The Lost Tomb : The Southern Archives Mysteries

Chapter 9: Case Closed

The lieutenant sat on the side of the ship, watching the reef explode and the other ships sink into the sea one by one. He was sitting ramrod straight as he clung to the airtight jar.

Since they were heading home, all of the soldiers were very happy, and no one had noticed that the seated lieutenant had actually died.

Everyone was destined to meet someone, and their lives would change because of it. After completing his mission, no one knew what the lieutenant had been thinking as he sat there dying.

Zhang Haiyan pushed the rubble away and climbed onto the reef, finding that the ships around him had already been sunk. There were only a few hundred laborers left on the reef, and they were all huddled together like penguins.

He coughed violently, and pulled the unconscious Zhang Haixia up. He couldn't hear a thing at all, and knew there was blood trickling out of his ears and nose. He felt as if his chest had been hit by a pile driver more than a dozen times, and thought that his internal organs had probably become something like mushy watermelon. Despite all this, he still desperately shouted Zhang Haixia's name several times.

His hands suddenly started to feel unbearably itchy, and he pulled his clothes up to find that his body was covered in a layer of blood blisters.

But they weren't burns from the explosion. He turned to look at the other laborers and saw that they had also discovered they had blood blisters on their bodies, and were starting to scratch them.

Zhang Haiyan felt cold all over. He knew this was the result of the disease infecting their bodies after the explosion.

On such a small reef, the next few months would be a real hell on earth without any boats or food. To him, plague and hunger always seemed to follow him wherever he went. [1]

Even though the Flower Reef case was closed, there were still some unsolved mysteries. But even to this day, Zhang Haiyan never revealed the details.

Six months later, Chen Libiao's family took a fishing boat out to look for them. They found Zhang Haiyan and Zhang Haixia on the reef, but no one else was with them. They took the two back to Malacca.

No one knew where the other people on the reef had gone, except for those who read the confidential telegram from the Southern Archives.

In the end, the Flower Reef case was marked as unresolved. The so-called "unresolved case" meant that there was a result, but they couldn't publish it.

A single piece of information entered the archive room in the basement of the Southern Archives, while all the other files were destroyed.

The Southern Archives' Southern Xinjian branch had taken over the investigation as to why a Guixi warlord wanted to look for a plague ship in the South Sea and obtain the source of the wudou disease that was inside. Whether they found the answer or not, Zhang Haiyan would never know.

Three years later. The Southern Archives.

It was dusk, and Zhang Haixia was sitting on a wicker chair as Zhang Haiyan silently washed his feet. Zhang Haixia looked towards the sea, and saw a bunch of children running up and down the beach.

"Just let me lie on the bed. Why bother moving me around every day?" He was still a little embarrassed to see Zhang Haiyan washing his feet with so much care.

"A person who is paralyzed will develop bed sores if they don't turn their body."

"I don't feel any pain." Zhang Haixia said.

"Whether you feel pain or not, the bedsores are still there." Zhang Haiyan took the water that had been used to wash feet and poured it downstairs.