Before I knew it, winter was coming, and Mengli sat by the window, quietly looking at the snow outside the window, feeling sad in her heart.

Since the last "showdown" with the little brother, she and the little brother have never met again, Wu Xie and the fat man will occasionally talk to her on the phone, but she and the little brother may be a little "stiff", oh no, it should be said that it is indeed "stiff".

Despite this, Mengli still arranged for someone to report their situation at any time.

The fat man is doing his antique business, and the little brother is still running around, but Wu Xie's situation is ......

Wu Xie's friend Lao Itch was released from prison, bringing shocking news to Wu Xie, who had just returned from Xisha: the strange hexagonal copper bell came from the hinterland of the Qinling Mountains. Wu Xie and Lao Itch went deep into the Qinling Mountains to explore, and entered the cave Zheluo salmon, Huangquan Waterfall, corpse array, and unicorn exhaustion......

The confrontation in front of the bronze tree learned from Lao Itch's mouth that the ability to materialize could appear here, that is, his wish came true, and he found that Lao Itch had died three years ago, and he objectified himself before he died. Candle Jiuyin stirred the entire mountain, Lao Itch was trapped to death, Wu Xie escaped and was rescued......

Mengli looked at the snow, hooked her lips, and smiled with loneliness and bitterness.

"I'll be fine...... Protect ...... You ......"

Hangzhou West Lake, Xiling Seal Society.

Nested in the air-conditioned room, lazy all afternoon and didn't even have the strength to doze off, Wu Xie was lying on the recliner in the inner hall of the Xiling Seal Society, his feet were cold, he didn't know what to do, and he was half-asleep, Wang Meng walked in and said to him: "Boss, someone is looking for you." ”

Wu Xie reluctantly reacted, yawned, and said in his heart that for three or nine days, there are still people visiting antique shops, this can be regarded as positive, but no matter how you say it, it is business, got up and patted his face, and walked out with a high spirit.

The air conditioner outside is small, the cold wind blows, people are excited, at a glance, it turned out to be the little girl under Uncle Hai in Jinan, who was shivering from the cold, Wu Xie thought: I guess I brought a check, my heart was hot, I was busy asking Wang Meng to make tea, and I asked her: "What, girl, Uncle Hai asked you to come?" ”

The little girl's name is Qin Haiting, a relative of Uncle Hai, only seventeen years old, and she is already a veteran of the antique world, she nodded and said, "Oh my mother, why is Hangzhou colder than our north?" ”

Wang Meng smiled: "It's dry and cold weather in the south, it feels a little bitering, and your Jinan is not too north." ”

Wu Xie saw that Qin Haiting only had a tooth flower, pulled her to the inner hall, the air conditioning inside was warm, handed him the water bag for hot hands, and asked, "You are too afraid of the cold, like this, is it warm?" ”

If Mengli sees it, he will definitely joke that he is a warm man.

Qin Haiting drank a few sips of hot tea to ease up, and still chopped her feet in the room: "It's a little better, people say how beautiful and beautiful Hangzhou is, my uncle didn't let me come over and I rushed to come, who knew it was so cold, hey, I won't come again next time." ”

"What did your uncle call you for? I didn't have a phone call. ”

Qin Haiting took off her scarf, took out something from her purse, and said, "Of course it's business, give, cash check, money for that fisheye stone." ”

When Wu Xie heard that it was, he took it and glanced at it, the price was good, and he immediately put it in his pocket and said, "Then thank him for me."

Qin Haiting took out another invitation note and handed it to Wu Xie: "My Uncle Hai will also come to Hangzhou the day after tomorrow to participate in an antique appraisal meeting, and he said to let you go too, and I will talk to you about important matters." ”

"The day after tomorrow? I don't know if I have time, why don't I say it on the phone, God is mysterious? "Actually, Wu Xie doesn't want to go, antique appraisal, it's too boring, for insiders, it's just a bunch of old men chatting there, in fact, how can there be so many allusions, whether it's true or not, you can see it in a few seconds.

Qin Haiting leaned into his ear and whispered, "Uncle I said that it has something to do with that bronze fish, and I don't regret it." ”

The relationship between Wu Xie and Uncle Hai is not so good that he has nothing to talk about, usually it is some business communication, and after getting acquainted with him, he asked Uncle Sheng to give him face, he suddenly wanted to be close to him, Wu Xie felt a little strange.

However, the little girl didn't show it well in Wu Xie, so she casually agreed and asked her, "What do you say?" What news did he find? ”

Qin Haiting smiled evilly: "Uncle I said, I'll tell you when the time comes, I don't know what's going on, don't ask." ”

Wu Xie scolded secretly in his heart, this old profiteer probably wants to knock on my bamboo pole again.

Beijing.

I heard from the older generation that when the old man Meng assumed the position of the head of the family, the dream family moved from the ancient house in Changsha to the current main house.

One is life-saving, and the other is translocation.

In fact, only Old Man Meng and a few elders knew the situation at that time, and the head of the family at that time received a letter from the main clan, so he immediately gathered them together to discuss the matter.

Overnight, the head of the family was translocated, and the dream family moved, avoiding the disaster of extermination, and gave Zhang Da Buddha a favor.

The main house of the Dream Family is similar to the courtyard of the ancient big family, but it is different.

The main house of the Dream Family is inhabited by the Dream Family, but there is no deceit, full of human feelings, and it also has its own customs and habits.

Each corridor of the main house of the Dream Family will be tied to a copper wind chime, and when a gust of wind blows, the wind chime emits a pleasant bell of "Ding Ding, Ding Ding".

Listening to the older generation, this is a prayer......

"Grandpa, I've come to see you." In the lobby, Meng Li smiled at the old man Meng on the main seat.

"You still know how to come!" After the old man glanced at her, he continued to sip the hot tea and ignored her.

"Grandpa~" Mengli stepped forward and hugged the old man's arm coquettishly, "Aren't I here?" Don't be angry~"

"You......" the old man sighed, there was nothing he could do with her, "Stay in the main house?" He asked tentatively.

"Well—just for a few days," Mengli thought for a moment and replied.

The old man sighed, not knowing whether he was sad or relieved.

"Alright, let's go back to the house and rest first! Look at your dark circles......"

"Is there one? Hehe......" Mengli touched her eyes, as if her heart was empty.

Mengli returned to her room, took out her diary from her luggage, and wrote down some things......

Hangzhou.

On the third day, Lao Hai really arrived, Wu Xie picked him up from the train station, took him to the hotel he booked, and Wu Xie asked him in the car, what news he heard, if he was blind, he would not spare him.

Lao Hai shivered coldly, and said: "The strong dragon doesn't suppress the head snake, it's all in your territory, how dare I fool you, but let's not talk about it here, I'm about to freeze to death." ”

Wu Xie took him to the hotel, put down his things, went to find a private room in the dining hall, scalded a pot of wine, and after a few glasses of stomach, he finally relieved himself.

Wu Xie saw that Lao Hai's wine strength reached his neck, and he knew that it was almost there, so he asked him: "Okay, you drank and drank, and ate and ate, it's time to say it, what did you find?" ”

Lao Hai blinked his mouth, smiled, took out a stack of paper from his bag, and slapped it on the table: "Look at this." ”

Wu Xie picked it up and looked at it, it was a yellowed old newspaper, the date was 1974, he circled a piece of news, there was a large black and white photo, although it was not very clear, but he still recognized it, the photo was taken, it was a snake eyebrow copper fish, and there were many small cultural relics on the side, such as Buddha beads.

However, the appearance of this fish is different from the one in Wu Xie's hand and the one in the third uncle's hand. There is a relief of three fish on the forehead of the tomb tomb statue in the submarine tomb, and this one should be the top one. In this way, it can be said that all three fish are alive.

"How did you find this newspaper? What's behind it? ”

Lao Haidao: "I've been helping a big boss tinker with old newspapers recently, you know, rich people have collected everything, you see, this is the Guangxi Cultural Evening News in 74 years, he asked me to find it for him from January to December, I looked for two months to get it together, these days to deliver, in the check, a look, happened to show me this news, you say it's a coincidence?" This newspaper was published in seven or four years, and it was closed in seven or five years, and it is difficult to find it in the world. ”

Wu Xie's eyes looked down, and there was a news of about 300 words under the photo, saying that this fish was found in the base of a Buddhist temple in Guangxi, and the tower collapsed naturally because of its age, and the underground palace was dug out when cleaning up the ruins. Experts speculate that it is a relic of monks in the late Northern Song Dynasty.

Northern song dynasty? Wu Xie lit a cigarette, leaned back on the chair, and muttered in his heart, this kind of snake-eyebrow copper fish, the first fish, appeared in the tombs of the princes in the late Warring States period, the second fish in the submarine tomb in the late Yuan Dynasty and early Ming Dynasty, and the third fish in the pagoda underground palace of the Northern Song Dynasty. What kind of plane is there, there is no boundary at all in time.

Wu Xie flipped through the other parts of the newspaper, only this news was about this fish, these contents, in fact, there was nothing new, it was equivalent to not saying that he still didn't know anything about this fish, and he was depressed thinking about people.

Lao Hai looked at his expression and said, "Don't be discouraged, I haven't finished yet, the story behind this is still exciting." ”

Wu Xie frowned: "What do you say?" Could it be that what else could be derived from this newspaper? ”

Lao Hai nodded and said, "That is, if I just find a newspaper, I don't need to come to Hangzhou to find you, right?" We have to start from the beginning. By the way, you are also mixed in the industry, do you know that there is a person called Chen Pi Ah Si? ”

Wu Xie was shocked when he heard this, Chen Pi Ah Si was a famous Tufu in Changsha when he was old, an old scoop handle, and a figure of the same generation as his grandfather, I heard that he is now over ninety years old, and he was blind during the ten years of catastrophe, and he has not appeared since then, and he does not know whether he is dead or alive. But his name is still well-known in his grandfather's mouth.

But this person is different from his grandfather, he lives on the knife edge, that is, he doesn't just rob tombs, kill people and set fires, as long as he can get money, he does it, so before liberation, people called him shaved his head, which means that he kills people like shaving his head, without hesitation.

When Lao Hai mentioned this person, Wu Xie was a little surprised, because he was not a contemporary of them, and Wu Xie had never been in contact with him, could this fish have anything to do with him?

Lao Hai saw that Wu Xie didn't speak, thinking that he didn't know, and said: "It's not strange that you don't know about Fourth Master Chen, in the end he is not the same generation as us, but I have to tell you that this copper fish in this newspaper was brought out by him from the underground palace of the pagoda, and the matter is really not as simple as what is said in this newspaper." As he spoke, he briefly told Wu Xie about the events of the year.

It turned out that in 74 years, Chen Pi Ah Si was nearly 60 years old, and his eyes were not blind, and it was a period of ten years of turmoil, because he had been a platoon commander in the Kuomintang army in the early days of liberation, and later became a bandit for a few years, so he had no legal identity.

In addition to the four old in the early years, many monuments have been smashed almost, Chen Pia Si has been to many places in Guangxi, because Guangxi is not the Central Plains in ancient times, and there are not many ancient tombs, he has lived honestly in those years, but unfortunately, that year, he happened to pass by in the Qiaoling inventory, and a few local Miao people chatted, those people drank too much, and talked about the collapse of a temple in Mao'er Mountain, saying that the movement was very big, even the ground also fell, collapsed out of a big pit, the night of the collapse, Many also heard a very eerie scream.

Chen Pi'a Siyi felt that it was wrong, he had been to Mao'er Mountain many times, and the temples in that place were built very strongly, how could it be said that they would collapse? Ask carefully, only to know that this tower is not on Mao'er Mountain, but on the side of a mountain called "Reclining Buddha Ridge" in the center of the mountain range, this place is very strange, all around the village, that is, a basin of about ten square kilometers in the middle, the altitude is very low, the vegetation is dense inside, the tree cover covers the sky and the sun, the village is on the cliff, the forest is under the cliff, the drop is more than 100 meters, it is two completely different worlds, and from the village, there is no way to go down, to go down to this basin, only with a rope.

Locals say that there must be other entrances and exits in this basin, but the vegetation underground is too dense to walk, and the Miao people who used to go down to hunt and collect medicine often go back to the bottom to disappear, so there is generally nothing to do, and everyone is willing to go down.

The ancient tower is built in such a place, almost in the center of the basin, usually people look down from the cliff, can only see a very small spire exposed dense canopy, and to the plant attached to the full, what is not clear below, Miao people said, they knew that there was a tower here more than ten generations ago, but no one thought to go down to see, now also get used to it, recently one day, suddenly a loud noise, come out to see, the spire is gone, only to know that the tower collapsed.

About this mysterious ancient tower, the locals still have a lot of legends, according to some old people, this tower is used in ancient times a monk to build to suppress the demon, now the tower falls, the monster is going to come out to do evil, that strange scream, is the monster to break free from the shackles of the cry.

After hearing this, Chen Pi Asi thought it was very interesting, and he vaguely felt that the location of the tower was not quite right with the voice that Miao Min heard in the middle of the night.

But people like them may have a peculiar intuition to instinctively find information from other people's accounts and some legends, which is already difficult to find in our generation.

Chen Pia thought for a moment and decided to go and have a look.

Guangxi mountain range is distributed in many places, can be called the first in the country, Mao'er Mountain is one of the important sources, across Xing'an, resources, Longsheng three counties. It is the birthplace of the Li River, the Zijiang River and the Xun River, connecting the two major water systems of the Yangtze River and the Pearl River, and there is a large area of primeval jungle in that place, and the first big mountain and the old mountain boundary crossed by the Red Army's Long March are among them. During World War II, several bombers of the Flying Tigers of the U.S. Army mysteriously disappeared here. So this place has always been a bit mysterious.

After several twists and turns, Chen Pi Ah Si came to a village on the "Reclining Buddha Ridge", stood on the earthen hill and looked at the basin in the middle of the mountain range, the tower was much bigger than he imagined, and several trees were knocked down when it fell, so there was a gap in the green tree cover of the forest, on the "Reclining Buddha Ridge", there was nothing in the gap, but Chen Pi Ah Si almost immediately found that in the week of the collapse of the tower, all the trees were very messy because of the ground sinking, it seemed that there was something under the tower, And the volume is even larger than the base of the tower.

When Wu Xie heard this, he already knew that it was a "Jing'er Palace", "Jing'er Palace" was a dialect in Changsha before the liberation, that is, under the above-ground building, there was an underground part with the same scale as the above-ground building, which looked like the reflection of the above-ground building on the lake, and the upper and lower ends were symmetrical.

This is also called "Yin and Yang Shuttle" in the Northern School, which means that the overall building is like a shuttle inserted in the ground, one side is the underworld, and the other side is the yang world, but such ancient tombs or ancient buildings are rare, and most of the ground remains have been destroyed, so this statement has almost no one mentioned in the ten years before the liberation.

Chen Pi'a Si just looked at the changes in the arrangement of the trees, and he could know that there was a "Jing'er Palace" buried underneath, this kind of judgment is impossible to do without extremely rich experience, Wu Xie couldn't help but sigh secretly, calm down, and listen to Lao Hai continue.

After Chen Pi Asi made up his mind, he was already greedy in his heart, in the underground palace of the pagoda, there would only be three things, either the relics, or the golden body of the monk, or a large number of Buddhist scriptures, whatever is the value of the thing.

But he is such a foreigner, it is not very convenient to move here, firstly, his identity is special, and his background is not good, and secondly, the Miao and Han clans were constantly in dispute at that time, and several villages here are Miao villages, and rashly entering may arouse the suspicion of others.

After thinking about it again and again, he came up with a plan, he found a local Miao guide at a high price, he told the guide that he was an old intellectual, when he came over, one of his students fell off the cliff, the Miao people are simple, not dark about the world, how could they think that there is a trick inside, as soon as he heard that someone was hanging, he immediately notified the people of the whole village, the young Miao man tied the hanging basket with a rope, and put Chen Pia Si and a few young people who helped under the cliff.

According to Chen Pi'asi's own recollections, through this drop of more than 100 meters is simply a hellish experience, the cliff is very steep, the weight of the person is completely stretched by a rattan rope, the buttocks are wrapped in a basket, the wind blows, the whole person spins in circles like a top, extremely unstable. By the time he had passed through the dense canopy and descended to the bottom of the jungle, only half a human life remained.

There is almost no sunlight in the interior of the forest, the light is extremely dim, the air smells of swamp gas, and there are many kinds of trees here, but without exception, all of them have green moss, and the mud is so soft that it is almost impossible to stand.

After Chen Pi'a came down, he pretended to be physically exhausted (in fact, he was really frightened), sat there panting, and the leader of the Miao tribe saw that he was not young, and he looked like a little old man, so he asked him to wait for them to come back. He lit a torch and beckoned the others to search in the direction he pointed.

As soon as they left, Chen Pi'a Si immediately took out the compass and drilled into the depths of the jungle according to the direction noted in advance. It's a pity that he didn't bring enough equipment this time, and whether he can enter the palace or not depends on his own creation.

After walking in the jungle for four hours, relying on the compass and his courage to travel north and south over the years, Chen Pi Ah Si finally came to the area he planned on the "Reclining Buddha Ridge", that is, the temple ruins around the tower.

As he continued to go deeper, Chen Pi'a Si saw more and more broken eaves, obviously the ancient buildings here have disappeared, only some foundations and broken walls remain, almost mixed with those vegetation, and it is not clear what it is. But looking at the scale, the area of this temple is huge, and although the stupa is in this large area, it is difficult to see where it is.

Chen Pia Si is not young in the end, walking around, feeling a little short of breath, and was about to sit down and rest, when suddenly his eyes flashed, and the grass planting with the entire wall on the side suddenly shrank, and it seemed to be wrapped in something.

Chen Pi Ah Si was startled, he rolled and rolled out, and at the same time turned out an iron bullet in his hand, looked back, only to see that in the vine grass quilt wrapped around the wall, there was a corpse dressed as a Miao person, which was almost shriveled, but the stomach of the corpse, I don't know why, was slightly agitating, as if there was something inside.