Daomu Biji: Restart

If the tomb chamber was flooded at that time and only the human skin boat was above water, then it was impossible to verify why the diver took off the shuikao at that time. Maybe it was so they could be more flexible when operating underwater.

But there was no denying that the leather figurines, shuikao, and thunder god statues in the tomb passage outside all had one thing in common—they were hollow. And this hollowness made them especially suitable for hiding parasites.

But all the other leather figurines below didn’t have any traces of entering the water and were well preserved, so this statement was just a speculation.

I used my phone to fiddle with the fragile shuikao and found that the dead things inside of it had completely rotted into cotton wool. They felt like some kind of coral bug. It was possible that some kind of parasite had been breeding here for a long time and filled up all the cavities.

After Fatty fiddled with it for a long time and found nothing, he turned his attention to the murals around him. "Don't worry about it too much. Let’s finish things quickly and leave,” Fatty said to me. “When the candles burn out and our cell phones die later, we’ll have to work in the dark."

After thinking about it, I immediately started taking pictures of the murals with my phone. The green candlelight wasn’t very bright, so I had no choice but to turn on the flash. All those eyes on the murals opened every time the flash went off, which was really creepy. I could only finish photographing all the murals as soon as possible.

Poker-Face took one of the rhinoceros horn candles from the basin and told us not to go near the door, no matter how important the murals were. He then jumped back into the waterway to go find Liu Sang. Fatty continued to stare at the shuikao in a daze. I looked at his expression and figured he had come to his senses, or he at least knew that the shuikao might be very important.

I also took some photos of the stone boats as I passed by them, but there wasn’t enough battery power left and the phone shut off right when I was in the middle of shooting. I couldn't see what I had photographed, so I could only remember it with my eyes.

The murals were continuous, and interpreting them required patience, meticulous observation, and the ability to reason. The tomb chamber was very high, which made it difficult to see those parts of the murals clearly. I remembered what I could and then started trying to figure out what the contents of the murals meant.

All the stories recorded in the murals were those of the South Sea’s King Zhi. The easiest one to understand was the story of his rebellion and defeat, which the mural depicted as a major opportunity for him to become immortal. The murals showed how he was first oppressed by the emperor and then how he met the alchemist who helped him resist the emperor’s final attack. They then went on to show how he became fascinated with immortals and went out to sea to find them.

After this part, it was mostly stories about the sea. After King Zhi's fleet left the mainland and went out to sea, the accompanying alchemist guided them to a strange place. The murals depicted that place as being similar to Penglai, but the people wore immortal clothes and had a lot of ears.

In this fairyland, all the immortals were standing on boats at sea and had their ears turned towards the sky. There was an immortal boat in the sky that looked like the human skin boat, which all the immortals down below seemed to be listening to. Surprisingly, the murals seemed to show that the people on the immortal boat were also listening to the immortals down below.

As I was going over all the details carefully, I heard a sound and turned my head, thinking that Poker-Face was back. But when I looked, I saw that Fatty was putting on the shuikao we had left on the ground. His movements and state were very strange, just like an animal trying put its skin back on.

He wasn’t using any protective measures at all as he touched the shuikao with his bare fingers.

"Fatty, are you crazy?!" I hissed at him. But by the time I ran over, he had already put his head in the shuikao. "What are you doing?!"

Fatty didn't listen to me at all as he continued trying to push the remaining half of his body into the shuikao.