The photo was taken by James inadvertently, probably sometime before entering the grotto, and in the photo we see the two Chinese, one caught on the side, and the other still standing on the back.

But it was that side face that all of us were stunned almost at the same time.

Soaring Tower!

Ling Zhihan picked up the photo and was speechless in shock, we never expected that twenty-five years ago, the person who was with Jim's father and them turned out to be him.

However, in the photo, Ling Xiao Ge's right hand was still alive at that time, and I suddenly thought of the severed hand I saw in the stone room.

"Ling Xiao Pavilion has been to the stone room, and his hand was cut off in the stone room, he ...... How did he get out of it alive? "I was dumbfounded, and I couldn't react at all.

"Grandpa has been to Dunhuang, I can unlock the secrets on the bronze mirror, of course grandpa is not a problem, but how can grandpa appear here?" Ling Zhihan was puzzled.

Extrapolating the time when Ling Xiao Pavilion appeared in Dunhuang from time, it happened that he passed the sect master to Ling and then hurriedly immediately after the Ling family, Ling Xiao Pavilion said in the ward that he was imprisoned by Du Yi for more than 20 years, so it seems that Ling Xiao Pavilion should have fallen into Du Yi's hands after the Dunhuang incident.

"Don't worry about how grandpa is here, you can look at another person." Ye Zhiqiu pointed to the standing back in the photo.

"What's so nice about a back?" Tian Ji asked.

"Don't you feel that this back is familiar?" Ye Zhiqiu tilted his head and looked anxious. "I always feel familiar, I should have seen it, but I can't remember who it is."

"You can't have seen it, this picture was taken twenty-five years ago, and you weren't even alive at that time." The general took a puff of his cigarette and shook his head. "If you've ever seen it, there's a ghost."

Looking at the tall back, it is estimated that the age should not be very old, Ye Zhiqiu was still thinking about who this back was, and my eyes inadvertently glanced at the notes that Jim had placed on the table before, and the words in it seemed familiar.

"Can I take a look?" I asked, pointing to my notes.

Jim nodded and told us that James had been clutching a bag in his hand when he was found in the desert, and that the notebook had been found in the bag, and that they had seen the contents many times, but had not found anything.

I picked up the note and found it to be half mutilated, and read the first sentence above.

I heard that some people in Dunhuang were asking about the feather dragon pattern, so I rushed to Dunhuang after leaving Suzhou......

"Notes from the Celestial Pavilion!" I finally recognized the handwriting on it, we found the other half of this notebook on Wuyi Mountain, no wonder the words on it are so familiar.

Jim, of course, they didn't know the importance of these words when they read this notebook, but I read through them carefully, and gradually I learned the whole story.

Ling Xiaoge knew that someone coveted the secrets of the Ling family, and was worried that the Ling family would be implicated because of him, so he left Suzhou in a hurry, and took away the secrets of the Ling family for generations, so he first went to Wuyi Mountain to hide the notes and the clues left by Ling Xuan.

He originally planned to go away and find a place to live in seclusion, but he accidentally learned that someone was in Dunhuang to inquire about the origin of the feather dragon, and Ling Xiao Pavilion had already realized that this pattern might be related to the secret left by the ancestors of the Ling family.

It's a pity that he has never been able to crack the mystery in the back picture, Ling Xiaoge mentioned Zhuo Mingfeng in the notes, he used a lot of space to record the metaphysical competition between Zhuo Mingfeng, and finally convinced himself that the Ling family's mystics were far inferior to the Zhuo family, and when Ling Xiaoge lost to Zhuo Mingfeng, Zhuo Mingfeng was just a ten-year-old child.

This is also something that Ling Xiaoge can't figure out, this is no longer a matter of talent, with Zhuo Mingfeng's age, he shouldn't have such a high metaphysical attainment.

Ling Xiao Ge then went to Dunhuang, where he successfully found Jim's father, but what Ling Xiao Ge didn't understand was that these people were looking for a palace ruins, and he didn't understand what connection this palace had with the feathered dragon pattern left by the ancestors of the Ling family.

There were a few blanks in the notes here, I flipped back, and when I saw the words again, I found that the handwriting was a little messy, and I could see that Ling Xiaoge must have been very excited and nervous when writing.

"This passage is a bit bizarre, and we can't understand it." Liang Lan said beside him.

I couldn't help but slowly read the messy words in my notes.

……

On March 18, 1942, I saw him for the first time, and I remember that it was in the ancestral hall of the Ling family, and it was raining so hard that I could barely see his face with a poncho.

He asked me to go to Golmud, but I didn't see him there, I didn't think this man would appear in front of me, until I saw him again today.

He walked in from the outside of the inn, and I recognized at a glance the gloomy and resolute face, with sharp black eyes hidden under the sword eyebrows, and a majesty that people dared not look up to, and when he stood in front of me, I was stunned for a long time and speechless, not because of his sudden appearance.

But......

I wasn't sure if it was him, and he stood in front of me as if he had done on that rainy night twenty years ago, with the same expression, the same countenance, and even the same temperament.

The same person!

He didn't change in the slightest, and I had some illusions about why more than 20 years of time hadn't left any change in him.

……

After reading this text, we were dumbfounded, and Jim probably saw our look of surprise and said on the other side. "We thought about it repeatedly, it should be the owner of the note who met someone he knew in the past, and this person was very well maintained, which surprised the owner of the note."

No one paid attention to Jim at all, he would never know the meaning of this text, Ling Xiao Pavilion used such a messy text to record the scene of reunion with this person, not because this person was well maintained.

He was saying that this person's appearance had not changed in the slightest in the past twenty years, I didn't believe that anyone would go through more than twenty years of tempering and still remain the same, and Ling Xiao Pavilion should not believe it either, so he was so shocked.

The person recorded in Lingxiao Pavilion is the mysterious person who recruited the twelve people who went to Kunlun Jinque forty years ago, no matter how powerful a person is, he can't resist the erosion of time, seeing this, I slowly remembered a text I had seen in another notebook before.

It was a record in the notes left by Xue Shuqiao in the Kunlun Golden Gate.

…… The man who recruited us was at the front, and I saw him struck by lightning several times, and when the dazzling lightning dimmed, he still walked unharmed, and the lightning struck on him in a blazing white outline, and I saw it as if I had seen a god......

I hadn't thought about that mysterious recruiter for a long time, but I didn't expect him to suddenly appear in Dunhuang twenty-five years ago, and he was still standing in front of Lingxiao Pavilion who knew him without concealment.

This man knows far more than we know about the Nine Dragons Boat of the Moon Palace, he appeared in Kunlun Jinque forty years ago, and he appeared in Dunhuang again twenty years later, and there are traces of feathered dragons everywhere he appears.

I hurriedly flipped through the notes backwards, and what Ling Xiao Pavilion was very surprised about was not why this person's appearance had not changed, and he was still as young as when I first met him, but that this person only said one word after seeing Ling Xiao Pavilion.

The feather dragon is now, and Vientiane is out.

This sentence was originally written by Ling Xuan at the back of the Tui Bei Tu, and it was impossible for anyone except the sect master of the Ling family to know the existence of this sentence.

Ling Xiao Ge never expected that this sentence would come out of this person's mouth, and in his notes, Ling Xiao Ge also realized that this person seemed to know the affairs of the Ling family very well, and he knew even more about the feather dragon pattern.

He asked this person why he came to Dunhuang, and the man said that the purpose was the same as that of Ling Xiao Pavilion, Ling Xiao Pavilion was eager to uncover the secret of the Ling family, and he thought the same as Ling Zhihan at that time, the only way to make the Ling family peaceful was to find out the secret and make it public.

Therefore, together with this man, Ling Xiao Court helped Jim's father find Grotto 126 and found a hidden bronze mirror from the frescoes.

And then......

That person easily cracked the mystery on the bronze mirror.

"Didn't my grandfather crack it?!" Ling Zhihan was taken aback.

"It seems that this man also has a deep understanding of metaphysics." I said with a deep breath.

At the end of the note was the unfinished account of Ling Xiao Pavilion, and I looked at the short text.

After tomorrow, perhaps the secret of the Ling family's thousand-year-old inheritance will be revealed......

We can already think of the next thing, they went to the Jade Gate Pass together, and found the stone room, but it was not as Ling Xiaoge expected, he did not reveal the secret of the Ling family after all, and his hand was mysteriously broken inside, what happened in the stone room, no one knows now.

Things are getting more and more confusing now, and every time we uncover something, we touch not the truth, but more mysteries, and they are completely unrelated to each other.

When I closed the note, something fell out of it, and I picked it up from the ground, and it was a half-torn photograph of two rows of people standing under a snow-capped mountain in yellowed.

This is a group photo of the twelve people who went to Kunlun Jinque to explore at the Kunlun Mountain Pass forty years ago, and I suddenly remembered that when I was in Wuyi Mountain, there was also half a photo in the other half of Ling Xiaoge's notes, presumably at that time, he tore out the first half of the notes and hid them with Ling Xuan's clues, and inadvertently tore the photos sandwiched in half at that time.

In that photograph we see the thirteenth person who went to Kunlun Jinque forty years ago.

Unfortunately, the photograph was torn in half from the middle, just enough to see the man's face, the thirteenth person happened to be the mysterious recruiter, and the other part of the photograph was in the inn's bag.

Things were finally getting some progress, and we wanted to know who this man was, and we wanted to rush back to the inn at once to uncover the thirteenth man, and I told them about the discovery of Jim's father and uncle in the stone chamber of the Jade Gate.

Unfortunately, the stone chamber was destroyed, and it was not easy to tell them the exact location, and the bones could not be recovered, but it was still safe to be found, and when I left, I told the Jims to give them the photographs of Grotto 126 that they had taken to the security office, which was enough to prove that the existing murals had been restored, and were not cultural relics at all, and that they would be released in a short time.

When I returned to the hotel, I quickly found the other half of the photo, and when the two parts slowly overlapped on the table, a complete photo appeared in front of us.

Everyone's eyes fell on the man in the middle of the photo, and then the room fell silent for a long time, a suffocating horror and confusion, and now they all looked at me in silence as the others looked away from the photograph.

I was the only one who was still looking at the photo in horror and shock, and I kept thinking back to Ling Xiao Pavilion's description of this person.

It was a man with heroic sword eyebrows, his expression resolute and gloomy, and his sharp black eyes were irresistibly majestic.

To be honest, I have tried to paint the man's face countless times with these non-exhaustive descriptions, but when this face actually appeared in front of me, I never dreamed that it would be like this.

By now, I finally understood why I was so frightened and scared when I saw me tearing off my human skin mask in the hospital room that day.

Forty years ago, he saw that person for the first time, and after a gap of twenty years, he saw him again, who was still young and had not changed in the slightest, and after another twenty years, Ling Xiaoge, who was still terminally ill, saw him again on the hospital bed.

The years still haven't left any traces on this person, just like when Ling Xiao Pavilion first saw him, no wonder Ye Zhiqiu felt inexplicably familiar when he saw the photo of Ling Xiao Pavilion and that person's back in Dunhuang, but he couldn't remember who it was.

This is like the bright moon hanging outside the window now, it will rise and set every day, the bright moonlight and clear light have never changed a little, but there are not many people who really care, who will pay attention to a bright moon that can be seen every day.

It's hard to remember things that are too familiar.

For them, I am like the bright moon outside the window, too familiar to pay attention.

I'm the thirteenth person in the picture!