Trickster Hunter.

Chapter 234 Bone Throne

……

The infected person led Sun Hang and his companions to run nearly two kilometers in the tunnel. On the way, they passed many forks in the road that still had the aura of strange creatures. However, the infected person did not stop, and it was not easy for Sun Hang and his companions to split up into several groups to explore these forks.

They could only simply mark these forks in the road and continue to follow the infected people.

Finally, when Ye Xuan was a little out of breath, they finally arrived at the end of the tunnel - a fairly spacious underground hall.

This hall is filled with life-size terracotta figurines. Most of them are defective, but the few that are well preserved exude a very obvious eerie aura - in addition to the armored and wielding soldiers, there are even quite a few horse and chariot figurines in the hall.

The heavy crossbow was mounted on the chariot, with four large bows up to three meters in length overlapping each other front and back. The huge capstan was wrapped with strings made of several strands of animal tendons. The front end of the crossbow arrows, which were as thick as a child's arm, flashed a sharp cold light, pointing directly at the people who broke into the hall.

"Wow... have they moved the Terracotta Warriors from the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor outside the city of Chang'an?" Sun Hang couldn't help but sigh.

"No, what's moved here is not the Terracotta Warriors from the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor." Zhulong shook his head. "The chain mail and weapons on these warriors are very different from those of the Qin Dynasty soldiers... and the crossbows mounted on the chariots are more similar to the style used by the Crusaders a thousand years ago."

However, in addition to this, Sun Hang also felt an extremely powerful aura hidden behind the military formation.

"Oh?" Sun Hang once again looked at the terracotta warriors, "So they are just a group of barbarians?"

It’s not that Sun Hang looked down on the European army, but in a horizontal comparison, the Crusaders were indeed not even worthy of the Song Dynasty army of the same period in terms of equipment or combat effectiveness, not to mention the more powerful nomadic peoples in the north of the Xiazhou continent.

For the Xiazhou people of that era, this Crusaders who marched eastward from Europe and into Asia Minor were just a group of beggars who had never seen the world.

"It looks impressive at first glance, but if you look closely, it's still far inferior to the Terracotta Warriors and Horses at the Imperial Mausoleum." Ye Xuan also commented, "both in terms of quantity and momentum."

There are about three hundred soldiers and mercenaries in this hall, with less than fifty war horses and only four chariots equipped with heavy crossbows... This amount of troops might be considered an armed force that cannot be ignored during the Crusades, but if they were brought to the battlefield of Song and Liao at the same time, they would probably have difficulty even attacking a small town.

"Could these things be imitations made by the 'Phoenix Factory' back then?" Yang Qi asked doubtfully.

"It should be. Europe has no history of making clay warriors." Zhulong said.

Just as they were discussing these pirated terracotta warriors, the infected person suddenly started running back, shouting in a hoarse voice: "He's awake! He...he's awake!"

A loud noise suddenly came from a distance. No one expected that the bed crossbow that had been placed underground for hundreds of years could still fire normally. The crossbow arrow, as thick as a child's arm, shot out and directly nailed the fleeing infected person to the ground!
"Betrayer, die!"

A dull voice echoed in the hall.

Several skeletons immediately rushed to the front and blocked everyone behind them. Yang Qi and Ye Xuan ran to the infected person and checked her condition.

"She can still be saved!" Yang Qi shouted, "But she must be sent back to the institute immediately. Sun Hang, can you use your ability to help stop her bleeding first... Sun Hang?"

Yang Qi looked up and found that Sun Hang had walked around the corpses and came to the front.

"No, buddy." Sun Hang continued to walk forward. "Your line is too childish, isn't it? Can you change it to something less awkward?"

"Intruders, surrender and you can live." The voice said again, "Resist or you will die!"

Those soldiers and mercenaries carrying the aura of strange things began to move. With a series of harsh and rough friction sounds, more than a dozen soldiers and mercenaries holding swords and shields surrounded Sun Hang, and the cold and sharp weapons pointed directly at the vital points of Sun Hang's body.

"Kneel down!" the voice shouted.

"I think you seem a little confused about the situation." Sun Hang glanced at the group of soldiers and mercenaries and said lightly, "Get out of the way."

His tone was calm, but the aura released from his body was extremely turbulent. In an instant, all the soldiers and mercenaries within a radius of a hundred meters centered on him fell to their knees. Even Wang Xiyi and Zhu Long, who were standing behind Sun Hang and were not directly hit by this aura, showed a look of discomfort on their faces.

"Watch carefully and learn well." Sun Hang said as he walked, "The so-called 'kingly aura' cannot be expressed with just words. Your kind can only be called 'turtle aura'."

Sun Hang had already seen the source of the sound - looking beyond these kneeling soldiers and mercenaries, he could see at the very back of the square formation, there was a throne made of bones, on top of which was a dried corpse, with a crown made of pure gold on its bald head.

There was an extremely exaggerated wound on its chest, extending from the left shoulder to the right lower abdomen, cutting open the entire chest and abdominal cavity. It could be vaguely seen that at the position of its heart, there was something emitting a faint red light.

Sun Hang kicked away a soldier mercenary who was kneeling in front of him and was in the way, and walked straight towards the throne.

"Soldiers! Kill him!" The voice sounded again, with a tone containing seven parts of anger, two parts of astonishment, and... one part of fear.

No soldier or mercenary moved. When Sun Hang walked to the center of the army formation, all the soldiers and mercenaries had already knelt down, facing Sun Hang's direction.

Sun Hang walked up the steps paved with bones and came to the front of the throne.

"Don't you think I'm more suitable to sit here than you?" Sun Hang asked seriously.

The corpse opened its eyes and stared at Sun Hang with its pupils that also emitted a dark red light... The next second, it suddenly jumped up, pulled out the dagger under the throne and slashed at Sun Hang.

But as soon as the dagger was swung into the air, its movement froze - because Sun Hang had reached into its chest and grabbed the glowing object.

Accompanied by the sound of dry tissue being torn apart, the thing was taken out from the chest cavity of the mummy by Sun Hang.

The dark red light in the mummy's eyes disappeared instantly, and it fell headfirst, rolling along the steps under the Bone King's throne into the army formation, only stopping when it was blocked by a kneeling soldier.

"You are...killing the king..." Its last words echoed in the hall. "What kind of king are you?" Sun Hang responded casually. While playing with the thing he dug out from the dried corpse, he turned around and sat down on the bone throne.

Although it is made of bones, the surface of this bone throne has been polished to be very flat and smooth - it is quite comfortable to sit on.

The thing hidden in the chest cavity of the mummy was also a crystal, but unlike the previous heart-shaped crystal, this crystal was an angular cube with dense lines covering its surface - but these lines were all straight lines, and the turning points were all right angles. There was no place in the entire crystal that could be described as "round".

For some reason, Sun Hang always felt that the thing, both in shape and size, was very similar to a Rubik's Cube... He tried to twist it, but the crystal did not move at all - those lines were really just lines, and the gaps left by the precise structure when they bit into each other.

"Sun Hang...did you kill that guy?" Wang Xiyi ran to the throne and looked up at Sun Hang who was sitting on the throne.

"Yeah... I thought this guy was so strong, but when I dug this thing out, it died." Sun Hang raised the crystal in his hand, "The powerful aura I sensed earlier did not come from that guy who likes to show off, but from this."

"Its meme strength... seems to be stronger than mine..." Wang Xiyi walked up and stared at the crystal at close range... But even she herself did not notice that the area covered by scales on its body was rapidly increasing. In just a few seconds, the entire face, except for the circle around the facial features, was already covered with iron-black dragon scales.

"Old Wang...something seems to be wrong with you." Sun Hang noticed the change in Wang Xiyi and immediately reminded her.

"Me?" Wang Xiyi was stunned, and then she noticed the changes in her body. She jumped back immediately, flapped her wings violently, and instantly created a distance of more than ten meters between her and Sun Hang.

The scales that almost covered her entire body slowly receded. She took a deep breath, reached out and touched her cheek, and muttered, "Strange... Why don't I feel anything at all?"

"It seems to be because of this thing?" Sun Hang stared at the red crystal in his hand for a long time, and recalled the incident when all the antiques imitated by the "Phoenix Factory" turned into strange things... A bold idea suddenly emerged in his mind.

Could it be that this thing also has the ability to “mass-produce weird things” like itself?

Mass production of weird things and memetic infection are not the same thing. The latter uses the weird thing's own memes to infect people or things that are still in a normal state, making them infected... and then becoming weird skeletons or weird things.

In this way, the memes in the infected object and the weird creature that is the source of infection are of the same "origin". Even if they mutate later, there will be many similarities between the meme fragments of the two.

But mass-produced monsters are completely different.

This is to use special abilities to make normal people or things produce weird memes, and then give birth to a "new weird thing" - for example, "Ji Er Qi Jiu Liu" and the liquid metal weapons that Sun Hang is carrying with him now. These things were originally just the most common scrap metals, but after being affected by Sun Hang's "Wish Come True" ability, they all became weird things carrying memes...

Song Yarong had already conducted a detailed analysis of the meme fragments of "己二七九六" and concluded that the meme fragments of this monster and the meme fragments in Sun Hang's body did not match at all, and there was no relationship of infection between the two.

"Old Wang." Sun Hang shouted.

"Ah? What's going on?" Wang Xiyi was stunned for a moment. "By the way, won't you be affected by this thing?"

"I haven't noticed any impact yet." Sun Hang said, "Do you have any unnecessary small items on you? Give me a few."

"Small items?" Wang Xiyi touched her waist and thighs, and suddenly remembered that she was still wearing the nano-armor combat suit she brought from the test site. Apart from the functional devices hidden inside the combat suit, she didn't have anything extra on her body.

This is also related to her usual combat habits - after all, once she enters the beast state, her clothes and personal belongings will basically be scrapped, so she rarely carries things like mobile phones when she goes on missions... In Wang Xiyi's own words, "If the monitoring bracelet is broken, the station will reissue it for free, but if the mobile phone is broken, you have to buy it yourself..."

"Won't the logistics department reimburse me?"

"At first they were willing to reimburse me, but later on... they were only willing to give me a cell phone for the elderly that cost two or three hundred yuan."

……

"Are you planning to test the function of this crystal?" Zhu Long saw through Sun Hang's intention at a glance. "It just so happens that I have a useless thing here."

Zhulong took something out of the big pocket of his jacket and threw it towards Sun Hang.

Sun Hang took it and took a look, and found that it was actually a stainless steel fork.

"Why do you carry this thing with you?" Sun Hang asked in confusion.

"I was having breakfast when I received the news." Zhu Long smiled awkwardly, "After I ran to the parking lot, I realized that I was still holding the fork in my hand, so I just put it in my pocket."

"also."

However, when Sun Hang looked at the crystal in his left hand and the fork in his right hand, he couldn't help but feel puzzled.

If the "Phoenix Factory" relies on this thing to turn those imitation antiques into weird things, then how do they do it specifically?

Is it just a matter of bringing the two closer together?
Sun Hang moved the things in his hands closer and closer... However, until the stainless steel fork and the crystal came together, there was still no change.

"Could it be a matter of time?" Zhu Long said, "Those imitations were transformed into strange objects a year after the Phoenix Factory disappeared... No, that's not right."

As Zhulong spoke, he shook his head to himself.

These imitation antiques were obviously not produced at the same time, but the time points when they were transformed into strange objects were very concentrated... This is obviously not because such a transformation requires time to slowly "ferment".

It is more like a "bomb" with a set "detonation time" or can be "remotely controlled".

In that case, theoretically it should be possible to make these "bombs" explode immediately after they are made.

(End of this chapter)