Todd, who had just escaped death, threw a piece of burning wood into the secret passage. He then used the iron ring to open the underground door. After confirming that there was enough oxygen in the cellar, he stepped onto the wooden steps and went down to the bottom.

The boy lit the torches soaked in oilcloth on the wall and first looked around.

The cellar wasn't large, only about five meters square. The four stone walls were plastered with mortar and simply reinforced with wood, and there were primitive ventilation ducts installed on the ceiling. To excavate such a large space and arrange it so meticulously in such hard limestone underground clearly required considerable effort from whoever dug it.

But what Todd found in the cellar disappointed him.

Cabbage, carrots, lettuce, potatoes, garlic, and a bag of wheat flour.

After searching through the vegetables and finding nothing, he turned his attention to the remaining bag of wheat flour.

Such a large-scale project couldn't have been just for storing a bunch of vegetables; otherwise, they wouldn't have been killed after being discovered.

With difficulty, Todd untied the bag and reached inside, feeling a hard object. He grabbed the edges and tried to pull it up several times, but the object buried in the wheat flour didn't budge.

This thing is really heavy.

He laid the bag down and scooped out the wheat flour by hand. The contents were finally revealed: a small wooden box, forty centimeters long and twenty centimeters wide. Wiping away the remaining wheat flour, a tiny keyhole appeared before the boy's eyes.

Looking at Todd, who was staring blankly at the keyhole, he sat cross-legged in place for a while, thinking about it, and suddenly thought of a possibility.

Climb back up the wooden steps to the ground floor of the hut.

Todd gritted his teeth and looked at the two corpses on the ground.

The key to the wooden box is most likely on them.

He had done things like touching or even dissecting corpses in his previous life, but those were all purely academic research. Now, he was going to reach out to the humans he had indirectly killed, and deep down, he still felt some resistance.

After a period of internal struggle, Todd's curiosity ultimately prevailed.

Stretching his arms as far as possible and tilting his head back, the boy searched the victim's body for a long time before finally finding a key with an iron ring on the hunchbacked man's waist.

Back in the cellar, by the light of the torch, they turned the keys over one by one until they finally found one that was about the same size as the keyhole.

Todd carefully inserted the key into the lock, turned it clockwise, and heard a soft click from inside the lock—the lock was open.

Looking inside, he finally understood why the wooden box was so heavy.

Inside, there were not only sandbags for cushioning, but also a cylindrical black box made of lead. The box was divided into two parts, which were tightly sealed together. No keyholes could be seen. Only sixteen copper six-sided rollers were installed on the front. Each side of the roller had a letter, and the sixteen rollers were all different.

"c, r, h, d, are these English letters? There are English letters in this world?... Look at this arrangement... Is it a word puzzle?"

In his previous life, Todd had seen a similar object in a museum. Each wheel had a letter on each side, and only by rolling it to the correct position to form a password could it be opened.

This letter lock may seem extremely complicated to the average person, but it actually follows a pattern.

For example, E, T, I, O, A, and N are the most commonly used letters and appear most frequently; the combination of syllables and the composition of vowels and consonants are also traceable.

However, there is a prerequisite: the answer to unlocking the lock cannot be a meaningless combination of letters.

In his previous life, the soul known as Xia Shang was often so engrossed in academic research that he lost track of time. This trait was fully manifested in Todd.

Before he knew it, the stone walls on all four sides were covered with combinations of letters written in charcoal. The boy had also basically confirmed several characteristics of the answer: First, the answer was a sentence, or possibly a combination of words; second, judging from the letters and their arrangement, the text of the answer belonged to Latin.

“casc…no, nascen…sixteen letters, this arrangement looks so familiar…” Todd’s mind popped into a sentence: “‘Nascentes_morimur’…‘Live toward death’, a Latin proverb, but what does it mean to mark this sentence here?”

After adjusting the roller to the correct position, the upper part of the solid lead column shifted a few millimeters, creating a thin crack.

He used both hands to move the upper part aside, and a shiny copper pipe, ten centimeters long and as thick as a thumb, appeared in front of the boy.

Having overcome numerous obstacles, Todd carefully took out the 'final result'.

Upon closer inspection under the light, the copper tube was very light, almost weightless. The material of the tube appeared to be hand-polished, with extremely fine workmanship. Under the firelight, faint relief could be seen.

"Once humans have satisfied their most basic survival needs, curiosity becomes the most terrifying thing in the world."

This curiosity can even cause the soul in this body to disregard the safety rules that were often repeated during scientific research in his previous life.

The first and most crucial point: Under all circumstances, approach all unknown things with caution and conservatism.

With a click, Todd unscrewed the cap on the copper tube and looked inside.

A cloud of grayish-white smoke was released from it and hit his unprotected eyes.

"Ah! Ah!!!"

A burning sensation, like flames, traveled from the cornea of ​​the eye along the optic nerve and "burned" into the brain.

Todd tossed aside the copper pipe in his hand, covered his eyes, and rubbed them vigorously, but this did nothing to alleviate the burning pain in his head. It felt as if his entire head had been placed in a furnace at thousands of degrees Celsius, melted, and then repeatedly hammered on an anvil by a giant hammer.

He slammed his head against the stone wall, his forehead splitting open with gash after gash, blood dripping down his cheeks to the ground, but this did nothing to alleviate the pain in his head.

His hands fumbled on the ground, but he tripped over some debris and fell. Todd's hands reached out haphazardly and accidentally grabbed a few cloves of garlic. He instinctively crushed them and rubbed them into his eyes.

The tangy, spicy sensation from the garlic juice brought a new source of pain to the boy's eyes, but it slightly alleviated the pain in his brain.

To relieve the intense pain in his head, Todd groped for more garlic on the ground, crushed the cloves, dripped the juice into his eyes, and stuffed the garlic paste into his mouth.

This continued for an unknown amount of time until the boy, whose body felt like it was on fire, lost consciousness, collapsed to the ground, and closed his eyes.

When Todd woke up again, he was surrounded by darkness and had lost all ability to move. In his dazed state, he felt someone moving his hands and feet.

He moved his lips with his last bit of strength.

"who?"

A deep voice spoke to him.

"Little one, my name is Hudgens."