Mercenaries and Adventurers

After Zhao Ji set up the forward camp on the terrace, he rested for a while.

This place is located underground, so you can completely ignore the rising and setting of the outside world, and it will change naturally.

Zhao Ji warmed the strips of wild boar meat with a campfire, carefully chewed it bit by bit, and then started yelling boredly on the empty and dark terrace. He had been depressed for a long time in the underground darkness, so naturally He has accumulated a lot of negative pressure, and now there is no one else, and here is another relic ten thousand years ago. Since he judged that the entire relic was abandoned in an orderly manner by the elves who left at the beginning, he is not too worried about what comes from ancient relics here. the trap.

After all, there is no ability to maintain lighting here, so naturally there are no other defensive facilities that can be maintained. Besides, no matter how you look at it, it doesn't look like a tomb, but more like a research institute where the elves used to be.

Not the cemetery, which needs anti-theft measures, but the research institute. Then, ten thousand years ago, there might have been many facilities and strict security here. But the elves evacuated in an orderly manner, naturally they left after their goals were achieved. It was abandoned here and there is no need for protection.

Zhao Ji thought about it, and felt that this possibility was the greatest.

After resting, Zhao Ji lit the torch, picked up the spear with the birdcage hanging on it, and began to explore down the stairs on the right side of the terrace.

The distance between each floor of the stairs is larger than Zhao Ji expected, what does this mean?

This shows that elves are taller than humans, so the height between their stairs is also larger. This can be seen in the previous Silver Passage and the facilities in the two rooms.

The height of humans walking in the Silver Passage seems a bit too wide, but if the elves are bigger and taller than humans, then that height is more appropriate.

Walking down step by step, because there is no guardrail to prevent falling on the side of the road going down the stairs, Zhao Ji has been walking tightly against the wall on the right in order not to accidentally fall down and fall to his death.

After walking about fifty steps, Zhao Ji found a stone gate on the wall on the right, and a small terrace appeared in front of the stone gate. Standing on the flat terrace, Zhao Ji first placed an oil lamp here.

After lighting the oil lamp, a small area around here was illuminated by the light. Zhao Ji raised his head and looked in the direction he came from. On the highest terrace, the campfire still illuminated the surrounding area. The air here is still very fresh, probably from the fresh air blown in from the outside before, so Zhao Ji is not so vigilant and keeps holding the spear.

Putting down the birdcage and spear, Zhao Ji held up a torch and carefully observed the stone gate next to the small terrace. There are intricate plant patterns carved on this stone gate, and there is a big elf word in the middle of the stone gate. Zhao Ji guessed that this elf word should be the function name of the house behind the stone gate.

Make a note of the new elven word and where it occurs. Zhao Ji is about to open this stone gate. He hopes that this stone gate can be opened in the same way as the previous stone gates.

Putting the torch on the stairs to the side, Zhao Ji approached the stone gate, and then moved it obliquely back in one direction.

Crunch, crunch, clack clack.

This stone gate was easier to push than the previous ones. Zhao Ji quickly pushed open the stone gate. Taking advantage of the air rushing in, Zhao Ji picked up the torch on one side and hid a little further away.

It is estimated that the inside is not big, so the air rushing in quickly stopped. Zhao Ji waited for a while, and then carefully approached the opened stone gate.

Lifting the long gun that was put aside, Zhao Ji poked into the birdcage that detects the presence of poisonous air for a while, and after taking it out, there was still no problem.

Putting down the spear, Zhao Ji stepped carefully into the room.

----

Zhao Ji came in and took a look,

It was found that the whole room was finally not hexagonal, but a semicircular shape. The walls are smooth and curved, and the whole room is like an upside-down bowl.

In the place where the room is facing the stone door, there is a stone bed against the wall, but unlike ordinary stone beds, this stone bed is sunken inwards, and there are several plants that have already petrified in the sunken place of the stone bed. Plant roots. Zhao Ji walked over and knocked with his hand, making the sound of metal colliding.

I don't know what the elves thought before, but they actually slept on the roots of the trees. Although they make beds, they seem to prefer to sleep on the roots of plants.

With the bed present, this room is clearly a place to rest. Judging from the fact that there is only one stone bed, only one elf should have lived here. After all, Zhao Ji looked at it with a torch like this. There is only a stone bed, an empty bookshelf and an empty shelf in this room. The furniture was all stone and placed against the walls.

It’s just that these household furniture are placed on one side of the stone bed, and the other side seems to be a small indoor garden. Many stone troughs and large and small flower pots are still in place, and there are still many flowers inside. soil.

It's just that Zhao Ji rubbed the soil with his hands, and found that the soil had already dried up and could no longer be dried. The various flowers and plants that originally existed in these stone troughs and flowerpots must have been taken away by the elves.

"It's true that not a single blade of grass was left." Zhao Ji complained.

The stone furniture was also empty, not a single object was left. It seems that the elves moved their own things very cleanly, but the public things in the ruins were not so clean.

After not finding anything useful in this room, Zhao Ji left here, continued to walk down the stairs, and explored downwards.

---

Zhao Jimo counted fifty times, and sure enough, he saw the next small terrace and a stone gate. It was better to put down a new oil lamp, and then Zhao Ji looked at the new stone gate.

It is the same size as the previous Shimen, and there is an elf word in the middle of it. Zhao Ji took out his notebook and compared it with the previous Shimen, and found that the two elf words are not the same. Zhao Ji even found that the stone carvings of flowers and plants on the Shimen seem to be different. ah.

The elf words on the two stone gates are different, either indicating that the two have different uses, or that this is the residence of another elf, and the elf words on the stone gate are the names of the owners of the room.

Just open it and have a look.

Zhao Ji opened the stone door according to the procedure he was familiar with. The torch went around and found that it was indeed a residence.

It seems that the elf words on the stone gate are the names of the elves.

Knowing this is of no use at all.

Although this room is also a place to live, it looks quite different from the previous room. The place facing the stone gate here is a bathtub-like thing, which is a bit small overall, only one meter high and one meter wide. It has a scene of an elven forest carved in careful stonework. Zhao Ji went over to take a closer look, and found that many parts that should have been installed on this unknown thing had been removed.

Zhao Ji scratched his head, not knowing what this thing was for, but it was placed in the main place of the room.

As for the stone bed of the owner of the room, it is placed against the wall on the right side of the entrance. But in the groove of this stone bed, instead of the previous tree roots, it was a piece of dry soil, and there was a layer of dry grass ash on the soil that would crumble when touched.

It seems that this elf prefers to sleep on the grass.

Among the furniture opposite the stone bed, there was still nothing left, only some furniture made of stone remained in the distance without moving for thousands of years.

After leaving here, Zhao Ji judged that the next room should be the residence of the last elf, and he has only descended by about one-third now, counting the descending height of the next elf residence. It appears that the important rooms and spaces actually used by the ruins are below.

----

Continuing to descend along the stairs beside the wall, Zhao Ji still met the next stone door after fifty steps of stairs.

But this stone gate was different. Zhao Ji took a closer look at it with a torch, only to find that the lower part of the stone gate was wet. When he wiped it with his hand, he could see a layer of water reflecting the light of the torch on the glove.

How could there be water in it? It's not like someone forgot to turn off the water pipe when they left. There is no water source in the residence of these elves, and there is not even a toilet in their residence. Zhao Ji understands this about the toilet, because the powerful elves in the story only eat some fruit spring water, they don’t eat a lot of food like humans, so those powerful elves never appear in the story. Being raided in the toilet, etc., these situations have never been in the story for characters of other races.

Because water seeped out of the stone gate, Zhao Ji was afraid that if the stone gate was opened, the water inside would wash away the oil lamp on the terrace, so Zhao Ji put the oil lamp here on the stairs beside it.

This time, Zhao Ji was more careful when opening the door, he only opened a gap in the stone door slightly. A large amount of water gushed out from the gap, and the water splashed out from the gap, and all splashed along the edge of the small terrace to the bottom of the dark ruins below.

Zhao Ji just waited in the same place, waiting and waiting, water kept gushing out from the gap opened by the stone gate. Zhao Ji took the torch to the side of the splashed water and observed it, and found that the sprayed water was very Clear, can not see a little bit of impurities. Zhao Ji dipped a little on the tip of the long sword and smelled it carefully, but there was no smell.

Then Zhao Ji made a little bit of the water and put it in the cage to feed the birds locked inside.

Although the water gushing out from the gap in the stone gate looks intense, but because the gap is too narrow, it is not known when the water will be sprayed. Zhao Ji, who became impatient, held the pattern on the stone gate with his hands, and carefully exerted force with his fingers, opening the stone gate a little bit wider.

After the stone door was opened as wide as a fist, the water gushing out from the stone door gradually became smaller, and no longer directly sprayed down to the bottom of the ruins, but dripped down along the small terrace and stairs. Zhao Ji hurriedly picked up his things, lay down on the water on the terrace, and went directly to the stairs that were higher.

The sound of water droplets dripping on the rocky ground can be heard throughout the ruins. Thousands of water droplets dripping on the ground, coupled with the empty and curved walls inside the ruins, the sound and echo of water droplets can be heard throughout the dark ruins.

Zhao Ji found it very interesting, feeling like a rainy day.

He no longer worried that the back of the stone gate was a place to connect to the water veins below, because the water flowing out from behind the stone gate was getting scarcer. Soon, when Zhao Ji was dozing off while sitting on the stairs wrapped in an oil lamp, a little water stopped flowing from the stone gate.

Zhao Ji was refreshed for a while, he put the oil lamp on one side of the stairs, and used the oil lamp to light the torch that he extinguished voluntarily. Zhao Ji stood up and approached the stone gate.

Zhao Ji preliminarily judged that the water gushing out of the stone gate was non-toxic after being drunk by the birds in the cage. But it is still not known whether long-term consumption is harmful. Anyway, unless Zhao Ji had nothing to drink, he would only drink the water gushing out of these ruins.

Zhao Ji pushed the stone door open completely, poked the torch into the room and looked around with his eyes.

Stone beds, stone chairs, stone bookshelves, stone shelves, and so on. But Zhao Ji also saw a big mirror on the side wall, at least three meters high and two meters wide.

The light of the torch is reflected by the mirror, and the whole room looks very bright. Then with this bright light, Zhao Ji discovered the reason why there is so much water here.

It turned out that on one of the walls of this room, there was a tree root that broke through the rock wall. This tree root did not force the rock, but it seemed that when the room was built, a convenient tree was left there. The hole drilled in.

However, the big trees outside have long since died, and their roots are no longer healthy wood, but have turned into stone components over ten thousand years.

At the place where the tree roots protruded, there was a small shallow pool underneath. No matter how Zhao Ji looked at it, he thought it looked like a shallow pool for bathing.

At this time, the lowermost end of the rocky root, and one of the breaches, slowly dripped water. Zhao Ji waded into the shallow pool with his boots on, and found something to try to block the breach in the root. Although he still couldn't stop the water seeping from the inside, at least it effectively reduced the water dripping.

There is nothing in this room, except for the big mirror, everything else was taken away by its elf owner thousands of years ago.

I didn't take this mirror, I don't know why. Until Zhao Ji knocked on the mirror with his hand.

After hearing the touch and echo, Zhao Jicai discovered that the mirror was made of a whole piece of silver flat plate. No wonder the elves didn't take it away with them, after all, in the silver passage outside, there is so much silver there that it is unreasonable. The silver mirror here is not important anymore.

Where did the elves get so much silver? Zhao Ji couldn't think of the reason for this problem. But this is actually not important, after all, Zhao Ji can no longer calculate how many silver coins can be made from the silver outside.

An imperial silver coin roughly weighs about fifteen grams, and the inside is not pure silver. Usually, some other metals are mixed in to ensure wear resistance and reduce purity.

How much silver does Zhao Ji estimate in the passage outside? One hundred tons? Or one hundred and fifty tons? Just a simple calculation, the amount of silver is an astronomical figure. It is estimated that it can be more than all the silver in the entire kingdom now.

Zhao Ji frowned, he didn't know what to do with so much silver?

Is it to stay here? Or dig it out and take it out? Or hide it somewhere else?