Chapter 22 What’s in the Mirror?

Fatty didn’t dare do anything to the mirror, so he had to go back the way he came. But things didn’t go as smoothly as he thought they would. He walked back for several hours but couldn’t find an exit.

Although the tunnel seemed pretty straightforward, he couldn’t reach the end by any means. No matter how many times he ran or shouted, there was always a dark tunnel stretching out in front of him.

At that time, he felt that the tunnel was alive and could change its shape arbitrarily to tease people. Maybe their behavior eventually angered the tunnel and it was going to have him die in despair like this.

He was right on the brink of collapse when he suddenly saw a savior. It was the deep pit that he had blown out of the rock wall at the front of the tunnel.

He remembered that the location of the pit should have been at the entrance of the tunnel. The rock in this section wasn’t that hard since the tunnel was dug at an angle in the mountain.

At this time, Fatty showed his ferocity. He divided all the explosives he carried into more than a dozen batches and tried to forcefully blow out a path. He blew a hole about six or seven meters deep. Although he didn’t blow out a path, he did manage to blow out a shadow person from the rock.

He remembered our experience in the miners’ cave from that time and directly smashed the outer stone skin until the stone man had been beaten to death. Then, he squeezed into the crevice where the stone man had been moving and crawled through it for several days. He finally found the way out, but he didn’t expect that the crevice was so small that he couldn’t squeeze through. He waited there for four days before we showed up.

After listening to Fatty’s account, I looked up at the sky and felt an extreme sense of discomfort well up from the bottom of my heart.

It was a chill. An extreme chill. And I knew exactly where it came from.

Fatty’s overall narration, including all the details, gave me a sense of déjà vu.

In fact, it wasn’t only déjà vu, but something I knew by heart.

Fatty’s experience in this cave was very similar to that of Uncle Three in the undersea tomb. In fact, it was exactly the same.

When Uncle Three was at the bottom of the sea, he also encountered a very strange situation. After he went to sleep, he found that all the people he was with had disappeared and his location had changed. He also discovered strange phenomena and left the place by himself.

I felt some confusion because I was a little uncertain of these things, but there was one thing I was almost sure of. Whether it was in the undersea tomb, the Heavenly Palace, or here, the style of the “traps” was very similar.

According to previous investigations, almost all of these techniques originated from the ghost craftsman Wang Zanghai.

In those days, Wang Zanghai first built the Heavenly Palace and then built the undersea tomb for himself. Now almost the exact same technology had appeared here.

There were a lot of bits and pieces to figure out, and I didn’t even know if Wang Zanghai was the source of all these technologies. If he was, then he was really too good. But at the same time, it was also possible that he was just a very talented craftsman. When he helped the people of Eastern Xia repair the imperial tomb, he learned various structural designs which he then used to build his own tomb.

Wang Zanghai couldn’t be alive now, so had his skills been passed on to the Zhang family or even the Yangshi Lei?

Geographically, the Zhang family was said to be a mysterious ethnic group in the northeast, which was close to the Heavenly Palace. Meanwhile, the Yangshi Lei family was located in Guangdong, which was close to Xisha.

There were two possibilities: the first was that when Wang Zanghai was active in Eastern Xia, he left or spread these technologies due to an accidental opportunity; the other was that these technologies were handed down to fishermen along the coast when Wang Zanghai was building his huge treasure ship for the undersea tomb.

I preferred the first one. The Zhang family used these technologies near the ancient building, which obviously fit better with the whole mechanism system. As for Yangshi Lei, all we had so far was that they designed this ancient building. We had only found a large number of architectural—not mechanical—designs, which was very telling.

If we didn’t return to that original moment in history, no one would know the truth of what had happened.

I also thought of Poker-Face’s extensive knowledge of the business, which gave rise to all sorts of strange feelings in my heart. Fatty had said that he had a very definite hunch that the mechanism’s structure here was huge and all-encompassing, which was why Poker-Face didn’t find the trap. It was also similar to that time in the undersea tomb when the whole room moved. Poker-Face hadn’t found the mechanism back then, either.

But I was almost certain that with Poker-Face’s IQ, even if he didn’t feel the mechanism behind the operation, he should’ve been able to figure out the general situation based on his experience in the undersea tomb.

But why didn’t he say anything?

The key was that he always had his own purpose for doing things. I bet he had even guessed the operation of the overall mechanism and proposed to look in the cave outside because he knew how to crack it when he saw it.

But he was also a person who wouldn’t let others die, so he must have gone back to save Granny Huo and the others and brought them into the ancient building. But instead of bringing Fatty along, he sent him to another place.

What was the purpose of this?

Did he send Fatty to a place where he would see them so that Fatty would know they were still alive and convey the message to us?

But there was no reason for this. As soon as Fatty sent the message, we would definitely increase our efforts to save him. But if it were true, Poker-Face shouldn’t have been so stupid and should’ve at least left a clear message.

I couldn’t figure it out. Everything seemed to indicate that he was trying to prevent Fatty from entering the ancient building.

I had a bad feeling. The only reason Poker-Face wouldn’t bring Fatty into the ancient building was because he knew this was a journey of no return. With Poker-Face’s skills and energy, if he determined that this was the case, then there definitely wasn’t any chance of survival.

Poker-Face thought they were going to die.

But he brought Granny Huo and the others in. Did Poker-Face think it was ok for them to die? He and Granny Huo had a lot of memories I knew nothing about. Moreover, the old woman still chose to come here even though she was in her nineties. It seemed that their respective problems were so big that they had to be solved, even if it resulted in death.

<Chapter 21> <Table of Contents><Chapter 23>

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Updated 2/4/2021