Not long after.
With the entire statue completely excavated, Ling Wuyuan stopped digging.
Looking around, the statue's base appeared to be an utterly ordinary square pedestal.
Including the pedestal, the statue stood a little over three meters tall.
Previously, however, only thirty or forty centimeters of the entire statue had been exposed above the silt at the bottom of the lake, and it had been completely wrapped in lakeweed.
Now, after carefully examining the statue's overall form, Ling Wuyuan could only say that the thing looked very ordinary.
Ordinary in the literal sense.
At the very least, he could not appreciate any artistic beauty in it.
Next, he reached out and rhythmically twisted and pulled several hidden movable latches along the edge of the pedestal. Soon, as the mechanism inside activated, a concealed door within the base automatically sprang open, revealing a black metal box before Ling Wuyuan's eyes.
The box was not large. It was rectangular, roughly twenty-five centimeters long, fifteen centimeters wide, and ten centimeters high.
Its surface was covered in many exquisite patterns.
Even without knowing what those patterns meant, anyone who saw them could instinctively tell that this thing was extremely precious.
With blazing eyes, Ling Wuyuan reached out with both hands, picked it up, and weighed it. He could tell with perfect clarity that it weighed at least a hundred jin. Normally, even if a metal box of this size were solid, it would weigh at most a few dozen jin.
Then, without any hesitation, he casually kicked the automatically opened hidden door in the pedestal shut again. After that, he gave the statue another kick. The force of dozens of tons sent the entire statue crashing down on the spot, and the lakebed silt stirred up by its fall naturally buried the toppled metal