The Lost Tomb : The Southern Archives Mysteries

(Extra Story: Spin Off Case) Chapter 1: The Most Despicable Man In The South Sea

Spin-Off Case: The Map In The Dream

This story is about two people and a corpse.

As usual, I won't cut to the chase. I'll start with something minor.

There were thousands of Malay aboriginal tribes scattered in the southern jungles of Perak. These southern jungles covered a wide expanse, including areas around Johor. The vast expanse of primitive rainforests gave birth to several fleeting civilizations.

Among these thousands of tribes, the natives in one tribe had a special tattoo. The extremely complex pattern had lasted for more than two thousand years. Western explorers who did research on tattoos and local customs couldn't deduce the origin of this pattern. It wasn't a symbol of productive activity, a mythological story, or an obscure spell or symbol.

In the seventeenth century, a piece of human skin with this tattoo on it was sold to England and accidentally seen by a priest in the Cardinal's Court. This priest had been a cartographer before he decided to follow God. He was surprised to see the traces of advanced map-drawing skills on this tattoo that had been passed down generation by generation for two thousand years.

That's right. The tattoo pattern was actually a two-thousand-year-old map that showed the entire archipelago around Borneo before the sea level rose.

At the end of the seventeenth century, research on ice ages appeared in Europe. During the third ice age, the water level was much lower than it was now and the shapes of all the islands at that time were different from the current ones. This information was enough to prove that this map was drawn very early.

In the native language of the local people, this tattoo was called "gonka". Gonka was actually a psychedelic drug there. After taking it, the native people would rush into the fire and dance in it until they died.

Gonka was highly addictive and most people would commit suicide after taking it for three consecutive years. It was said that if those who tried to kill themselves were saved in the end, this map would appear in their minds. As a result, there was a saying that this picture came from the underworld.

The gonka basically went extinct eight hundred years ago and was rarely seen in the rainforests. Maybe there were still some in the depths of the rainforests, but no one had confirmed it. There were few people who remembered the process for preparing and consuming it. The question of whether they could see this map in a hallucination had also become a mystery that could never be verified.

What made people very concerned was that there was a strange mark on this human skin map.

The person who drew this map two thousand years ago made a mark at a certain location that was in the depths of the rainforests. What was there?

Since the seventeenth century, a total of five expedition teams had entered the rainforests in southern Perak to find this location. Three expedition teams didn't reach their target destination before the rainy season. The other two teams didn't reappear after entering the rainforests, so the final result was unknown. After that, people called the location "ghost spot", and the expeditions stopped ever since.

At the end of the eighteenth century, the western countries rekindled their interest in the gonka map after gonka was re-discovered in western Perak. The Westerners took the gonka powder and saw the map when they were dying. Moreover, it was said that they even saw some images that had never been passed down in the world.

In order to reach the "ghost spot" on the gonka map and verify whether those images were true, gonka rewards were established.

In the end, the rewards were exchanged for two thousand photos. The rewards were then cancelled and these photos were sealed in the archives.