Merchant of the Underworld

"The tracker crab stopped and seemed to have reached its end," Pike Hui reported.

Jiang Dayu, Fan Chong, and Lina and I also gathered over one after another.

The little red dot landed on top of the boulder and became motionless. Obviously, the tracking crab had lost its target.

Half of the boulder is buried deep under the water, and the other half is exposed by the constant erosion of the river, revealing a blue-black stone surface.

There are extremely obvious artificial traces carved on it. It is slightly cylindrical and lies on the ground.

Even if only half of the area is exposed, it is still as tall as a person and more than four meters long.

Jiang Dayu swam around the boulder twice and asked Pike: "Are you sure the other end of the gourd rope is below?"

Pike nodded firmly and said: "The tracking crab's sense of smell is ten times stronger than that of dolphins. There is no mistake."

Lina held a small square box, tested it back and forth in front of the boulder and said: "The element content under this boulder is not quite right, especially the calcium and mercury are seriously abnormal. It should be corpse bones, and the bones also contain a large amount of of mercury.”

Jiang Dayu turned to look at me.

I didn't wait for him to ask this time, and said directly: "In this case, it should be right. The people who can come here are definitely not ordinary tomb robbers. They are most likely alchemists from the early Tang Dynasty. Most alchemists use mercury as their base. The raw material is mercury. Since the crab tracking and scientific judgment have focused on this place, it must be correct!"

Jiang Dayu nodded slightly and focused his gaze on the boulder.

"I'll do it!" Fan Chong shouted, and at the same time he drew out the long sharp knife, and the black light flashed on the blade and struck straight down.

Boom.

Jiang Dayu swung his pipe, blocked the blade, and shouted angrily: "Nonsense!"

"What?" Fan Chong asked very puzzledly: "Isn't it just down here? This stone is so big and sunk so deeply. How can we move it without smashing it?"

Pike put away the tracking crab that had just emerged from the mud, and took a step forward to block the boulder and said: "Mr. Fan, Mr. Jiang is right, you can't be so reckless! Even if you break the stone, there are so many gravels. How long will it take to clean up the sludge and mud? By then we will not have much oxygen left. Let alone continue to explore the ruins, it may not even be enough to return to the submarine."

Fan Chong was stunned for a moment. He might have never thought about the issue of oxygen.

Although he was carrying two oxygen bottles on his back, one was a spare for the whole team, and the other was not used much by himself. The consumption was about one-seventh of mine.

After all, his underwater skills are extremely good. Even if there is no oxygen at all, he can swim back to the river in one breath, so this kind of thing has never been within his scope of consideration.

However, the answer to the mystery lies under the boulder. If the boulder is not removed, how can we find out the truth?

While everyone was puzzled, Liang Mingli drove the big bubble to roll over.

He stretched out a small hand and gestured something on the bubble.

As he moved his fingers, wisps of black smoke appeared out of nowhere, and a few words appeared on the air wall: "Step back, let me try."

The abilities that Liang Mingli showed were extremely unusual. Whether it was cutting off an arm to hold a soul, or condensing energy into a ball, these were extremely rare martial arts. I don't know what good method he had.

Jiang Dayu thought for a moment and motioned for everyone to disperse.

But Liang Mingli kept waving his hands and writing: "Retreat, retreat, retreat again."

It wasn't until we were more than ten meters away that Liang Mingli approached the boulder again, and then a small blood-red bubble popped out of the big backpack behind him.

He grabbed the small bubble and swung it with his hand, then smashed it against the boulder.

With a pop, the bubbles shattered.

Thick red blood was flowing everywhere, but the blood did not melt with the water. Instead, it penetrated into the rocks, and in the blink of an eye there was no trace left.

Liang Mingli danced his two little hands quickly, and kept making seals and pinching his fingers.

I saw a line of blood growing on the stone, spreading like a blood vessel, densely forming a blood-red network, covering the entire boulder.

Snapped! He suddenly clapped his hands.

The stone shook slightly, then tilted up at one end, and was slowly pulled out of the mud.

The more you pull out, the higher you get, and the more you pull out, the bigger you get.

When the boulder was completely exposed from the mud, we finally saw clearly that it turned out to be a stone man!

The stone man was built extremely roughly, almost in the shape of a cylinder, with its hands and feet all attached to the torso. Only a few deep grooves were cut out at the joints to distinguish them, and even the fingers were not carved.

Relatively speaking, only the head originally buried in the mud is very detailed. Although the lines are still rough, the ears and nose are still there, and the eyebrows and eyes are still intact.

What's a little weird is that the stone man only has one eye, and that eye is so huge that it almost takes up half of his face!

Under Liang Mingli's control, the stone man slowly stood up, six to seven meters tall, terrifying and majestic, staring at us with a big eye.

With a bang, the stone man fell on his back, and the surrounding mud was lifted up more than two meters high, creating a huge wave of water that shook us for a while.

Liang Mingli sat in the bubble and waved to us, indicating that we could come over, and then he closed his eyes and fell asleep again.

We swam back to take a look, and saw a large human-shaped pit three to four meters deep in the mud at the bottom of the water.

There were two corpses lying at the bottom of the pit - indeed corpses, not bones.

The hair and clothes were still intact, but the body had been deformed by the pressure and was a blur.

Wrapped in layers of silt and boulders, a natural sealed space has been formed here, so it has not decayed after thousands of years, and everything remains in its most original state.

Fan Chong looked at it and swam down first, followed closely by Jiang Dayu and me.

Both corpses were wearing green-grey robes with wide collars. One had white hair, and the other also had mixed gray and white hair.

Fan Chong groped around the two of them and took out a lot of small items. Judging from these things, they should all be alchemy items from the early Tang Dynasty, which is basically consistent with what we have guessed before.

Not far from the two of them was the pitch-black gourd rope. One of them was still holding on to half of the broken air bag.

Fan Chong looked back towards the direction where the stone man fell to the ground and said, "Were they killed by the stone man while they were replenishing their energy?"

Jiang Dayu had been staring at the body for a long time. Then he turned his head and asked me, "Brother Zhang, what do you think?"