Chapter 1384 — Each Takes What He Needs
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
The stone doors here had no codes and could be opened directly - but Old Yu, forever fearing some mishap, would naturally not open the stone door himself.
Lao Hei opened the stone door with some irritation. Nothing strange happened at all, which let everyone breathe a sigh of relief.
The vault was large, but there was very little inside it - only a single display rack, on which a few bronze and porcelain pieces were sparsely set. Yet the things inside made both Lao Hei's and Yu Xiao Ke's eyes light up at once!
Lao Hei hurried over. Looking at the objects on the rack, his face showed greed and astonishment. To a knowing eye like his, their worth could be judged at a glance: every single one was a treasure worth a fortune.
"This bronze medicine cauldron must be a product of the Spring and Autumn period..." Lao Hei clicked his tongue in wonder at the cauldron on the rack. "And it should be an article for the royal house's own use in those days - there are markings here..."
"I only want money!" Yu Xiao Ke looked over the things on the rack. Fine things, to be sure, rarely seen anywhere - but to her they were of no use at all!
"You won't take even one of these?" Lao Hei frowned. There was a great deal here - far more than he could ever carry away alone - and now that they were inside the tomb, with no notion of how to get back out, taking too much would only make walking harder; besides, porcelain shattered easily. It was the very picture of biting off more than one could chew. So Lao Hei meant to take only a few things that were easy to carry. That medicine cauldron alone was a priceless antique - properly handled, it could easily fetch over a hundred million at auction.
"If I took them, I'd have no way to sell them off." Yu Xiao Ke shrugged.
"Fine. The one-tenth I promised you before won't be a coin short." Lao Hei mused for a moment and decided not to go back on his word. That Male Thief was no good sort, and Yu Xiao Ke had been of great use along the way; so it cost him nothing to give her a tenth of the take. The key question was this: now that they had entered the ancient tomb, how were they to get out?
Going back the way they had come was plainly unrealistic. Never mind that the floor above had already sealed shut - even if it had not, climbing up would still be next to impossible. The whole passage was a giant "S," its stone walls so smooth you could have used them for a slide; when they had fallen earlier, the walls had offered no sense of obstruction whatsoever. This was a place, in short, where going down was easy and going up was hard, unless one had something like suction cups to climb with. But if the winding route did not pull a body down naturally by gravity, how long would one have to climb to reach the top?
Lao Hei was no fool. He picked up only that bronze medicine cauldron, along with a few bronze vessels for boiling and storing medicine, and stowed them in the pack on his back. He did not touch anything else.