Chapter 95.2

Editor: Kat

Proofreader: Junyans

“Xuefeng, stay away from me, don’t follow me.”

Wei Xun wanted to explore the Kapala’s Hailuogou. Dog IV-1 had never been here, which meant that the difficulty had not been unsealed, and there were not too many supernatural influences. However, this ravine had the ability to attract wild beasts to jump into it to commit suicide. Hence, there might be something under it.

Also, the Insects of Evil who’d gone down to the bottom of the ravine had lost their way and turned back and forth, unable to continue descending. This made Wei Xun curious.

However, Wei Xun didn’t dare to believe the Lama’s words. He’d said that Xuefeng was the snow mountain’s sacred beast and would not be affected by anything. In case there was really something at the bottom of the ravine that could interfere with the minds of animals, Xuefeng might be affected by it. If it remained on top, and stood far away from the ravine, it would not be affected.

After Wei Xun’s repeated orders, the snow leopard finally found a hidden rock crevice to lie down unwillingly, but when Wei Xun left, it held onto Wei Xun’s clothes and did not want him to leave.

“Don’t worry, I’ll come up soon.

“Let the young mink stay with you first.”

Wei Xun put the young mink in front of the snow leopard and asked it to keep an eye on Xuefeng, to supervise it if it had any signs of jumping off the cliff. Then, he fed a drop of honey into its mouth.

The young mink and the snow leopard looked at each other, large eyes staring at smaller eyes.

“Squeak, squeak, wu, wu!”

With much bravado, the young mink’s fur exploded, like a fried ball of white hair.

Amid its chirping, the snow leopard slowly bared its teeth.

The young mink: !!

With a swish, the young mink hid itself. Surprisingly , it had hidden itself in another rock crevice. Only then did Wei Xun feel relieved, and walked towards Kapala’s Hailuogou. On the way to the ravine, he wore the Nine-Eyed Dzi Bead on his wrist and held theGusin’s thangka in his hand, but as expected, until Wei Xun walked to the cliff of Hailuogou, there was no reaction from these two items.

The ravine’s existence was not related to the devil.

Although the cliff sloped downwards almost ninety degrees, it was far inferior to the hole that had been devoured by the Insects of Evil for generations, which was full of vertical slopes. Wei Xun, who was possessed by the power of the young fox and still full of Yang Energy, stepped on various rock cracks on the cliff and easily jumped down without the help of the spider silk climbing rope.

On the way down, Wei Xun even split some of his attention to ask Xiaocui what had happened earlier.

How did it retrieve 20jinof purified demonic honey???

‘GqD SOl RAOVDm ZqD SAZqDy aDD El ZqD qAlDc BOy.’

egOjcbg tOgS jiZSgZXHoV, ‘sbmgxgZS SZNjXgc MjXZV MOt TZmV tHmjXy ZXZmyV. pZ JmjiOioV GOXHZS HMZ NjHMZm iZZ Hj ZTjoTZ, ibH n HMgXf gH’t O GOtHZ jx ZxxjmH.’

DMZ ZTjobHgjX jx O xZNOoZ NjHMZm jx HMZ tGOmN GOt XjH Ot tgNJoZ Ot dbtH JmjTgSgXy gH GgHM JbmZ ZXZmyV. DMZ gXtZcH NbtH Ootj MOTZ O MgyMZm oZTZo OXS JjttZtt HMZ tHmZXyHM Hj OSTOXcZ Hj O MgyMZm mOXf Ot GZoo.

fDE Wjl yOERDm qER DcDayAzR, wDDxEld WEOAXjE’R ESTxEDm wxOZZDyc. ulm RjyD DlAjdq, WEOAXjE XOjZEAjRxc jZZDyDm ZqD lDtZ SASDlZ, ‘vORZDy, ZqD 33 myATR Aw mDSAlEX qAlDc…’

Earlier, Wei Xun promised Xiaocui that he would give it one drop for every three hundred drops of demonic honey he received. This drop was calculated according to the abdominal capacity of the bee, probably in grams.

As a result, Xiaocui got back a full 20 jin of demonic honey!

A jin is 500 grams, and 20 jin are 10 kilograms, which means that Xiaocui can receive 33 drops of demonic honey.

‘Take what I promised you,’ Wei Xun replied casually.

Although it was true that Xiaocui had stolen demonic honey slightly beyond his expectations, Wei Xun would not renege on what he had promised.

‘Thank you, Master. Master is really great!’

Xiaocui was over the moon. It softly cheered, and shyly said, ‘I’ll just use three drops now. Can Master save the remaining thirty drops for me?’

‘Okay.’

The corners of Wei Xun’s mouth twitched. That was why he said Xiaocui was currently the smartest subordinate under him. It knew what it should do and what it shouldn’t. It could be said that its IQ and EQ had far surpassed that of normal insects, and it was not an exaggeration to say that it was another kind of intelligent creature.

In this way, compared with ordinary mothers of the swarm, Xiaocui was indeed much better than them.

After the bout of happiness washed off, Xiaocui grew worried and added, ‘Master, the mother of the swarm heard Bee Master mention he would use the bee to control you, command you to steal corpses for him, and then he planned to sell you to you after you left the tour to higher ranking people.’

Bee Master naturally wouldn’t be wary of his own bee. He vented his anger out because of the trouble caused by Hair Ghost II-49 previously, and those words happened to be heard by the mentally incapacitated mother bee.

Including the grievances between II-49 and Bee Master, II-49’s ghost hair and so on, all of this information was reported to Wei Xun by Xiaocui in detail.

But now, Bee Master had gone out.

After hearing Xiaocui’s recounting, Wei Xun pondered for a moment. The environment between the tour guides could be described as the strong would prey on the weak, and as the devil taking the hindmost. Wei Xun already understood this. Both II-49 and Bee Master had no good intentions. If Wei Xun hadn’t been strong enough to convince IV-1, he wouldn’t have known that IV-1 had been carrying the bee chrysalises on his body. And if it weren’t for Wei Xun’s many miraculous encounters and Xiaocui, he would not have been able to control the mother bee and steal honey through the child bee.

Since Bee Master came with bad intentions, Wei Xun would not hold back either. Allowing one’s enemy to develop and become stronger, only to deal with oneself in turn, was the stupidest thing to do.

Now that Xiaocui had smuggled all the 20 jin of purified demonic honey from the honey jar, the mother bee was useless. If Wei Xun was more greedy, he could let Xiaocui control the mother bee and let her show some characteristics of a mother of the swarm. That way, maybe Bee Master would soak it in other demonic honey jars.

However, Wei Xun understood the principle that being greedy would cause one to suffer defeat, and knew when he should stop.

‘To what extent is your control over the female bee?’

Wei Xun said, ‘Can it be controlled to escape with the demonic bees without being discovered?’

‘It is impossible, Master. They are now in an enclosed space and cannot escape.’

‘An enclosed space?’

Hearing Xiaocui’s description, Wei Xun thought of the Travel Services’ base. If the demonic bees and mother bee were really there, no one could take them away except Bee Master.

That being the case, the only solution was to kill the mother bee and let the hundreds of demonic bees following it die.

But after Wei Xun thought for a while, he suddenly said, ‘Can the mother bee only transfer demonic honey, or can any contents which the child bee can store be moved away?’

Xiaocui was stunned for a moment, but it quickly said, ‘As long as it is within the capacity of the child bee’s belly, it can be transferred!’

‘Then transfer everything,’ Wei Xun answered calmly.

Xiaocui obeyed the order, and soon the transportation of goods route from the mother parasitic bee to the child parasitic bee, and then from the child parasitic bee to Xiaocui, started to move again.

At this time, Wei Xun had reached the bottom of the pit. Unlike Black Rock Mountain, which was more than 4,000 meters above sea level, Hailuogou was more than 1,000 meters deep, and the bottom of the valley was about 3,000 meters above sea level. Wei Xun could obviously feel that it was becoming much easier to breathe, and the surrounding temperature increased slightly. There were many such deep canyons in Tibet, usually with lush vegetation inside these grooves and a milder environment than the highlands, where various wild animals lived.

However, the bottom of Kapala Hailuogou was different. Although it was as wide as a canyon, it was desolate and dead. Apart from scattered black stones, various horns of cattle and sheep, and bones, there was no sign of any living creatures.

Wei Xun first looked at the place where the Insects of Evil lost their way and were turning around in circles. He found that there was a hole sunken into the inside of the rock wall, and on the exterior was a stone surface extending outward, like a naturally generated stone platform. There were many small bones on this platform, but they were more like the remains of lizards, snakes, and other small creatures, rather than large animals such as cattle and sheep.

It seemed that this stone platform was angled in a great manner. The falling wild animals would not land on it, but the thing that attracted animals to jump off the cliff should also be here, otherwise it would not attract snakes and lizards.

Even after standing on the stone platform, Wei Xun still didn’t feel anything special. This sunken hole was narrow and deep, but its width could merely fit one arm inside it. But before he found out what was inside, Wei Xun decided that he wouldn’t stretch his arm in like a fool.

He summoned Mantis No. 3.

Both MantisNo. 1 and No. 2had been influenced by his consumption of the devil’s shadow previously, and had become more inclined to the support type that could create illusions. Only Mantis No. 3 had been fed a snow leopard hair by Wei Xun, and it had returned to its original form, the attacker type.

Sure enough, not long after Mantis No. 3 entered the hole, it got into a battle with other creatures. The hole in the rock was narrow, and Mantis No. 3 was too huge, so it couldn’t turn around inside, and it could only advance rather than retreat when encountering enemies.

However, no matter how fierce an ordinary animal was, how could it be more capable than a demonic insect? Under the attack of a creature that was evolutionarily stronger than them, the battle was over without giving them any chance to fight back. A rustling sound came from the hole in the crack. Mantis No. 3 first pushed out a palm-sized black scorpion corpse with its two hind legs, and then pushed out a big centipede with a blue-red carapace and black stripes.

In the end, like a dung beetle rolling a dung ball, it rolled out a conical off-white object the size of a fingernail with its two hind legs. Wei Xun took a closer look and found that it was a tiny and strange conch fossil.

Geologists had discovered many fossils of ancient marine organisms on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, such as nautilus, trilobites, Foraminifera, etc. Therefore, it was speculated that the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau had once been a vast ocean a long time ago, and it had gradually become high mountains due to crustal movement.

Therefore, it was normal to find conch fossils on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

But what was abnormal was that Wei Xun’s title [Archaeologist] instantly commented a few words after seeing this conch shell.

[Kapala’s Conch Shell. According to the legends, once it’s pulled out, a curse will descend, and the Devil’s Sea will set off huge waves to swallow the earth and submerge the world under water.]

Curse? Devil’s sea? Submerge the world under water?

Wei Xun did not believe that there was any curse so powerful that it could submerge the world, and this conch had already been captured by Mantis No. 3, so it would be too late to think about any curse.

However, the [Archaeologist] title had provided a hint. This indicated that there were ruins beneath the hole. Since he couldn’t change what was already done, Wei Xun simply asked Mantis No. 3 to carry out all the things in the hole of the stone. And sure enough, he found a small black stone statue inside, as well as a relic composed of six fingernail-sized stacked circular-shaped gold flakes. Or rather, they could be described as plates of gold.

Following that, prompts given by [Archaeologist] sounded one after another. Through these prompts, Wei Xun comprehended the uses of the items.

It turned out that the small conch fossil in his hand was not Kapala’s conch at all, but an imitation sacrificial object. The real Kapala’s Conch was in the Devil’s Sea. It was as big as an average human size’s head, and it was said that Buddha had used it to block the keyhole to the devil’s seal.

The legendary Devil’s Sea that could devour the world was Siling Lake, the third scenic spot of their tour. In Tibetan, it means the Majestic Devil’s Lake. However, the local herdsmen call it The Devil’s Sea or The Devouring Sea.

Siling Lake was a saltwater lake. Livestock would get sick if they drank from it, and humans couldn’t drink from it either. But the reason why it was crowned as the Devil’s Sea was because the lake had been expanding.

In 1976, the surface area of Siling Lake was 1666.96 square kilometers, but in 2009, its lake area reached 2323.6 square kilometers, swallowing up many pastures and grasslands and forcing herdsmen to relocate.

They all called this lake the greedy Devil’s Lake, the sea that would devour the world, and the reason why this lake continued to expand and swallow land was that the devil was sealed at the bottom of the lake. The devil’s energy was seeping out and swallowing the earth.

As for the statue, the conch shell, and gold plates, they were from the Xiangxiong Dynasty. At that time, this area had still been fertile land, where many Tibetans gathered and lived. People and livestock often fell to their deaths in the ravine. Later, a highly respected Lama had come to take a look and had said that this was the Hailuogou of God Kapala, and Kapala liked blood sacrifices, which was why so many accidents happened.

Later, they set up a small altar in a crevice of the Hailuogou, used gold plates, a conch, and statues instead of flesh and blood to sacrifice to Kapala, and the Tibetans who lived nearby gradually moved away. Then, the incidents of people falling to their deaths gradually declined.

Wei Xun looked at this small black stone statue. It looked normal from the front, but there was a layer of grayish-red meat on the back, densely covered with black fur. This might be the effect of the devil’s resurrection that the Lama had mentioned.

However, Wei Xun didn’t observe any resentment from it. That meant that there was nothing related to the supernatural or the devil here. He placed these things into the young fox’s belly, and continued his exploration in Kapala’s Hailuogou. When the sky was about to light up, he returned to the base.

T/N: Sorry for the late chapter update, I was having some network issues and wasn’t able to post the chapter until currently.