If the Kingdom of Durban was conceived and built by the machinations of two long-faced beings, then why would they engineer such a wealthy and mighty nation only to create four true gods to tear it all down? The logic behind it was utterly baffling.

I couldn't make sense of it, staring at the scene frozen on the wall—the devastation of Durban City following the tsunami—my mind momentarily blank. At that moment, the scene on the wall ceased moving, accompanied by a faint click of mechanisms engaging, and then the stone slabs flipped back over, revealing the surface studded with countless bright beads.

I glanced at the bead configuration; it had reverted to its original sequence, just as it was before we had done anything. The three of us stood in stunned silence, much like an audience lingering after witnessing a breathtaking, gripping film—a saga brimming with legend, soaked in blood and violence, and threaded with occurrences that defied all common sense, leaving us deeply unsettled.

After a while, I asked Zoya, "That’s it? Is that all the imagery there is?" Zoya wiped the fine sweat from her brow, nodded, and said, "Yes, exactly the same as last time, but every time we view it, it remains equally stunning." I let out a long breath and asked the two of them, "Are the things recorded here true?" Long Jia frowned slightly.

"Of the four true gods, we've met at least one. I suspect, even with some exaggeration, the core truth isn't far off." I sighed.

"But don't you find the whole thing utterly inexplicable? The beginning and end of this matter make no sense, and the birth of those four true gods is far too contrary to nature.

Could that high tower truly communicate with deities?" Long Jia interjected from the side, "No, not four true gods—five. Because after the King of Durban died, the long-faced ones placed him into five separate urns." I turned to Zoya.

"Yes, Grandma Zoya, why five urns if you only told us there were four true gods?" Zoya stated calmly, "It wasn't me who said there were four; it’s just that the Kingdom of Durban could only harbor four true gods. As for the fifth urn, nothing was born from it; it was discarded." "What do you mean, only four gods?" I pressed urgently.

Zoya merely explained that this was foretold long ago, and the ancient script on the high tower recorded this very event. From the moment the Kingdom of Durban was established, its destruction had been prearranged by the long-faced beings; everything followed the prophecy.

Hearing her say that, I had no grounds to argue, as I hadn't examined the writings on that tower closely myself. And I knew that the tower depicted in the mural was the lighthouse we had seen standing in the center of the former Durban Royal City.

The missing piece atop the tower wasn't due to centuries of decay but the scar left by a massive lightning strike back then. Since Zoya had been here so long, she must have examined the inscriptions on that lighthouse firsthand to reach such a conclusion.

If we wanted to confirm this, we absolutely had to visit the lighthouse. Thinking of this, I asked Zoya, "Grandma Zoya, is there a passage in this Golden Hall leading to the central lighthouse?" Zoya frowned slightly and instead asked me, "Why?

You want to see the writings left on the tower too?" I nodded. "Precisely.

And I want to know the fate of the fifth urn, and also how the Yayak people managed to survive until today." Zoya smiled faintly. "I can answer the latter question for you right now.

Not all the people of Durban died. After thousands of years of development, some factions naturally opposed the belief that the king was a monster.

They would never worship the high tower. So, when disaster struck, these people were the first to flee the island and scattered across the world.

Your people, the Weiguo of China, are one such branch, and our Yayak people here in Chukchi are another." I asked, "How do you know this so clearly? Are there other murals here?" Long Jia chimed in then, "We don't need murals for this.

It is clearly recorded in our Yayak genealogy." I nodded, stroking my chin as I pondered several matters. A while later, I sighed.

"We've investigated this for ages, yet we still don't know the true origin of the Yayak people. If we are merely descendants of that village afflicted by the plague, then we are no different from ordinary people.

It's just that the foreign middle-aged man and those two long-faced figures had an immense influence on the Yayak. Our ancient advancement wasn't due to our own brilliant minds or superior technology.

Frankly, the Kingdom of Durban reached that level because someone was helping." As I spoke, I reached out to touch the cool stone wall beside me, thinking that even today's technology might struggle to create murals that could move like this. I had absolutely no concept of the principle driving those stones.

After we talked for a bit longer, I suddenly remembered something and asked Long Jia, "How about you? Did you manage to decipher any answers from those patterns just now?" Long Jia nodded, and then she shook her head.

I was confused and asked what she meant. Long Jia began to explain, "I deciphered all seven possible answers, but every single one was meaningless—just gibberish.

Or, perhaps not gibberish, but rather each potential answer was missing a crucial piece of information, which threw the whole into chaos." I knew what Long Jia meant. For example, take the idiom "When one door closes, another opens" (a rough English equivalent for the concept of mixed blessing/loss in Chinese idioms); if you remove one key character, the phrase becomes nonsensical, conveying no discernible meaning.

However, in such common cases, one could usually infer the missing word, but only if we already knew the original idiom. If you are given a completely unknown idiom with one character already removed, understanding its meaning becomes exponentially harder.

Given this, staying here any longer was pointless. Originally, if Long Jia could have solved the other versions, perhaps we could have rearranged the beads on the wall based on those solutions to unlock new murals, but that plan had now evaporated.

So I asked Zoya, "Grandma Zoya, can you tell us where these pictures originally came from?" Zoya sounded slightly impatient. "I told you, I don't know.

It brought them to me." Zoya pointed toward the large white dog on the ground. She continued, "When I first arrived on this island, it was early spring, and visibility was so low due to the thick fog that I dared not venture inland; I could only set up camp by the shore.

But this fellow was different from me; he would constantly venture onto the island for explorations. After several months, he mapped out everything on the island and led me here.

Even the murals, it was he who showed me where to find them."