behind this?

He sent Fatty to a place where he could see him, so that Fatty could know they were still alive. Was this to let Fatty convey this information?

That doesn't make sense. If Fatty conveyed this information, we would definitely try to rescue him more actively. But if that were the case, Poker-face shouldn't be that foolish; at least he should have left clear written information.

I can't figure it out. These pieces of information gave me the feeling that it was purely to prevent Fatty from entering the ancient building. This feeling was quite bad. The only possibility for Poker-face not letting Fatty enter the ancient building should be that he clearly knew this was a journey with no return. And with Poker-face's skills and courage, what he considered a no-return trip basically truly had no chance of turning around.

Poker-face thought they were doomed.

But Old Mrs. Huo and the others were brought in. Did Poker-face think Old Mrs. Huo and her people could die? He and Old Mrs. Huo have many past experiences that I don't know about. A ninety-something-year-old old woman still comes here to make trouble. It seems that their respective problems have become so big that they must be resolved, and even if people die, it doesn't matter.