Chapter 1390 — The Robbery, Part One: "Don't know? What do you mean? Why not just open them both and see?" Elder Yu frowned and asked.

"Elder Yu... once this Death Door and Life Door are opened, they're no different in themselves, but where they lead is another matter. One leads out of the tomb; the other leads to the place where the coffins are kept. One is life, one is death. Step through the wrong one and you're not coming back." Old Hei said with a rueful smile.

"Is that so?" Elder Yu started. "Then what are you waiting for? Why haven't you cracked it yet?"

"Well... cracking it takes some thinking too..." Old Hei turned, a touch awkwardly, to Yu Xiaoke and Wei Zhao. "Male Thief, Heroine Yan, have you either of you a bright idea? What I've just told you is only my own account - it isn't certain that these really are the Life Door and the Death Door, is it?"

"These should be the Life Door and the Death Door." Yu Xiaoke looked at the two doors before her, weighed the matter a moment, and said: "We have to work out which of the two is the Life Door and which is the Death Door."

"But how? They look more or less the same, the pair of them." Old Hei nodded and asked.

"My guess is that the key secret lies in the two jigsaws set above these doors. The two jigsaws are two pictures, and different pictures stand for life or death." Yu Xiaoke ventured.

"Meaning that once we've put the jigsaws together, we'll know which door is the Life Door and which is the Death Door?" Old Hei asked.

"In theory, yes. But I think the mechanism that opens both doors is those same two jigsaws. I can't guarantee that assembling them right there won't set off some danger, or that the jigsaws follow any pattern at all." Yu Xiaoke said: "If the pictures have to be put together in a certain order, then breaking that order rashly could bring very serious consequences. It might stir up some unforeseen disaster, or wreck the mechanism for good!"

"That serious!" Old Hei did not altogether take to what Yu Xiaoke said, but in this ancient tomb anything might happen and nothing went by the book - and that left his heart hammering.

"Perhaps. It's only a guess," Yu Xiaoke said.

"So what do we do now?" Old Hei stared at the two stone doors ahead, frowned, and said.

"First find a way to copy these two pictures down, then put them together on paper and decide which door is the Life Door and which is the Death Door. We can think of something else after that." Yu Xiaoke said after a moment's thought.

"Fair enough - let's do it that way." Old Hei too thought Yu Xiaoke's plan the steadier one: copy the two pictures onto paper first, make out what they meant, and telling Life Door from Death Door would be the far easier part.

Elder Yu understood nothing of this and offered no opinion. But having heard Yu Xiaoke, and learned how perilous the mechanism was, he too shut his mouth. A respectable Earth Grade expert, all but invincible out in the world, yet in this ancient tomb he did not dare stir, hardly dared draw a breath, and had taken wound upon wound. It left him sour with frustration - and no longer daring to press them recklessly.

Wei Zhao troubled himself not at all with Yu Xiaoke and Old Hei. He simply sat himself down cross-legged - not to cultivate this time, but pulled out Zhang Liju's medical practice notes and started leafing through them.

Wei Zhao was not sure whether, once they were out, he could get the better of Elder Yu; nor was he sure Elder Yu would have the patience to let him copy the medical practice notes. The book ran to several hundred pages - copying it would not be done in a trice, and even photocopying would take time. With a man as hot-tempered as Elder Yu, Wei Zhao had to keep his wits about him and prepare ahead of time! He had already made up his mind to risk his life - but if he could find a clue to the Fire Spirit Holy Fruit in the book first, what would be the point of risking it?

Seeing Wei Zhao actually sitting there leafing through Zhang Liju's medical practice notes, Elder Yu froze for a moment. He did not believe Wei Zhao had the wit to make sense of such a book, yet he had nothing to say about it either. He only snorted, sat himself down, and began tending his wounds.

Zhang Liju's medical practice notes in Wei Zhao's hands were much like the old man's own. They recorded chiefly the processes and methods by which he had practiced medicine and saved lives - prescriptions, the refining of drugs, the gathering of herbs, and the like - along with a number of entries concerning the Fuxi Nine Needles.

For the moment, of course, Wei Zhao had no mind for any of that. Curious as the Fuxi Nine Needles made him, he meant first to hunt for word of the Fire Spirit Holy Fruit.

The notes had no table of contents, only dates and numbering, so Wei Zhao could not look anything up; he could only turn the pages one after another. His eyesight was extraordinary - by the faint glow of Yu Xiaoke and Old Hei's torches he could read the writing on the page perfectly clearly.

Qiu Lingshan and Chen Yutian could not be of help, so the two of them simply sat down beside Wei Zhao and cultivated. The Mighty General, for its part, lay quietly off to one side, as though none of it concerned it in the least.

Time slipped away, second by second. The tomb lay in perfect silence, broken only by the occasional puzzled cry or cheer from Yu Xiaoke and Old Hei. Tomb raiders the two might be, with years of experience behind them - but they were no hands at this sort of jigsaw!

The two of them had already copied the jigsaw pictures from the stone doors, piece by piece, onto slips of paper they carried with them, and cut them into fragments of matching size, which they laid out on the ground, ready to fit them back together.

Songshan City, however, was not nearly so quiet.

A Land Rover without license plates pulled up, quietly, at the door of a bank. A careful eye might have noticed touch-up paint on the front and the rear of the vehicle - and had Feng Xiaoxiao still been alive, she would have seen that the repair marks on this Land Rover were identical to the ones on her own.

Before long the Land Rover's door opened silently, and out stepped a man in black with a hood over his head. His build was well-proportioned, and his figure was oddly familiar. The moment he was out of the car, without a word he strode straight into the bank.

"Ah!" The hooded man in black had burst into the bank without warning, and the customers inside jumped and cried out in alarm.

But the hooded man in black appeared not to hear a thing. He paid no heed whatsoever to their cries, walked straight up to the bank's service counter, and swung his fist hard against the glass of the teller window!

With a thunderous bang, the thickened glass of the bank window shattered as though it were nothing at all. The hooded man in black vaulted over with a single leap and landed inside the counter.

A piercing alarm blared to life, but the robber was deaf to it - he gave no sign of having heard a thing.

"Ah -" The bank clerks who had been serving customers behind the counter cried out as well!

They had all watched videos of bank robberies, and had studied what to do in that event - but a hold-up carried out like the hooded man in black's was a first for every one of them!

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