Lu Yuan could not help but frown. Why had the statues been carved like this?
By rights, shouldn't statues display what the deceased had looked like in life?
They should commemorate their glorious achievements for later generations to admire, or something like that. Were all these predecessors of forbidden studies like this?
Unable to make sense of it, Lu Yuan continued onward.
Soon, the first statue came into view.
The statues were set into both sides of the path. The first depicted a man in a coarse linen robe, except his face had not been carved.
He held a cracked clay tablet in both hands, its surface inscribed with vast quantities of profound and obscure text. Yet the writing seemed to have been simplified, making it nearly impossible to discern anything from it.
Lu Yuan examined it more closely and discovered that, aside from these statues, there seemed to be nothing else around him.
Even if something had been carved onto the statues, it offered no useful information. Nor were the deeds or names of these people inscribed upon the stone walls beside them.
The second statue was of a female scholar. She wore a tall high-priest's robe, somewhat like the robes of a church, yet not quite.
The hands protruding from her sleeves had been carved into layers upon layers of overlapping scales, like the claws of a lizard or dragon. It appeared to be connected to some sort of physical mutation.
Her eye sockets had been hollowed into two pitch-black cavities. She had no eyes, and no face.
The third statue was tall and powerfully built. A massive single eye had been deliberately chiseled into its left chest, while its right hand rested upon the stone shortsword at its waist.
Lu Yuan continued onward past the cold stone