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

Zhang Wuxun had carefully observed this when he cut open the long-winged snake-tailed mummy before; most of the long bones of the Ge Que Qiang Qiong people were hollow.

Whether it's innate or the result of evolutionary mutation, perhaps the Goqunqiong people really are capable of short-distance flight.

The entire statue is a product of the Goguryeo people, including the base below.

Zhang Wuxun stepped on Zhang Haike's knees, raising his body and reaching out to turn the statue's eyeballs.

The statue remained motionless, but movement came from the niche in the cave wall behind it. The mummified corpse tumbled down with a clatter, and the side walls of the niche began to recede inward, while the niche cavity and bottom protruded outward.

Wu Xie, with his sharp eyes, spotted something and exclaimed, "There seems to be a pattern on the bottom of the niche!"

Everyone perked up and waited a moment. They saw that the original position of the niche had been changed to form a relief mural of moderate size.

The mural depicts a vast number of people, densely packed from top to bottom like ants winding their way down. These people all have a pair of elaborate, long wings, showing that they value their wings highly. When carving the mural, the craftsman emphasized and exaggerated the shape of the wings, and even added decorative gemstones hanging below them.

The higher up the character goes, the longer their wings become, indicating a clear difference in rank.

At the very top is a large, curved outline filled with overlapping circles of thunder patterns. A towering giant with wings that blot out the sky stands on a giant drum, raising his hands in a gesture of blessing.

The winged figures around the giant drum are kneeling, and the background of the entire mural is filled with a large number of distorted and meaningless lines, interspersed among the figures, as if they were dreamt of after eating poisonous mushrooms.

"What's in the sky?" Wu Xie murmured. "And what are those circles made of lightning patterns?"

The fat man pondered, "I always feel like something is about to pop out from those circles at the top."

"Hey Zhang Jiuri," the fat man turned to Zhang Jiuri and asked, "You've been following Zhang Nian for so long, has he ever told you anything about what's going on under this snake mine?"

Zhang Jiuri was silent for a while before replying, "What he said was half true and half false; it was just some stories tinged with mythology, and it had something to do with the Queen Mother of the West."

Upon hearing this, everyone's gaze turned towards them.

Zhang Jiuri pursed his lips and repeated word for word the words Zhang Nian had used to fool Kenga.

Wu Xie shone his flashlight, the beam focusing on the thunderclouds that seemed to be brewing something.

He said thoughtfully, "So, the Goqun Qiangqiong people worship and pray to the Queen Mother of the West, but this place is nearly two thousand kilometers away from the Snake Swamp, and the Queen Mother of the West had long been a legend by the time this tribe existed."

"So what exactly did they ask for? Could it really be the Queen Mother of the West?"

"Zhang Nian said that a divine oracle descended from the heavens. This oracle might be a projection of consciousness, invisible and intangible, but it can descend into a person's mind, for example..."

Zhang Wuxun paused here, exchanged a glance with Zhang Haike, and the two said in unison, "A divine gift!"

"what?!"

"Holy crap!" Wu Xie and Fatty jolted as if struck by lightning, almost jumping up on the spot. "You mean divinely ordained?"

Wu Xie suddenly thought of something and waved his flashlight back and forth between the mural and the statue of the Queen Mother of the West. "Look, isn't the Queen Mother of the West's eyes very similar to the circles on the mural?"

After he reminded them, everyone realized that the overlapping circles really did resemble the double pupils in the statue's eye sockets, except that the patterns in the statue's eye sockets were obscure and complicated characters.

Wu Xie speculated: "Therefore, based on this, it is very likely that 'it' wants to use the Ge Que Qiang Qiong people to accomplish something, and the process of accomplishing this is just like that of the Queen Mother of the West three thousand years ago."

A thought that had been suppressed deep in his heart began to stir: What exactly was in the meteorite jade cave in the underground palace of the Queen Mother of the West? Was the Queen Mother of the West really one of the first people to come into contact with the meteorite jade and want to gain immortality?
Fine beads of sweat appeared on Wu Xie's forehead; he dared not think any further.

The fat man was quick; he had already searched the other niches and, after throwing the mummified corpse aside, discovered that these niches also had patterns behind them.

Based on these fragments of murals, Wu Xie roughly deduced that the murals depicted the process of the Ge Que Qiang Qiong people going to the ruins of the Bai She tribe to steal snake species.

They carried many huge, patterned snake eggs and fought for a long time against the blue vines guarding the snake nest, eventually managing to escape with a few eggs.

Hidden in the other niche is a picture of a natural disaster, a man-made one.

"The Goku and Qiangqiong people, inspired by snake eggs and meteorites, successfully created a living creature with a human body and a snake tail. They revered this creature as the incarnation of the Queen Mother of the West in the human world, and after a series of complex rituals, they...ate it!"

Wu Xie stared wide-eyed and looked at it again in disbelief.

The fat man leaned closer and said, "They really ate it. It seems this Ge something-or-other guy is no ordinary thug. We have to deal with him severely."

The fat man confidently patted the large bag on his back.

Wu Xie looked at his bulging bag and remembered how Fatty had been stuffing it with detonators before they left. His lips twitched slightly. "No need. The thugs have already been dealt a more severe blow."

"Look this way." Zhang Haike pushed over a mummified corpse and patted the dust off his sleeves.

The third mural clearly displays the Zhang family's narrative style, with delicate, concise, and factual brushstrokes. Unless it was a very important, laudatory piece, the Zhang family would not use such refined and mature techniques to paint and carve. At other times, the Zhang family simply recorded the entire event as a simple mark so that later generations could understand it. Just like the mural in front of us, the painting has always maintained its original color tone.

"It seems that what Zhang Nian said about the Zhang family coming here to deal with the monster created by Ge Qun Qiong is probably true, but there is a discrepancy in the timing."

The mural is very straightforward, divided into two parts. On the left is a majestic, angry-looking Qilin descending from the clouds, standing on a large drum with a ferocious ghost eye on it. Supported by the drum is a kneeling winged human whose head appears to be deformed.

Below, all around, were corpses lying in disarray, but these corpses all had long snake tails.

Looking at the right half, the Zhang family members with long fingers are driving the remaining long-winged, snake-tailed monsters towards a cave, with the snakes guarding behind them.

The Zhang family imprisoned the monster in a cave burned by a meteorite, sealing the entrance with a huge piece of meteorite jade, leaving only small holes for the snake to enter and exit. (End of Chapter)