bookbashuk Chapter 92 The Lu Family's Old Lock, Blood Relatives Suppressed at the Bottom of the Coffin
Chapter 92 The Lu Family's Old Lock, Blood Relatives Suppressed at the Bottom of the Coffin
The sound of water could still be heard through the cracks in the bricks.
Lu Yuan stood in front of the black wooden coffin, his gaze falling on the pale blue hand.
The old red rope had faded, but the small brass lock hanging below was spotless. The two characters "Lu Family" on the lock were carved with great skill, as if they had been painstakingly chiseled in.
An old grudge resurfaced in his mind.
In the Lu family, all male direct blood relatives would have a longevity lock made when they reached the full moon of their baby's birth. He had one, and his younger sister, Lu Qingxue, had one too. The design of this lock could not be imitated from outsiders, and the baby's hair was hidden inside the clasp.
The person lying in the coffin was a member of the Lu family.
Lu Yuan reached out and placed his fingertips on that wrist.
There was no pulse, only a wisp of life hanging in the air. This life force flowed stiffly and sluggishly through his meridians, yet it had a subtle connection to the blood in his body.
Blood ties cannot be faked.
He turned his head and looked at Tao Xuan, who was nailed to the corner of the coffin.
"Where did this lock come from?"
Tao Xuan's sleeve was pierced by a short knife, and half of his body was leaning against the coffin, trembling with pain. He looked at Lu Yuan's face, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down twice.
"This...this happened more than twenty years ago. Someone brought him here."
"who."
"I don't recognize them! They were wearing masks and only said it was the will of a big shot in the province. They said the Lu family of Jiangnan has the deepest bloodline, and their birth charts are full of evil, so they're perfect for filling this water hole."
Lu Yuan gave a short laugh.
He cultivated immortality for nine thousand years, sweeping across the ages, and had seen all sorts of despicable things. Using living people to fill the eye of an array, pulling out tendons and bones to extract evil energy—only lowly, evil cultivators would do such things.
These supposedly righteous sects, the Heavenly Surveillance Bureau, and the well guardians on Earth, while spouting rules, secretly engage in deeds even more despicable than those of demonic cultivators.
He slapped her across the face with his backhand.
The force of the energy struck Tao Xuan's face from a distance.
Tao Xuan's face collapsed halfway into the wall, and several old teeth mixed with black blood splattered onto the bluestone wall. He didn't even have time to scream before collapsing like a limp rag, with only his chest rising and falling weakly.
Jiang Huichun, kneeling in the mud beside him, felt a chill run down her spine.
She considered herself a ruthless person, willing to drag half the city down with her to overturn a case. But when this young man struck, he showed not a trace of human emotion. Breaking a well keeper's bones was no different than crushing a dead branch.
"What are you standing there for?" Lu Yuan glanced at her. "The pump upstairs hasn't stopped yet."
Jiang Huichun suddenly came to her senses.
She frantically pulled out a spare walkie-talkie from her pocket and pressed the call button.
"Zhou! Stop the pump! Stop it immediately!"
There was static on the other end of the walkie-talkie. After two seconds, Zhou's furious roar came through.
"It can't be stopped! People from outside have arrived! The provincial officials have removed the security cordon from the Natural Resources Bureau, and Shen Qingci has been disarmed! They've taken over the pumping station!"
Jiang Huichun's face turned pale instantly.
"What did you say?!"
"They're going to blow up the well and the factory together! They say it's an order from above, to seal it off completely!"
Two gunshots rang out over the walkie-talkie, followed by the sound of a heavy object falling to the ground, and communication was completely cut off.
The water seeping from the top of the stone chamber was getting faster and faster, and the sewage, which smelled of rust, was poured down on them.
Jiang Huichun's hand trembled, and the walkie-talkie fell into the muddy water.
"It's over... those lunatics from the provincial bureau have gotten involved. They don't care about the fate of the old city district; they just want to completely wipe Gu Ku's name off."
She looked up at Lu Yuan with a face full of despair.
"It's too late. Once the explosives detonate, the well gas will rush back in, and we'll all die here."
Lu Yuan ignored her.
He gripped the edge of the black wooden coffin with one hand, applying force with his five fingers.
"Bang!"
He forcefully ripped the entire heavy wooden cover off, sending it crashing heavily into the bluestone wall behind him, scattering wood fragments everywhere.
The contents of the coffin were now fully revealed.
Inside lay a man who was as thin as a rake. He was naked, skin and bones, and his limbs were driven into the bottom of the coffin by eight thick black iron nails.
The man's chest was covered in blood-stained symbols, and most alarmingly, a bronze nail half a foot long was stuck in the back of his neck.
That copper nail is the well-suppressing nail.
The flesh around the nail had long since died, and the black well gas continuously drew life force from the man through the nail, then fed back to the underground water vein.
The man's eyes were closed, his withered lips parted slightly, and he was exhaling more than inhaling.
Lu Yuan stared at that face.
His features were very defined, and there was a hint of familiarity in his eyes and brows.
He quickly went through the Lu family genealogy in his mind. When his mother brought him to Jiangnan to seek refuge, she rarely mentioned the main family in Yanjing, only saying that he had an uncle who disappeared when he was a teenager.
The age and bone structure match perfectly.
He used his uncle as the key figure in the formation for twenty years.
The chill in Lu Yuan's eyes materialized completely. The surrounding moisture instantly froze into ice beads, which rained down on the ground.
He raised his hand, and a ball of golden spiritual fire ignited in his palm.
The spiritual fire split into eight lines of fire, which landed precisely on the black iron nails on the man's limbs.
The steel nails couldn't withstand the spiritual fire for even a second, turning directly into molten iron that flowed down.
Lu Yuan reached out and supported the man's back, lifting him up from the bottom of the coffin.
The man's emaciated body had no weight that a living person should have.
"The well-suppressing nail," Jiang Huichun warned in a trembling voice, "That nail can't be pulled out! It's connected to the earth's veins; pulling it out will cause the well to explode!"
Lu Yuan gripped the blackened bronze nail with his five fingers.
"My family doesn't need to be a door latch for this dilapidated place."
He exerted force with his arm and pulled outwards.
"puff!"
A stream of foul-smelling black blood spurted from the back of the man's neck.
Immediately afterwards, the entire stone chamber began to shake violently. Large cracks appeared in the floor tiles, and a deafening roar came from deep underground.
The suppressed yin energy of the earth veins, which had been suppressed for twenty years, transformed into a visible black storm, surging wildly upwards through the hole at the bottom of the coffin.
Jiang Huichun was thrown to the ground by the shockwave and rolled several times before crashing into the wall.
She closed her eyes in despair.
The earth's eye has opened. Forget the explosives above; just the sheer amount of energy surging out from the ground will turn the entire old town into a ghost town tonight.
"It's so noisy."
Lu Yuan turned around and stood in front of the man.
He stomped heavily on the cracked bluestone floor with one foot.
His peak Golden Core cultivation was unleashed without reservation. The raging golden spiritual energy transformed into an invisible giant hand, slamming down on the hole spewing out black gas.
The two forces collided.
There was no stalemate.
The black energy couldn't withstand it for even a second and was directly slammed back into the ground by the golden light.
The cracked floor tiles were filled with golden light, and the vibrations stopped abruptly.
The only sound in the entire stone chamber was Lu Yuan's steady breathing.
Jiang Huichun opened her eyes and stood there dumbfounded.
She had planned for ten years, poring over countless ancient texts, regarding the Earth Eye as an invincible natural disaster. But the person before her had crushed that natural disaster back into the mud with a single step.
Lu Yuan casually tossed the well-suppressing nail stained with black blood in front of her.
"Take it."
Jiang Huichun stared blankly at the bronze nails on the ground.
"This...is for me?"
"Weren't you going to use it to save someone?" Lu Yuan took off his coat and wrapped it around the man. "Take the nails, go upstairs and tell Shen Qingci to clean the outside and wait for me."
Jiang Huichun grabbed the nail, kowtowed three times, and scrambled into the secret passage.
Lu Yuan turned his head and looked at Tao Xuan, who was half-dead on the ground.
"You just said that the person who brought him here back then was a big shot in the province."
Tao Xuan's mouth was full of blood and foam as he nodded frantically.
Lu Yuan lifted the man's body with one hand and grabbed Tao Xuan's collar with the other.
"The people from the province are up there right now. Perfect, I'll ask them in person."
He pushed off with his foot.
A large hole was smashed through the top of the stone chamber, and the two of them transformed into a streak of light, rushing straight up the well.