The Lost Tomb : Sea Of Sands

Chapter 147: Ancient Changsha Tomb

The black-clad person nodded, "Everything you do in the future is related to this concept, because you're the only one who can see the true face of 'the truth of the world'."

Li Cu was puzzled.

On Monday, they got in a jeep with tinted windows. Two other black-clad men joined them, which brought their total to four. They arrived at an airport in the middle of the night, and took an overnight flight to a city. After they got off the plane, they took a car from the airport, and it was only in the rearview mirror that Li Cu discovered it was actually Changsha's Huanghua Airport.

The plane had flown for about three hours, but the range of three-hour flights coming in and out of Changsha Airport could cover almost all of China.

Li Cu gave up the idea of trying to back-trace where they had come from, and leaned against the car's tinted window with his eyes closed. They traveled a whole day and a half before he could finally get out of the car.

In front of him was a rural pond, and the surrounding area was all farmland. Green plants were growing all around, but he couldn't tell if they were rice or wheat. There were two bamboo shacks by the pond, and a single glance showed that they were very shabby, and couldn't be lived in. They must have been temporarily built by people who wanted to view the pond during the summer.

The road they drove on was a concrete village road, and they could see the farmers' houses in the distant village.

This was a typical New China village, and since it was near Changsha, the distant horizon was nothing but mountains. It was fairly obvious that this village was in the mountains.

He saw that the person who came to meet them was a young man with a dark farmer's complexion. The other black-clad people in their group went to the shack and picked up some stones to sit on while the leader asked him what was going on.

The young man told them that several village children found something when they were looking for snails in the fish pond. As he spoke, he handed over a tile, which must have been a fragment from a jar.

"This fish pond is very deep. The shallows on the outer edge of the circle are only two or three meters, but if you go just one step further, you'll sink in up to your head. It's like a giant jar. They say that when the pond is cleared every year, and the water is pumped out, even the sludge at the bottom is sucked up. Normally, the sludge around ponds sinks down, but the sludge at the bottom of this pond seems different from the soil around it. Every year, the pond gets a little deeper. The owner of the pond is quite happy, because the water depth is good for fish farming and he doesn't have to dig. Today was the seventh year that the pond's been cleared, but something's not quite right. A lot of broken tiles were washed up. Broken tiles don't appear without reason, so they must have been buried deep in the mud. After seven years of pumping out sludge, all the mud covering the broken tiles was pumped out and they were finally exposed. The villagers didn't pay it much mind until a brat hooked a large piece of tile while fishing. That was when they realized that something was wrong. This kind of tile wasn't a fragment of an ordinary jar. Based on its curve, the jar had to be taller than a person. It was usually either used as a jar for storing water or.... for burying people."

"Urn burial." The leader of the black-clad people said: "It's very common, so why did you call us?"

The young man said, "I dove down and took a look. The whole bottom is full of jars. Besides, look at the color of this fragment."

There were a lot of large red patterns on the tile. They didn't seem to follow any rules, but they appeared to form a symbolic pattern at first glance.