The Lost Tomb : Sea Of Sands

Chapter 181: Rock Garden

When I was looking at the mountain depression from the hillside during the day, the conditions were very simple, and there wasn't any sign of such a large object. I had even been able to see the humanoid monster on the other side, so the fact that I didn't see this thing made me want to dig my eyes out.

I looked up. This thing must have fallen from the sky; otherwise, it would have been absolutely impossible for it to appear here.

Or, I had run to the wrong place. The mountain was very long and narrow, after all, so did I run to another section?

I looked at the burning tree, and knew that it wasn't the case. The tree was still burning red from the fire, so I could use its light source to compare the area with my memory.

A road that suddenly disappeared... a stone disc that suddenly appeared...

Was there any relationship between the two? Was it this place itself that had an abnormal phenomenon?

I pulled out my Kukri and listened to the noises around me, ensuring that nothing was waiting to ambush me in the grass. Then, I carefully climbed up to the stone plate.

It was half a person high, and much taller than the surrounding grass. I could only make out a rough picture under the moonlight and the light from the distant fire, but I was certain that this stone plate didn't have any patterns on it. It was a very rough, polished thing similar to a millstone, and required at least five people surrounding it in order to describe its size.

I touched it, and found that it was cold. Since its temperature was much lower than that of the surrounding air, I figured it had to be composed of a lot of metal. There was a large amount of earth and sand on the stone plate, which gave off the feeling that it had been dug up from somewhere.

I rolled over and realized what it was.

The area on top of the stone plate had more accumulated soil and sand, and there were countless weeds. If the stone plate had been buried in the soil, I never would have found such a surface. But now, it was just like a big, round flower bed.

After glancing around, I determined that the ground must have suddenly dropped half a person's height, and as a result, the stone plate was raised up.

I noticed something on the edge of the stone plate, and started pulling the grass from its surface until it was revealed. There were an unexpected number of very deep holes on the surface of this disk, all densely packed together. Even if I didn't have this kind of phobia, seeing thousands of holes of different sizes all packed together on the surface of the stone disk still made me break out in goosebumps.

The edges of these holes were all ash gray, as if they had been eaten by something. I could even see some small protrusions on the outer edges of the holes that looked like caterpillar cocoons, or the growths found on a Chinese parasol tree. I had no concept of something of this magnitude, but I felt that there might be as many as a hundred thousand of these things. That kind of densely packed scene occupied my whole vision, and even though I wanted to pick one to focus on, I didn't know which one to pick.

I couldn't keep looking at it, so I immediately jumped down, resisting the strong urge to vomit.

This was a bug dish used to raise bugs called "shidan". They were a very rare, very valuable bug that could be used to treat a special kind of eye disease.

I had only heard of them, but they were also recorded in Chinese herbal medicine books. Some people in Shandong called this bug "shixiazi", but few had ever been caught.

Because the bugs lived in sealed rocks, their reproductive ecology and food structure were completely unknown. Most of the discoveries were made by quarrymen or sculptors who suddenly found that there was a hollow in the stone they were carving, and in that hollow were bugs.