Throwing a piece of burning wood into the secret passage, Todd, who had just escaped from death, opened the underground door with an iron ring. After confirming that there was enough oxygen in the cellar, he stepped on the wooden steps to the bottom.
After lighting the oilcloth-soaked torch on the wall, Todd first looked around.
The cellar is not big, just five meters square. The stone walls on all sides are smeared with mortar and simply reinforced with wood. There are also original ventilation ducts on the top wall. Such a large space has been dug out of such a hard limestone layer underground.
, and made such a careful arrangement, it is obvious that the people who originally dug this place must have spent a lot of effort.
But the things stored in the cellar made Todd a little disappointed.
Cabbage, carrots, lettuce, chickpeas, garlic and a bag of wheat flour.
After rummaging through the vegetables and finding nothing, he set his sights on the remaining bag of wheat flour.
Such a time-consuming project should not be simply to store a bunch of vegetables, otherwise it would not be directly exterminated after being discovered.
With difficulty, he opened the bag and thrust his hands inside. Todd touched a hard object. He grabbed the corners with both hands and pulled it up several times. The object buried in the wheat flour did not move at all.
This thing is really heavy.
Lay the bag down, and then use your hands to scoop out the wheat flour in the bag. The true contents are finally revealed, a small wooden box 40 centimeters long and 20 centimeters wide. Wipe off the remaining wheat flour on the wooden box.
A tiny keyhole appeared in front of his eyes.
Todd, who was looking at the keyhole in a daze, sat cross-legged and thought about it for a while, and suddenly thought of a possibility.
Climb up the wooden steps to the ground of the hut again.
Todd gritted his teeth and looked at the two corpses on the ground.
The key to the wooden box is most likely on their person.
He had done things like touching and even dissecting corpses in his previous life, but those were purely academic research tasks. Now that he had to reach out to the humans he had indirectly killed, he still felt a little reluctant in his heart.
After a mental battle, Todd's curiosity finally got the better of him.
He stretched his hand as far as possible, tilted his head back, and after groping for a long time on the victim's body, he finally found the key to an iron ring on the hunchbacked man's waist.
Returning to the cellar again, under the light of the torch, I turned over the keys one by one, and finally saw one that was about the same size as the keyhole.
Todd gently inserted the key into the keyhole, turned it clockwise, and heard a soft click inside the lock, and the lock opened.
Looking inside, he finally understood why the wooden box was so heavy.
It turned out that not only were buffer sandbags stacked inside, but also a cylindrical black box made of lead blocks was placed. The box was divided into upper and lower parts, which were tightly fitted together. No keyholes could be seen. Only sixteen copper boxes were installed on the front.
A six-sided roller is made, each side of the roller has a letter, and each of the sixteen rollers is different.
"C, r, h, d are English letters? There are English letters in this world too?... Look at this arrangement... Is it an anagram lock?"
In his previous life, Todd had seen similar objects in a museum. There was a letter on each side of each roller. It could only be opened by rolling to the correct position to form a password.
This kind of letter lock seems extremely complicated to ordinary people, but it is actually regular.
For example, E, T, I, O, A, and N are the most commonly used letters with the highest frequency of occurrence; the splicing of syllables and the composition of vowels and consonants are also traceable.
But there is a premise: the answer to unlocking the door cannot be a meaningless patchwork of letters.
In the previous life, the soul called Xia Shang was often immersed in academic research and forgot about time. In Todd, this characteristic has been vividly reflected.
Unknowingly, the stone walls on all sides have been filled with charcoal letters and combinations of letters, and Todd has basically confirmed several characteristics of the answer: first, the answer is a sentence, or maybe a combination of words; second, from
Judging from the letters and arrangement, the text of the answer belongs to Latin.
"casc...no, nascen...sixteen letters, this arrangement is so familiar..." A sentence popped up in Todd's mind: "'Nascentes_morimur'...'Live to die', a Latin proverb, but
What does this sentence marked here mean?”
After adjusting the roller to the correct position, the upper half of the solid lead column moved a few millimeters and cracked a thin crack.
He moved the upper part with both hands, and a shiny copper pipe ten centimeters long and as thick as a thumb appeared in front of him.
After breaking through all the obstacles, Todd carefully took out the "final result".
I got it and examined it carefully in the light. I found that the copper pipe was very light and had almost no weight. The material of the cylinder should be polished by hand and the workmanship was extremely fine. Under the light of the fire, a faint relief could be seen.
"Once people meet the lowest level of survival needs, curiosity will become the most terrifying thing in the world."
This kind of curiosity can even make the soul in this body ignore the safety rules that were often mentioned during scientific research work in the previous life.
The first and most critical one: treat all unknown things with a cautious and conservative attitude under any circumstances.
With a click, the cover on top of the copper tube was opened, and Todd looked into the inside of the copper tube.
A burst of gray-white smoke was released from inside, hitting his unprotected eyes.
"Ah! Ah!!!"
A burning sensation like a flame "burns" from the cornea of the eyeball along the optic nerve into the brain.
Throwing away the copper pipe in his hand, Todd covered his eyes and wiped them hard, but it did not relieve the burning pain in his head. It felt like his whole head had been put into a furnace with a temperature of several thousand degrees.
After being burned, it was placed on an anvil and struck repeatedly with a giant hammer.
He hit his head hard against the stone wall, his forehead was cracked one after another, and blood dripped down his cheeks to the ground, but it did not relieve the pain in his head at all.
His hands kept groping on the ground, but his body tripped over debris and fell to the ground. Todd's hands reached forward randomly and he accidentally grabbed a few garlic cloves. He crushed them subconsciously and rubbed his eyes.
The sour and spicy pain caused by the garlic clove juice brought a new source of pain to his eyes, but it diluted the pain in his brain.
In order to relieve the severe pain in his head, Todd groped for more garlic from the ground, crushed the garlic cloves, dripped the garlic juice into his eyes, and stuffed the garlic paste into his mouth.
He didn't know how long this action lasted. His whole body was on fire and he lost consciousness. He lay on the ground and closed his eyes.
When Todd woke up again, his vision was dark and his body had lost all ability to move. He felt someone moving his hands and feet in a daze.