The Lost Tomb : Extras & Special Stories

(Extra Story: 2015 Chinese New Year Special) Chapter 1: Inventory

I strained my back halfway through helping Xiao Hua move things out of the warehouse, so now I was sitting in the empty building.

This was the Xie family's old residence. It was said that each of the nine families had a huge warehouse back in the day, and moving the warehouse was one of the most troublesome things. The style of storehouses was also very different. Some were full of rows of coffins from various dynasties that had to be sealed in order to preserve them. Of course, OCD families like the Xies were extremely neat and organized.

The house was old, and all the surrounding buildings had collapsed and been abandoned. In order to protect this old house, the walls were mostly supported by wood. I was busy worrying about Fatty's trip, so I got distracted and ended up pulling a muscle in my back while moving things.

When we arrived, most of the things had already been loaded and transported away. The house was actually only used as a way station for goods. It was a French villa built in the 1930s and located in Tianjin. The Xie family bought it sometime after the 1980s. Most of the buildings on the street had been bought by the government, and this was the only one that had fallen into disrepair. It was about to be demolished, but the Xie family paid the maintenance cost, and got two certificates .

Practically the whole house was used as a warehouse. The reason why we "besties" had to do such heavy work was because the goods had been moved to an area outside the inner room, which couldn't be accessed unless you belonged to the family. Not even the underlings could get in.

Those of us helping weren't family members, but there weren't many people in the Xie family, so Xiao Hua didn't have much of a choice.

There were some special items in the inner house that had been passed down through the ages, but we could no longer tell what many of them were, so there was some relative danger. Even Xiao Hua wasn't very familiar with the items in there.

Although the items weren't valuable, they could be considered important or special.

The inner room was under the stairs, and blocked by a very strong iron door. When the door was opened, we could see a corridor leading down to the basement, along with a shelf full of things that had been set up beside the stairs to hold the overflow. I finally understood why Xiao Hua basically didn't know what was inside the inner room—everything was wrapped in cloths that were covered in words. The words were very small and in different fonts, and the cloth itself was very dense. If you didn't open it carefully and just passed on by, there was no way to know what was inside.

Most of the cloths were white, but some were yellow and red, which made the interior look inauspicious. But surprisingly enough, there was only a very thin layer of dust inside.

We were faced with two choices. One, regardless of the consequences, we could start moving the items directly. Based on the number of items, we would be here until the early hours of the morning, and I didn't want to stay in this old house that late. Or two, we could take a closer look at the situation. The scene was really spectacular to someone like me who came from a poor family. With the exception of a few dog kennels my grandfather had left behind, I had almost ruined all the other valuable businesses. And as far as I was concerned, a thriving family was "electricity, light, and only a fairytale."

We walked directly into the basement, which had bookshelves running all along the walls. There were almost no shelves in the middle, but there was something strange. Upon seeing it, Xiao Hua paused and stopped us with his hand.

It was also wrapped in white cloth, and was the size of a BMW mini car. It could have been a bunch of things piled up, or some huge object.

"This thing wasn't here the last time I was in here." Xiao Hua said. "There's a problem."