The Lost Tomb : Tibetan Sea Flower

Chapter 47: Where the Problem Lies

The Zhang children looked at the hazy statue and then looked at each other, all muttering a little.

The patriarch's lecture said: If everything seems strange, what you think is strange actually isn't so.

The really strange thing must be that there are things that differ from the common phenomena, whether you can understand them or not.

For example, if you wake up and head in to work, only to find that the world is without gravity, it's not really strange because you would understand that you were either dreaming or floating in space. But if you find that gravity only works on you in this world, then it would be strange.

But the discovery of such contradictions was precisely the turning point for many things, and if this was a plot in a novel, such contradictions would often expose a lot of hidden things.

Among the people I know, Fatty is someone who is especially good at finding this contradiction because he has the advantage of doubting the rationality of everything. To put it bluntly, when he encounters anything he doesn't understand, he feels that someone is messing with him: if it's not a person, it's a ghost.

The advantage of thinking this way was that you always had an object to beat. People normally are unable to face invisible fears, but once they know that someone is playing with them, anger gives them a lot of extra strength.

Among these people who are good at finding contradictions, Zhang Haike is a person very similar to Fatty. These kinds of people are actually very intelligent and have their own advantages, but only Zhang Haike has the so-called "breakthrough" ability.

Most of the time, it's said that if someone is scheming against you, it's usually better to act before all the indicators are buried, because otherwise, everything is put in motion and it's especially difficult to turn the tables.

In other words, if you've entered a well-laid trap and can't escape, destroying the trap requires considerable wisdom and imagination.

The most important thing is to observe the trap's weakness and then imagine how to circumvent it.

So when Zhang Haike saw the statue right in the middle of the tomb, he knew it must be the key.

Although everything in the tomb was hung upside down, this was the one normal item, which meant that it could provide at least two clues. First, assuming that the layout of the tomb was special and had a symbolic meaning, they could use this thing to deduce what that meaning was. Second, if this tomb was designed with any mechanisms, then this upright thing had to be a very important part of it.

Unless the creator of this tomb wanted to play with some ultra-modern designs, these two points couldn't be refuted.

Acting individually, they all dispersed and slowly approached the thing. As they neared it, they saw that hidden in the darkness was a bronze horse.

The bronze horse was little more than half a person tall, with its entire body blackened and covered with protruding nails, as if it had a skin disease. That kind of black was different from ordinary black, in that it was a bit dim and dappled. To put it bluntly, it wasn't pure black, but many different shades of black combined. Because these black colors were very similar, it was hard to distinguish them, but you could see the irregularities at a glance.

It wasn't clear what material it was made of, but Zhang Haike thought it might be a kind of lacquerware that had become like this after it had corroded.

This kind of lacquerware was probably hollow inside, woven with dried rattan fibers and then glued together and painted over.

In terms of symbolism, he didn't think a horse standing upside down on the ceiling of a house that was turned upside down had any significance. Even if the people around him thought that the setting itself was related to feng shui, his heart wasn't particularly convinced. If this was part of a certain mechanism, however, then the hollow design would reveal a lot.