Chapter 477: Ancient Tower: Second Level

The two of us advanced through the second floor of the Zhang family ancient building, passing through the racks holding the iron warrior figurines, carefully stepping and crawling over collapsed ones, and walked a long way before reaching the center of this floor. There was a large open space here with nothing placed in it.

Looking around from this spot, you could see that all the racks holding the iron warrior figurines were arranged radially with this point as the center, forming a complete set of Fuxi's Sixty-Four Hexagrams.

However, aside from these iron warrior figurines, there was nothing else on this floor. The iron warrior figurines were all cast from pig iron, exactly like what we had seen before under the ruins at the bottom of the lake, and they should all be the remains of Mi Luo Tuo that had been sealed with iron.

"This is a warehouse," Fatty said. "When they were doing projects here, all the Mi Luo Tuo they killed might have been stored here."

"So many? There must be a battalion's worth here."

"Not that many. Didn't that deformed guy say these things followed human movement? They must have kept gathering during construction."

Fatty said, "There were so many iron figurines they couldn't transport them out, so they just piled them all here. The burial floors of the Zhang family might be further up. Let's keep searching and see if we can find a passage upward."

This floor, like the bottom floor, also had four massive pillars.

From the outside, the Zhang family ancient building was eleven stories high. Apart from the floor buried beneath the quicksand, there should be eight more floors above us.

This ancient building was entirely constructed from the stone and wood of this mountain, and the stone here was mixed with a large amount of "Mi Luo Tuo stone," which was very rare.

There were a large number of messy footprints on the ground, clearly indicating that Poker-face and the others had also searched extensively here. The footprints were too chaotic to provide us with any reference.

Fatty looked up and stroked his chin, pondering the footprints. After thinking for a while, he muttered to himself as he pondered, "There are too many footprints on the ground to judge, but there must be traces above."

I followed his gaze and looked up, seeing him sweeping his flashlight across the beams.

The beams were densely covered with peculiar Zhang family script. These scripts seemed to come from different systems, each line from a different place. The only common point was that we couldn't decipher any of them and had no idea what they meant.

In one of the lines, I actually saw a passage of Heavenly Book script.

Fatty stopped and said to me, "Looks like my guess was right. The Zhang family, as the most original grave-robbing clan, might be the only people in the world who understand the truth of Chinese history."

They sealed all the secrets they brought out from their tomb raiding into this Zhang family ancient building."

I said, "What do these scripts actually mean? Do you think the people who built this place understood them?"

Fatty replied, "You don't have to know the hen to enjoy the egg. I reckon the Zhang family provided the patterns, and then the Yangshi Lei family designed them into the blueprints."

"These different strange scripts should all come from fragments of already broken Chinese civilizations. If my guess is correct, the closer you get to the top floor here, the closer you get to modern times."

"Some secrets of Chinese civilization should be buried in the huge bottom floor of the Zhang building, completely covered by quicksand."

"So if we go up, aren't we moving away from the biggest secrets?" I said.

Fatty said, "Aren't our main tasks here to rescue people?"

"Think about it, even I gave up on scavenging funerary objects. You shouldn't overthink either; this place is full of damn Heavenly Book scripts."

"But I saw some bronze inscriptions, probably from the early Spring and Autumn period. One floor up, we might see a lot of seal script characters."

So we continued searching and finally found a climbing mechanism on the west side of the building. Fatty climbed up first.

After going up, it turned out to be unexpected. On this floor, there were no more iron warrior figurines; instead, there was a giant turtle.

The turtle had an unusually long neck and limbs, with a human face and a turtle body. The front limbs ended in human hands, the hind limbs were turtle feet, and the face was a woman's face, venomous and fierce, with a half-smile, like some terrifying Tibetan thangka portraits.

On the turtle's back was a depression with a black ball carved all over with human faces, which seemed removable.

When Fatty saw the stone statue, he clicked his tongue in wonder: "Do you know the origin of this thing? It's a statue of the Shi Ren people, descendants of Shennong."

"The Taiping Yulan quotes the Fengsu Tong: At that time, primitive people lived in groups, practiced polygamy, and had chaotic reproduction. To make childbirth clear, Nuwa ordered every cave-dwelling group to make clay figurines for counting."

"The clay figurines used by the Shennong people's country were human-faced and turtle-bodied. Later, this human-faced turtle-body image became the national emblem of the Shi Ren country."

"That national emblem is really shabby. But how come a culturally illiterate guy like you read the Taiping Yulan?" I asked curiously.

"It was because of the cover image of Nuwa. I thought it was a spicy book, but it turned out to be so serious."

He said, "I still remember a passage from it: 'The One-Eyed Country has one eye, located above the face. Surnamed Sheng, descendants of Fuxi. The Three-Headed Country, this kind, has three heads, later served as vassals to Xuanyuan. The Shi Ren Country has human faces and turtle bodies, descendants of Shennong. Goumang has a human face and a bird body, descendants of Fuxi.' Remember the human-faced birds we saw at the Cloud Summit?"

I crouched down and carefully examined the details of this turtle, and I noticed that it was indeed similar to the human-faced bird statues we had discovered at the Cloud Summit.

I said, "Goumang is the god of wood and spring. Fuxi and Xuanyuan are all from mythological times. This thing must have been dug up from somewhere and carried here. It definitely isn't something we could unearth now. It must have been from tomb raiders of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period; only graves from that time could contain such things."

"The Zhang family's seniority is real. No one would recognize this thing if we took it out."

Fatty said, "What kind of god is the Spring God? The one in charge of Viagra?"

"It's the god of spring. Let's look around and see what tricks this floor has. Maybe we'll find things from other tribes around the edges."

Just as I was about to explore, Fatty suddenly started coughing again. This time he coughed even more violently, his entire lungs seemed to spasm, and he nearly collapsed to the ground.

I immediately went to support him and saw that this time, the phlegm he coughed up was all blood.

I looked and thought, this is bad—the amount of blood is definitely no small matter. Could it be that when he shook the bag just now, he inhaled that much dust? I originally thought coughing it out would be fine, but now it seems his condition has actually worsened.

After he finished coughing, his whole face turned pale. I immediately handed him his canteen and told him to rinse his mouth. "Are you okay? Don't push yourself if you can't handle it."

He looked at the blood he had coughed up, cursed, and said to me, "We need to move fast. If we stay here any longer, you'll end up like this sooner or later."

I helped him rest for a moment, and then he pushed me away. Next, we looked at the floor around us.

This area was relatively open, and on the ground there was an extremely clear trail of footprints, leading straight ahead into the darkness.

While walking through the darkness, I had thought about all kinds of things we might see immediately, but I never expected that after making a full circle, I'd discover that there was nothing at all on this third floor of the ancient building.

The footprints wound around all four sides of the ancient building. Their owner must have thought the same as we did—that the opening to the upper level must be near the edges of the building and the pillars.

"Is this place not fully decorated or something?" Fatty coughed a few times and said, "I once robbed a tomb like this before. All the chambers, murals, and reliefs were perfectly intact, but there was nothing inside.

I thought it had been looted, but all the tomb doors were completely untouched."

I was a bit doubtful. Looking at the footprints on the ground, I noticed a very strange pattern—like "flowers blooming beneath the steps." Every so often, the owner of the footprints would stop and turn in circles in a very small area.

"What do you think this pattern means?" I asked Fatty.

Fatty pressed his chest and said, "That's ballroom dancing. Looks like Xiao Ge was in a good mood when he got to this floor, dancing a waltz with someone." Then he made a waltz gesture.

I thought to myself, your lungs are practically ruined and you're still messing around. I looked down at the footprints again and realized it was a sign of hesitation.

They might have found something strange here, stopped, and examined it carefully.

But there was nothing around—completely empty. What were they looking at? There was nothing worth stopping for, unless they encountered some sudden situation here.

"Be careful," I said, noticing that this pattern occurred every few steps along the trail. "Based on my past experience, something is about to happen soon."

"I'm already half a consumptive now—can you stop bringing trouble?"

I said, "Giving advance warning is never a bad thing."

Just as I finished speaking, we both heard a series of faint footsteps echoing through the empty hall.

Fatty looked at me, and I looked at him. I asked, "Is that Xiao Ge?"

Fatty shook his head and swept his flashlight around. I couldn't see anything. Fatty said to me, "Listen carefully."

We both quieted down, stood back-to-back, turned around to monitor our surroundings, and tried hard to track the footsteps. I immediately understood why Fatty had shaken his head.

The footsteps came from the ceiling. We shone our flashlights upward and immediately discovered what was unusual about this floor.

The ceiling on this floor was exceptionally high, with an unusually large number of beams, forming a huge checkerboard-like structure above our heads.

In the squares of that checkerboard, within the shadows of the beams, I saw countless objects hanging.

"Holy shit," Fatty said, his eyes wide. Under the entire shadow of the ceiling, there were tens of thousands of small boxes hanging.

The boxes varied in size and shape, with patterns on them. At a glance, it was an extremely spectacular sight.

"Immortal fruits," Fatty said. "They're immortal fruits. So many of them, so many of them!"