The tunnel in the shape of "╦╧" is crossed by the trajectory of the projectile, and you can see that there is a hole in the asymmetrical position at the left and right ends, and the deepest part is not very clear. The sides of the main road are littered with white bones, and due to the distance, only a large number of large white tusks in the shape of cones can be distinguished, as if there were some other animal bones. At the end of the flare, you can see the flash of water waves there, judging from the location, it should be the underground water system of the Snake River.

Although I didn't expect that the entrance of the pit under my feet was a burial pit with so many white bones, judging from the scale below, since there is a water system flowing down parallel to the deep valley, this tunnel can definitely lead to the main mausoleum area of the tomb of King Xian.

We deliberated, and although this tunnel had a powerful mechanism, it was still feasible to venture into the tomb of King Xian through the underground tunnel compared to the boundless mountain miasma and poisonous fog. Anyway, the three of them are not bad, and it is not like the last time they went to the desert of Xinjiang with a group of intellectuals, and it was very cumbersome to do things. The inverted bucket is the most suitable for two or three people to form a team, with the strong firepower support of the "Chicago typewriter" and the Bingane injector, plus the traditional tools of the golden captain, no matter what comes across, it is enough to deal with it.

So we took a break at the entrance of the cave and got some equipment. Since there was no raft this time, if there was groundwater, it would be necessary to swim in an armed way, so everything unnecessary had to be temporarily removed and left in the shrine dedicated to the mountain god.

First, I changed into a sharkskin wetsuit, put on elbow and knee pads, adjusted the spotlights on the mountaineering helmet to the side, replaced with a new battery, equipped with diving goggles on the helmet, and hung a simple small refillable oxygen cylinder on the back. Each person should only bring one waterproof carrying bag, which contains emergency medicines, spare batteries, cold fireworks, gas masks, fluorescent tubes, candles, evil spirits, wolf-eye flashlights, and other items that need to be used.

The fat man's diving tights were not suitable for wearing, so I didn't plan to wear them, so I said to him: "It's okay if you don't wear them, anyway, you are a stupid boy sleeping on a cool kang, and you are all strong with firepower." ”

Shirley Young said, "No, you can't wear it!" Don't you remember how cold the water was under Shalong Mountain? If you swim in the water for a long time, you are prone to hypothermia, and even if your clothes are a little narrower, you have to put them on, otherwise you will stay and wait for us, and you will not be allowed to enter. ”

The fat man remembered the scene when Shirley Yang dropped the bamboo raft in Shalong Mountain, and his lips were frozen purple when he swam back, it seems that although this neighborhood is humid and sultry, the underground water system is cold and abnormal, not a joke; What's more, a large number of Ming utensils from the tomb of the king are not far away, how can I stay here and wait, I had to inhale and close my stomach, forcibly put on the diving suit, and complained again and again after putting it on: "*** The crotch of the shoes and pants is short, who is uncomfortable and who knows it." ”

Heavy items such as sapper shovels and pickaxes, ropes of all kinds, and jugs of food, as well as weapons and ammunition, detonators and sixteen ingots of explosives, and bingane flasks that can shoot flames, are concentrated in a large waterproof bag, and inflatable air bags are tied around it, so that these equipment can be floated on the surface of the water at any time with the buoyancy of the water, and we can also pull it to save some effort when we swim in the water.

The rest of the things were packed and placed in the main hall of the mountain temple, and by the time everything was ready, it was already the golden wuxi fall, the resident birds had returned to their nests, and by the twilight of dusk, the three of us entered the tunnel.

Shirley Yang led the way with a vajra umbrella and a wolf's eye in front of him, and the fat man and I walked behind with the large pile of equipment packed in the waterproof plastic bag, slowly descending the slightly steep slope.

This section of the tunnel at the entrance is obviously artificially built, both sides are neatly built with large blue stones, the stone joints are sealed with red lacquer, and the large square bricks on the ground are very smooth, like the Yongdao in the ancient tomb.

On both sides of the tunnel were neatly stacked elephant bones, the skeleton of a whole elephant, which was obviously brought from outside after being slaughtered. The whole elephant bones or ivory are placed in the burial pit in order to take the homonym "auspicious" of "elephant". The elephant, a large and docile animal, is itself a symbol of good fortune and prosperity, and in ancient China, as early as the Shang Tang period, elephant bones and ivory were used as burial objects. A large number of ivory tusks have been unearthed in Yinxu, and at that time, there were still a large number of elephants in the Yellow River valley in China, but now they are long extinct.

These white bones of the martyrs are deliberately half-buried, rather than buried in the whole soil like the burial ditch, which shows that the tomb owner is to become an immortal, and he no longer cares too much about worldly things.

I counted the sixty-four holoysbones in this single burial pit, and the ivory was not counted. There were also small animal bones scattered around that had decayed like dirt over time, and it was no longer possible to tell what they were, and Shirley Young deduced that they might have been hounds and horse bones, as well as human bones from slaves.

Once again, we appreciated the huge scale of the tomb of the king and the luxury of the funeral goods, and I said to them: "The king's tomb in a small country like ancient Yunnan in southern Xinjiang is so pompous - for one person, hundreds of thousands of people suffer from hanging upside down, and build such a large-scale tomb with the blood and sweat of the common people. How ridiculous it seems now, such an ancient tomb built with people's fat and ointment, as many as it should be. ”

Shirley Yang said: "I didn't expect that the tomb of the king was so big just a burial pit. As she spoke, she had already reached the intersection of the "╣" shaped tunnel, only to hear her wonder: "What are these for?" ”

The fat man and I then walked and used the wolf's eye flashlight to shine at the bend in it, only to see that it was not a tunnel, but only a part of the stone wall of the main tunnel, only a few meters deep, scattered with a few long poles, which seemed to be connected together. I also thought it was strange, so I wanted to reach out and pick it up to take a look, but although these long rods looked intact, they rotted into mud when touched. Due to the underground water channels, there are no sealing measures inside, and things from 2,000 years ago will rot at the touch of a button.

This pit in the stone wall of the tunnel seems to have been specially used to hold these long poles, could it be used to measure the depth of the water? The three of them couldn't figure out what it was for. There are too many strange and strange things in this tomb area, and these items are nothing in comparison, so I have to ignore them and move on.

Walking to the end of the tunnel, where we fired the flares and saw the reflection of the water surface, we walked along the inclined tunnel to a drop of about tens of meters from the ground. From here, it is no longer a tunnel built by artificial excavation, but a natural cave underground; But it was completely submerged, and if you wanted to continue from here, you had to go into the water and swim.

There are several ancient wooden boats lined up on the stone wall next to the water, and it is possible that people who go to Minglou to worship the tomb of the king are going to take these boats. But with the passage of time, these wooden boats have almost rotted to the shelves, and they are no longer usable.

We pulled the airbag tied to the big backpack and let it fill the air and float on the water, and weapons such as submachine guns were placed on top so that they could be taken out and used at any time. Put away the wolf-eye flashlight, turn on the tactical spotlight on the helmet, and then follow into the water, holding the air bag on the backpack, and wading through the water.

After walking more than ten meters in the water, your feet can't reach the ground, and the cold and biting groundwater is getting deeper and deeper. I looked at the compass, and the current was parallel to the direction of the worm valley.

In the caves here, there are many huge natural stone pillars in the water, like corals on the bottom of the sea. Due to the darkness in the cave, it is not clear how these strange stone pillars were formed.

The low position above my head from the water was particularly oppressive, and when I looked up, I saw that the huge rhizomes of many of the valley's plants had grown from above. Some of the longer ones even protrude directly into the water, forming a rare plant cave roof.

As you travel farther and farther, the terrain gradually lowers. The cave was filled with groundwater, and the distance between the water surface and the top of the cave gradually increased, and the breathing was much easier than before, while the plant rhizomes hanging overhead and those strange stone corals were getting denser and denser. I also noticed that there were some fish in the water of this cave, which occasionally touched our bodies underwater and then swam away, and I was secretly glad that it was not piranhas.

To further confirm the direction of travel, Shirley Young asked the fat man to take out the flare gun and fire another flare in front of him. The fat man counted the number of flares left: "There are still eight rounds, this time there are still too few, so you have to use them leisurely." After saying that, he loaded a shot in the flare gun, adjusted the range, and fired forward.

The flares drew a shining arc and finally hung on the intertwined vines not far away, and at this moment, the white light illuminated the surrounding caves, presenting a rare and terrifying natural landscape in front of us.

It turns out that the coral-shaped stone pillars are fossils of forest trees from ancient times, and the so-called "ancient" here is not something that modern people can trace.

Fossils are ancient relics buried in the stratum, formed by tens of millions of years of sediment burial. The most common are animal fossils, because the bones and teeth of animals have less organic matter and more inorganic matter, the degree of decay will slow down after being buried by sediment, and will be washed away by the slow-flowing groundwater in the sediment voids, and the excess minerals will be precipitated to form crystals, and before the bones completely decay, the crystals of these minerals will form real fossils if they can completely replace organic matter.

But plant fossils are very rare, Y Yang said excitedly: "Shalong Mountain may have been a huge active volcano hundreds of millions of years ago, during the last apocalyptic volcanic eruption, at the same time there was a mudslide nearby, magma swallowed the forest below the mountain, and the trees that were charred by the high temperature in an instant were immediately swallowed by the ensuing mudslide before they could be destroyed, and the temperature was also instantly cooled." ”

After tens of millions of years, with the changes of nature and the repeated erosion of the underground water system, the forest that had been sealed in the sediment for countless years was revealed underground.

I don't think there is anything unusual about these stone trees, I also dug them up in Kunlun Mountain back then. However, recently, Shirley Yang has always seemed worried, and her expression has always been melancholy, and it is rare to see her happy, so I said to her: "Although we have not been frightened on the way to Yunnan, we have also seen some real mountains and rivers, and seen some things that ordinary people can't see in their lives, which can be regarded as a worthwhile trip and a lot of gains." ”

The fat man interjected: "Just looking at some broken stones will inevitably seem to be a fly in the ointment, and then touch a few earth-shattering artifacts to go back, and shake the golden tooth and the grandson together in the Pan homeland, and then kill out of the Pan homeland and enter the glaze factory, which is almost complete." ”

I was about to speak, but the flare hanging in front of me ran out of energy, and then it went dark, and the hole gradually turned into darkness again, except for the faint pillar of light from the tactical spotlight on our helmets. I felt as if we were drifting in a black ocean, the only three of us left in the world, and as the last glimmer of light from the flares was slowly being taken away by the darkness, a sudden sense of loneliness and depression spread through my brain nerves.

I felt very strange that I felt this way, and in the process of going from light to darkness, I felt as if I was struck by a faint electric current, and then I had this inexplicable sense of loss, and my mood suddenly became depressed. I looked at Shirley Young and Fat Man, and the two of them also seemed to sense that something was wrong, but how did this subtle change come about, what exactly did it portend, and why did they suddenly feel a panic?

At this point, the flare that had been fired directly in front of it had finally been completely extinguished, but we found that while the last ray of light of the flare was completely gone, a faint white figure slowly appeared in the dark depths of the groundwater. Although the cavern was very dark, the white light on the figure's body was getting clearer and clearer, and I was sure that it was a female corpse with a whole body. She seemed to have floated from the water, and as the corpse drew closer to us, the frosty face of the corpse could be seen, and my heart began to beat faster, and the nightmarish panic intensified.

There were a lot of floating aquatic plants on the water in front of us, blocking our progress on the water, so we had to take out the sapper shovel and keep pushing away these floating aquatic plants. Duckweed and aquatic plants grow a lot of mosquitoes, water spiders, and grasshoppers, constantly pounce on people's faces.

Just as we were overwhelmed, we suddenly heard the sound of buzzing insect wings in front of us. I subconsciously pulled the submachine gun out of the waterproof bag, and in order to see what it was, the fat man had to shoot another flare. In the light, I saw that the roots and vines of the plants hanging down in front of me were tightly blocked, and countless huge black flying insects looked like small dragonflies, but they had no eyes, and there were thousands of them, like black clouds transiting, circling back and forth around the roots of the plants.

No one has ever seen this insect before, and it probably exists in a special environment where the ground is wet. Insects are the largest group in the world, and about one-third of the species are yet to be recognized by humans.

However, this black dragonfly-like flying insect does not seem to attack people, but such a large group of people can't help but make people's scalp tingle.