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

Chapter 464 The Bizarre Bronze Horse
The young man entered the tomb, lit a tinderbox, and looked around. He found that the ancient tomb was very unusual and gave people a very absurd feeling.

The stone slabs underfoot were covered with murals and carvings of the Nine Heavens Mystic Maiden, while the top of the tomb was just a row of uneven blue bricks, nothing else.

The young man carefully walked around the tomb and found that many of the things hanging upside down on the tomb ceiling were burial objects that were usually only seen on the tomb floor. He then realized that the entire tomb was upside down!

It turned out that the place they had painstakingly dug out was not the top of the tomb, but the bottom. The entire structure and layout of the tomb chamber were completely reversed.

The young man saw a large object hanging upside down at the bottom of the tomb, surrounded by many burial objects. He walked over, raised his tinderbox and shone it upwards, and discovered that it was actually a coffin attached to the bottom of the tomb.

The young man told the people waiting outside about his discovery, and they were all somewhat skeptical.

However, after the young man widened the opening and they all climbed in, they were stunned by what they saw.

Some people have suggested that the earthquake might have turned the entire tomb upside down, which is why it turned out this way.

Zhang Haike shook his head and said no, "If it were an earthquake, even if the coffin was flipped up during the earth's rotation, it would quickly fall down and be smashed to pieces along with the other burial objects. The entire tomb roof would even collapse into broken tiles, instead of hanging directly on it like it is now. It is clear that the people who built this place deliberately constructed it in this way."

"Could it be related to feng shui? The way this tomb is set up clearly makes the sky the earth and the earth the sky," another child from the Zhang family said.

Zhang Haike thought for a moment and said uncertainly, "I once saw a similar record in an ancient book. The overall mountain shape in this area is inward, not upward. The feng shui master may have had to build the ancient tomb in this way in order to follow the trend of the mountain range here."

After listening, the others felt that what he said seemed to make a lot of sense.

The young man suddenly spoke up: "Mountains are all like this, with their tops pointing upwards and their bottoms pointing downwards. Even underground mountains are like this. Due to the subsidence of the mountain, this mountain range and the ancient tomb will sink to a very deep place underground."

After thinking about it, everyone felt that what he said made sense. When the ancient tomb was first built, the rocks at the bottom of the mountain arched out of the ground, which made it easy to think of it as a relatively flat rock mountain. The mountain peaks that grew downwards from the bottom were like the roots of a human tooth, embedded in the soil.

The traditional method of excavating a pit before building the burial chamber in ancient tombs is obviously not applicable here, unless they have extraordinary people who can use the method of moving mountains and filling seas to uproot the entire mountain.

Otherwise, the only option would be to dig in from the side, like digging a tunnel to make repairs.

The more they thought about it, the more eerie the place seemed. Some of them wanted to give up, but when they did, they remembered all the hardships they had endured along the way and felt extremely reluctant to leave.

Most importantly, they no longer have enough time to find another ancient tomb that will satisfy them.

“Open!” one of them said. “The winner takes all, and the loser has to accept the consequences. We’ve practiced the skills we need countless times at home, and we know them by heart. It’s just an upside-down ancient tomb. At worst, we’ll just open it upside down too.”

That being said, it would be too risky to lift the coffin from the top using the usual methods. Once the coffin lid is opened, the balance of gravity will be lost, and the corpse and bodily fluids inside, whether poisonous or not, will leak out through the opening.

After some discussion, they decided to have Zhang Haike, the most agile among them, climb onto the human ladder and hang up to make a hole in the coffin wall first, to check the situation inside before considering anything else. This operation was not difficult. After Zhang Haike climbed up, he inserted the awl by feel with his fingers, then tied the end of the awl with a rope, jumped down, and found a safe corner in the tomb.

Seeing that everyone had taken cover, Zhang Haike picked up half a brick from the ground, aimed at the awl, and threw it, smashing the awl all the way into the coffin wall. Finally, he pulled hard on the rope and pulled the awl out.

I thought there would be bodily fluids spraying out, but instead, a thick plume of black smoke emerged, seemingly from the dust and rotten, moldy matter that had accumulated inside.

The spraying only lasted a short while, and soon the tomb returned to its previous tranquility.

The group covered their mouths and noses with the damp corners of their clothes, looking at each other in bewilderment.

“It looks like there shouldn’t be any major problems.” Zhang Haike led the way to the bottom of the coffin. “It’s dry inside. I’ll go up and take a look first. If there’s no problem, we’ll just remove the nails.”

Everyone agreed to send Zhang Haike up using the same method as before.

Zhang Haike crouched down and carefully peered inside the coffin. As soon as he saw it, he knew something was wrong. The inside of the coffin was filled with an extremely fine black ash.

Dust is more difficult to deal with than water. Water can be drained slowly, but once all the fluffy dust is released, it will fill and cover the entire tomb. If the dust is toxic or corrosive, they will have nowhere to hide.

Just when they were at their wits' end, a child suddenly called out to them, pointing out a very strange thing at the corner of the tomb chamber, not far behind the coffin, which looked like a statue of some kind of beast from a distance.

It's not surprising to find animal statues in a tomb. What's strange is that while everything else in the tomb is hanging upside down from the ceiling like the coffin, this statue is placed squarely on the floor in the center of the tomb. It's hard not to be suspicious.

The Zhang family ancestral precepts state: If everything is strange, it's not really strange. True strangeness lies in the existence of something different within universal phenomena, regardless of whether you can understand these universal phenomena. This strangeness is directed at everything around you.

And this strange thing is the only contradiction that exists in the general phenomenon.

The discovery of this contradiction is precisely the catalyst for many things. If it is a conspiracy, this contradiction often exposes many hidden things behind it.

As soon as Zhang Haike saw that thing, he knew that it must be the key to the entire tomb.

The group split up and slowly approached the object from several directions. Upon closer inspection, they discovered that it was a bronze horse hidden in the darkness.

The bronze horse is only about half a person's height, and its entire body is black. Its surface is covered with raised spiral rivets, densely packed, making it look as if the horse has some kind of circular skin disease.

(End of this chapter)