Chapter 32 – Lawful Sound – Northern School Tomb Raider’s Notes

“Dead is dead!” As soon as I touched the two holey eyes I knew that the orb was encased in a skull.

A mole blushed slightly, but she reacted better than I did.

She braced herself and said, “Yun Feng you’re a big man, thanks to you being a tomb raider, what are the skeletons afraid of! If Lao Er was here, he would still dare to kiss this thing.”

“Get up! I’ll do it!” She frowned slightly and went straight for it.

Since the orb had already been smashed through a large crack by me before, this time she didn’t have to make much of an effort to straighten it out with a few strokes of a rock.

This time it looked real, and I was right in my earlier guess that the orb did indeed encase a dead man’s skull.

Parts of the skull were weathered, and what made it strange was that there were some gilt layers on the surface of the skull, which were staggered and looked less like writing and more like some kind of patterned symbols.

I’ve heard of copper gilt, silver gilt, hairpin thin gold, misplaced gold and silver, gold and silver ring wire, etc. in ancient crafts, but I’ve never heard of this kind of gilding being used on a dead person’s skull.

The ring of gilt layers around the skull’s eye sockets is golden, and the style is quite eerie when paired with the solid black skull. .??…

A mole frowned, “I’ve seen something similar when I was helping a Chengde gang with logistics in the early years, but it wasn’t a skull, it was a small section of a human finger bone, and the head handler in that gang at the time told me that it was from the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods.”

She looked up at those trapezoidal bronzes on the roof of the cave and said, “Yunfeng you can be accurate, there must be dozens of these things under a rough look, you smash one down, let’s study it and see.”

“Uh-huh,” I nodded in agreement.

At this height, I couldn’t even reach it by jumping up, so I did it the old-fashioned way, with a rock, and I deliberately picked a bigger rock.

“Bang!”

I hit it on the first stroke, and the stone and the bronze hit together with a long, crisp thud that echoed.

Hearing this sound, I have agreed in my heart with a mole’s previous guess that this row of trapezoidal bronzes, ninety percent is the chimes.

“Two more handfuls,” a mole looked up.

“Bang!” This last one hit solidly.

>Poof, the chimes fell into the river, a mole had been prepared for this, and she fished the thing out in less than a minute.

We both studied it after we fished it out.

This bronze vessel is narrow at the top and wide at the bottom, with some red spots and green rust on the body, besides, the waist line, fan line, and cloud and thunder pattern are all done in a very regular way, which is the old Western Zhou goods that opens the door at a glance.

I weighed the portion and felt it was a little too light and lifted it up with a gentle lift.

“Sister Hong, try it, why do I feel that the portion is not right.”

A mole reached out and took it, “Huh, so light, it’s not bronze?”

A mole is older than me, she has been in this business for many years and has seen much more than I. She used her fingernails to pick those green rusts on the copper chimes, which were very floating and fell off with a light touch.

Once the green rust fell off, the inside of the trapezoidal chimes revealed a gray-black base.

A mole looked at it and frowned: “It’s not bronze, it’s a good thing, if I’m not wrong, it should be heavenly iron”

“Iron chimes?” My eyes glazed over, incredulously saying, “Sister Hong, there were iron weapons in the Western Zhou period? There wasn’t, was there? Are you mistaken?”

She shook her head, “You didn’t understand, I’m talking about heavenly iron, not pig iron, iron appeared in the late Spring and Autumn period, to put it bluntly, heavenly iron is meteorite iron, it’s meteorite ore. No wonder the weight felt wrong as soon as I put my hands on it.”

A mole says that the trapezoidal chimes are made of meteorite iron, in fact, there is a basis, just a few years ago, in the 96th year, the Henan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and Sanmenxia cultural relics task force teamed up, they carried out salvage excavations in the Shangcunling Guo State Cemetery in Sanmenxia City, and eventually found two rusty iron swords, these two short swords from the tomb of Guozhong, after the radiological analysis of the x-rays, in the body of the iron swords, the archeological team discovered A lot of unknown components similar to high concentration of nickel, finally, these two swords from the Bronze Age, recognized by the national archaeological team as meteorite swords.

“Sister Hong you say, this thing is so precious, why don’t we carry it out?” Knowing the preciousness of this chime, a hint of greed arose in my heart.

I just muttered in my mind, “Instead of putting it in this dark underground river, it wouldn’t be a waste to let me take it out would it.”

A mole glanced at the chimes on the floor, and she too was a bit impressed.

“It’s not that heavy, so let’s take it with us, this place probably won’t get a person down for hundreds of years,” she shook her head, signaling for me to take the chimes with me.

I took off my shirt and twisted it into a stream of rope, and I don’t mind that the clock is cold, put the clock behind my back with a bundle of clothes, and then tied a knot in front of my chest, which is even finished, I shook, and it didn’t move, and it’s stable.