Book 1: Chapter 161

Book 1: Chapter 161

We reorganized the equipment and collected some other things from the rest of the group, such as climbing ropes, flashlights, batteries, crank generators, and some dry food. I borrowed a machete and stuck it on the back of my belt. Kan Jian also had three long-range slingshots, so he picked up some pebbles and dipped them in mud to make them ball-shaped until he had about seven or eight hundred of them. He even had a slingshot that could shoot short arrows, so he made about thirty or forty arrows out of bamboo stalks. The arrowheads had all been heated in the fire and were very sharp.

Kan Jian, Liu Sang, and Baishe followed me. I roughly explained my plan for the tulou to them so that the rest of the guys could execute it when they had the chance. The four of us set out for the fog-covered mountain.

The clouds were hanging very low. After spending a long time in Fujian, I knew that this meant it might rain again in a few days. The trees in the mountains were so huge that their branches were intertwined with each other. The mountains here werent very tall, but the trees were very dense. Even the gaps were covered in shrubs. When I first came here, I remembered that there was a sign that seemed to say this was a protected area.

Finding a specific tree in such a large forest was too difficult, but fortunately, royal poincianas were a different kind of tree. We climbed up the mountainside and used binoculars to search carefully in the valley below. The wet fog made me feel like I had returned to the past, but there was also a faint ache in my knees. My father had developed rheumatism after walking in the mountains for so many years, so I figured it was something I couldn't avoid. At this time, I couldnt smoke and even had to cover my nose and mouth so that the air in the woods wouldnt hurt my lungs. It was exhausting.

We soon saw the crown of a huge royal poinciana.

Liu Sang seemed a little skeptical, "Don't you find it strange? This kind of tree only entered China in the nineteenth century. Many of them are planted in the houses of Fujian maritime merchants in urban areas. How could this kind of tree exist out here in the wilderness?"

Even if Poker-Face and the others were just passing by here, they didnt have to eat so many snakes. These snakeskins must have been processed here by the local snake wranglers. It looked like hundreds of them had been hung up over the years, which showed that this place wasnt a deep mountain.

"Is this the mark?" Kan Jian asked. I shook my head and looked around. There were snakeskins littering the ground around the other tree trunks and hanging from their branches. I slowly looked around, carefully examining everything. There were thousands of snakeskins hanging in the tree canopies here.

I felt like something was off, so I said to the others, "Be careful. There may be something here."

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TN Notes:

(1) Its the largest and tallest tulou in Yongding District, covering an area of more than 10,000 square meters. The main building is 6 stories tall. It was built between 1851-1874. More info is on slide 19 here (scroll down a bit for the full paragraph) or the middle of footnote 19 at the bottom of the webpage (you can ctrl+f "Yong Longchang").