In this way, I don't know how long I got lost in the Taihang Mountain, and the war horse I rode was also frightened by the tigers, leopards, wolves, and insects to abandon him, and I didn't know where to flee from the wilderness, Yu Xiaoren relied on a strong desire to survive on foot and insisted on walking through the endless mountains and forests, and finally one day, he found a cave under a hillside to avoid a torrential rain that suddenly fell from the sky, and made an amazing discovery in the cave.

Soon after Yu Xiaoren ran into the cave almost with a roll, he was pleasantly surprised to find a pair of fire sickles on the dry ground in the cave, which could be said to be the first time he had found something left by a human in the deep mountains and old forests since he had been lost in the mountains for so many days.

Overjoyed, Yu Xiaoren immediately found some dry branches in the cave, lit a fire sickle, made a torch to shine on, and continued to walk deeper into the cave.

This cave was a little beyond Yu Xiaoren's imagination, and he walked out of the path in the cave for a while, which only allowed two people to pass side by side, and turned two corners in succession, and his eyes suddenly became clear.

To Yu Xiaoren's even greater joy, in the depths of the cave, in what looked like a stone house, there were bags of grain piled up.

Who could have hidden so much food in such a secret cave? Yu Xiaoren walked forward with the doubts that suddenly rose in his heart, and tried to open one of the bags of grain, only to find that most of the grain contained in it had been rotten and spoiled due to the long storage time, and could not be eaten, and as soon as he moved the grain bag slightly, a swarm of rats sprang out of the grain bag pile, so frightened that Yu Xiaoren almost threw away the torch.

After steasing his mind slightly, Yu Xiaoren found that most of the swarms of rats that had sprung out of the pile of grain bags had slipped in the same direction. He tried his best to restrain the panic in his heart, and followed the mouse to turn and walk in the other direction, but after a short walk, he turned a corner, and the faint sound of rushing water came to his ears.

It turns out that there is a dark river in this cave. Yu Xiaoren was in good spirits, holding a torch high and following the sound of the water all the way over. Sure enough, not far ahead, a dark river about two zhang wide appeared in front of him, and looking along the direction of the dark river, a trace of light could be seen in the distance.

It seems that this dark river leads beyond the cave. Thinking so, Yu Xiaoren turned back to the stone house where the grain was stacked: he was so reluctant to take a grain of grain with him, and walked out of the cave empty-handed.

After more than a few days of untouched rice, Yu Xiaoren didn't care that the grain in the stone house had been gnawed by rats, and with great desire in his heart, he kept moving, looking through the bags of grain, trying to find something that could still be eaten and take it out of the cave for his own hunger.

Moving around, Yu Xiaoren heard a "snap", and a white dangling thing fell to the ground from a bag of grain.

He leaned closer, holding his torch and staring at the white dangling thing, and could not help but be truly startled: what had fallen from the sack was a human bone.

In the past few years, Yu Xiaoren has followed Yang Guang out of the town in Bingzhou, and during this time, he has been on the battlefield more than once, and he can see at a glance that the ground in front of him is a white human bone, and it is definitely not the bone of other animals.

Yu Xiaoren moved a few more bags of grain, but no more human bones were found.

He fixed his mind, looked at the rats that still came out of the grain bag from time to time, and understood in his heart that the human bone that fell from the grain bag was most likely brought from elsewhere by these rats who came to steal food from the grain pile.

Thinking of the bones of the people who were probably hiding the food in the cave after their deaths, Yu Xiaoren had a glimmer of hope in his heart: since these people could hide so much food in this cave, maybe they could carry something other useful on them, even if they could find a sword for self-defense from their bones (his own sword had long been taken away by the frightened war horse).

With such a thought, Yu Xiaoren temporarily dispelled the idea of bringing food out of the cave, turned around and returned to the dark river, thought about it, and first groped his way to the depths of the cave along the dark river.

Not far away, in a spacious area under a suspended rock next to the dark river, Yu Xiaoren found dozens of human bones scattered on the ground.

Although the bones clearly showed signs of being dragged by rats in the cave, it was vaguely revealed that they were the bones of three humans.

Two of them were separated from the one next to them, and both skeletons had a saber next to them. Yu Xiaoren stepped forward, first picked up two swords from the two skeletons, one on the left and the other on the right, and put them on his waist, and then walked to the skeleton next to him with a torch, wanting to see if there was anything useful to him beside him.

When he approached the skeleton close inside, Yu Xiaoren was surprised to find that there was an iron lock running through the collarbone on both sides of the skeleton.

Yu Xiaoren glanced back at the two skeletons with swords on their bodies, and suddenly woke up: the two skeletons were clearly guarding the skeletons close to the inside, and the two guards were obviously quite jealous of the one being guarded, for fear that he would run away, and they would put iron locks across the collarbones on his body.

Thinking like this, Yu Xiaoren walked over to the skeleton next to him, and opened his eyes to search around him, trying to find something from what he had left behind that could indicate his identity during his lifetime.

Leaning down and looking for a long time, he finally found a glittering object in the crevice of the rock behind the skeleton.

It took Yu Xiaoren a lot of effort to pull out the glittering thing from the crack in the rock, and when he got closer to the light, it turned out to be a belt buckle made of fine copper.

The Sui Dynasty did not have the strict division of clothing and color in the later Tang Dynasty, and the people who lived in the official often used the number of rings on the belt as the main sign to distinguish their status, such as Yang Guang, as the king of Jin, who wore a thirteen-ring gold belt every day.

Although the belt buckle that Yu Xiaoren found in the rock crevice behind the bones of this cave is only one ring, because it is made of fine copper, it can also be guessed that its owner was also a prominent figure during his lifetime.

Just as Yu Xiaoren took the belt buckle into his arms and was about to leave, he walked past the bones of the two guards when he suddenly tripped over something under his feet and almost fell to the ground.

Yu Xiaoren hurriedly stabilized his figure, looked down at his feet, and it turned out that there was a Buddha statue with the color of a rock under his feet. He felt strange in his heart, bent down to pick up this Buddha statue from the ground, and as soon as he started it, his palm was pressed down: it turned out to be a Buddha statue made of bronze.

The cave was dark and damp, there were three white bones in front of him, and from time to time there were small animals such as bats screaming, Yu Xiaoren didn't dare to stay in the cave any longer, holding the bronze Buddha statue in one hand, holding the torch in the other, three steps and two steps along the dark river ran out of the cave.