The fat man was delighted when he heard this, "Then what are you waiting for? We have to hurry up."
As he spoke, he got into the water first and swam deeper into the cave.
The water in the pool is living water. When you swim in, you can obviously feel the water washing through your skin.
Wu Xie followed the fat man with half-squinted eyes and passed through the stone door that opened a gap. Nie Xiaoba and others behind him quickly followed.
The board leader who was swimming in the last position was about to pass through the iron gate. The rope hanging on the backpack suddenly spread out for some reason, and it happened to hang on a stone inside the door.
As the head of the board swam in, I felt a pulling force from behind. I turned around and found that the rope was tied. I didn't think much and pulled hard. Unexpectedly, the small stone was moved out of position. , the big stone pillar that originally supported the stone door immediately became loose.
Only a series of pulling sounds of chains were heard, and the stone door began to slowly close. At this moment, the back half of Ban Tou's body was still lying across the crack in the door.
Seeing that he was about to clamp it around the waist, the head of the board was so anxious that he kept blowing bubbles from his mouth. He turned around and pulled the rope harder. With this pull, the big stone lost the support at the bottom corner and rolled directly to the side. The rope was pressed down.
The breath he took when the board went into the water could no longer be held in. There was a suffocation in his lungs. In the panic, one of his legs somehow got entangled.
At this critical moment, Wu Xie in front noticed that the number of people was not right and returned to check. Seeing this, he immediately stepped forward and took out the big white dog leg, cut the rope, and pulled the head of the board out one second before the stone door closed.
With a muffled roar, the heavy stone door closed, stirring up a large amount of mud under the water.
Wu Xie grabbed his backpack and dragged the board head, which was about to fall into coma, with his backhand and kept swimming forward. Finally, after advancing more than ten meters, the light of a flashlight appeared on the water in front of him.
Wu Xie immediately surfaced and dragged the board's nose to the river bank. The fat man hurriedly pulled the man up.
"Are you okay? Tianzhen?" Fatty stretched out his hand to pull him, "What just happened?"
Wu Xie grabbed the fat man's hand and used his strength to climb up. He took a breath and said, "Fortunately, it's just that the rope got tangled."
Ban Tou quickly choked on the water, coughed and woke up leisurely, "Thank you, Mistress."
Wu Xie waved his hand, signaling him to slow down first, and stood up to observe the cave here. It was still the same stone wall niche as before, with mummies wrapped in mud inside.
It's just that these are older than the previous ones.
Wu Xie climbed up to the niche, carefully cut open a clay sculpture, and took off some of the cloth for wrapping the corpse. The material was very rough cotton and linen linen from the Qing Dynasty.
There was a half-meter-wide crack on the stone wall of the cave. Wu Xie looked inside with a light on and found that there was another cave inside.
After walking in, I saw that this was still a cave space that had been artificially dug.
There was a charred black oolong wood coffin stored on the ground in the center. The coffin was narrow and long, at least half as long as an ordinary coffin.
Oolong wood is also called sunken wood. Due to natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, mudslides and other natural disasters, the ancient forest was buried upside down in the low-lying depths of the ancient river bed or in the mud. In an environment of hypoxia, high pressure, weak acid and microorganisms, Under the influence, its original physical properties are changed, and it is formed after thousands of years of slow carbonization.
This kind of wood is delicate and smooth, dense and corrosion-resistant, and has a special fragrance. As the old saying goes, "Even if there is a box full of gold, it is not as good as a box of ebony."
Although gloomy wood is rare, it is relatively abundant in Sichuan, Chongqing and Guangxi.
The owner of the coffin was able to use such precious wood to make a coffin for burial, so his status must be extraordinary.
The fat man also squeezed in from the crack in the mountain. When he saw the coffin, he started shouting, "Hey, innocent, there is a coffin here, and here is a small coffin room."
"What's surprising about this? You've seen very few coffins." Wu Xie used a flashlight to look at the carvings on the wooden coffin.
What comes into view in the pattern on the coffin lid is the totem of a scorpion sitting on a lotus. The depiction is very exaggerated. The eight legs of the scorpion are very long, like an octopus, they spread directly from the coffin lid to the side of the coffin, and even along the side. He crawled into the bottom of the coffin along the edge, as if a giant hand descended from the sky and grasped the entire coffin.
The tail of the scorpion turned into the wrist of the giant hand, raised high.
The whole pattern makes people feel that in the minds of the people of this eternal kingdom, the scorpion is the god of faith in their country.
So what is the meaning of their portrayal of such a scene? The scorpion god descending from the sky? Or is the owner in this coffin a sacrifice to the gods?
Wu Xie looked around and saw nothing similar to the sacrificial plate in his image. The cave was empty except for this gloomy wooden coffin.
The fat man came over eagerly and asked him in a low voice, "Do you want to open the coffin and have a look? This is the first time in my life that the fat man has seen such a long coffin."
"That big guy isn't outside right now. Let's move quickly and let Nie Xiaoba and the others watch the wind outside. Nothing will happen."
Wu Xie glanced at the fat man, and nodded slowly under his expectant gaze, "Let's open it, but there shouldn't be any valuable burial objects inside, unless you carry the whole coffin out."
The fat man said, "The fat man opened the coffin not to make money." He rubbed his hands, steadied his horse, and pushed the coffin lid.
There were no nails in the coffin, as if it was ready to be opened at any time, the fat man easily pushed the coffin lid aside.
When the contents inside came into light for the first time, Wu Xie and the two of them gasped in shock.
"Mermaid!" The fat man screamed strangely, then immediately changed his mind, "No, it should be called Bird Snake."
There was a strange corpse lying in the coffin. This time it was no longer the same as the monkey and snake mummy. The head of the corpse directly turned into the head of a human-faced bird. The body was dressed in black and red sacrificial clothes with very complicated patterns. The torso was very It was clearly a human being, but it had four arms and its lower body was in the shape of a python.
This is a composite corpse made of three types of creatures. No wonder the coffin needs to be made like this.
But why should the corpses of the Changsheng people be made like this?
Didn’t Queen Mother Xi’s original splicing experiment fail and she was refining the Corpse Pill? Didn’t the people of Changsheng country know how to learn from the lessons of their ancestors?
The fat man tried to see if the human-faced bird's head was connected to its neck. He accidentally used too much force and the furry head was pulled off by him.
The human-faced bird's dark eyes looked at the fat man, which was awkward.
The fat man coughed, and while Wu Xie's attention was focused on the clothes pattern on the corpse, he quickly put the head back together.
"Hey, innocent, what do you think those immortal monkeys want to do with this? They can just piece this thing together. Why should they replace a good human head with a bird's head?"
"Could it be that those people from the Eternal Life Country were so stimulated by their constant failures that their mentality exploded and they became abnormal?" The fat man gestured at the strangely shaped corpse.
Wu Xie shook his head, "I don't know, but I always feel that this should be some kind of special sacrificial ceremony."
Splicing different creatures together must have the meaning they want to express.
Wu Xie thought of the welcoming figurines they had seen in the Snake Cave Tower. Could it be that they were welcoming the scorpion deified totem on the coffin lid?
The fat man looked at it and realized something was wrong, "Zhenzhen, look at the body in the middle. In this shape, the four arms on it seem to have grown on it originally, and were not put together later."
"Really?" Wu Xie looked at it, then took out two pairs of rubber gloves from his backpack and handed a pair to the fat man, "Here, help him unbutton his clothes and take a closer look at what's going on."
The two men moved quickly with their hands and carefully uncovered the cloth that had been soaked in corpse fluid. The skin of the corpse inside was also covered with strange patterns and tattoos, and like anatomical sutures, these patterns were all raised. It looked like a long blue-black centipede lying on it, with countless tentacles spreading around, making people's hair stand on end.
"Come and turn it over." Wu Xie raised his stiff arm and put it on his abdomen for the fat man to grab, and then he lifted the corpse's shoulders and hips.
The two of them worked together to turn the corpse sideways, and discovered that an arm actually grew out from under the shoulder blade of the corpse, like an angel's wings. In terms of length and thickness, it was almost exactly the same as the arm that normally connected to the shoulder joint.
The two looked at each other, and both saw the disbelief in each other's eyes.
"What's going on? This thing, an angel descended to earth, God and Nuwa got married?" The fat man was surprised, "This is too scary."
Wu Xie didn't say anything. He put his fingers under the corpse's shoulder blade to feel around, and found that a raised bone joint at the lower corner of the shoulder blade was very similar to the original shoulder joint. The humeral head on the extra arm grew out of it.
"This is a deformed person." Wu Xie said, "He should have looked like this since he was born."
"That's what you said before, what about conjoined twins?" the fat man asked.
Wu Xie nodded, and the fat man added, "Then the legend of the Gu King that Cai Laojiu told is not true."
Wu Xie turned the body back and sorted it out, "We might as well make a hypothesis. If this so-called Kingdom of Immortality built by the Gu King really exists, and was not created by the Zhang family to make fun of people, then the two-headed people who appear in the story The four-armed snake man is real.”
"The reason why they have two heads and four arms is that for some reason, they are born with conjoined twins. This kind of existence is not an exception. I probably know why we found the corpse cocoon in the ancient temple. Why did the wild lama here have his shoulder blades cut off?"
The two restored the coffin to its original shape, went out through the gap in the mountain, and continued walking along the river.
There are many similar small coffin chambers in the stone walls on both sides of the bank, and long gloomy wooden coffins are also placed in them.
An hour later, they walked out of the cave and came outside. They were faced with an extremely huge towering ancient banyan tree. The crown of the tree spread around, making it look like a miniature forest.
It does not have an independent trunk. Its body is composed of countless grown aerial roots. Because these aerial roots are thicker than ordinary large trees, the gaps between them are very narrow. Together they look like a single tree.
Thick roots protrude from the ground, covered with green moss and vines, like the Green Giant's house.
The water flowing out of the river flowed directly into the hollow under the banyan tree, forming swamps and pools covered with water plants. There were many mosquitoes flying in the air, and they were scary in size.
Wu Xie and others stood on the rocks, listening to the sounds of the insects flying around, as if they heard the sound of their own blood being sucked out in the next second.
Ah Zhai's calves were trembling, and his voice was so soft that he couldn't hear it. "Mistress, what should we do? There are too many bugs here and there. Before we can crawl over, we will have to be sucked into our bodies." "
Wu Xie took a deep breath, turned around and ordered: "The five of you will wait at the entrance of the cave. If something goes wrong, run back immediately. Fatty and I will go there."
"How can the mistress do this? There is no chopstick head to help the waiter." Nie Xiaoba and others immediately objected.
Wu Xie slightly raised his hand to stop them from talking, "It's not that I don't want you to go over, but it's not necessary. This fight is different from the fights you have had in the past. There is probably no treasure in it. In such a fatal situation, you If you insist on going in and dying, I won't stop you."
Speaking of this, Nie Xiaoba had no choice but to grit his teeth, nodded and said, "Okay, let's listen to the mistress."
After that, he divided the food in the backpack into two parts, put the extra portion into the backpack and handed it to Wu Xie, "Little Third Master, you and Fatty must come back safely."
The fat man grabbed his backpack and threw it on his back. He stepped on an aerial root with one foot and tilted his head towards the big banyan tree. "Tianzhen, let's walk."
Waving goodbye, Wu Xie and Wu Xie put on protective clothing, wrapped their whole bodies, put on headlamps and climbed up the tree roots.
Less than ten meters in, it was already pitch black under the cover of branches and leaves. The dense leaves prevented any light or shadow from penetrating. They seemed to be crawling into the abyss of a huge green monster.
The two of them moved forward carefully among the tree trunks, surrounded by the smell of swamps and the buzz of mosquitoes, which made people feel very uncomfortable, as if the noisy sound passed through the eardrums and was directly engraved in the brain.
Soon they crawled completely into darkness, and all the light around them was swallowed up.
The two of them carefully grasped every place that could be climbed. The moss was so slippery that they would fall into the swamp below if they were not careful.
Due to their full concentration, they had no idea that their bodies were already densely covered with countless black bugs. Every time they took a step forward, the bugs would fly up due to the vibration. From a distance, it looked like two clumps were sticking to the ground. black small tornado.
Wu Xie climbed at the front and got in through a gap between intersecting aerial roots. When he looked up, he found that the trunks of the banyan trees here were full of holes. They were dug out by some animals with their claws, and there were many green bones piled inside. .
