So, I Transmigrated Into The Heavenly Realm

49. Finding a Temple in a Field

49

On the farm where the special architectural stone had been found, in the field where they'd found the human bone, the archaeologists were still digging.

The digging site had expanded considerably since then. Both the stone and the human bone had now been fully excavated. Gently digging with specialist trowels, dusting them off with brushes before levering out the bone had uncovered that it was in fact, not the only bone here.

Right now they were looking at an entire human skeleton laid out perfectly on the white cotton cover laid over a trestle table.

Many of the bones were broken but it would take some time to find out whether that was because of the sheer amount of time it had spent in the ground being disturbed by ploughing, animals or a potential cause of death. Either way the skeleton had laid under a large amount of debris. Loose rock and soil that had slid down the mountain at some point.

Maybe they had died in a landslide. Maybe they had died before the landslide and the cascading rock and gravel had crushed their body with its weight. It would take weeks if not months of studying to try and piece together what had happened.

The farmer whose land they were on, had quickly helped them to determine that this was not a death that had occurred in living memory. The last landslide had been at least two hundred years ago though there were tales of a much larger one having happened a very long time ago.

Tying it down to a specific period of time was going to be hard if the bones weren't associated with carved rock it lay not too far away from.

When the archaeologists had entered into the valley, there had been very noticeable boulders scattered all over it. Some, the size of a house and impossible to move without advanced machinery or hundreds of people. The rockfall was one of the reasons that it was so hard to farm anything up here.

You could barely get a spade into the ground for the rocks that lay just beneath the surface of the soil. Getting any amount of arable land back from it was back breaking work and took years to reclaim an area of land where there was space to expect a sufficient harvest from. Mountain soil, so sparse in nutrients also needed to be fertilised if you were wanting to get anything to grow in it and that took even more time and effort to do.

In short, it was amazing that there was anyone still farming here at all.

One of the students was kneeling in the fine gravel that had lain under the skeleton and was gently removing it with a small trowel to see if they could find out just how deep the landslide had been and whether there was any sign that it had been more than one event. Right now the team was only able to identify one continuous layer of this very fine gravel. The sort of stuff that people would think of putting in a fish tank but not as colourful.

With one last push on the soil sample probe, the ground gave way beneath them.

It syphoned away, down into the void below, like the sand in an hourglass pulling the unexpected archaeologist with it. They screamed, taken aback by the sudden movement and flailed their hands trying to find some sort of safe purchase or to grasp the hands of the others that were outstretched towards them. Soil was still falling and no-one trusted that the hole wouldn't widen even further pulling everyone beneath the surface.

Fingers slipped past each other, no-one able to grasp their colleague strongly enough to arrest their fall. Shock bloomed on everyone's faces as the archaeology student disappeared beneath the shifting stones.

All they could do right now was hope that they were alright down there.

That the fall wasn't as deep as they feared peering down into the darkness.