The major aristocratic families are still very concerned about digging the canal. After all, if it is opened earlier, their business can reach farther places.
Moreover, the sooner we collect tolls, the better.
So when Tang Ping and others conquered the Arab Empire, these aristocratic families came with money.
Yes, I didn’t bring much else, just food.
To dig canals in this era, shovels, shovels and picks were all that was needed.
Others just need people.
Compared with recruiting people from Datang, it is much more cost-effective to recruit people here.
Due to successive wars, large areas of farmland in this area have been destroyed. The most urgent thing for the survivors is food.
As long as they take care of the food, a large number of workers can be recruited to the construction site.
Not to mention that those who do a good job and meet the workload will receive extra food as their salary.
So in the first few days, the project progressed quite quickly.
But just yesterday, after digging out the statue, these workers said they dared not work anymore.
At first, these aristocratic families thought that these workers wanted to raise prices, so they simply raised the wages by 30%.
But I didn't expect that not many people dared to come to work.
They had no choice but to come to Tang Ping.
Fortunately, Tangping is an oil refinery in the north of Yanbu. Because it is close to the Red Sea, the refined oil can be sent back to Datang by sea from the Red and Black sides.
It is only a few dozen kilometers away from where the canal was dug.
After more than an hour of bumpy driving in a pickup truck, we arrived.
Tang Ping came here during the last groundbreaking ceremony. It was still a bustling construction site, but now there are not many workers.
The Wang family was sitting in the passenger seat of a pickup truck. Before they got out of the car, a man who looked like a manager ran over.
"Elder of the clan, it's not good. Four workers died this morning. They were all workers who were still willing to work after we increased the wages."
"What?"
Tang Ping asked in surprise: "Where is the person? How did he die?"
The steward glanced at Tang Ping. Given his status, he didn't even know Tang Ping.
"Oh, this is Mr. Pingguo. Please speak quickly if I ask you anything." The Wang family boss jumped out of the pickup truck and urged.
"Just..." The manager hesitated for a moment: "This is quite strange. After the price increase yesterday, there were fewer workers coming, and then I paid overtime pay to make them work overtime."
"These workers also wanted to make money, so they naturally agreed."
"After working overtime, they lived in a shack on the construction site. As a result, when it was time to start work this morning, four people were found dead."
"The signs of death are exactly the same, except that the heart is missing."
The steward made a gesture on his chest and felt a chill on his back.
"The heart is missing? Did someone kill them?" Tang Ping asked.
"That's the strange thing. Looking at their faces, there is no trace of pain on their faces. Moreover, even though they were disemboweled, not much blood came out."
Having said this, the manager hesitated again before saying: "After the four of them were found dead this morning, no one dared to come to work anymore, and the interpreter at the construction site said that the locals said they were the gods of death, and It’s inexplicable that these people’s hearts were weighed.”
"The God of Death? Heart weighing? What nonsense." The Wang family members were a little disbelieving. It was difficult to find an interpreter at this construction site. They first found a local person who could speak Tianzhu dialect, and then found a person from Tianzhu who could speak Datang dialect.
The local people's words had to be translated twice by these two interpreters, so he only thought that there was something wrong with the translation.
But Tang Ping did have something in his mind. This was Egypt, and what they were talking about sounded very familiar.
First, he asked the Wang family elder to take him to the excavated statue. He walked along the excavated river and arrived there not far away.
Only half of the statue was dug out, but just like Tang Ping thought, it was a statue with a dog's head and a human body.
This is Anubis, the god of death in Egyptian mythology.
Ancient Egypt fell in 30 BC and became the Egyptian province of the Roman Empire.
Then until this time it was captured by the Arab Empire.
But as legend has it, Anubis has apparently not been forgotten by those around him.
This is why no workers dared to continue working after his statue was dug out.
In ancient Egyptian legends, Anubis is the god of death, and the most famous legend related to him is the weighing of the heart.
The heart-weighing ritual is an important element in Egyptian mythology, in which Anubis weighed the heart and considered it lighter or heavier than the ostrich feather, a symbol of reality.
If the heart weighs more than a feather, it will be devoured by Amit, a monster with the head of a crocodile, the upper body of a lion, and the hind legs of a hippopotamus.
Of course, this is nonsense in Tang Ping's opinion.
The weight of an adult's heart is about 250 grams, which is heavier than a feather.
So it's obvious that in this case, someone must have discovered the statue of Anubis and then caused trouble behind it.
Now only half of the statue has been excavated, because no workers dared to work on it, so the lower half of the statue is still buried in the figure.
Tang Ping didn't know when and who buried this statue here, but it had little to do with him. He had to find out who was behind it.
He called the steward of the Wang family and took him to see the four corpses.
The body was placed outside the dormitory at the construction site and covered with a white cloth.
It can only be said that the people here have no sense of protecting the scene. The room where they died was messed up by people coming and going.
When Tang Ping arrived, there were still several Wang family guards standing inside.
So it seems useless to think about whether we can narrow down the scope of the murderer from clues such as footprints or fingerprints.
Several corpses were also consistent with what the steward said. It seemed that a lot of blood had been lost before the heart was taken out. As a result, the clothes outside their cut chests were not widely stained with blood.
And several people indeed looked peaceful, and seemed to have died unconsciously in their sleep.
"Who discovered them first?" Tang Ping asked the steward.
The steward looked at it and pointed to one side and said, "It's those workers. They were also the workers who stayed to work overtime yesterday. When they asked these people to go to work this morning, they found that they were all dead."
Tang Ping watched the few kneeling on the ground and kept walking towards the locals who started kowtowing to the statue of Anubis.
"Were you the first to find out that they were dead?" Tang Ping asked, just the sound of his voice startled those people.
After looking at Tang Ping, he said: "Yes... we discovered it. It was the God of Death, the God of Death, Anubis."
"Even if they die, the God of Death will definitely not let us go!"
