Chapter 120: Fog Locks the Ancestral Home, Blood Leads the Way Home
"Ajiu..." Xiao Yu looked at Ajiu with unprecedented tenderness.
"Keep leading the way. We... trust you."
"Um!"
Jiu no longer looked at the uncles struggling in pain around him, nor did he listen to the noisy crying and temptations in his ears.
She closed her eyes and felt the guidance coming from deep within her blood with all her heart and soul.
The smell of home... the smell of daddy... the smell of mommy...
Under the guidance of Ajiu, the team started moving forward again.
This time, no one was lost, no one went crazy. Everyone stared intently at the golden light.
They didn't know how long they had been walking, perhaps an hour or two, or perhaps just a stick of incense.
Just when everyone felt they were reaching their limit.
Ajiu suddenly opened his eyes and raised his little finger forward.
"Sir, Brother Xiongxiong..."
"arrive."
Everyone looked up subconsciously.
I saw the thick gray fog in front of me, as if it was split by an invisible sword, slowly dispersing to both sides.
At the end of the fog, there were no longer twisted trees and rotten soil.
An ancient and weathered stone archway stands there quietly.
The archway has weathered the storms and is covered with moss and traces of time, but one can still clearly see two large characters engraved in a flamboyant style on the top:
Lin Mansion.
"We... are out?" A black-armored guard rubbed his eyes, his voice full of disbelief.
"It's out..." Xiao Yu exhaled a breath of foul air, which turned into a cloud of white mist in the cold air. The coldness and violence that had been lingering in his mind were quickly dissipating.
He looked at Chu Xuanyi beside him. His face was still pale, but his eyes had regained their former depth and clarity.
And they protected Ah Jiu, who was in the middle. The dazzling golden light above her head gradually became softer after passing through the archway, and finally slowly converged and sank into her body.
Ajiu stared blankly at the archway and the deserted courtyard behind it, and his eyes suddenly turned red.
"Here..." She sniffed hard, "This is... the smell of home..."
Although she had never actually been here, the sense of familiarity in her blood could not be deceived.
Every blade of grass, every brick and tile here silently tells her about the long-lost family memories.
"Everyone, rest where you are! Wake up the fainted brother!" Xiao Yu immediately ordered, "Stay alert!"
"yes!"
The Xuanjia Guards immediately took action, untied their companions who were tied up on horseback, gave some water, and pinched some people's Ren Zhong points.
The soldiers who were most tortured by the hallucinations all looked confused and frightened when they woke up.
Chu Xuanyi gently picked up Ajiu.
"Ajiu, can you still walk?"
"Yeah." Ajiu nodded. Her little hands tightly grasped the corner of Chu Xuanyi's clothes, and her big eyes looked at the house in front of her curiously and timidly.
Most of the courtyard walls had collapsed, revealing the overgrown courtyard within. The rockery in the yard was half-collapsed, and the pond had long since dried up, leaving only cracked mud. The roofs of several of the main houses had large holes in them, leaving them in a state of disrepair.
If one had not personally experienced the horrific miasma, no one would have imagined that such a dilapidated house would be the ancestral home of the Lin family, which was once famous throughout the world and controlled the destiny of the Great Qi.
"Here...it seems like no one has been here before." Xiao Yu walked forward and used his feet to push away the thick fallen leaves and dust at the door. There was no trace of any footprints on the ground.
"Of course no one has been here." Chu Xuanyi's gaze did not look at the ruins, but fell on the seemingly randomly scattered stones, dead trees, and several sealed ancient wells in the courtyard.
"What do you mean?" Xiao Yu asked.
"Look," Chu Xuanyi pointed to two huge locust trees on the left and right of the courtyard gate. They had long since withered, leaving only charred trunks. "This is 'Double Ghosts Knocking at the Door,' a dangerous position in the formation. Look over there, that collapsed rockery and the dry pond opposite it. This is 'Tiger Crouching on the Moon,' a killing formation. And the positions of those wells correspond exactly to 'Seven Stars Locking Souls...'"
Xiao Yu was stunned when he heard this. Although he didn't understand these mysterious things, he understood them.
"You mean, this courtyard itself is a huge formation?"
"That's right." Chu Xuanyi nodded, his expression solemn. "Moreover, it's a chain formation that combines both offense and defense. The bewitching miasma on the periphery is only the first layer of defense, used to confuse outsiders. But this house itself is the real killer! If someone doesn't understand the formation and forces their way in, every step they take will trigger a mechanism and bring about fatal disaster. Every stone and every dead tree in this yard could be a deadly trap."
Xiao Yu's scalp tingled when he heard this.
"Then...what should we do now?" a black-armored guard asked nervously, subconsciously taking a step back, afraid of stepping on something he shouldn't.
"We can come in because of Ah Jiu." Chu Xuanyi's eyes fell on the small figure.
At this moment, Ajiu didn't listen to what they were saying.
She let go of Chu Xuanyi's clothes and walked towards the depths of the courtyard step by step like a puppet pulled by invisible silk strings.
Her steps were slow, but each one was incredibly precise. Her route was tortuous and strange, but the formation nodes that had originally held murderous intent in Chu Xuanyi's eyes seemed to ignore her, not triggering a single one.
"Xuan Yi!" Xiao Yu's hand was already on the hilt of the knife.
"Don't move." Chu Xuanyi stopped him. "Follow her. She is the blood of the Lin family and the only recognized master of this formation. Only she can lead us to the true way out."
Everyone did not dare to delay and immediately followed the footprints left by Jiu carefully, without missing a step.
After passing through the overgrown front yard and around the collapsed corridor, they finally arrived in front of the main house, which looked relatively intact.
The doors and windows of the main house were closed with faded seals on them. Two tattered lanterns hung at the door, swaying slightly in the wind.
Ajiu stopped in front of the door.
She stretched out her little hand and gently pushed the vermilion wooden door.
“Squeak—”
A sharp friction sound was heard, accompanied by the falling dust, and the heavy wooden door opened with ease.
It was pitch black inside the door, and a smell mixed with stale wood and dust hit me in the face.
"Ignite!" Xiao Yu shouted in a low voice.
A black-armored guard immediately took out a tinderbox and lit a torch.
The orange-yellow flames instantly illuminated the scene inside the door.
Everyone was stunned.
This room is unexpectedly... clean.
Although there was a thick layer of dust, the tables, chairs, bookshelves, and antique cabinets inside were all neatly arranged, without any signs of having been turned over.
This doesn't look like the scene of a tragedy when a family was wiped out.
"This...is not where the Lin family suffered the disaster." Chu Xuanyi immediately made a judgment. "The Lin family mansion was burned to the ground by a huge fire. This is the ancestral land, the true roots of the Lin family. The people who hunted the Lin family back then probably couldn't get through the soul-bewitching miasma outside, so this place was preserved."
Everyone felt relieved after hearing this.
Ajiu didn't stop, she walked straight to the innermost wall of the room.
There was a huge landscape painting hanging on the wall. The painting was shrouded in clouds and mist, and the artistic conception was lofty, but the paper had turned yellow and brittle due to its age.
Jiu stood on tiptoe, stretched out his little hand and gently pressed on an inconspicuous seal in the lower right corner of the painting.
Click.
A slight mechanical sound was heard.
Then, in front of everyone's shocked gazes, the wall with the painting slowly slid to the side, revealing a pitch-black entrance with stone steps leading underground!
Secret room!
Found it!
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