Chu Chen searched every inch of the five- to six-hundred-square-meter area around him, but aside from mud and stones, there were only some shrub roots, weeds, and things like beetles. Not only had he failed to find any treasure, he had not even found a single rat.
"Could Zhang Huo Ni have conned me?"
The result left Chu Chen nothing but disappointment. If the treasure had been something else, he would not have taken it so seriously. But Zhang Huo Ni had said that the Imperial Seal was hidden inside, so he could not help but care. Unfortunately, the greater the hope, the greater the disappointment. The more he thought about it, the more unwilling he felt.
"Could the key information really be hidden in those few characters I failed to identify?"
As Chu Chen walked back toward the camp, he pondered this. In the end, however, he felt that the possibility was not very high. Those characters were broken and incomplete, and under normal circumstances, they could not be pieced together into useful information. Of course, it was also possible that Zhang Huo Ni had deliberately made them that way, but that possibility was extremely slight.
Since the problem did not lie with the treasure map, there were only two possibilities. One was that Zhang Huo Ni had placed only a few gold and silver ingots here, and that the Imperial Seal was something he had simply made up. The other was that the treasure map still contained some crucial information he had not found.
Based on what Chu Chen knew about Zhang Huo Ni, both possibilities were highly likely. Since that was the case, Chu Chen would naturally consider the second one first. What clues had he still failed to find?
"Right! I almost forgot about those three