The Lost Tomb : Sea Of Sands

Chapter 85: Tomb?

"Come and have a look." Li Cu had hardly finished speaking when Liang Wan squatted down and spread out the floor plan on the sand. "This is a bit interesting."

When Li Cu looked and saw that it was a side profile, he glanced at the title, and knew that it was a section cut of this huge room. "This room is thirty meters deep and has a huge space. We're now near the ceiling, but there are more than twenty meters below us that are all buried. This pool is a high reservoir tank that's very deep, but we're only seeing the top of it now because it was all filled with sand. And then—"

Liang Wan pointed to a spot: "The door's here, and leads to the sand control channel, but it's more than twenty meters under the sand."

"Is there no other passage? If we're near the ceiling, there should be a ventilation system."

"There are two sets of ventilation systems: one on the top and one on the bottom. They were prepared for different needs and have a diameter of thirty centimeters. I don't think I can get in, and you have no hope. There's no other way out. And—it's more interesting to just show you."

Liang Wan handed him a thick stack of drawings and said, "This is the full layout of the whole building complex. It was a huge project that was divided into two parts. You can see that the buildings on the outer edge of this circle were all drawn by modern architectural standards. This small one square kilometer part in the middle, however, was done using archaeological mapping methods."

What did that mean?

"This was done by two different groups of people. The group of people in the middle weren't drawing designs, but surveying and mapping. The outside talents designed from scratch, which shows that there's an ancient archaeological relic at the core of the whole building's circle. Everything outside was built around this relic."

"It's a tomb." Li Cu took a deep breath, remembering what Wu Xie had said.

Liang Wan nodded. "Look at the structure." She tried to recall what she had investigated before, "I believe the whole building was initially on the ground. You see, these lines on the sides are very high sand-proof walls. Obviously, the seasonal sandstorms here were a very difficult problem to solve. The people who built the ancient tomb might have wished to use these sandstorms to protect it from foreign invasion. However, they didn't foresee that engineering in the future would be able to change the natural environment. They desperately wanted to block the wind and sand from this whole circle, so they set up a huge engineering project. As a result, sixty percent of the project was focused on building a system to divert sandstorms outside of the circle, but we don't know about the remaining forty percent. The remaining mystery project was concentrated around the tomb, but all of the designs for this part of the project weren't modern."

Liang Wan took out a small piece of paper from the floor plans that had a strange figure on it and compared it with the floor plans. It was the exact same.

"This figure is part of some ancient architectural drawings that were discovered during the Warring States Period. Four hundred and twenty-five drawings were found at that time, and recorded in twenty-five silk book volumes. Now they are at the Metropolitan Museum. You see, the arrangement and design of the whole building complex are exactly the same as this drawing."

"It was designed three thousand years ago, so I don't know why they used modern technology to restore such an ancient design. It certainly wasn't for a tourist attraction. It must have an inevitable use."

Liang Wan had found all of that information while studying the drawings. She wasn't willing to tell Li Cu at first, but now she felt that she would be in trouble if she didn't share it with him.

Li Cu asked, "How do you know so much?"

Liang Wan figured that the energy she spent researching was disproportionate to what she ended up learning. "I didn't say I was finished. Take a look at how this room is located in conjunction with the entire building complex."

The room they were in was also one of the largest rooms in the whole complex. It was located on a central axis on the innermost side of the sand-proof wall, but it belonged to the outer edge of buildings designed according to the three thousand year old drawing. The position was very neat.

"I just looked at all of the drawings. If we go further inside, there are no other openings. The building inside is totally enclosed. In other words, Wu Xie pointed us in this direction because it's the closest entrance to the ruins of the ancient imperial tomb located at the center of the building complex."

"He wants us to enter this imperial tomb?"

Liang Wan smiled and pointed in one direction: "There's only one room and it doesn't lead to the outside, but to the building inside these sand-proof walls." She pointed to the pool. "At the bottom of this pool, there's a water pipe leading to that area."

When Li Cu frowned, Liang Wan said: "Brat, you don't have to consider whether these things are reasonable or not. We have no choice but to enter here now. If Wu Xie wants us to enter the imperial tomb, then he must have sorted out the entrance for us."

When Yang Hao returned empty-handed and said, "There's nothing here to light a fire", Li Cu said, "Pile up all the empty containers that can be found and form a circle. I'll fish up the tent from the pool and seal the sandy bottom. It should be relatively safe."

"There are snakes in the water."

"I'll be careful."

Li Cu took off his clothes, picked up the flashlight, jumped into the filtration pool, swam forward, and quickly dove under the water.

He soon found the tent and pulled it up, but found that it was very heavy and seemed to be stuck to the sandy bottom. When he pulled hard, the water around him surged towards the sandy bottom, and he tried hard to pull the tent up before it could be sucked back in.

A hole the size of a manhole cover appeared below him. The current was rushing in, and although it wasn't fast, he could still feel the water's power.

That woman was really right.

Li Cu bundled the tent up and floated over the hole. When he shined the flashlight down and saw a mass of hair in the hole all tangled together, he knew that it was covered in those venomous snakes.

Li Cu had goose bumps, and immediately went to turn around and swim away, but suddenly saw a white object in the middle of the coiled black hair that was thicker than any snake.

It was a white snake as thick as a bowl. It didn't have any hair, but its scales could be spread out like countless little wings opening and closing.

Is this what I saw in the mirror just now?

Li Cu looked at it carefully. He couldn't see the snake head, and could only see its exposed body, but the shape of its scales was different from that of the other snakes.

Damn it, Lady White Snake [1], it looks like you were staying here all along. Li Cu swam back and climbed ashore.

Yang Hao pulled him up and asked, "What did you see?"

"Lady White Snake." Li Cu pulled up the tent and wiped the water from his hair. "There are also a lot of Xu Xians played by Gu Tian Le."

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Note:

[1] Madam or Lady White Snake is a super well-known Chinese story. In The Legend of the White Snake, Xu Xian is a main character (her lover/husband) and Gu Tian Le is a Hong Kong actor, but I couldn't find anywhere that he actually played Xu Xian.