Volume 7 Chapter 43 Snake Swamp Ghost Town (Part 2)

We all looked at each other, a sense of fate came over us. It turned out that we had only a dozen minutes left to reach the exit of the so-called canyon, and we had chosen to stop.

If we had insisted on going on, the outcome might have been completely different. We walked a few more steps and came to the edge of the swamp. From here, the view of the swamp was limited, not as vast as the one we saw from the top of the valley outside. If we weren’t walking along the mountain wall, we wouldn’t have known that we had already left the valley. The forest in front of us was still dense, and it felt like just a continuation of the canyon. Of course, there was a difference. The further we walked, the more we felt that something was wrong. The water was getting deeper and deeper, and the mud under the ground was getting harder and harder to stand on.

Fortunately, in the shallow part of the swamp, there was a large flat stone, protruding abruptly from the swamp, and it had not been submerged by the water. We were very surprised to see such a large rock here, so we carefully waded across the water and climbed up to find that this huge rock was carved with intricate decorative patterns, and there was a very large shadow under the water, as if it were part of several large statues standing side by side.

This is an entrance to the City of the Queen Mother of the West, who was the absolute spiritual leader of the Western Regions for a long time. The entrance to the City of the Queen Mother of the West would naturally not be too shabby. Perhaps this was a stone carving at the time, or a statue on the city’s defensive buildings, used to give a spiritual deterrent to the envoys passing through. Of course, after so many years, it is impossible for such a statue to be preserved under the scouring of rain and water.

At first glance, the ancient patterns on the stone looked a lot like those at Angkor Wat. Upon closer inspection, I realized that they were not Khmer Buddhist patterns, but rather the result of the stone being blackened and grayed by wind and rain, making it look particularly ancient and mysterious.

Just as I was thinking that if there was a collapsed statue here, then there might be other ruins under the swamp, I heard the fat guy call out to us to look over there.

We turned around and saw that in the sunlight, in the deeper part of the black swamp in front of us, there were dense and huge black shadows, seemingly containing something. It looked like stones, and some were completely underwater. When I and Mian Youping looked through the binoculars, we were surprised to discover that the shadows under the swamp water seemed to be all the ruins of a city, stretching all the way to the center of the swamp.

The ruins of the ancient city of Xiwangmu were actually buried under this swamp.

“There should be a very prosperous ancient city in this valley. After the collapse of the Xiwangmu Kingdom, the ancient city was abandoned, the drainage system collapsed, groundwater gushed up, and rainwater with sediment and sludge poured back for thousands of years, flooding the entire city underwater. It seems that the scale of Xiwangmu City was very large, and what we see now is just a drop in the bucket.” Mian Youping said lightly.

I was also a little shocked. It is not uncommon for ancient cities to be flooded by water. This swamp is actually not very large. The ancient city had already developed to the edge of this basin, which shows that the civilization at that time had reached its heyday. But if that’s the case, isn’t the Xiwangmu Palace also in the sludge under the water? How can we get in?

However, thinking of Wenjin’s notes, this swamp has been formed for more than a year or two. In the 1990s, her team, Huo Ling, entered the Xiwangmu Palace, also after heavy rain. Then there should be a way to get in, but we haven’t reached that situation yet.