Shilin Relic

"Lin Xue... this is the mysterious old man you mentioned?"

"When did I ever say he was a mysterious old man?" Lin Xue rolled her eyes. "I only said he had something unusual."

"Even if he's just an NPC guarding a mysterious item, he should have something special about him... but this appearance..."

Before us stood an old man with dark skin, a filthy shirt on his upper body, gray trousers below, and pant legs rolled up to his knees. He held a huge bowl and desperately slurped noodles as though he had never eaten in his life. Every now and then, he reached down to scratch his hairy calves. He seemed completely immersed in his world of noodles and had not noticed our arrival at all.

"Don't underestimate this old man," Lin Xue said quietly. "Gu Zhengfeng was once China's most famous Grave Robber. He'd robbed more tombs than you'd visited supermarkets, and he almost never came back empty-handed. Unfortunately, during his last tomb robbery, he touched something he shouldn't have and was hunted down by someone he absolutely couldn't afford to provoke. In the end, he had no choice but to hide here and narrowly escape disaster."

"Is that so..." I studied the scruffy old man battling his noodles again, unable to imagine that he was such an impressive figure.

Lin Feng leaned over mysteriously and said, "There's more. They say that on the second day after he hid in Exile Town, the enemy pursuing him was choked to death by a Four Joy Meatball..."

"You little brat, did you come here today just to piss me off?!" The scruffy old man had somehow already slurped down his last noodle. He glared at Lin Feng and shouted. So he had heard our conversation all along; he simply couldn't be bothered to acknowledge us.

"Wouldn't dare, wouldn't dare!" Lin Feng clasped his hands and chuckled. "We came today because we have an important matter to ask of you, sir. Could we discuss it inside?"

"Cut the crap." The old man lifted the huge bowl and gulped down the noodle soup inside. Then he wiped his mouth and said, "You wouldn't let me leave anyway. On your turf, what could I possibly object to?"

Following behind the old man, we entered the unremarkable mud-brick house.

What lay inside greatly exceeded my expectations.

The small room was filled everywhere with battered jars, pots, and tools whose purpose I could not make out, leaving barely any place to set foot. Even the walls were hung with grimy objects that looked like antiques. The already dim room was made even darker by these blackened, gleaming relics of those who came before, polished by the river of history. The moment I entered, I even felt as though I had stepped into a freshly excavated tomb chamber.

"These things are what ruined me," the old Grave Robber said as he expertly wove through the floorful of "junk." "But I still can't bear to throw them away."

"Wouldn't any one of these things be worth a fortune if sold?" Qian Qian carefully stepped over an old clay jar that looked as though it would shatter into pieces at the slightest touch and spoke softly.

"Don't get any ideas about these things," Lin Xue said in a low voice. "Otherwise, Old Gu will definitely fight you to the death. When he came to this town, he donated a total of two hundred and twenty-seven cultural relics, along with all his property. He made one request: no one was allowed to touch the things remaining here until he died."

The old Grave Robber clearly had excellent hearing. Even Lin Xue's quiet voice did not escape him. He chuckled and said, "After I die, you can handle these things however you want. But when that day comes, I hope I can lie among this pile of treasures—Old Gu spent his life digging up the graves of countless princes and nobles. When I die, I want to lie in a heap of treasures just like them!"

Hearing the old man's words, all we could do was roll our eyes helplessly.

"All right, sit." After a difficult trek, we finally reached the only open patch in the room. The old man casually pulled out several chairs that looked ready to fall apart and invited us to sit.

Sitting among the Old Ancestor's treasures, we suddenly felt as though we were holding a meeting inside a tomb...

"Tell me, did you come for that thing?" The old man seemed to have known our purpose all along.

"That's right." Lin Xue answered readily.

"It's not impossible for me to give you that thing." A sharp gleam flashed through the old man's eyes, and his slovenly air seemed to vanish in an instant. He appeared to have regained the shrewd, capable bearing of the Grave Robber he once was. "If I hadn't greedily taken it out back then, I wouldn't have ended up like this. To me, it's nothing but a disaster magnet. But I can't just hand it over so easily—you know my rules."

Only then did I realize that the thing Lin Xue had come to ask this old Grave Robber for was the very object that had nearly brought him a fatal disaster years ago. Even I became intensely curious about that mysterious item.

Lin Xue seemed entirely unconcerned by the rules the old man had mentioned. She pushed Qian Qian, who had been curiously examining the antiques nearby, forward and said, "This is Xu Feng's daughter, Xu Qianqian. If what you said is true, then this girl is qualified to activate that thing. Well? Take it out and let's try."

"Hey—" Thinking that Lin Xue was about to make Qian Qian do something dangerous, I could not help stopping her.

"Relax. I won't hurt your sweetheart. I just need her cooperation for an experiment."

The old Grave Robber looked Qian Qian over from head to toe for a while, then chuckled. "Heh, the missing man's daughter? Her father was a certified materialist. He wouldn't even believe in your Espers, and he gave me quite an earful too. What, his daughter is willing to believe in all this bizarre nonsense? Wait here. I'll go get it..."

After the old man got up and went to the back to search for that mysterious object, Qian Qian and I asked together, "Uncle Xu (Dad) came here too?"

"Yes." This time, Zheng Yiming answered us. "Because the ruins they were going to investigate were somewhat unusual, before setting out, we arranged for several key members of the expedition team to come here. We hoped they could obtain that important item from Gu Zhengfeng. Fortunately, Mr. Xu successfully resonated with it. But what we didn't expect was that Mr. Xu not only refused to believe us at all, he also denounced our advice as pseudoscience and thoroughly berated Old Gu for being a former tomb robber..."

Qian Qian looked at us apologetically, as though she had long expected her father's stubbornness.

After hearing Zheng Yiming's account, I became even more curious about the mysterious object they had mentioned. "You said that thing could 'resonate' with Uncle Xu, and that Qian Qian, as Uncle Xu's daughter, could also produce this so-called 'resonance'? What exactly is it?"

"You'll know when you see it yourself. One thing is certain: it is a miraculous item even harder to explain than the powers of us Espers."

Just then, I heard a rustling sound behind me. The old Grave Robber had brought the item over.

"This is it?" I stared in astonishment at the inconspicuous thing in the old man's hand. It was a palm-sized hexagonal metal plate made of some unknown material. Its surface was covered by a layer of blackish-red grime resembling rust, and faintly visible upon it were several incomplete symbols. Other than that, it was no different from scrap metal in a junkyard.

This thing that looked like a broken piece of iron was the mysterious item they had made sound so extraordinary?

Just as I was beginning to think I had been fooled by an old man who liked to play mysterious games, Pandora's voice came through our Spiritual Connection. "This is a Null Beacon!"

"What?!" I was shocked. "Pandora, you know what this is?"

"A Null Beacon is used by members of the Empire Army for emergency teleportation when they need to evacuate a battlefield in a crisis. It can also serve as a navigator for small-scale Spatial Jumps. I have a similar device. To a Shilin Warrior, a Null Beacon is an extremely important item... How could this world have one..."

At that moment, what happened before us interrupted the Mind Communication between Pandora and me.

Following Gu Zhengfeng's instructions, Qian Qian placed her left hand on the black metal plate Pandora had called a "Null Beacon." At once, the metal plate emitted a faint hum.

"How is this possible?!" Pandora's astonished voice rang through my mind. I had never seen such intense emotional fluctuations from her. "How could an Empire Army item resonate with a Carbon-Based Lifeform?"