Then he saw that there was actually another drawer beneath the table.
Li Zhi, who had already lost most of his expectations, instinctively pulled open the drawer.
There was only an ancient book bound with some unknown material.
The cover felt like it was made of leather.
Without examining it closely, Li Zhi stuffed the book into the Snakeskin Bag as well.
Afterward, unwilling to give up, he carefully searched the cellar again, but found nothing else.
Then he took the Snakeskin Bag and left.
After replacing the stone slab and filling in the Great Pit, Li Zhi carried the Snakeskin Bag back to the front courtyard.
He took a shower first, then brought the Snakeskin Bag into the living room.
Only then did he realize that the Snakeskin Bag before him was far from ordinary.
It was not made of ordinary plastic woven fabric, but sewn from the hide of some unknown animal. Its dark-green pattern merely resembled snakeskin.
The bag was one meter long and one foot wide, with a purplish-black rope at its opening.
As for its exact appearance, Li Zhi thought it looked somewhat like the human-seed bag carried by Maitreya Buddha in movies and television dramas.
He took everything out of the bag.
Only then did Li Zhi discover that the Luoyang Shovel, Oil Lamp, Brush, Small Flat Shovel, and even the Feng Shui Compass had all been made from unknown materials.
They were not only lightweight but also exceptionally sturdy. They were absolutely not tools forged from ordinary steel.
Li Zhi even picked up the Luoyang Shovel and lightly tested it on the living-room floor. It immediately left a small hole several inches deep in the tiled floor.
The hard tiles seemed to turn into soft sand before the Luoyang Shovel.
With hardly any effort, it could poke a hole with every thrust.
The Small Flat Shovel was similar. Although it looked not the least bit sharp, when dragged across the tiles, it cut like a diamond blade, leaving a conspicuous mark.
The Luoyang Shovel and Small Flat Shovel, which looked covered in rust, were actually comparable to Divine Weapons.
Afterward, Li Zhi tested the other items by striking them.
Without exception, they were all extremely sturdy. Even the Brush was the same. Li Zhi used all his strength, yet he could not break a single bristle on its head.
Moreover, he was astonished to discover that the rust on these items seemed impossible to remove.
No matter how much force he used, it was useless.
Even when he used the Small Flat Shovel to scrape the rust from the Luoyang Shovel, he could not remove it.
"Treasure. True treasure." Li Zhi shouted inwardly.
Then he shifted his gaze to the book bound in unknown beast hide.
There were three characters on the cover, seemingly written in Oracle Bone Script.
Li Zhi barely recognized the middle character as "Heaven."
He then ran to Li Daqiang's study and searched through a great deal of material before finally determining the meanings of the other two characters.
"Stealing Heavenly Secrets." That was the correct reading of the three characters on the cover.
The instant he read those three characters aloud, Li Zhi felt a chilly aura rise from his coccyx and shoot straight to his forehead, cooling his overheated mind and restoring his composure.
Once he had calmed down, Li Zhi
stared at the archaeological tools he had neatly arranged on the coffee table and fell into deep thought.
This set of archaeological tools clearly could not have been forged by mortals. They had most likely been made into Magic Artifacts by cultivators.
Moreover, they were a complete set of equipment specially made by cultivators proficient in burial studies for robbing tombs.
If he had been in another parallel spacetime, Li Zhi might not have fallen into deep thought.
But now that he was on Earth in the Shrouding the Heavens World, he had no choice but to consider whether he was qualified to possess these things.
Based on his memories from his previous life, he guessed that part of this Earth might very well have evolved from ancient burial grounds.
That was why it possessed extraordinary corpse-nurturing effects and could greatly shorten the time required for the birth of the Mark of Reincarnation.
It was easy to imagine how many corpses of ancient Great Powers were buried beneath the earth.
Celestial Worthy of Primordial Beginning, Emperor Heng Yu, Emperor Void, Amitabha Emperor, and Emperor Jiu Li had all buried their imperial bodies here, only to emerge again after forming Marks of Reincarnation within themselves.
As for how many ancient Great Powers beneath the earth had yet to successfully form Marks of Reincarnation, the original work had never mentioned it, so Li Zhi did not know either.
But by ordinary reasoning, there had to be quite a few.
Moreover, this world had an organization known as the Netherworld.
The curses from the Netherworld were extremely dangerous. People could fall victim to them without realizing it.
They could even be cursed simply by cultivating their Cultivation Methods. The Source Heavenly Masters on the Ancient Beidou Star were a perfect example.
Those who dealt with tombs year-round were bound to meet an unfortunate end, with the exception of the Nether Emperor.
Li Zhi even faintly suspected that the reason his father, Li Daqiang, had died young might have been because he had been injured by these Magic Artifacts in his early years and thereby become cursed.
There were now two paths before Li Zhi.
First, he could carry these Magic Artifacts on him for protection and then seek immortality and the Dao.
Second, he could return these Magic Artifacts to the cellar, pretend he knew nothing, and then seek immortality and the Dao.
As Li Zhi struggled with the choice, his gaze inadvertently fell upon the book Stealing Heavenly Secrets.
Perhaps he could find the answer in Stealing Heavenly Secrets.
However, he had already flipped through the book Stealing Heavenly Secrets, which contained only a few dozen pages.
To be honest, he could recognize no more than five of the characters inside.
The entire book was written in Oracle Bone Script, like a Heavenly Book.
Moreover, each character, taken separately, looked like a jumble of ghostly scrawls. He had no idea what any of them meant.
From the materials in his father Li Daqiang's study, it was clear that Li Daqiang had worked hard to decipher the secrets in this book.
He had filled several notebooks with annotations alone.
For Stealing Heavenly Secrets, which contained just over a thousand characters, the notes Li Daqiang had left behind were extremely extensive—at least a million characters.
Perhaps the opportunity lay in Stealing Heavenly Secrets.
Li Daqiang did not know that cultivators existed in the world, but Li Zhi knew that the cultivation methods on Earth had never truly been severed.
They simply had not appeared within mortals' field of vision.
To mortals, Oracle Bone Script was an ancient form of writing.
But to those cultivators, it might merely be the script they used in their everyday writing.
Once he had made up his mind, Li Zhi picked up a notebook and began copying the characters in Stealing Heavenly Secrets, imitating them as best he could.
There was no need to produce the original when asking others about the characters.
It was possible that the book bound in unknown beast hide contained some other hidden mystery.
If those cultivators saw it, it might bring him disaster.
Li Zhi spent a full three hours copying the more than one thousand Oracle Bone Script characters.
After comparing them repeatedly and confirming that there were no errors or omissions, he finally put down his pen.
He packed the archaeological tools on the coffee table into the Snakeskin Bag one by one, then carried the bag, a shovel, and the keys back to the rear courtyard.
Night fell, the full moon rose, and a cool breeze stirred.
Li Zhi returned the Snakeskin Bag to the cellar and restored the ground to its original smoothness.
It was already past ten at night.
That day had thoroughly exhausted him.
He tossed and turned in bed, unable to fall asleep for a long time.
All sorts of bizarre scenes kept surfacing in his mind.
There were battlefield scenes of fighting his way into the Nine Heavens and challenging enemies from every direction.
There were scenes of the Heavenly Palace, where people drank and laughed amid soaring jade towers.
There were scenes of the Netherworld, with Tomb Mounds covering the ground, Yin Energy pervading the air, and not a single living person in sight.
There were also invincible scenes of one who controlled Heaven and earth and was revered above all others in a Lifetime.
What made Li Zhi feel the most terrified was the image of himself in a black robe, lying peacefully on a black-canopied boat as it drifted through the All Heavens, when suddenly a sword beam flew from nowhere and shattered both him and the boat.
"Phew!"
Li Zhi instantly came to his senses.
He touched his forehead. It was already drenched in sweat.
Before you continue