Chapter 1384 — Each Takes What He Needs

In his eyes, Wei Zhao was a cautious and careful man, and if Wei Zhao was certain there was nothing to be found, then looking again would be pointless. Besides, he did not understand these antiques very well, and he reckoned Male Thief was rather more expert than he was.

"There's a stone door ahead. Once it opens, that should be the way to the main burial chamber - though there may be danger inside." Lao Hei shone his flashlight at the spot not far in front of them. "These things at the doorway were plainly prepared for ordinary tomb robbers."

"Prepared for what? They were prepared for the dead, weren't they?" Wei Zhao said flatly. "Just now the Swallow Heroine nearly got crushed to death, and this tomb's entrance goes down but never up. Even if ordinary tomb robbers took those things, how would they get out?"

Lao Hei was startled for a moment, then nodded. Wei Zhao had a point: any tomb robber who could make it this far was surely no ordinary sort - where were the ordinary tomb robbers to speak of? The things at the doorway were merely what triggered the mechanism, and none of them were especially valuable. Even if they were smashed to pieces, it was no great loss.

"The stone door is the same as before - still a coded lock. But my tools were all smashed to bits earlier, so opening this door will be a difficult business, I expect." Lao Hei glanced at the stone door in the distance. "Old Yu, do you have any bright ideas?"

"What bright idea could I have?" Old Yu said. "I don't understand any of this either."

"You tagged along and you're useless, yet you want this and that." Wei Zhao said flatly. "If I'm not mistaken, this stone door's code should be the same as the last door's. Any tomb robber who got this far is an expert; a common mechanism like this is only a matter of time for such people - even without equipment, patience alone would see it through. So the designer would not have wasted much thought on this part."

What Wei Zhao said was in fact what Liu Bojia's materials had predicted: in his view, if there were coded stone doors in the tomb, then the codes should all be identical.

"Oh?" Lao Hei was slightly taken aback. "I'll go and try."

It was Lao Hei who had cracked the previous code, so his memory of it was the sharpest. Following the same sets of numbers, he turned the dials on the stone door one after another, and soon there came a crisp "click" - the stone door opened at once.

Lao Hei shot Wei Zhao an admiring look. "Male Thief's experience really is the richest."

"Enough talk. Everyone be careful - there may be more traps in here." Wei Zhao glanced at the corridor beyond the stone door.

For some reason, Wei Zhao kept sensing a faint, barely-there aura of danger in there - and yet the jade pendant gave no warning. Which meant that if nothing was done, the danger would not manifest; but if some great mechanism were triggered, there might be grave peril.

Wei Zhao's words made Old Yu, who had been about to stride in first, pull his foot back. He eyed the others warily. "You go first!"

Wei Zhao could no longer be bothered to scorn Old Yu for his cowardice. Never in his life had he seen a cultivator so afraid of dying.

Wei Zhao did not mind; he walked straight in. This long corridor was clearly different from the last: on both its left and right sides there were no more treasure chests or display cabinets. Instead, at regular intervals, a door stood in the stone wall on either side.

"This is the main burial chamber. These rooms on either side should be the accompanying burial vaults and such. The master of this tomb was clearly a scholar, so the tomb prized practicality. A few vaults would be enough for the tomb's master to rest in peace after death; there was no need for the grand luxury of an imperial mausoleum." Lao Hei spoke to Old Yu as he walked. "What we're after should be in one of these vaults."

"Good. Open it and let's have a look!" Old Yu nodded, pointing at the door of the first vault.

The stone doors here had no codes and could be opened directly - but Old Yu, forever fearing some mishap, would naturally not open the stone door himself.

Lao Hei opened the stone door with some irritation. Nothing strange happened at all, which let everyone breathe a sigh of relief.

The vault was large, but there was very little inside it - only a single display rack, on which a few bronze and porcelain pieces were sparsely set. Yet the things inside made both Lao Hei's and Yu Xiao Ke's eyes light up at once!

Lao Hei hurried over. Looking at the objects on the rack, his face showed greed and astonishment. To a knowing eye like his, their worth could be judged at a glance: every single one was a treasure worth a fortune.

"This bronze medicine cauldron must be a product of the Spring and Autumn period..." Lao Hei clicked his tongue in wonder at the cauldron on the rack. "And it should be an article for the royal house's own use in those days - there are markings here..."

"I only want money!" Yu Xiao Ke looked over the things on the rack. Fine things, to be sure, rarely seen anywhere - but to her they were of no use at all!

"You won't take even one of these?" Lao Hei frowned. There was a great deal here - far more than he could ever carry away alone - and now that they were inside the tomb, with no notion of how to get back out, taking too much would only make walking harder; besides, porcelain shattered easily. It was the very picture of biting off more than one could chew. So Lao Hei meant to take only a few things that were easy to carry. That medicine cauldron alone was a priceless antique - properly handled, it could easily fetch over a hundred million at auction.

"If I took them, I'd have no way to sell them off." Yu Xiao Ke shrugged.

"Fine. The one-tenth I promised you before won't be a coin short." Lao Hei mused for a moment and decided not to go back on his word. That Male Thief was no good sort, and Yu Xiao Ke had been of great use along the way; so it cost him nothing to give her a tenth of the take. The key question was this: now that they had entered the ancient tomb, how were they to get out?

Going back the way they had come was plainly unrealistic. Never mind that the floor above had already sealed shut - even if it had not, climbing up would still be next to impossible. The whole passage was a giant "S," its stone walls so smooth you could have used them for a slide; when they had fallen earlier, the walls had offered no sense of obstruction whatsoever. This was a place, in short, where going down was easy and going up was hard, unless one had something like suction cups to climb with. But if the winding route did not pull a body down naturally by gravity, how long would one have to climb to reach the top?

Lao Hei was no fool. He picked up only that bronze medicine cauldron, along with a few bronze vessels for boiling and storing medicine, and stowed them in the pack on his back. He did not touch anything else.

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