Martial Dao: Peace by Force

Chapter 213: Chapter 159: Two-in-One

The statue’s hands were folded in its lap, its posture serene. It looked as if it were meditating, or perhaps gazing down at something below.

Professor Song’s flashlight beam settled on the statue’s face, illuminating eyes that had been so eroded by wind and rain they were nearly unrecognizable.

He said softly, "This is a True Monarch Divine Statue. It’s at least eighteen hundred years old."

Sun Beixi tilted his head back, his mouth agape. After staring for a long moment, he finally managed, "It’s huge!"

Just then...

"BUZZ!"

A vibrating sound shattered the silence of the mountain forest, exceptionally jarring.

Everyone immediately looked toward Sun Beixi.

Sun Beixi froze, then fumbled in his pocket. "I swear I turned it off..."

He pulled it out and saw it was the black communicator.

The moment he saw the new message notification, his expression changed. He immediately looked to Wan Ze.

Wan Ze didn’t speak, just gave him a pointed look.

Sun Beixi pulled up the message.

A line of encrypted text popped up on the screen—a string of jumbled symbols, completely unintelligible.

"Damn it!" Sun Beixi felt his scalp tingle. "They’re too cautious... What do we do now?"

Li Weiran suddenly spoke up, his voice a bit hesitant. "Um... that’s a type of encryption."

All eyes turned to him.

Sun Beixi was stunned. "You know about it?"

Li Weiran adjusted his glasses and gave a slightly embarrassed smile. "I enjoy studying cryptography in my spare time. It helps me relax my mind."

Relax?

Your mind?

It was the first time Sun Beixi had ever heard of such a niche hobby for "relaxation." He glanced at Li Weiran’s refined face, then back at the string of gibberish on the screen, and suddenly felt like he didn’t quite belong in this world.

"Can you crack it?" Wan Ze asked.

"It shouldn’t be too difficult." Li Weiran leaned over for a look. "This is a variant of the Caesar cipher, combined with a simple rail fence cipher. The logic is to first shift the letters by three places, then rearrange them according to a specific pattern..."

He explained a lot more, and everyone understood except for Sun Beixi.

Sun Beixi just stood there, a look of complete confusion on his face.

Li Weiran quickly cracked the code and translated the one-line message: "Report. Anything unusual?"

Wan Ze took the communicator. Now that he understood the mechanism, he knew what to do. His fingers flew as he typed a reply: "All normal."

But then he added another message: "Made a special discovery, currently investigating. Suspect another party is also after the target. Organization unknown, very covert. Identifying marks are as follows..."

Message sent.

A few seconds later, a reply came: "Await further instructions. But you must retrieve the item as soon as possible."

"Understood."

Wan Ze pressed send, but instead of returning the communicator to Sun Beixi, he slipped it into his own pocket.

He was deliberately trying to draw out the Tail Society. He didn’t know if he could successfully divert their attention, but at the very least, it would buy him some time.

He lifted his head and looked at the stone statue.

"Where’s the entrance?" Sun Beixi leaned in and asked in a low voice.

Wan Ze stared at the statue, saying nothing.

It was a twenty-meter-high, sheer, vertical cliff face. An ordinary person would have no way of climbing it.

Li Weiran and Chen Chong had already started shrugging off their backpacks to get their climbing gear. For them, this was standard procedure.

But in the next second...

Wan Ze moved.

He took a step, tapped his toe against the cliff face, and his entire body launched into the air.

A second step, another tap, and he rose again!

In the dim light, his figure was like a night bird skimming up the rock face. In just a few bounds, he had already leaped to the top, twenty meters high.

"CLATTER CLATTER CLATTER!"

The sharp clattering was the sound of the climbing tools falling from Li Weiran’s hands.

The four of them stood there dumbfounded, heads tilted back and mouths agape.

Sun Beixi’s eyes were as wide as saucers.

Professor Song craned his neck, staring at the figure standing steadily beside the statue. A strange thought suddenly occurred to him. ’If I were a few decades younger and had that kind of skill, why would I have bothered with science? I’d have spent my days scaling mountains and searching for Imperial Mausoleums.’

A moment later, Wan Ze’s figure vanished beside the statue.

After a little while, he peeked over the edge. His voice drifted down from above, "I found the entrance... I’ll pull you guys up."

One by one.

Wan Ze lowered a thick rope—it was the climbing rope from Li Weiran’s backpack. After getting up, he had found an anchor point and secured it.

Li Weiran and Chen Chong went first, followed by Professor Song, and finally, Sun Beixi.

The five of them stood on a stone platform beside the statue, facing a pitch-black entrance.

The entrance was located within the statue’s slightly open mouth.

A flashlight beam cut through the darkness, revealing a tunnel that sloped downward.

Li Weiran was about to step inside when he suddenly stopped.

"Professor, look—"

The beam of his flashlight landed on the ground beside the tunnel’s entrance.

There were several rectangular holes there, arranged irregularly. Their edges were weathered, but they were clearly man-made.

’Are these... tomb robbers’ tunnels?!’

The color drained from Sun Beixi’s face. He rushed over, crouched down, and shone his flashlight into one of the holes.

It was bottomless.

But he could see the marks of ancient tools left on the tunnel walls.

"God damn it!!"

He completely lost it right then and there.

All this hard work, all these heart-pounding days, and for what... only to find someone had beaten them to it?

And there wasn’t just one fucking hole?

So it turned out he wasn’t even the second one here! He was the third, fourth, maybe even fifth!

Professor Song’s face was grim. He stared at the robbers’ tunnels for a few seconds before saying in a heavy voice, "Let’s go inside and take a look."

The tunnel was very deep.

The deeper they went, the more humid the air became, carrying the stale stench of mildew.

The flashlight beams illuminated the stone walls on either side, where faint, blurry carvings were barely visible. They had been damaged beyond all recognition.

Finally, the tunnel opened up at its end.

It was a stone grotto.

The flashlight beams swept across a scene of utter chaos.

Pottery shards littered the ground, stone tables were overturned, and rotted wood was scattered about.

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