Chapter 142: Strange Occurrences (1)

I woke up to the swaying of the car. As soon as I opened my eyes, He Yu’s large face was right in front of me, nearly scaring the soul out of my body. He gave me a smirk. “You’re awake, you’re awake, Master Si. You were burning up with such a high fever, yet he insisted on taking you to such a dangerous place. It’s really not right.”

Immediately after, I heard a familiar voice faintly coming from the passenger seat. “Even his classmates have met with misfortune. I didn’t feel safe leaving him at school alone, but I can’t stop the progress of the project on my end either. I have no choice but to take him along for now. Ask him if he’s thirsty; I have water here.”

I reached out and felt around, realizing I was in the back row of a moving van. He Yu, perhaps afraid I would accidentally roll off if left to sleep on my own, was also sitting in the back, using his thigh as a pillow for my head while holding an ice towel to my forehead.

Lu A’yao was sitting in the seat in front of my head. Hearing the voices, he looked back at me. I gave him a dazed look, then looked up at He Yu, completely confused about the situation.

“Stop looking. You were unconscious with a fever. We gave you some fever reducers three hours ago. How are you feeling? Any better? Are you thirsty? Do you want some water?” He Yu pulled me back and made me lie down properly.

I cleared my throat. “Where is this? Why am I here? And why are you here? What’s going on?”

He Yu sighed helplessly and turned his gaze toward the passenger seat. “As for what’s going on, you’d better ask your Fourth Brother. After all, I was suddenly hijacked by them halfway through. Now I have no choice but to follow them!”

“Fourth Brother?!” Hearing that keyword, my voice cracked with excitement. I quickly turned my head to look at the front row.

Fourth Brother also turned around from the passenger seat to look at me, giving me a rare smile and a greeting. He gestured for me to lie down. “You have a fever. If you get up too fast, you might get motion sickness. Lie down and rest; we still have a long journey ahead of us.”

I didn’t quite know how to describe my feelings at that moment. My heart was leaping with joy. I suddenly felt as if I had caught a lifeline, as if the heavy burden I had been carrying these past few days had vanished in an instant. The mysteries that had troubled me for so long finally had a breakthrough point for release.

I immediately felt relaxed, and the joy on my face was impossible to hide. He Yu scolded me, “Hey, can you stop moving, my young master? After all this time, it’s like this towel was never even applied. I just changed it for you, and I’ll have to do it again in a bit. All you know how to do is grin like an idiot.”

Aside from my head still being a bit dizzy, I felt like I was mostly fine. It took me a moment to react before I asked, “Wait, Lu A’yao, I remember we just came out of the old site of Xinchang Bank, right? Fourth Brother, are we on the highway now? What exactly is going on?”

Lu A’yao didn’t say anything. Fourth Brother sat in the front and slowly pulled a string of items from his pocket. I froze the moment I saw it. What Fourth Brother was holding was clearly the bracelet I had sold in Yunnan just a few days ago! How did this thing end up in Fourth Brother’s hands?

“Did you think the things you did in Yunnan could really stay hidden?” Fourth Brother turned around and tossed the bracelet to me. “Good lad, you’ve really grown up and gotten capable. When my subordinate told me you were impersonating me to sell things in the group, I thought I had misheard. I didn’t expect you to actually do it.”

I caught the bracelet, unable to say a word for a long time. This outcome was simply too shocking.

Fourth Brother said, “After you came out of that tomb, my men have been following you. At the same time, I discovered that you were being watched by people other than me. Their surveillance methods are quite sophisticated; I haven’t managed to uncover their true identities yet.

“I knew Qiao Sangui had blocked your channels for selling goods, but I couldn’t rush over right away. I figured you might try to sell something to make some money, but damn it, I didn’t expect the first thing you’d think of was to impersonate me online.

“My man told me the second after you sent that message. I immediately spent five thousand to buy this bracelet from you. You probably thought I was some nouveau riche with more money than brains at the time, didn’t you?”

I nodded silently in my heart as I put the bracelet back on my wrist. I was shocked by how deep Chen Si’s calculations had become over the years. To think the three of us were even gloating at the time, saying we’d struck it rich and were lucky to have met a sucker with too much money, never imagining that this was just Fourth Brother’s way of sending me money for relief.

Fourth Brother went on to talk about many other things. This time, he didn’t intentionally avoid certain topics. Much of what he said was news to me. It was only then that I realized the things I had investigated before were merely old news, or even just an insignificant tip of the iceberg.

The story began after they left Shennongjia. After Chen Si said goodbye to me, he took all the photos he had taken of the ruins beneath Shennongjia to the Institute of Archaeology. Several top experts at the institute spent seven full days and nights studying them, finally finding a trace of evidence regarding the origin of the ruins beneath Shennongjia.

The conclusion was that the ruins beneath Shennongjia likely originated from a mysterious ancient kingdom of the Xia Dynasty. However, this ancient kingdom has no historical records in the existing official histories that have been excavated; it only exists in fragments within some unofficial records left by ethnic minorities in the western Hunan region.

Through these fragments from various ethnic minority records, Wu Yili was the first to reconstruct this religious state called “Ne.”

People of the Xia Dynasty and even earlier times mostly worshipped primitive gods. To put it more simply, their worship of nature reached an extreme at a certain point, and many ethnic groups continue this to this day. For example, the Yi people believe in the gods of land, wind, water, and mountains, while the Mongols believe in the Firmament, which evolved into the image of Tengri.

However, the people of the Ancient Ne Kingdom that Wu Yili investigated clearly deviated from this system. They worshipped something called the “Lotus Bodhisattva,” and the descriptions of this in the unofficial records were very strange.

Translated, it means the “Lotus Bodhisattva” is a wild deity who controls life and death. It is important to note here that the term is not “presides over,” but “controls.” Minority languages are not like English; they are precise in their descriptions. Fourth Brother said the linguist who translated for them indeed used the word “control” specifically.

These two words caused Wu Yili and the Bald Professor quite a headache for a while. What exactly did it mean to control life and death?

There are no records regarding the actual location of the Ancient Ne Kingdom, but they appear in the local chronicles of several different places. The commonality is that there are only a few brief mentions, yet these locations are vast distances apart, and the chronicles are not even from the same ethnic groups.

It was as if the people of the Ancient Ne Kingdom would suddenly appear in one location and then just as suddenly vanish. After some time, they would abruptly reappear thousands of miles away. Without exception, they were always very clear about their identity as people of the Ancient Ne Kingdom, so they never made any effort to integrate into other populations.

In addition to this, Fourth Brother shared a bizarre little story with me from those far-fetched local chronicles.

The story, recorded in one of the chronicles, tells of a young Yi man who went into the mountains to gather herbs. He went almost every day and was very familiar with the deep mountain terrain. However, on this trip, he discovered a strange cave he had never seen before. He was certain the cave had been newly excavated. Curious as to why anyone would dig a hole in a place infested with venomous snakes, he went inside to investigate.

Inside, he found a corpse. The body had already turned white and begun to rot, having been dead for two or three days. There were two massive puncture wounds on the ankle, likely from a venomous snake bite. In that era, with no emergency services or hospitals, being killed by snakes or wild beasts in the mountains was a common occurrence.

The young man immediately backed out. Not wanting to disturb the body, he covered it with leaves, bowed a few times, and left. But something strange happened three days after he saw that corpse.

A stranger suddenly arrived in the village, looking for a place to stay.