The Informal Tomb Raiding Diary: She is the occupant of the tomb!-Chapter 76: The Compass Requires a Blood Bond
I still have the Undead Heart, so I asked him if he had any strange encounters, like falling off a cliff and learning some Divine Skill or something.
Chen Qinghan was speechless, he likes to play deaf and dumb when he doesn’t want to talk to me.
"You can’t be passively resisting, this is very important, that... Nightmare, uh... that’s her name, that’s what it translates to. She can’t control you, what does that mean? It means—"
"Do you remember her?"
"Uh-huh... yeah, suddenly I just knew her name! It’s magical~"
"What about the others?"
"She has an ability to trap people in nightmares, repeating a dream, unable to escape. That killer might be trapped in a dream of killing, repeating the act."
The bodies in the mist don’t decay, those alive but trapped in the mist don’t grow old. It’s less a mist and more an independent space that ’opens’ only at certain times and conditions.
If that’s the case, then the Nightmare should be much like me, imprisoned for all these years.
The prison of our clan is quite unique...
"Is there anything else?" Chen Qinghan’s tone didn’t change, but I just knew what he wanted to ask.
"A compass~ a compass." I thought about the image of a compass in my mind, and information about it started flooding out, like using a search engine.
Space, time, direction, I whispered to myself, pulling out the information we needed from a pile of search results.
"Oh, oh, oh, got it, I know how to use it!" I took out the compass, pricked my fingertip with a dagger, and dotted each of the nine grids.
Buzz...
The compass emitted a buzzing sound like a phone vibrating, and then nine symbols lit up on the nine grids.
"Look, look, it lit up!" Like a child discovering a new toy, I showed the lighted compass to Chen Qinghan.
Chen Qinghan was driving, took a quick glance, his expression unchanged, unlike my excitement.
Maybe after being disappointed for so long, it’s hard for him to truly be happy without seeing results.
I hurriedly continued researching the compass, hoping to quickly understand how to use it.
Calming down and pondering for a while, I suddenly froze, "That island you mentioned, do you suspect it’s not in this world?"
Recalling the true purpose of the compass, I became unsettled. No wonder earlier when I mentioned remembering the island’s features, Chen Qinghan had a flat reaction, neither excited nor happy.
He might have already known that using existing technology wouldn’t find the island, after all his efforts over the years, trying countless methods. What I could think of, he probably already tried.
"There hasn’t been a word from little sis over these years, so I investigated the others in the video. After they went to sea three years ago, they never came back. One friend’s friend said that shortly after his friend went missing, his family received a parcel, with only the recipient address, no sender."
Chen Qinghan never told me the origin of the compass, seems like he plans to tell me now.
"Inside the parcel was this compass. The parents wanted to use it to find their missing son, but no one knew what it was. They asked many people, all ended up in failure."
Even so, the parents couldn’t bear to throw it away because they believed it was the only clue to find their son, just no one knew how to find it at the moment.
Later, this thing landed in Chen Qinghan’s hands. He knew there were murals about it in the Heavenly Maiden Tomb and knew it was a compass-like thing, but didn’t know how to use it.
He tried numerous methods but couldn’t get it to work, never tried a blood identification method.
A normal train of thought wouldn’t consider ’starting’ with a blood drop possibility, even if thought of, couldn’t possibly succeed.
So I became more certain of my earlier guess, the compass could only be activated by the DNA of our clan.
If my guess was right, then how did Chen Qinghan’s sister get on the island? Two possibilities: one is she was brought there by an ’old acquaintance’ of mine; the other is that there was a descendant with our bloodline in that team.
I looked at Chen Qinghan again, with a vague suspicion in my heart, staring at his hair for a long time, thinking about how to pick a strand for a DNA test.
"Your thinking is a bit scattered, that’s impossible." Chen Qinghan suddenly spoke.
"Hmm? I didn’t say anything."
"You thought, I’m not a descendant of the Heavenly Maiden Clan, neither is my sister."
"How are you sure you’re not? Maybe eighteen generations up, there is one!"
"In the Heavenly Maiden Tomb murals, there’s almost no content on daily living. Can you imagine a people without any signs of life?"
Chen Qinghan’s rhetorical question seemed unrelated to the topic at hand, but I still pondered for a moment before saying, "Maybe life isn’t important to her, to us. Maybe no one needs to eat or drink or get sick, then there’s no need for farming or hunting."
"Traveling the seas, wars, death, those are the main themes of the Heavenly Maiden Tomb murals. What do you think the focus of your life is?"
"...World domination?" I replied uncertainly.
Chen Qinghan paused for a moment, then said, "You had space technology thousands of years ago, if you wanted world domination, you’d have succeeded long ago."
I replied indifferently, "Even the mightiest dam can be destroyed by an ant hole, maybe internal strife, fighting too fiercely, missed the chance for world domination."
Chen Qinghan didn’t argue with me; he didn’t seem like he believed my nonsense either.
My memory now is like a search engine; without inputting keywords, results won’t come out on their own.
Still need to see the actual thing... I pondered privately, maybe upon finding that island, I could gain more memory keywords.
"No, need to be out at sea to locate, how about we head to the seaside right away!" I wanted to test the compass’s function immediately, but Chen Qinghan refused.
He said we need to finish the tasks assigned by the organization first, finding the sister after all has a personal element, so it should be postponed later.
Although he appeared particularly calm on the surface, yet during our breaks, he asked me how to use the compass and even tried dripping his blood, but unfortunately, his blood couldn’t activate the compass.
This meant he wasn’t a descendant of our clan, and the compass was useless in others’ hands, meaning even if he commissioned someone to set out immediately to find someone, they couldn’t use the compass to navigate. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖
"We finish the work quickly, then can return early. Maybe that place is like the mist, time is static, the people trapped on the island, she..." Speaking halfway, a flash of light crossed my mind, but it was too quick, I didn’t catch it in time.
"Thank you, actually I’m mentally prepared for anything." Chen Qinghan’s tone carried a hint of reassurance.
I, trying to comfort him, ended up being comforted instead.
