34: The ruins under the weeds

The ruins of the Old Market Town were a hundred times more desolate than the old man had described. Half-man-high wild grass grew rampantly, nearly drowning out everything in sight.

Beneath their feet was nothing but slippery silt and hidden gravel. Wang Dalong stumbled along unevenly, nearly twisting his ankle several times.

The stench of rotting plants and muddy fishiness in the air gave him a headache. Several unidentifiable black insects buzzed incessantly in his ears, annoying him to death.

Wang Dalong followed behind Lin Feng, his windbreaker and pants long since covered in yellow mud spots and grass seeds, looking utterly wretched.

"Brother Feng... can... can there really be anything in this place?" He panted heavily, looking at the dilapidated scene before him; the little confidence he had left had dropped to freezing point.

"Look at this, it's almost been leveled! Even if there really were cellars or secret rooms back then, wouldn't that great flood from over a hundred years ago have washed them clean long ago?"

The bullet screen in the livestream room also began to waver.

[Holy crap, this is way too broken! It feels more desolate than the mass grave on the back mountain of my hometown!]

[This... how can anything be hidden here? Any hole you dig would be soaked and ruined by the water.]

[Don't worry! Everyone, don't worry! Feng God has his own clever plan! Just watch Brother Feng's operation patiently!]

Lin Feng ignored him and didn't look at the bullet screen.

He walked unhurriedly through the ruins with light steps. His trekking pole occasionally pushed aside grass taller than a person as he carefully observed the exposed wall foundations.

Most of these foundations were built with river pebbles and yellow mud, crude and simple. After a hundred years of wind, rain, and flood immersion, they had long since rotted into a mess.

Suddenly, Lin Feng stopped and crouched down.

He picked up a broken tile from beneath a corner where half the wall had collapsed. The tile was covered in thick green moss, its edges pitted and weathered. He gently rubbed the patterns on the back of the tile with his fingers.

Wang Dalong watched him like this, feeling suspicious in his heart.

Time passed minute by minute. Wang Dalong's patience was about to be completely worn away by the dead silence and the buzzing mosquitoes.

He found a relatively dry boulder to sit on, exhausted like a dead dog. He pulled out his phone to scroll through some videos, but a big 'X' at the top of the screen instantly threw him into despair.

Not even a single bar of signal!

"It's over, we're completely cut off from the world now." He sighed, stuffed his phone back into his pocket, and shouted at Lin Feng's back: "Brother Feng, how about we retreat? This ghostly place really doesn't look like it could hide anything!"

"Think about it, no matter how you put it, Taiping Rebellion Leader was a Wing King, a prince of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom! He couldn't possibly hide the national treasury in a mud pit like this, right? That's too beneath him; wouldn't people laugh their heads off if word got out?"

Lin Feng finally stood up and patted the dirt off his hands. He turned around and surveyed the bleak, silent ruins.

"You're right," Lin Feng suddenly spoke.

"Huh?" Wang Dalong didn't react for a moment. He hadn't expected the usually stubborn Lin Feng to actually agree with him.

He asked tentatively: "Then... then we're going back now? To town for hotpot? I heard the yak meat hotpot around here is a masterpiece!"

"I'm saying, you're right that the treasure can't be hidden here."

Lin Feng looked at him, his eyes clear.

"But this trip wasn't in vain. It confirmed one of my hypotheses and overturned another."

"What hypothesis?" Wang Dalong's curiosity was instantly piqued, and he even forgot about the hotpot.

"This place," Lin Feng pointed his trekking pole at the muddy ground beneath his feet, "proves that the eight words 'Facing water, leaning on mountains, treasure lies within' don't refer to an ordinary market town like Anshunchang at all."

"Because an ordinary town can't withstand a natural disaster like a great flood, let alone be used to hide treasure!"

He paused and continued:

"Think about it, the warlord Chuan Army General back then deployed an entire engineering regiment to dig for treasure, and the final official statement was 'very little gained'. Looking at it now, the reason probably wasn't that he dug in the wrong place, but that the 'object' he wanted to dig up had already been physically erased by the great flood decades earlier!"

"What he dug up back then was likely just some scattered valuables that had been washed out by the flood and buried by silt in these ruins of the Old Market Town!"

Wang Dalong listened in a daze, feeling like his brain couldn't quite keep up. But he still caught the most crucial point:

"You mean, the treasure isn't in Anshunchang at all? Neither the new one nor the old one?"

"Correct." Lin Feng nodded decisively.

"Anshunchang is just a geographical coordinate. It narrowed down a general area for us. But the real treasure site must be a place that meets 'special conditions'!"

"This place must not only fit the Feng Shui layout of 'facing water and leaning on mountains,' but also be able to withstand natural disasters like floods and landslides, and be hidden enough to preserve a large amount of gold and silver treasures for a long time without being discovered!"

Lin Feng didn't speak fast, but every word was like a nail, driven hard into Wang Dalong's mind.

He wasn't guessing; he was performing a rigorous logical reconstruction based on the results of the site survey!

"Can withstand natural disasters and must be hidden..." Wang Dalong scratched his head, following his line of thought, "What kind of awesome building would that be? A bunker? Or a cave?"

"A cave is possible. But large natural caves are too conspicuous and easily exposed; small ones don't have enough space to hide things. As for manually digging a cave, how could Taiping Rebellion Leader's group of defeated generals have the time and conditions for that?" Lin Feng directly rejected that option.

His gaze moved past the ruins in front of him and toward the rolling green mountains in the distance. The afterglow of the setting sun cast a dazzling golden edge on the mountain ridges.

"A building that must be built on a Feng Shui treasure land 'facing water and leaning on mountains,' has a solid structure, and has an unknown underground space... what kind of building best fits these characteristics?"

Lin Feng didn't wait for Wang Dalong to answer, but as if answering himself, spat out two words:

"Temples."

Wang Dalong's brain felt as if it had been struck by a bolt of lightning, and his eyes instantly widened!

"Temples?!"

"Exactly!" Lin Feng's expression became excited; it was the satisfaction of a sudden breakthrough in thought!

"Since ancient times, those ancient monasteries and Taoist temples deep in the mountains have been most particular about Feng Shui in their site selection; 'facing water and leaning on mountains' is basic operation! Moreover, to prevent fire and theft, and to house Buddha relics and store precious scriptures, many large temples would build extremely sturdy underground palaces or secret rooms!"

"Think about it, those underground palaces use the best stone materials and are built more solidly than imperial tombs; they are practically natural 'super safes'! When Taiping Rebellion Leader's army passed by, they could just find any excuse like 'worshipping Buddha' or 'offering incense' to use the temple's underground palace, secretly hide the treasure inside, and then seal the entrance! Isn't this ten thousand times more brilliant and ten thousand times more hidden than him huffing and puffing to dig a hole himself?"

Wang Dalong was stunned by Lin Feng's earth-shattering reasoning, his mouth hanging open for a long time.

The clues that were originally a tangled mess were instantly made crystal clear by Lin Feng's sorting!

"Holy crap! Brother Feng! Is that brain of yours something a carbon-based lifeform can grow? You could even think of this?" He jumped up from the rock in excitement, "Then what are we waiting for? Let's hurry back and ask around about what old temples with several hundred years of history are nearby!"

The livestream room completely exploded!

[I declare! Feng God! The eternal God!]

[Temples! Underground palaces! Holy crap! This line of thinking is brilliant! Why couldn't I think of that!]

[Case closed, family! I freaking declare the case closed again! Is this brain a supercomputer! No, even a supercomputer isn't as fast as you!]

[Everyone in front, calm down! Brother Feng won't do illegal things like digging up underground palaces! He's looking for clues!]

[Quick, quick, quick! I can't wait to see the next episode! Find the ancient temple immediately!]

Lin Feng looked at the distant mountains, the corners of his mouth curling up slightly.

"Let's go back to town first, find a local elder, and root out every famous, aged ancient temple and Taoist temple around here."

The setting sun completely sank behind the mountains, and twilight surged from all directions, swallowing the entire ruins.

The two turned to leave. Behind them were the century-old sounds of the river waves and the boundless silence of the wilderness.

And in their hearts, a brand-new door leading to a massive treasure was slowly opening.