Chapter 478: Divine Fruit on Level Three

"What are immortal fruits? Are they like pancake fruits?"

I thought of a comic where there were many fruits that granted superpowers when eaten. Thinking of that, I felt a strange amusement.

I looked at Fatty. Fatty said, "I heard it from one of my girlfriends. She's a top-class escort. Once she went to a boss's house for a 'delivery' and saw a box hanging in his room. The boss wouldn't let her touch it, said it was an immortal fruit."

She didn't understand, so the client asked if she had seen "The Legend of Chu Liuxiang". The monk Wuhua in it had never touched the ground since birth; he was always on a bed or sitting on a palanquin, like rootless water.

"That man had extremely high Buddhist nature, never touched the mundane world from birth. Some things are the same—from the moment they are made, they never land on the ground; they are always hung for preservation. The box that holds such treasures is called an 'immortal fruit'. I've only heard about it, didn't expect to see so many here."

"Are you fucking reliable?" I said. "I've also heard a story. Eunuchs used to have a treasure room; everything cut off from their bodies was put in a box and hung in the treasure room. Same situation, all kinds of boxes. Some big eunuchs' treasures even had their own special rooms. Looks to me this is exactly a treasure room."

"You mean, on the ceiling of the third floor of the Zhang Family Ancient Building? Damn, the Zhang family head's aesthetic is really kinky. Absolutely impossible!" As he spoke, Fatty pulled out his submachine gun and said, "Pick one, and I'll show you my skill, hit a target at a hundred paces."

I saw him coughing, his face almost turning green, and said, "Stop bullshitting, just shoot one down."

Fatty pointed to a distant one: "We need to do things with style. See that one, the smallest." I didn't see clearly, but he raised his gun and fired. A box hanging from the ceiling far away fell with a bang, rolled on the ground a few times.

We covered our mouths and noses, waiting for the dust to settle before going over. Fatty picked it up. It was a wooden box, quite decayed on the outside. Fatty pried it open with an iron spike and dumped the contents onto the ground.

It was a withered hand with two unusually long fingers, but not the same as Poker-face's.

Fatty and I looked at each other, saying nothing. Fatty stood up and immediately shot down a few more.

I opened the boxes and found they all contained withered hands. Some hands were completely rotten, just a few white bones, but you could tell all these hands had abnormal fingers.

Moreover, the boxes that fell were some new, some old, showing they were from very different eras.

"The Zhang family certainly have distinctive features," Fatty teased me. "You're into that kind of thing, huh?"

"Damn it," I cursed, looking up at the ceiling. "This is a thousand-hand burial ground. All these hands clearly have Zhang family characteristics, and there are so many, from different periods. Do you know how many overseas Chinese in the past wanted to be buried back home after death? How did they do it?"

I paused, glanced at him, and continued, "The bodies were too heavy and couldn't be preserved, so they only brought back a part. I think these hands are probably from bodies that were too damaged to be returned for burial. So they cut off one hand and buried it here in this form."

"Then why are there so many?"

"War," I said. "So many people must be due to large-scale conflicts or wars.

"Not necessarily big wars, but since ancient times, large tomb-raiding families had their own armed forces. Not just tomb raiders, many local magnates had armed forces. During war times, these people were strong local military forces."

"Then do you remember the bodies we fished out of the lake?" Fatty asked. "Those also had no hands; hands were cut off."

"These hands all have obvious Zhang family features. The reason they cut off the hands, besides for burial, must also be to hide identity."

I said, "It seems the bodies we fished out of the lake were also Zhang family members."

"Zhang family members?" Fatty muttered, "This is too confusing. What the hell is going on?"

These hands stirred up my intense curiosity. I couldn't wait to follow Poker-face's footprints and continue exploring forward. We found the next staircase and climbed up.

On this next floor, I immediately saw many wooden railings—this floor finally became normal. Like many pagodas, there were many compartments and corridors inside.

We walked forward from the stairway entrance and found all the compartments had closed doors, with black paper pasted over the windows, completely blocking the view inside.

Fatty stepped forward a few steps, found a door, pushed it, found it locked. He raised his foot to kick it, but immediately remembered the dust and drew his foot back.

We used our clothes as fans to brush the dust off the door, then Fatty poked a hole in the black window paper with his iron spike.

We peeked inside. The room was pitch black. Shining a flashlight through the hole didn't illuminate the whole scene. Fatty took out a homemade flare we found on a dead body earlier, lit it, and threw it through the hole.

The thing burned aluminum foil, lighting up the entire room at once. I realized it was basically a large fire-striker, improved by these grave robbers. Working people are truly ingenious.

We pressed our eyes to the hole again and saw the room was small, at most three square meters, with a large black wooden coffin inside.

The walls were covered with wooden plaques inscribed with text. I could see they were in small regular script Chinese characters, probably epitaphs or something.

The firelight lasted less than a minute before dimming. Fatty threw another one in, looked more carefully, and said, "No doubt about it, this level is a burial chamber. The whole row should be the same."

I estimated: this floor is at least two thousand square meters. Each room is two to three square meters, meaning there are about a thousand such rooms.

There are probably a thousand coffins, a thousand dead people here.

"Does the Zhang family have that many people?" Fatty said. "How big must this family be?"

I said, "Ancient magnate families were enormous. Have you read Dream of the Red Chamber?

"Do you know how many people were in the Grand View Garden? Cao Xueqin alone wrote about four hundred and fifty. The Genghis Khan family's descendants today probably number in the tens of thousands; you and I might even have some 'Golden Family' genes.

"The Qing imperial family also had a huge population. Historically, as long as a family thrives for three generations, by the third generation, having tens of thousands of members across the country is not a problem."

"These Zhang family members have a special status; their rise and fall are not affected by historical changes, so the family is probably even larger. Those who can get a small room here are probably the truly impressive ones of the main branch; all the other seventh cousins and third cousins are hanging downstairs."

Fatty said, "Good grief, thank goodness by Little Brother's generation they're all dullards, otherwise China would have been taken over by them."

"The third most common surname in China is Zhang. 'The fifth son of the Yellow Emperor, Qingyang, gave birth to Hui, who observed the Arc Star, made bows and arrows, became the official in charge of bows, and presided over the worship of the Arc, thus becoming the Zhang clan.' It's no surprise that the Zhang family is a prominent clan," I said. "Do you smell something strange?"

As we talked, a strong burnt smell came over. Fatty sniffed: "It's nothing, it's the burnt smell from the flare just now."

I thought it was wrong. The smell was very strong, and it was warm, not like the smell of a cold smoke.

"No, no." Before I finished speaking, I saw that in the room we had just looked at, there was some light shining in the cave.

I leaned in to look and knew we were done for. The flare had been thrown onto the floor inside; the floor was wooden, and the temperature of the flare was very high, so the floor had caught fire.

"You've caused a huge disaster, dammit," I said. "Quick, quick, quick, water bottle."

"It's fine, it's just a small fire, right?" Fatty said. He opened the water bottle cap, took a sip, and sprayed it into the cave.

A few sprays were useless. The water in the bottle was completely sprayed out, but the fire burned stronger and stronger.

The entire ancient building was made of wood, and this was the middle floor. If it caught fire, the whole building would be finished. "Now I admit I've caused a big disaster,"

Fatty said, looking at the beam above. Originally, if we kicked the door in and stomped a few times, the small fire would definitely be put out, but I was almost certain that the nearly thousand-year-old toxic powder above would kill us before the fire was extinguished.

"Use urine." A past event that Third Uncle had told me came to mind. "Do you have to pee?"

"Damn, it's all powder up there. Who knows if it'll burn my 'little brother'? I've already sacrificed my lungs for Little Brother, I don't want to sacrifice that thing too."

"It's fine, just poke another hole in the upper part of the window. Use your eyes to see from above and aim from below. At most a little powder will stick, and some skin will peel off, but it'll be fine."

"Then why don't you pee?"

"I didn't drink that much water," I cursed. "Hurry up, if you don't pee now, even the biggest bladder will be useless."

Fatty looked at me, looked at his own crotch, then looked at the firelight inside. He sighed and made up his mind: "Then squat down!"

I squatted down. Fatty pulled down his pants with a swish, revealing his shorts, and came at me. He stepped onto my shoulder. Then I heard Fatty yell: "Son of a bitch, eat my…"

I really didn't expect Fatty to be so heavy. As soon as he came down, my collarbone made a cracking sound, as if it had broken.

I couldn't bear his weight at all and immediately fell sideways. Before Fatty could finish the word "whip," it turned into "Holy crap," and his whole body fell onto the wooden door.

The entire wooden door was knocked down by him and crashed to the ground.

The flames were obviously extinguished instantly by the fall. I saw that the situation was bad and immediately yelled: "Hold your breath!"

Saying that, the two of us immediately wrapped our heads with clothes, covered our mouths and noses, and protected our faces tightly.

I had foreseen that dust would then fall like snowflakes, but I didn't expect that this time there was only a little light dust.

Fatty and I waited a while, brushed the dust off our hair, and felt it was strange.

"Does someone clean this place?" Fatty said.

I shook my head: "Maybe it's because the windows here use this kind of black paper. Look, the floors we passed before all used white window paper, and it was all rotten."

"The black paper here is still intact, so it must have been specially treated." I used my foot to stir the dust underfoot and found that the dust was also thin, and it was gray.

I carefully picked some up and rubbed it between my fingers, and found that it was real dust, not powder.

I let out a long breath—this place was relatively very safe. I had thought I would be completely rotted away; it seems empiricism doesn't work.

Just as I was thinking, I smelled a very unpleasant odor, and then I found that my pants leg and the door we had knocked over were all wet. I sniffed and let out a long sigh: "Fatty, you bastard, you didn't stop in time, did you?"

"Damn, I had just released the valve, and then it fell. Can you be more reliable? If you could have held on a little longer, I would have finished peeing."

Fatty lit a cigarette, patted his crotch, "I spent the last moments retracting my divine artifact, otherwise if I fell like that and got stuck in the door, damn, even the hardest gun would be ruined."

I said, "Put your thing back first." Then I stood up, shook my pants leg, and turned on the flashlight to look at the text on the wooden plaques on the walls around the coffin.

The wooden plaques were quite decayed. From the first few lines of text, I found that this was a biography of this person, all written in classical Chinese.

I read it very quickly and suddenly felt a burst of ecstasy. Although what was written here was not what I wanted to know, it was extremely valuable; from it, it seemed possible to infer some core secrets of the Zhang family.

Moreover, this secret was no longer inferred from various pieces of information. The life written on the epitaph could basically be confirmed as one hundred percent true.