Is This a National Treasure

The two stood up and walked forward carefully, step by step.

Shen Bing held the gun professionally, while Lu Zhe tucked his gun into his shorts and held a large gold bar in his hand.

Shen Bing looked a bit puzzled: "What are you going to do with that?"

"If we encounter any danger, I'll slam it with this gold bar. The impact will be more devastating than a gun, and it saves bullets."

Shen Bing thought about it and found it reasonable. She tried to pick up a gold bar as well, but she couldn't even lift it.

"This thing is so heavy!"

"Yeah!"

With no other choice, she picked up a square black rock nearby instead.

It was heavy too, but still much lighter than the gold bar.

After walking for a distance, they saw that black shadow again!

Was it the dragon guarding the treasure?

Something didn't seem right!

It was lying on the ground, with a head-to-tail length of about 1.7 meters!

If it was a mighty dragon, it would be too small.

Lu Zhe focused his attention and finally saw its true form.

"It's a pangolin!"

Shen Bing raised the rock: "Shall we smash it?"

"Not yet, let's follow it?"

"Follow it for what? To find an old man with a machete to lead us out of here?"

"Let's see where it's going!"

At that moment, the pangolin sensed the danger and crawled out through a hidden stone crevice.

It disappeared!

Lu Zhe and Shen Bing hurried over.

The crevice was not small. Lu Zhe tried to squeeze through, but the rubble shifted as he moved his shoulders, causing the rocks above to rattle.

It seemed quite dangerous!

If they didn't go through the crevice, this would be a dead end.

It was unclear whether the blockage ahead was caused by a landslide or man-made, but it was filled with massive boulders.

Lu Zhe put down the gold bar and tried to move one of the rocks, but quickly gave up.

It wasn't that he couldn't move it, but he was afraid that forcibly moving it might destabilize the pile and cause another collapse.

"Should we return the way we came?"

The two came back to the spot where they initially fell.

Other areas were lower, but the place where they fell was like a hall, slightly higher, about five or six meters tall, with a funnel shape from top to bottom.

Lu Zhe and Shen Bing had fallen through the funnel opening above.

"It's not easy to climb back up!"

"Yeah, it would take some effort. Let's consider this as the last option and check out the other side first."

Lu Zhe and Shen Bing headed in another direction. After a few steps, Lu Zhe stopped.

"What's wrong?"

Lu Zhe frowned and held the lighter closer to the ground: "Look here..."

Shen Bing squatted down and stared for a while, then suddenly gasped in shock and covered her mouth.

There was an imprint on the rock, as if someone had lain there.

"Is this... a corpse?"

"Aren't you a professional?"

"I'm not a coroner, but this..." Shen Bing observed the rock surface.

Due to the passage of time, the body and clothes had completely decomposed, and even the bones had turned to dark soil, leaving only traces imprinted on the stone.

Some areas still had pangolin claw prints.

"This... is someone who buried treasure?"

"Probably, with an eight or nine out of ten chance!"

After a few more steps, they found another body imprint.

"Let's look for more!"

After a careful search, they found imprints of six bodies in this area of less than a thousand square meters.

"Why did they die here? Did they engage in a gunfight?" Shen Bing pondered.

"It doesn't seem like it. If you look closely at their postures before death, with their legs positioned like this, it looks quite graceful, like a lady, not a man's body imprint."

"Yeah, you're right! This one too! But the one in the middle looks like a man."

Suddenly, Shen Bing realized a horrifying possibility: "There are both men and women, and a total of six people..."

Hearing her words, Lu Zhe also felt a chill run down his spine: "Sis, we're both materialists, let's not scare ourselves. That's a bit far-fetched."

"But there are certainly some coincidences."

"Look closely, only those two look like women. The others don't look like it. That one over there looks like a child. We don't have any children with us, do we..."

Shen Bing stared at Lu Zhe blankly:

"Hey, Lu Zhe, although it may be inappropriate to say this, Fruit is about that size!"

"Don't overthink it!"

Lu Zhe pondered: "It is strange, though, whether it's pirates or merchants, there's no need to bring children along when hiding such valuable resources!"

"This is a bit eerie, isn't it?"

"Yeah, it is!" Although Lu Zhe also had some doubts, he decided to lighten the mood: "Hey, what if one of these body imprints is lying face-up? We could perform the 'Great Shift of Yin and Yang' and find a way out."

Shen Bing frowned: "This is no time for jokes!"

Lu Zhe smiled and searched through the soil on a few of the body imprints, then picked up a three-foot-long iron plate.

"What's this?"

"Looks like a blade!"

"Check if it looks like your military dagger!"

Lu Zhe unsheathed his dagger and compared it, but this blade was much wider and had a different shape.

"See, you're just scaring yourself. We're clearly not from the same group as them!"

Shen Bing frowned in thought: "Then who were they?"

Lu Zhe picked up something from the waist area of one of the body imprints. After spitting on it and wiping it clean, it turned out to be an oblong jade pendant.

"Do any of us have something like this?"

Shen Bing shook her head.

Unfortunately, the patterns on the jade pendant were indistinguishable.

But judging from the pure quality of the jade, the person wearing it was unlikely to be an ordinary pirate, but possibly a fleeing nobleman or official.

But what kind of nobleman or official would have so much money?

And why would they bring their entire family and run to this place?

Lu Zhe said: "Do you remember our speculation about the origins of the cattle Haiyan and Yongqiang?"

Shen Bing nodded: "During the Ming Dynasty, someone came to this island to escape and left their domesticated cattle here..."

"There might have been a group of people. These could be..."

Then, Lu Zhe noticed the square stone in Shen Bing's hand.

"That thing is perfectly square!"

"Yeah!"

Lu Zhe took it and saw that it was covered in moss, but the word "jade" came to his mind.

Lu Zhe exclaimed in amazement: "No way!"

"What's wrong?"

"Sis, do you have any water?"

"It's raining, but I didn't bring any. I only have a few empty bottles. What do you need it for?"

Lu Zhe took off his wet vest and used it to wipe away the moss on the surface. Soon, the jade emerged in its original form.

"Is this... an imperial seal?"

Lu Zhe was also secretly astonished. Was this the missing seal?

This was a national treasure!

Sis almost used it to smash the pangolin.

However, Lu Zhe also realized that while they could keep gold and silver, they had no choice but to hand over this item to the state.

But the inscription on the seal was not the expected "Received the Mandate from Heaven, Forever Prosperous!" Instead, it had sixteen characters!

The exact characters couldn't be deciphered until the moss was completely cleaned off.

At that moment, Lu Zhe had a rough idea of who these people were.

"They fled from the north to the south, avoiding pursuit, and instead of heading east, they kept going southeast, possibly drifting all the way here."

"You mean Emperor Jianwen?"

"Most likely him."

"But why would they end up on this island?"

"Maybe he knew that a few hundred years later, on a certain day, there would be five college students and a flight attendant stranded on this deserted island, so he wanted to leave something for us!"