When Qin Tiexin stopped, Nangong Yao had already taken a few steps. She noticed the movement behind her and turned around.
"What's wrong?"
Qin Tiexin did not answer immediately. He stood in place, maintaining the state of [Spirit Material Sense], looking towards the area on the left that was covered by boulders and vines.
"There's something over there," he said.
Nangong Yao followed his gaze and saw nothing unusual. But she did not question it directly, she just asked, "What is it?"
"Not sure, maybe it's a fragment of Law Artifact." Qin Tiexin said that this matter was not hidden from them, but the matter of [Spirit Material Sense] was too mysterious to be discussed with others. It could only be classified as a special talent of a weapon refiner to sense spiritual materials.
Li Yun also stopped and glanced back and forth between Qin Tiexin and the area. She did not ask how Qin Tiexin noticed it - everyone has some way of not wanting to say more, and it would be inappropriate to ask too detailed a question.
Nangong Yao didn't ask any more questions. She had been with Qin Tiexin for so long, and knew that this junior brother was not a random person. Since he said it was, there was a high probability that it was.
"Let's go and take a look." she said.
Qin Tiexin led the two of them through a low bush, around several boulders covered with vines, and came to the location corresponding to the metal aura. The ground here was lower than the surroundings, and the snow was thick. The surface looked smooth, and no abnormalities could be seen.
Qin Tiexin squatted down and swept away the snow on the surface with his hands, revealing the gray-brown frozen soil below.
He did not take out tools. He inserted his hands into the frozen soil and used force to lift it - Body Tempering Ninth Layer's physical strength, even with bare hands, was enough to deal with this level of frozen soil.
There was a click. The frozen soil layer as hard as stone slabs was directly scratched by him and broken into several large pieces. He dug several times in succession, and the frozen soil and gravel were thrown aside piece by piece, and he soon dug a pit about three feet deep.
Nangong Yao stood by the pit, looked over and took a look. "There is really something."
A dark blue metal piece was exposed at the bottom of the pit. Qin Tiexin stretched out his hand to grab the edge and lifted it hard - it was a flying sword broken into two pieces.
The sword body was rusty and covered with a thick oxide layer, and its spirituality had been completely lost. Qin Tiexin put the two broken swords together and looked at the material carefully. The metal at the fracture showed a uniform dark silver color. Although the aura had dissipated, its texture was still dense and hard.
"Moonlight Copper." He whispered.
And it's not an ordinary content of Moonlight Copper. According to the overall material ratio of the sword body, the content of Moonlight Copper in this sword is at least 70% - Upper-Grade Law Artifact.
This sword has been buried here for at least a hundred years.
Qin Tiexin did not put the sword away, but continued to dig deeper. Since Spirit Material Sense was pointing to this sword, and the sword was buried so deep, there might be more than one sword underneath.
He dug about half a foot more, and his fingertips touched something soft.
He carefully pushed aside the surrounding soil with his fingers, revealing a piece of broken cloth - dark brown, thick texture, with vague lines embroidered on it, and the original color could no longer be seen. The edges of the cloth were uneven, mostly rotted, and it fell apart at the slightest touch.
Qin Tiexin slowed down and continued to expand the scope of the excavation. Soon, under the broken piece of cloth, he touched a smaller object - a Storage Bag.
But it was completely damaged. The Spirit Rune bag body was basically broken, the fabric was rotted in many places, and the space inside had long since collapsed. Qin Tiexin carefully lifted it up and weighed it, and several small hard objects slipped out from the damaged areas.
The broken Lower-Grade Spirit Stone. There are also some pill residues that are black in color and cannot be identified.
He put these things away and continued digging.
I dug about two more inches.
His fingers touched something hard that was completely different from soil and gravel - the surface was smooth, slightly curved, and the texture was extremely hard, with a cold touch. But the touch was not Shitou, nor wood. Qin Tiexin slowed down his movements and pushed away the surrounding soil and gravel bit by bit.
A pale skeleton appeared in front of him.
He paused for a moment, and then continued digging. First the hand bones, then the wrist bones, and then the entire forearm - Qin Tiexin followed the direction of the bones and cleared away the surrounding frozen soil piece by piece. When the entire skeleton was completely exposed in the pit, he stopped what he was doing and squatted there to look at it for a long time.
His bones were thick and his shoulders were obviously wider than ordinary people. He should have been an adult male with a very strong body. There were two deep cuts on the left side of the ribs, which were claw strikes. The laceration wounds almost completely cut off half of the ribs. There was a fist-sized hole on the side of the skull with uneven edges, which was a fatal injury caused by knocks from the outside.
It has been buried here for at least a hundred years. There is no coffin, no tombstone, and no clothing - the cloth has long since rotted away, leaving only a few fragments. It was buried hastily in the frozen soil less than a hundred feet away from the edge of the forest, without even a mark to prove its identity.
Qin Tiexin was silent for a moment and continued to clean up. He dug out all the frozen soil around the skeleton to fully expose the entire skeleton, and then carefully took it out section by section. From the hand bones, arm bones, leg bones, to the pelvis, ribs, and finally the skull. He took out a spare piece of cloth and placed the bones neatly on it.
After doing all this, he squatted down and searched the soil at the bottom of the pit carefully. After confirming that nothing was missing, he found a bronze medal at the waist of the skeleton.
The bronze medal is about the size of a palm, and has been oxidized and turned green, but the writing on it is still legible. The four characters "Great Yan Sect Chen" are engraved on the front, and there are several inscriptions on the back, but after hundreds of years of corrosion, they have become blurred and cannot be read.
Nangong Yao came over, squatted by the pit, took the bronze medal from Qin Tiexin, and looked at it over and over.
"Great Yan Sect..." she whispered, as if she was recalling something, "One hundred and thirty years ago, there was a small sect who came to Wind and Snow Pass for duty, and it was called Great Yan Sect. Among that group of people at that time, almost all the elite disciples died in Devil Domain Forest."
She paused and handed the bronze medal back to Qin Tiexin: "I heard that it was an attack and encountered a Devil Marshal. After the war, less than 20% came back alive, and the sect later dispersed."
Qin Tiexin took the bronze medal and put it together with the skeleton. Then he organized the high-grade magic sword that was broken into two pieces and the remains of Storage Bag, wrapped them in cloth, and put them in the storage ring.
The sword was useless. After returning to the customs, he wanted to try melting the sword to see if he could purify it into Moonlight Copper and reuse it. This kind of spiritual material was rare.
As for the rest, he took the bones and the bronze medal back to the pass and sent them to the registration office to see if he could find this person's descendants, or at least, leave his name in the sect's records.
He stood up and patted the dirt on his hands.
"Let's go."
The three of them continued traveling north.