Tomb Raiding: My Family's Last Clan Chief is Little Brother

Chapter 31 Sudden Changes
The fat man scoffed, "Where's the door? I, Fatty, haven't seen it!"

"That just means you're not meant to be in this Heavenly Palace," Wu Xiaoxie teased.

The fat man waved his hand dismissively, "It doesn't matter whether I have a connection with the Heavenly Palace or not, as long as I have a connection with the artifacts here."

As he spoke, he bent down and groped in the water, and actually found a flattened and broken oxygen tank, while holding up a broken diving mask in his other hand.

After searching for a long time, I didn't find a single funerary object, except for some miscellaneous junk.

The fat man spat, "What a waste of my time."

Zhang Wuxun nudged him with his elbow and pointed at the young man standing in front of the stone tablet, transformed into a stone sculpture, "Look, the young man seems a bit off."

The three of them gathered around and took a closer look, and their hearts sank.

The young man's eyes at that moment looked as if he had experienced some calamity; they were lifeless, despairing, and filled with extreme sorrow.

"Brother?" Zhang Wuxun asked cautiously, slowly waving his hand in front of his eyes. "Are you alright?"

The young man slowly raised his eyelids and looked around at the three people in front of him, as if to confirm something.

He said in a barely audible voice, "I remember what happened twenty years ago."

The young man's expression was so ashen it was suffocating, as if he had stopped breathing and become a dead man.

Zhang Wuxun looked at it and felt a little uneasy. He asked softly, "Can you tell me?"

The young man nodded and, in an extremely slow and calm tone, recounted a huge mystery buried for twenty years from the perspective of an observer.

Zhang Wuxun and the other two listened intently, as if they were actually there.

It turns out that the painting on the double-eared porcelain bottle that had previously captivated Wu Xiaoxie to the point of losing track of time and nearly caused him to be scratched by the sea monkeys depicted the Cloud Palace designed and built by the legendary craftsman Wang Zanghai in the early Ming Dynasty.

When the archaeological team discovered the Dinghai Stone Monkey here, Wu Sansheng, who should have been sleeping in another tomb, inexplicably appeared here and was even twisting his body and combing his hair in front of the stone tablet, behaving inexplicably strangely.

As a result, while combing through the comb, he inadvertently discovered something strange: the mechanism here was actually a form of divination.

The young man stared at the stone tablet in front of him and said, "Back then, my understanding of the traps and mechanisms in ancient Chinese tombs surpassed that of everyone else in the world."

"But I didn't find any trace of any mechanism on the stone tablet."

Zhang Wuxun was naturally very familiar with Qimen Dunjia. Qimen Dunjia is a system that uses military strategy and numerology. It is also called the Eight Formations and is divided into eight gates: Open, Rest, Life, Death, Shock, Injury, Du, and View. The Life Gate is for life, and the Death Gate is for death. Once you enter the other gates, you will see the other eight gates again. The cycle repeats itself endlessly.

This is the mystery of Qimen Dunjia.

Zhang Wuxun had always enjoyed studying and solving mechanisms, and then he would improve and create even more ingenious and exquisite mechanisms based on them.

In terms of expertise in government affairs, he and the young man are absolutely on par.

Upon hearing the young man say that Master Wu found the mechanism by dressing up as a woman and combing his hair, Zhang Wuxun thought for two seconds and decided to try it himself, but the fat man beat him to it.

"Little Fish, get out of my way! I need to comb my hair!"

The fat man, in a affected voice, flicked his right hand with his pinky finger, as if shooing away a fly, and with a swish of his fat buttocks, he pushed Zhang Wuxun aside.

Zhang Wuxun stumbled and steadied himself, touching the goosebumps on his arms with a look of disgust. "Ew~ Fatty, did you take the wrong medicine?"

Wu Xiaoxie grinned silently, "Brother just said there's a fifty-star map made of luminous pearls inside the Heavenly Gate."

Zhang Wuxun rolled his eyes. He knew this fat man was suddenly so eager; it turned out he had his eye on the luminous pearl in the palace. "Hmph~ Little devil, don't think I don't know you were talking badly about me just now." The fat man fawned, smoothing his hair. "That damned Consort Ning has run away, and the commission she promised me is probably all gone. I've never returned empty-handed in all these years of tomb raiding. This grudge won't be forgotten until it's settled."

Zhang Wuxun interrupted him helplessly, "Fat eunuch, please get to the point."

"Didn't the young man just say that the passage to the Heavenly Gate is uphill, and that big house with the Heavenly Palace model is very tall? With it being so tall, the top of the treasure might be the highest point in the entire tomb. At that time..." The fat man's tone suddenly changed as he spoke.

"Oh dear, I mean, Fatty saw those three fish!"

Wu Xiaoxie quickly went over, "Where? Where?"

The fat man turned around and pointed to a door, "This is it!"

[Host, may I borrow your body?]

[What?]
Zhang Wuxun was startled. Before he could react, he suddenly felt dizzy and lost consciousness the next second.

Fatty was still discussing with Wu Xiaoxie about using the gilded bronze mirror arm with the character "福" (fortune) from the big house as a hammer when suddenly a gust of wind blew past his ear.

A figure darted to the hidden door with lightning speed, about to slip inside.

The young man reacted very quickly, catching up and grabbing "Zhang Wuxun's" arm.

"Zhang Wuxun" turned his head and gave the young man a strange smile, then swung his arm to throw him away, followed by a leg whip that swept straight at him.

That was a quick and brutal blow; if it had landed squarely, it would have broken at least three ribs.

The young man quickly stepped back, leaped up, pushed off the wall, and flipped in mid-air to avoid the fall. The moment he landed, he reached out to pull the person back.

"Zhang Wuxun" had already taken advantage of this one-second time difference to slip into the hidden door.

Wu Xiaoxie and Fatty, who were behind him, were stunned by the sudden turn of events and stood there dumbfounded.

“This… Muyu…” Wu Xiaoxie stammered, unable to utter a complete sentence.

"It's him, and it's not him." The young man's expression was solemn.

Wu Xiaoxie was completely confused. "Isn't that just a wooden fish? It's been right under our noses the whole time. How could it have been switched?"

The young man said, "His eyes are golden."

The fat man who was running over suddenly stopped in his tracks. "What the heck? Golden eyes, buddy, are you sure you're not seeing things? Could it just be the light reflecting off them?"

The young man nodded very affirmatively.

"What's going on? Could there be a monster in this tomb?" The fat man looked around suspiciously. "Or maybe the wooden fish, like Master Wu back then, is possessed by an unknown female ghost?"

The young man shook his head. "I don't know."

Wu Xiaoxie was extremely anxious. "Whether it's a demon or a ghost, it must have its purpose in controlling the wooden fish. The wooden fish is in a very dangerous situation now."

The fat man also became anxious, "Tianzhen is right, let's hurry and follow him before he gets too far."

Without delay, the three of them packed their bags and went into the secret door where Zhang Wuxun's figure had disappeared.

(End of this chapter)