They eventually pried the door open. Li Zu fiddled with the damaged lock and discovered that it had been packed tightly with iron filings. This was the simplest way to destroy a lock. Looking further inside, they were met with a shocking sight: every part of the truck had been stripped of its locks, rendering it nearly irreparable.

This kind of destruction was typically the result of a prank. The place was in shambles, with scratches from fingernails and marks from fists everywhere. A corpse lay grotesquely in the front of the truck, its mouth wide open, conveying immense pain.

“Did he do all of this?” Li Zu exclaimed, staring at the scene inside the truck.

“Probably,” Wu Xie replied.

“Must have been drunk,” Li Zu recalled how his father acted when he was intoxicated. “This guy definitely drank a lot.”

Wu Xie climbed into the cab and crawled next to the corpse, pointing to a container that had already been opened in the corpse’s hand. “This should be the cause.”

“Are these containers filled with alcohol?” Li Zu asked.

“From the looks of this person, it’s much stronger than alcohol.” Wu Xie picked up the corpse’s hand and said, “Look, the bones are all shattered. Clearly, whatever was in this container drove him mad, so someone locked him in the truck.”

Li Zu thought for a moment, feeling surprised. The level of destruction to the lock would have taken some time, and the damage was irreparable. This meant that whoever was there at the time did not intend to let this person out.

“Come on, help me lift him out,” Wu Xie said to Li Zu. Li Zu stepped inside and grabbed the corpse, pulling it outward.

Just as they managed to lift the body off the seat, Li Zu felt something was off; it seemed like something was stuck to the chair, caught on the corpse.

He and Wu Xie cautiously looked beneath the corpse and saw that the seat had been dug out, with a rope hanging down from the corpse leading into a hole beneath the seat.

“Is this a latrine?” Li Zu asked. “What’s with the rope?” As he pondered this, he tugged on the rope, and something was pulled out of the hole. To his shock, it turned out to be a bundle of grenades.

He frowned, still trying to process this when the grenades fell back into the hole, leaving only a few pull rings on the rope.

Wu Xie exchanged a glance with him and shouted, “Run!”

The two of them practically tumbled out of the cab. They had barely rolled seven or eight meters in the sandy ground when the grenades exploded.

The shockwave erupted, blowing the entire front of the truck into pieces. They were thrown several meters by the force, but fortunately, they landed on a sand dune, so it was just sand hitting them.

The debris from the explosion was sent into the air and rained down like confetti into the lake. Wang Meng, who had been daydreaming by the lake, was terrified and quickly turned to look at them.

Once everything settled down, Li Zu climbed to his feet. His eardrums were ringing, and he looked toward the truck, only to find that the entire front had vanished, leaving behind a shattered chassis.

However, the devastation of the truck was not the most shocking sight for him; his attention was drawn to another scene that left him even more stunned.

Due to the enormous shockwave and air blast generated by the explosion, all the sand in the dunes beside the truck was blown into the sky by the combined effects of the shockwave and the air blast, revealing everything that had been buried in the dunes. There were the wrecks of more than a dozen trucks and one that had been blown to pieces parked side by side, which meant that Wu Xie’s earlier speculation was correct—there were indeed multiple trucks buried in these dunes.

Li Zhu was about to call Wu Xie over to take a look but noticed that Wu Xie was focused on something else. Following Wu Xie’s gaze, he saw an incredible scene. Almost half of the dunes surrounding the Haizi (a type of lake) were gradually shifting due to the massive disturbance, and beneath the dunes surrounding the lake, rows upon rows of truck wrecks were being exposed, estimated to be at least a few hundred. These trucks were like a dragon coiling around the lake, quite a spectacular sight. From one side of the lake to the other, it looked just like a scene from a war movie.

“Is this a parking lot?” Li Zhu murmured to himself.

Wu Xie didn’t reply; he simply began to walk forward along the lake, looking at the rows of truck wrecks beneath the sand. They discovered that beneath all the trucks, many dry corpses were curled up together, their upper bodies buried in the sand.

“This place must have seen some major events,” Wu Xie sighed. “It seems we have our work cut out for us.”

Li Zhu, Wu Xie, and Wang Meng worked together to clear a clean area beside one of the trucks. The three of them half-lay down to rest. Li Zhu felt a bit anxious, as he knew that behind him, the truck was filled with dead bodies, and perhaps there were still one or two corpses buried beneath the truck that hadn’t been unearthed.