The old things I repaired have become fine

Chapter 730 My new acquisition is burial goods? Whose tomb is built in the sea?!

what?
what?
What is a crab's old house?
Shen Le's brain short-circuited for a moment. Before he could react, the octopus tentacles with blue rings slammed into the broken tank, smashing it to pieces and revealing its soft hindquarters.

"Mr. Shen, don't listen to him. That's not his house, that's his shell. Ji Nu is a hermit crab that has become a spirit. Anything it picks up as a shell is somewhat interesting, and it's sold off many times!"

Ah this...

Ok……

I just hope this hermit crab doesn't sell everything he wants, selling it all over the world, leaving him to scavenge the entire ocean floor...

He waved his hand weakly, asking Yun Kun to follow the hermit crab to its old nest. Luckily, the hermit crabs usually live in shallow waters with rocks or coral reefs at a depth of 5-10 meters, so Yun Kun didn't need to dive and could drive there directly.

Even if Ji Nu had become a spirit, it would need to go to waters with abundant resources. The place where it is currently staying is no more than 100 meters deep.

Shen Le didn't even need Yun Kun's help; he easily stepped off the ship's side. The surrounding seawater embraced and supported him, slowly sinking him to the seabed. He felt cool and comfortable, without any feeling of stuffiness or oppression from darkness.

Landing on the seabed, Mo Yingjun stood guard nearby, its eight claws waving and its gaze fixed intently. Ji Nu plunged headlong into the large clump of intertwined coral, brandishing its two large claws and beginning to dig with all its might:

“Mr. Shen, please wait a moment! It’s right here! Give me a little time, this is my old place, I haven’t been back for a long time…”

Snap, snap, snap snap snap. One by one, the coral branches were broken off by the fragments of the large tank, and the small fish, shrimp, and sea snakes in the coral reef scattered in panic.

Only the sea anemones, which grow on the reefs, are unable to move, frantically waving their tentacles as if screaming in agony:

do not come!
Don't come any closer!

"Oh, please step back a bit, I'll take care of it." Shen Le couldn't bear to see the little animals in such a mess, so she sighed.

Ji Nu was still groaning, "Oh, oh, oh, how could I trouble you?" when Mo Ying Jun had already extended his tentacles, lifted it out, and tossed it aside.
"Mr. Shen said he'd come, so he'll come! Don't ignore him!"

The hermit crab crashed onto the seabed next to it, rolling several times. It was only because the seawater cushioned most of the throwing force that it didn't smash the large tank pieces in half again.

Shen Le found it rather unbearable to look at, so he held the cleaned pottery shard in one hand and made a hand seal with the other, looking at the coral reef ahead:

"Come, tell me, where are your companions—"

A mysterious wave swept by silently. From the seabed, beneath the silt, and among the coral reefs, more than one wave responded.

With Shen Le's current mental strength, he was already casting a spell right in front of him, so finding these fragments was as easy as picking them up.

He simply focused his attention slightly, and one by one, clumps of unidentified objects, their true forms obscured by silt and sea sand, floated up and drifted towards him:

The largest was about the size of a bowl, and the smallest was no bigger than the tip of a finger. They were scattered here and there, with twenty or thirty pieces floating in front of Shen Le.

Shen Le patiently searched the area and confirmed that there were no similar fluctuations within a hundred meters before moving to a spot near the coral reef ahead to search.

He cast spells seven or eight times, circling Ji Nu's den for a long time, until his spiritual power was fully deployed and there were no more pottery shards nearby. Only then did he slowly float to the surface and bow to Ji Nu:

"Thank you so much! You've done me a huge favor this time—wait a moment, I'll get some things out, you can pick one you want as payment for your help this time?"

"Mr. Shen only needs it because he's doing it a favor. Why should I give it any reward?" Before Ji Nu could answer, Mo Yingjun waved his tentacles and answered triumphantly.

Under the overwhelming power of the top-tier demon, even the hermit crab could only shrink back and tremblingly express its agreement:

"That's right...that's right! Mr. Shen has helped us so much, it's my honor to be able to help you in any way! There's no need for any reward, really no need!"

Shen Le: "..."

He examined the hermit crab carefully, then shook his head and returned to the boat. He asked Huang Yutong for help to bring out a large vat from the old house and then embedded several pearls into it.
"Here you go, your house is broken, here's a new one!"

Seven pearls formed a spirit-gathering array. The hermit crab demon crawled inside with its soft hindquarters, immediately trembling and kowtowing excitedly.
"Mr. Shen, you're so kind to me! You're really too kind to me! Mr. Shen, if you need anything in the future, just let me know! I'm an expert at finding things underwater; I can find anything!"

You're only good at finding containers on the seabed... vases, porcelain jars, boxes, anything that can be used as a "house," but you're not good at anything else.

Shen Le silently complained, but forced a smile onto her face:
"Okay! I'll contact you if I need anything! By the way, Mr. Ji Nu, if it's convenient for you, you can register at the Special Affairs Bureau and get a cell phone, so I can contact you easily—"

The resources you find on the seabed can be exchanged for many useful things by giving them to them. Even information about the location of shipwrecks, and some items salvaged from them, are very useful!

That's it!
Ji Nu was greatly encouraged and nodded repeatedly, promising to register his identity the next time the Special Affairs Bureau came. Shen Le smiled and bid them farewell, boarded the Cloud Kun, and returned to the South China Sea Shipwreck Museum.

"I'm back! Come on in, let me borrow your lab and some equipment!"

The professors and doctors at the shipwreck museum greeted him with great friendliness.

With instruments like micro-nano cleaning devices, he only needs to use wooden sticks and scalpels to do basic cleaning of these dozens of unidentified objects, roughly exposing the target objects.

Next, a few items, a dozen items, were thrown into the instrument. They were sent in the morning and picked up in the afternoon, all cleaned up!

"Ah, it's so great to have this equipment..."

While sighing, Shen Le took out his phone and ordered two units for himself—or rather, asked the Special Affairs Bureau to order two micro-nano cleaning devices for him.

One was placed in the old house, and the other in the laboratory built by Huang Yutong, so they could be used conveniently anywhere.

As for the supercritical CO2 fluid extraction vessel, forget about it. Even if it could be customized, Shen Le didn't have enough experience to develop a cleaning plan for every item that would need it.

I still have to borrow it every time I need it, and I have to ask my PhD senior for help every time!
Shen Le spent five days cleaning out all these things and putting them into the extraction vessel to dehydrate and desalinate them.

Then, frowning, he began to examine their faces:
"These things have such strange shapes... what are they supposed to be again?"

One piece is big, one piece is small, one piece is in the east, one piece is in the west. Some are straight, some are curved, some are slanted, some are arc-shaped—Shen Le tried to piece them together, but almost no two pieces could be put together completely; either something was missing or something was missing.

"It was supposed to be a hermit crab's house! Shouldn't it at least be able to be pieced together into a container?" Shen Le started scratching her hair.

"Where's the container?"

"What's wrong, can't figure it out?" Just as he was frantically scratching his head, spinning around, and walking back and forth around the table, a teacher who had finished his work and came over to relax pushed open the door and came in.

Seeing Shen Le's expression, and glancing at the pottery shards displayed on the table, he immediately burst out laughing:
No ideas?

"I just have no idea how to do it! -- Teacher, how did you guys put it together before? There are so many messy things in the seabed silt, how did you manage to put it together!"

Speaking of this, Shen Le was also impressed. He had seen the exhibits in museums; those plates, dishes, bottles, and jars were rarely intact when unearthed, mostly consisting of various fragments—

Moreover, there were hundreds of pieces of porcelain, broken into at least several thousand fragments, scattered haphazardly on the seabed, waiting for the teachers to restore them to play a game of extreme matching.

Even more frightening is that these fragments, even when pieced together, cannot form a complete picture:
Just look at the bottles and jars in the display; you'll know how much white plaster covers them—those are pieces that couldn't be found, so they were simply filled in with plaster.

Sometimes, plaster takes up more than half of the space, meaning that teachers have to pick out seven or eight usable pieces from the pile of debris to piece together something that is less than 50% intact...

"Ah, this is very simple." The restoration teacher smiled, his face full of nostalgia.

“You’re not a porcelain restorer, so you haven’t worked on a team. Basically, everyone here has been down into a porcelain kiln. Several people would excavate a kiln, unloading cartloads of porcelain shards and sorting them piece by piece…”

One or two pieces, eight or ten pieces, or even one or two hundred pieces, are not enough to establish a complete judgment about porcelain.

However, when one or a few students follow their mentor to sort through an entire kiln of porcelain shards and piece together hundreds of items, they can almost all develop a sense of porcelain.

Don't ask. Practice makes perfect. You can pick up a piece of porcelain and roughly guess what shape it is and where it's located...

The teacher specializing in porcelain restoration walked over to the table and carefully observed the pottery shards that Shen Le had arranged on the table.

With a slight frown, his fingers unconsciously traced patterns around him, seemingly trying to outline the shapes of the pottery shards and blocks, attempting to piece them together into a whole.

After a while, he strode to the other end of the long table, his hands flying as he began to mold the plaster cast:

"It should be roughly this shape... here... here... here..."

He would pinch a piece, glance at the pottery shard on the table, pinch another piece, and glance at it again. Before long, Shen Le had pinched out roughly similar replicas of all the pottery shards spread out on the table.

Shen Le watched from the side, veins throbbing on his forehead.

"No, teacher, you don't need to go to all that trouble! Just scan all of these, 3D print a set, and you can assemble them however you want, right?"

"..."

"..."

The two stared at each other. Shen Le looked completely innocent, while the restoration teacher stared at him, his chest heaving, seemingly gritting his teeth. After a long while, he let out a long sigh:
"Local tycoon!"

"That's right, that's right, I'm a tycoon." Shen Le nodded repeatedly.
"Should I donate a 3D printer to the museum?"

"Forget it!" The teacher glared at him fiercely. Listen to that, listen to what he said!
If word gets out, it will seem like their museum is so underfunded—of course, a museum's funding can never be completely sufficient—but it's not that bad!
They wouldn't go to such lengths to extract money from some rich student!

He spread all the plaster replicas out on the table and waited for them to harden on their own. Then he picked up a pen and began to write and draw on the drawings.

Draw a few strokes, glance at the document, draw a few more strokes, open the database, and quickly search for various information.

Once the sculpted plaster products had begun to harden, he was confident and began mixing resin, cutting corrugated paper, and gluing the plaster products together:
"Here, here... help me hold this up! Okay, here's another piece, hold it up while I apply the glue! Great!"

Shen Le was being bossed around by him. Halfway through, he also figured out the teacher's general approach:

"You mean...this is a pottery house?"

“That’s right, judging from the existing fragments, it should be a pottery house.” The restoration teacher skillfully pieced together the fragments, and in just fifteen minutes, he had built the basic framework of the pottery house.
"Although many parts are missing—structurally it should have been at least a courtyard, now there's only one room—it should have been a pottery house. But how did this thing end up in the sea?"

Shen Le was completely stumped. Logically speaking, these pottery houses, or rather, all the pottery houses unearthed so far, should be funerary objects—

In other words, they are burial objects from the tomb.

However, Chinese tombs, even if they are submerged, were once on land, having experienced the vicissitudes of time, or the transformation of high gorges into calm lakes, before finally ending up underwater.
It can't possibly go into the sea!
No tomb is ever deliberately built in the sea!

"And this is pottery..." The restoration teacher frowned, then circled the pottery shards twice more.
"This type of pottery was only used during the Han and Wei-Jin dynasties, and at most the Northern and Southern dynasties. It was no longer used in the Tang dynasty. During those dynasties, porcelain was not exported on a large scale..."

He looked at Shen Le expectantly. Shen Le looked at him blankly. After a pause, she spread her hands:
"I really don't know—I'll look around more, find more fragments, and try my best to fix them. Maybe once I've fixed them, I'll know the answer?"

"It's not that easy..."

The repairman sighed softly. There were no words, no signature, nothing that could reveal its origin or provenance.

Even if you drag it in for carbon-14 dating, you can only determine the approximate dynasty, not its complete origin.
"Never mind, take your time. Call me anytime if you have any problems." He seemed reluctant and hesitant, dragging his feet as he walked away. Shen Le quickly called after him:

"Teacher, I have a question—what's the best way to completely restore this kind of pottery? Would refiring it in the kiln to make it a whole piece repair its cracks?"

Crack! The teacher deformed and shattered.
"You want to burn it again?!"

(End of this chapter)