Chapter 322: Mummy

The herds of cattle, sheep, and horses being driven, the dark-skinned men wearing felt hats and thick robes of blue or

In the biting cold wind, Franca let a four-wheeled wooden cart pulled by long-haired oxen pass, then tilted her head to say to Lu Mian and Jenna:

"Why are you both so quiet? Exchange some local customs and traditions."

What's the point of walking so dryly?

Lu Mian was silent for a second and said:

"I don't know."

Jenna then felt a surge of shame:

"I don't know either."

She had only heard the love legend of the Pharaoh's Queen and stories of adventurers discovering treasure in the rainforest.

"Uh..." Franca waved her right hand and said, "I don't know much either."

How much is "not much"? Lu Mian didn't press the matter, leading his two companions into the shop named "Highland Secret Medicine."

The Intis owner, Salient Empire, wearing a blue coat with gold trim, recognized Lu Mian at a glance. After all, both his hair color and his looks were impressive, and it hadn't been many days since they last met.

Salient looked Franca and Jenna over a few times and gave Lu Mian a warm smile:

"What do you want this time?"

Lu Mian, whose spirituality was so depleted that he had a bit of a headache, said straightforwardly:

"Real mummy ash, I want to see the mummy!"

Salient's eyes flickered slightly; he didn't ask why:

"Fine, I'll take you to see it."

As a long-term seller of mummy ash, he knew very well that this stuff had no effect on enhancing that kind of ability and was always mixed with some truly effective secret medicines to be sold. But since the other party didn't ask whether real mummy ash was useful, he was happy not to mention it.

Besides, he suspected that this man and two women wanted to buy a mummy outright to resell for profit; that would be a big business.

Salient temporarily closed the shop's front door and led Lu Mian, Franca, and Jenna into the rear warehouse where ordinary herbs were stored, following a narrow staircase all the way down until they reached the entrance to the basement.

He turned around, looked at Lu Mian and the others, and asked as if to confirm:

"Do you really want to see it?"

This didn't sound like a guilty conscience; it was closer to a warning.

"Of course." Lu Mian answered without hesitation.

As he spoke, his gaze fell upon the pitch-black wooden door of the basement.

There, a few twisted and mysterious symbols were outlined in a mixture of murky green and ghastly white.

Some of them looked like simplified skull heads, some resembled arms and vines entwined together, and others were composed of inverted triangles.

Surrounding these symbols were thin lines of the same color, extending in all directions and burrowing into the walls, floor, and ceiling.

Just as Salient took out a key that looked like it was made of gold and stepped forward, preparing to open the door, Franca lowered her voice and said to Lu Mian and Jenna:

"Those occult symbols look like they belong to the Death domain."

"What do they mean?" Jenna asked since she didn't understand.

Franca shook her head:

"I don't know. Normally, this should be part of some ritual magic, but ritual magic without a source of power cannot continue to function.

"As far as I know, the large churches of the orthodox gods all have more or less similar arrangements, and what keeps the ritual magic running is the believers who go to pray every day. The spirit and spirituality that each of them contributes individually isn't much, but accumulated, it's enough."

"Perhaps there is power here to maintain the ritual magic." Lu Mian smiled and said to Franca, "You should be happy. From this perspective, there might really be a mummy here."

Franca let out a soft sigh and said:

"The fakes here shouldn't be as rampant as in Trier."

She asked with some confusion:

"Why do you insist on dragging us to see a real mummy? I could have just divined whether the mummy ash was real."

"To gain some experience." Lu Mian answered righteously.

Before Franca could curse, he added:

"If I asked for mummy ash directly, he would most likely give me fake stuff. When that happened, after you divined the result on the spot, would you say I should kick over his cabinet or beat him up? Fighting and killing is so unpleasant."

Lu Mian used a phrase Aurora often said.

Of course, what he didn't mention was that this also had the negative effects brought by the three contracts: "Abscessed Severed Hand" made him always want to snap the target's neck; "Human-Faced Mantis" made him hate those who slander innocent people even more than before; and the Armor Shadow gave him the urge to occasionally feel imprisoned by life, crashing around trying to break through the constraints.

Perhaps thanks to Mr. Fool's witness, or perhaps because "Bribing" brought benefits, the degree of all three was quite mild, belonging to the negative effects that Lu Mian could control if he concentrated. But combined, they still made him occasionally have thoughts of acting on impulse.

Franca and Jenna let out sounds of disdain at the same time.

Only a "Hunter" loves fighting and killing the most!

At this moment, Salient, who had been fiddling with the lock, twisting it left and right, finally opened the pitch-black wooden door painted with mysterious symbols.

Lu Mian immediately saw oil lamps in the basement corridor, embedded in the walls, seemingly never extinguished.

The firelight, tinged with a bit of murky green, swayed gently. Franca and the others followed the secret medicine shop owner, Salient, into the corridor behind the door.

Even though there was light here, it gave them the illusion of stepping deeper into the darkness.

The already cold temperature seemed to drop by several more degrees Celsius.

Salient walked forward seven or eight meters, passed by closed gray-white stone doors, and stopped in front of a room in the middle of the corridor.

These stone doors and the surrounding walls had symbols similar to those at the basement entrance.

Salient pushed open the stone door in front of him, revealing a small tomb chamber to Lu Mian and the others:

A gold-bottomed, colorful humanoid stone coffin with a very exotic style was quietly placed in the middle of the tomb chamber.

"This is a mummy from five centuries ago." Salient introduced while moving close to the stone coffin and pushing the lid down.

"He doesn't seem afraid that we'll just snatch the mummy here..." Lu Mian muttered in a low voice.

Franca laughed in a low voice:

"Maybe he just looks down on us."

Jenna didn't join their conversation, looking into the interior of the gold-bottomed stone coffin with both curiosity and fear.

Lying there was a corpse wrapped in yellowish-brown cloth strips, its mouth slightly open, its eyes nothing but hollow black holes, and there seemed to be traces of residual grease that had once oozed out on the surface of its body.

Being in a foreign land, Franca didn't have many scruples and directly took out a mirror to perform divination in front of Salient.

Salient's gaze flickered slightly before quickly returning to normal, as if he had seen similar things too many times.

Not long after, an old voice with the sound of water came from Franca's mirror:

"It is a real mummy, but not an ancient mummy."

Franca suddenly raised her head and looked at the secret medicine shop owner, Salient.

Salient smiled quite awkwardly:

"I lied just now. This isn't a mummy from five centuries ago. In fact, it was only made and sent here two weeks ago. But regardless, it has gone through the complete, long mummy-making process. The only difference from those ancient mummies is that it hasn't been in the tomb chamber long enough."

An "ancient" mummy that came out of the oven two weeks ago? Lu Mian looked at Salient and asked nonchalantly:

"Do you hunt living people to make mummies?"

Salient shook his head gently:

"No need for that. So many people die in the Southern Continent every day; you can buy plenty of fresh corpses for a little money. Hiring people to hunt is much more expensive, and doing it yourself has too high a time cost."

He unconsciously analyzed the pros and cons of several schemes.

After hearing the secret medicine shop owner's explanation, Jenna felt something completely different when looking at that mummy:

It was a person who hadn't been dead for many years.

And their corpse was placed here, sold as merchandise.

Although a mummy with only two weeks of history could be used and was a qualified auxiliary material, Franca certainly hoped to get something better.

She sighed and withdrew her gaze from the fresh mummy, asking Salient:

"Are there any older mummies?"

Salient "uh-ed" for a few seconds before asking cautiously:

"Will one from last year do?"

This was the "oldest" mummy in the basement.

Franca sighed helplessly:

"That'll do."

Salient led the three of them to another tomb chamber with some disappointment.

He had originally thought Lu Mian and the others wanted to buy an entire mummy to take back, which was why he had shown them the most intact one. Now it seemed the other party only wanted a part of it.

The yellowish-brown mummy from last year was already very incomplete; not only were the parts below the torso missing, but there were also hideous holes in the chest and abdomen.

After Franca divined to confirm its authenticity, Salient asked, not as enthusiastically as before:

"How much do you need?"

"50 grams." Franca intended to stock up a bit more.

Salient calculated and said:

"500 gold pounds."

Franca paid the money immediately, watching as Salient pulled out a hammer and a short knife from who knows where, and in the manner of mining ore, banged and hacked until he knocked off a small part of the mummy's arm.

Jenna was stunned; to her, this was truly a bit bloody and brutal.

She had witnessed gang shootouts before and had killed people herself, but she had never seen anyone treat a human body like cheap merchandise.

Franca sighed inwardly, forcing herself to suppress all kinds of emotions to the bottom of her heart.

This was the cruelty of the supernatural world and the potion system, but compared to "Gifts," this seemed exceptionally beautiful.

After taking the small part of the mummy's arm, Franca led Jenna out of the tomb chamber in silence, with Lu Mian and Salient following side by side behind them.

They hadn't gone back three meters when the oil lamps in the corridor shrank simultaneously, their light dimming to the extreme.

Salient turned his head in astonishment, his expression uncertain.

(End of chapter)