Throwing a piece of burning wood into the dark passage, Todd, who had just escaped death, opened the door with an iron ring, and after confirming that there was enough oxygen in the cellar, he stepped on the wooden steps to the bottom.

Lighting the torches soaked in tarpaulin on the walls, the boy looked around.

The cellar is not large, five meters square. The stone walls on all sides were plastered and simply reinforced with wood, and primitive ventilation ducts were installed on the top walls. With such a large space dug out in such a hard limestone layer underground, and so carefully arranged, it is clear that the people who excavated this place must have put a lot of effort into it.

But what was stored in the cellar disappointed Todd a little.

Cabbage, carrots, lettuce, potatoes, garlic and a bag of wheat flour.

After rummaging through the vegetables, finding nothing, he set his sights on the remaining bag of wheat flour.

Such a laborious project should not simply be to store a bunch of vegetables, otherwise it would not be discovered and directly choose to extinguish it.

With difficulty unsealing the cloth bag and reaching in with both hands, Todd touched a hard object. Grabbing the corners with both hands, he lifted it up a few times, but the object buried in the wheat flour did not move.

This thing is really heavy.

Lie down on the bag and remove the wheat flour from the bag by hand. The contents were finally revealed, a small wooden box forty centimeters long and twenty centimeters wide. Wipe the remaining wheat flour off the wooden box, and a tiny keyhole appears in front of the boy's eyes.

Looking at Todd, who was in a daze with keyholes, he sat cross-legged and thought about it for a while, and suddenly thought of a possibility.

Climb the wooden steps up to the ground of the hut again.

Todd gritted his teeth and looked at the two corpses on the ground.

It is highly likely that the key to the wooden box is on them.

He had done this kind of thing in his previous life to contact and even dissect corpses, but it was purely academic research work, and now he had to reach out to the humans he had indirectly killed, and he was still a little resistant in the end.

After a period of psychological warfare, Todd's curiosity finally got the upper hand.

Stretching his hand as far as he could, tilting his head back, and groping for a long time on the victim's body, the boy finally found the key to an iron ring around the waist of the hunchbacked man.

Back in the cellar, I turned the key over by the light of the torch, and finally saw one about the size of the keyhole.

Todd lightly inserted the key into the keyhole, twisted clockwise, and heard a soft click in the lock gate, and the lock opened.

Looking inside, he finally understood why the wooden box was so heavy.

It turned out that there were not only sandbags for cushioning, but also a cylindrical black box made of lead, which was divided into two parts, tightly sealed, and no keyholes could be seen, only sixteen copper six-sided rollers were installed on the front, each side of the roller had a letter, and the sixteen rollers were different.

"C, R, H, D, are the English alphabets? There are also English alphabets in the world?...... Look at this arrangement...... Anagram locks?"

In his previous life, Todd had seen similar objects in museums, with a letter on each side of each wheel, which could only be opened if it was scrolled to the correct position and a password was formed.

This kind of letter lock seems to be extremely complicated in the eyes of ordinary people, but in fact, it is regular.

For example, E, T, I, O, A, and N are the most commonly used letters, with the highest frequency, and the splicing of syllables and the composition of vowel consonants are also traceable.

But there is a premise, the answer to unlocking cannot be a patchwork of meaningless letters.

In the previous life, the soul called Xia Shang was often immersed in academic research and forgot about time. When it comes to Todd, this characteristic is vividly reflected.

Before he knew it, the stone walls on all sides had been filled with permutations and combinations of letters written in charcoal, and the boy had basically confirmed several characteristics of the answer: first, the answer was a sentence or possibly a combination of words, and second, from the point of view of the letters and arrangement, the text of the answer belonged to Latin.

“casc...... No, nascen...... Sixteen letters, this is a familiar arrangement......" A phrase came to Todd's head: "'Nascentes_morimur'...... 'life to die,' a Latin proverb, but what does it mean to mark this sentence here?"

Adjusting the rollers to the correct position, the upper part of the solid lead pillar was moved a few millimeters, and a thin slit was cracked.

With both hands, he removed the upper part again, and a shiny brass tube ten centimeters long and the thickness of a thumb appeared in front of the boy.

Breaking through the layers of obstacles, Todd carefully took out the "final result".

I got the light and took a closer look, the copper tube is very light, almost no weight, the cylinder material should be hand-polished, the workmanship is extremely fine, under the light of the fire, you can faintly see the faint relief.

"Once man has satisfied the lowest needs of existence, curiosity will become the most terrible thing in the world. 』

This curiosity can even make the soul in this body ignore the safety rules that were often muttered in the scientific research work of the previous life.

The first and most crucial one: to be cautious and conservative in all things that are not known, no matter what the circumstances.

With a click, the lid above the brass tube was twisted open, and Todd looked into the inside of the brass tube.

A puff of grayish-white smoke was released from inside, striking his unprotected eyes.

"Ahhh!!h

The burning sensation like a flame "burns" from the cornea of the eye along the optic nerve into the brain.

Throwing away the brass pipe in his hand, Todd covered his eyes and wiped it vigorously, but it couldn't alleviate the burning pain in his head. It felt like putting the whole head in a furnace thousands of degrees high, firing it, and then placing it on an anvil and being repeatedly beaten by a giant hammer.

He slammed his head against the stone wall, his forehead cracked one after another, and blood dripped down his cheek, but it didn't alleviate the pain in his head in the slightest.

His hands kept groping on the ground, but his body tripped over the debris and fell to the ground, Todd's hand grabbed forward indiscriminately, inadvertently grabbed a few garlic, subconsciously crushed it, and rubbed it into his eyes.

The sour and spicy pain from the garlic clove juice brought a new source of pain to the boy's eyes, but it diluted the pain in his brain.

To relieve the sharp pain in his brain, Todd groped for more garlic from the ground, crushed the garlic cloves, dripped the garlic juice into his eyes, and stuffed the garlic paste into his mouth.

I don't know how long this action lasted, and the boy, who was burned all over his body, lost consciousness, lay on the ground and closed his eyes.

When Todd woke up again, it was dark in front of him, his body had lost all mobility, and he felt someone move his hands and feet in a daze.

Moved his lips with the last of his strength.

"Who?"

A deep voice said to him.

"Little one, my name is Huggins. ”