(No one's giving me monthly votes or tips. Hard to feel motivated to put out extra chapters!)
He had the three of them help pull the object up from underwater. A black Buddha statue, long since covered in algae and shells, slowly broke the surface.
"How could it be this thing?" The three were astonished. They even wondered whether Tang Changsheng had searched in the wrong place.
Never in their wildest dreams had they expected the treasure to be a Buddha statue sunk beneath the water. Its style was nothing like those of the Central Land; it clearly resembled the statues found around the Southern Seas.
Outside Chinese Settlement, things like it were everywhere. What was so special about it?
But Tang Changsheng reached behind the statue and pulled out two pearls.
The wicked Daoist took one look and cried, "A Thick Earth Pearl, and the other's a Sharp Metal Pearl... These were placed inside the statue... Could all Five Elements be present? Are there five precious pearls?"
A hazy realization dawned on him: the Wind-Settling Pearl he had obtained earlier must have fallen from this statue.
Tang Changsheng smiled faintly and pocketed both pearls under everyone's envious gaze before saying, "Three-Course Dam was originally the site of a Water Eye. Back when shipping was busy on this river, boats often capsized in its whirlpool. Later, a Founding Patriarch of our General's Temple sank a Buddha statue here to suppress it..."
Naturally, he would not mention that the statue had belonged to a major local Southern Buddhist temple. That temple had suffered a crushing defeat under the combined assault of the General's Temple and the City God Underworld Office, and had been driven out of Lower River altogether.
Even its temple-protecting Treasured Artifact, the Heavenly King Pagoda, had fallen into