Chapter 702: 702
Xia Lei’s left eye went to the sound as soon as he heard it . His eye saw through the grass, and saw the thing in the grass . He couldn’t help laughing to himself — what had been hidden in the grass was not a person but a snake .
It was a false alarm .
Xia Lei moved forward, going around the area with the snake . He came to the foot of the mountain about ten minutes later and finally saw that tombstone . It was hidden in the grass, and only half of it was left . The thick grass had covered it up, and the broken surface was covered with bird droppings . The part which had broken off had fallen in the grass to one side of it, and faint markings of a cross could be seen on it . The stone had moss crawling all over it, and people had carved graffiti in Italian on the surface of the stone — Alice was here, I love Leonardo, Peter is an idiot .
It seemed Italians liked to do these sort of things too .
These bit of vandalism also proved one thing, and that was that this place was remote, but people still came here . The tombstone might even have been broken because of these visitors .
A mound of dirt lay behind the tombstone . It wasn’t very high, perhaps up to a person’s knee . The mound was covered in wild grass, and bird nests of birds which nested on the ground . There was nothing special about this place other than these things . The initial impression was that this was just a normal grave . No noble was buried here, and it was most likely someone who had been a carpenter, a butcher, a farmer, or someone completely ordinary .
But Xia Lei grew excited when he first saw this ordinary-looking grave . It looked almost 90% similar to what had been painted .
Hundreds of years had passed, and this grave had had a big change, but the mountain and the river opposite matched the painting exactly . If he took the cross on the tombstone into consideration, the matching percentage increased further .
‘The map which da Vinci had left on the canvas was fairly complicated . It was like a maze . The entrance to that was below this tombstone . It looks like I really have to dig up a grave . I’ll have to take a look underground before I start on that,’ thought Xia Lei . His left eye twitched after he thought that, and activated his X-ray vision .
The dirt slowly disappeared from his vision, and when he was about 1 . 5 metres in, a large marble slab blocked his X-ray vision . He tried to see through it, but alas, he could go no further than halfway through it . 1 . 5 metres of dirt and partway through a marble slab was the limit of his X-ray vision .
Everything had its limits, and his X-ray vision was no exception . If he had no limits, he would have been able to see what was happening on the other end of the world, or even see the surfaces of planets far away . This was an impossible thing .
He did not manage to see further, but that marble slab was a clue in itself . There had not been a coffin but a large marble slab . This was obviously a fake grave, and its secret lay below that marble slab .
Xia Lei looked around himself . It was quiet . He did not see anyone else around either . This situation suited him perfectly . He removed his backpack from his shoulders and took out a shovel to start digging .
The grave dirt was very soft, and loose . It was not difficult for him to dig at all . He dug and he dug, and the pit before him grew deeper and deeper . The pile of dirt behind him grew taller and taller .
One hour later, the buried marble slab was exposed to the air . It was much larger than the pit he had dug . He used his X-ray vision on the area around it, and quickly discovered that this marble slab was like a door which had been placed in the dirt . What made his heart sink a little, was that this marble slab was startlingly thick . He would not be able to see through this slab even if he stood on it and tried his best to see through it with his X-ray vision .
He estimated that this marble slab was at least a metre thick, and was over a hundred tons in weight!
This conclusion surprised himself . There had been no tools for the people of hundreds of years ago to move a marble slab over a hundred tons to this place, but here it was . Unbelievable .
‘Damn it . How am I to go down with such a big marble slab in my way?” Xia Lei was perplexed .
The simplest way was to blast it with explosives but the quake from the explosion was a bad thing . It would attract the attention of the town’s residents, and also bring the police . However, if he did not use explosives, there was no way for him to move it aside even if he was the strongest man on Earth .
Was this a dead end?
Xia Lei frowned . His gaze went to the marble slab again . The white corner of something sticking out of the dirt caught his eye, and he squatted to wipe away dirt with his hand .
Hidden in the dirt was a round ball carved out of white jade, about the size of a basketball . Half the ball was embedded in the marble slab, and he saw a pit below it when he lifted it . There was a gear in the pit . The gear was made out of bronze, but the strange thing was that the gear teeth were not a normal ones, but in the shape of letters .
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