Daomu Biji: Restart

Before Fatty had finished speaking, Poker-Face had already rushed over. I didn't even have time to react at all as he instantly arrived in front of the backpack, grabbed its strap, and yanked it hard. The contents fell out, rolled all the way down the stones, and landed at our feet. Fatty and I immediately jumped back and picked up our guns.

Fatty stepped on that thing and tried to smash it with the butt of his gun, but I quickly stopped him. At this time, I could see clearly that it was a simple piece of metal that was the color of rusted bronze. I didn’t know what kind of household utensil it came from, but it was covered in detailed and complex patterns.

Just now, the bag had suddenly moved by itself and stood up. I thought there was a living thing inside of it, so I honestly didn't expect to find a piece of metal.

Poker-Face directly held the backpack down in case there was something inside of it, but after pressing on it, he shook his head at us. This meant that the bag was empty.

I wondered what exactly was going on with this bag. It wasn't there just now, so how did it move? Fatty looked at the bronze piece and asked, "What is this thing?"

When I pointed my flashlight at it, I couldn’t help but gasp.

Whether it was the material or patterns on it, I knew this thing like the back of my hand. I was certain that it had come from the bronze meteorite I had seen before.

I picked it up and rushed back over to the shrine. There was a mark at the bottom of the shrine that had been left by something sitting there for a long time. When I placed this bronze piece on it, I could see that the mark was consistent with the bottom of the bronze piece.

This meteorite fragment had originally been placed in the shrine.

I threw the fragment to Poker-Face, who caught it with one hand and started examining it.

I glanced at my watch. Poker-Face had moved so fast just now that even if there was a living thing in the bag, it couldn't have run away. But there wasn’t a living thing inside the bag at all. Still, the fact that the bag had suddenly moved was very strange.

I looked at the time on my watch and broke out in a cold sweat.

It seemed that we were missing a few minutes. Were we bestowed a heavenly gift again? But the time was so short. In these few minutes when we had been heavenly gifted, one of us had taken this bag and put it on the stone.

But I couldn’t remember the exact time—it was hard to understand the difference in a few minutes—so I couldn’t be sure if my guess was correct.

In any case, this didn’t alleviate my apprehension. If my theory was correct, then that meant that it absolutely wasn’t safe here. The mysterious force here was still trying to bestow that heavenly gift on us, but its energy was intermittent in this area, which made it difficult to have any effect. In fact, just a few minutes ago, it was interrupted again.

But even so, it was too hard to defend against. After thinking about it, I immediately said to Fatty, "Put all the hands back."

"What's wrong? I’m thinking about making some sauce and dipping the Zhang family’s treasured palms into it tonight before eating them."

"When we were under the influence of the heavenly gift, we took both the hands and this bronze piece. This is because that force wanted us to destroy this place. But the heavenly gift was interrupted before the destruction was complete. We have to restore everything here. I think the protection here seems to be weakening."

"Are you making up stories now?"

"In any case, it’s unlikely that something bad will happen if we restore it,” I said. I really was making up stories, but the logic was definitely sound.

Fatty didn't understand it the first time, so I repeated it again until he finally got it. After that, the two of us quickly began to put the hands back in place.

Since the corpses were mummified, we could put their hands back in place with a toothpick, so it wasn’t long before all of the hands were reset.

Is this a spell or some kind of array? I asked myself. Is it a feng shui array? I didn’t quite understand why these corpses and meteorite were able to ward off the heavenly gift.

I straightened the meteorite in the shrine, let go of these stray thoughts, and patted my clothes again for cigarettes.

I was a little startled by this behavior. I sniffed my fingers and realized that I had been smoking while under the influence of the heavenly gift.

It seemed that over this past month, I had picked up my smoking habit again, which hadn’t disappeared even though the heavenly gift had been lifted.

Not only did this habit not disappear, but it even passed on to me.

I had a special dent in my hand, a callus formed by smoking too many cigarettes over the course of my life. But after not smoking for so many years, there was only a vague outline now. I was now staring at that callus in a daze.

During those extremely difficult years, I always felt that I was fighting against the gods. In those long days and nights when there was no chance of winning at all and I didn't even know if the other party saw through my tricks, the only thing I could do most of the time was to look at this callus. This was also a very strong habit of mine.

At this time, I suddenly saw a possibility of winning and sneered.

****

Bad heavenly gift! Bad! How dare you let Wu Xie smoke when his lungs are terrible! Take it down Iron Triangle! Burn that heavenly gift to the ground!