Records of the Cattle and Horses of Chang'an

Chapter 622 Furnace explosion?

There was no pause this time. After a turn of about forty-five degrees, there was another narrow and dark passage.

Jiang Shangxian felt like a darkly crawling American cockroach, anxious but having to keep moving forward.

She had been silently calculating the angle of her crawling. Although it was a bit difficult, she was able to determine that both sections of the passage were heading upward, but in completely opposite directions.

This time they didn't crawl for too long, the distance was only half of the previous one, and they were out of the passage.

"Could this be a tunnel?" Zhao Shan was panting with exhaustion, like a husky that was forced to run 20 kilometers for a walk in the middle of summer.

Jiang Shangxian looked at the scene in front of him with a bit of confusion: "Why is there another fork in the road?"

I saw a small stone chamber in front of me. It was less than 20 square meters but five meters high. The top slanted down to a dark corridor. On the same side of the corridor, only two meters away, there was a low door less than two meters high, which seemed to be a passage.

Unlike the tomb chamber outside which was obviously designed to confuse tomb robbers, there were no murals on the stone walls here. It was so plain that it did not look like the mausoleum of the highest leader of a dynasty.

She murmured, "Which way?"

This feels like a big IP adaptation that book fans are looking forward to, with a lavish cast and staggering investment, but in the end it's a huge mess that has to be forced upon fans by all the owners.

Cui Bianxu was a man of action. After a brief thought, he said, "Connect all the ropes."

Now that he was here, he wanted to check both roads. The compass was no longer useful at this point.

The guards naturally refused to let him go alone, but unfortunately Cui Bianxu was firm in his attitude. Since Jiang Shangxian was here, he had to personally eliminate all potential dangers.

Jiang Shangxian tied the rope around his waist with a stern face, tied a tight knot, and said worriedly: "If anything goes wrong, shake the rope."

"Don't worry, you can't hurt me."

Cui Bianxu touched her dusty crown and signaled to Li Shengruo that if something was wrong, he should take her out immediately and find a way out.

Li Sheng, who received the signal, pursed his lips and walked behind Jiang Shangxian. The other guards each held the other end of the long rope vigilantly.

This look of being faced with a great enemy did not last long. Not long after Cui Bianxu left, he came back. His face was calm and his steps were unhurried. It was obvious that there was nothing special going on.

"How is it? Is there anything inside?" Jiang Shangxian went forward.

Cui Bianxu shook his head, then nodded hesitantly, "There's nothing inside, but the color of the walls is a bit strange."

"What color is it?" Hearing the strange color of the walls inside, Jiang Shangxian instantly thought of the walls of the Layao Temple.

If the stones outside hadn't been painted, she would have definitely crawled over the wall to see if there was any paint on it.

Cui Bianxu recalled what he had just seen and stretched out his right hand to show her. His index and ring fingers were stained with a layer of black ash. "It looks like it's been burned by a fierce fire."

Burned by fire?

Knowing there was no danger inside, Xiao Jiang couldn't stand any longer. He touched his nostrils to make sure he wasn't bleeding, then he pulled the male Gu off Qiqige's head and put it on his own head. Without waiting for her to object, he took her arm affectionately and said, "Come on, let's go take a look!"

"What are you doing? What are you doing! Hey, hey, hey, stop it!"

Qi Qi Ge also wanted to go and take a look, but what was going on with Jiang Shangxian?

How could the action of catching one's own Gu God be so natural and skillful?

Whose Gu God is this?!

The male Gu, who had finished his work and filled his stomach, was dozing off at this time. When Jiang Shangxian forcibly moved his hand, he just shivered twice and closed his eyes again.

There is nothing special about this path. Its length is about the same as the crawling secret passage that turns back, about a hundred meters, and its height and width are basically the same. It is just right for one person to walk, but it would be too crowded for two people to walk side by side.

I didn't feel any slope while walking, which means that this section of the passage is roughly parallel.

As we went deeper, the sound of flowing water that had gradually disappeared reappeared, until we passed a stone door and the space suddenly became larger.

To say it is big is actually just a relative passage. The tomb wall is indeed as Cui Bianxu said, with large patches of black mottled marks. If there were not any remains, the stench of corpses and a large amount of powder, Jiang Shangxian might have thought that someone had burned a corpse here or something.

If the previous suspected tomb was a physical danger, then this place was full of weirdness and was puzzling.

"There's a hole here!" Zhao Shan, who followed in, found a hole in the wall after taking a few steps.

Qiqige also made a discovery: "There's one here too!"

"Why is this hole..." Jiang Shangxian, who was studying why the wall looked like it had been burned, turned around and looked at everyone. He felt that the hole seemed familiar.

Cui Bianxu took over the conversation: "It looks like the small hole in the secret passage just now."

This is what Li Sheng called the "fork in the road". It is impossible for people to pass through. There is no danger in putting your hand in, but it is pitch black inside and you can't tell what it is used for.

Jiang Shangxian looked left and right, his mind about to explode, but he couldn't figure it out. He could only temporarily record this as a suspicious point: "The two holes seem to be facing each other, which means they are used together."

"This tomb chamber is square, which must have been difficult to carve. However, there are no traces on the stone wall, so I don't know what it was used for." If there were any written records or something, Cui Bianxu could have made a judgment based on clues, but with just a bare tomb chamber like this, who knows what Zhao Tuo used it for?

Zhao Shan, the clever fellow, had a brilliant idea: "The Qin people love to make elixirs and ask for medicine. Maybe this place is where Zhao Tuo made elixirs, and he blew up the furnace, leaving this place in such a smoked state."

"If so, where is the alchemy furnace?" Jiang Shangxian immediately retorted.

Let’s not talk about how the bulky, heavy and huge furnace was transported in. Suppose the furnace exploded while refining the elixir here after it was transported in, but what about the fragments?

Could it be that Zhao Tuo liked to familiarize himself with the environment and make elixirs in his own grave before he died?

He couldn't possibly invite a Taoist priest to his tomb to make elixirs, right?

Zhao Shan, however, felt that his thinking was correct. "Why not? He's already killed so many people to be buried with him, so what's the harm in having a few more Taoists? As for the debris, we can just clean it up. How much trouble can it take?"

The two people have different ways of thinking. Faced with heavy labor, Jiang Shangxian has not yet fully integrated into the feudal privileged class, and he is more concerned about how troublesome it will be for him to do it.

Zhao Shan, on the other hand, was the complete opposite. He was used to being served and wouldn't bother himself with things that didn't require his involvement. If the furnace exploded, he would just let it explode and have someone clean it up.

Cui Bianxu reached out and stopped Jiang Shangxian, who was leaning against the wall and trying to pull something down. "It couldn't be a furnace explosion. If a furnace blew up in such a small space, there would definitely be traces left on the stone wall. But there are none now, only black marks from the burn."