As daylight shifted across the sky, flocks of birds sent a chorus echoing from the distant ridges. The beasts were stirring—how long before the humans did the same?
There was no time to hesitate. Gu Xianwang set down her backpack and refastened the Velcro straps on her jacket. “I’ll climb up and scout. You stay here below and watch yourself.”
Ye Chan slung the pack across her chest and glanced at the sheer rock face, utterly devoid of footholds. Worry creased her brow. “You planning to free-climb that? Come on, it’s covered in those thorny vines up top. Even monkeys might balk. If anyone’s come this way, there’d be traces—no way it’d be this pristine.”
“Or we loop around to the back and climb up from there. Bound to be a path, and the view down from the summit would beat this angle by a mile.”
Gu Xianwang shook her head and pulled a roll of elastic bandage from her pack, wrapping her fingers with quick, efficient loops. Standing face-to-face with Ye Chan, they carved out a hidden nook between them. The Undying Turtle lay concealed beneath the trailing bandage, its needle wavering between Longevity Eye Lake and the nearby hills.
“Long Li’s definitely passed through here. We can’t afford to wait any longer. If we drag our feet, the folks from Golden Hook Town will be on our tail.”
Ye Chan’s eyes flicked past Gu Xianwang’s shoulder to Old Godstick, who was dozing on the opposite tree. He’d matched the stamina of any young buck earlier, but now fatigue had softened his edges—no real menace there. She hefted her axe. “Got it. At least take the knife.”
Gu Xianwang smiled, wasting no more words. She backed up a few paces, broke into a sprint, and vaulted onto a cliffside pine thrusting straight toward the lake. Her palms clamped lightly, her waist twisted in a fluid swing, and in an instant she spun onto the trunk. Bouncing off its momentum like a coiled spring, she launched higher. No more tidy perches above—just a mess of twisted, stunted trees. She wedged into the gap between thick brush and sheer wall, then hugged the crevice, groping her way upward.
The bloodstain they’d spotted at the base sat in an odd spot. Last night’s downpour should’ve washed away far more than that. The wound had to be grievous. In this cramped defile, unless it was a gunshot, no blade or club could inflict such damage—not when you could barely stand, let alone swing.
Her best guess: the victim had taken the hit higher up, on the cliff face or even the mountaintop. Blood had sprayed down, some snagging in the bush roots and shielded by an outcrop to linger till now.
~~~
Climbing here crushed her field of view. Jagged dead branches and razor grass snarled everywhere. One stretch was a solid tangle, barbed wire come to life. No dodging it—she gritted her teeth and scraped through, thorns shrieking against her tough shell fabric in a relentless whoosh.
Stings prickled her face, thin blood-trails trickling down. Eyes locked ahead, unblinking, she hunted for more stains. Roughly twenty meters up, her hand still reaching for purchase, two sharp hisses erupted almost atop her skull. Her scalp crawled; she froze mid-motion, fingers hovering, peripheral vision tilting upward. There, coiled in a weed-choked ledge jutting forty centimeters overhead: a deep-brown serpent with a blunt triangular head, stubby and thick.
Her breath snagged in her throat. She knew it—a short-tailed viper, folk-called grass flyer or ground flattener. Senior Brother used to tote those mountaineering rags everywhere, each week’s feature profiling deep-woods venom. This beauty claimed a throne in the nation’s top ten.
It was a stalemate between her and the snake, both of them locked in place. Barely forty centimeters long, its first lunge might miss at this range. But pinned to a vertical wall, her options were nil. A second strike? No escape. As tension peaked, that nightmare infant wail pierced the distant woods—no farther than a li. If the Mountain Demon Pack had their scent, their scampering speed meant they’d swarm here in under ten minutes.
Gu Xianwang drew in a deep breath. Her right palm slowly closed around the rock as her left arm slid downward, drawing the dagger from behind her waist. By this point, the short-tailed viper had already reared up halfway, flicking out its tongue. It swayed its triangular head lightly, as if gauging the perfect angle to strike. A snake’s speed could rival that of any feline; the shorter and stockier the venomous serpent, the more explosive its muscular power in that split second. Right now, she absolutely could not make the first move. She had to wait.
In this razor-edge moment, Ye Chan saw the figure halfway up the cliff frozen in place and assumed she had spotted something. Anxiety gnawed at her, and she could not help but call out softly. That single sound startled both human and serpent. The short-tailed viper lunged like a bolt of lightning, its hollow, hooked fangs hurtling toward her hand in the blink of an eye.
Gu Xianwang even glimpsed the transparent venom jetting from the fang channels. Before it could make contact, she whipped her center of gravity upward, barreling straight into the snake. Any ordinary person would have recoiled, but she drove her body even closer. With her weight shifting up, her wrist carved a flourish of steel, cleaving the short-tailed viper neatly in two at its midpoint. Yet even in death, a snake’s body did not go still right away. The front half shot forward by momentum, jaws gaping wide toward her face. Completely unprepared for this, Gu Xianwang panicked. On pure instinct, she switched hands to fend it off. Her right hand flew open, slapping the snake aside—but she lost her purchase on the rock and toppled backward.
In the ensuing chaos, she flailed wildly, her limbs battering against the mountainside. She slid and scraped along the sheer wall for five or six meters before a tangled mass of iron-wire bushes—thick with thorns—finally snagged her, bringing her to a precarious halt.
Filthy and disheveled, she paid no mind to the extent of her injuries. A hasty glance revealed no bite marks anywhere on her body, and that was enough. She lay huddled in the thorn-choked underbrush, where spikes two or three centimeters long had punched straight through her clothes and into her flesh during the plunge. Amid the sharp stings of pain, she suddenly furrowed her brow. Her hand groped downward and to the right until her fingers snagged a narrow crevice in the rock. Her heart leaped. Twisting into an acrobatically awkward position, she lowered her upper body, sprawling half-prone across the bed of spikes like a penitent on a board of nails. From this vantage, she finally spotted the uncanny triangular mouth of a cave.
Damn. There really was a cave.
Gu Xianwang flashed a hand signal downward to indicate she was all right. Like a gecko, she scuttled diagonally toward it. The opening appeared minuscule from above and utterly concealed from below; it was only visible from dead level. Roughly one point two or one point three meters across, it stood just a few dozen centimeters high. The only ways in were flat on one’s back or belly-crawling. Gu Xianwang clambered beneath it first, then wriggled headfirst inside. The walls at the entrance were slick with moisture, and one stretch lay submerged in pooled water. After slithering inward some five or six meters, the space abruptly yawned open.
It felt like a balloon inflated from a pinhole neck. The inner chamber could easily accommodate four or five people standing shoulder to shoulder. Words failed to capture Gu Xianwang’s chill of horror in that instant. The room was not fully sealed—faint drafts whistled through fissures in the inner walls—but there was no passage onward. Amid the utter darkness, she could plainly make out dense coverings of primitive, ancient rock art etched across every surface: floor, ceiling, and walls alike.
And dead center before her jutted a knife ladder, carved right into the living stone, identical to the sacrificial altar she and Ye Chan had seen in the Yin Vortex. Cow-horn protrusions studded it, each draped in countless red threads. But dangling from those threads were no wish plaques. Instead, they were knotted around teeth—incisors and canines of every size and shape. A rough count put them at over a hundred.
If each one came from a different person…
A blinding insight pierced her mind. She suddenly recalled Golden Hook Town’s sordid history. For how many years had these folk lurked in the deep mountains, turning on their own kind in a cannibal feast? How many lives had they claimed? Could this hidden rock cave be their “treasure vault,” a repository for some grisly trophy?
Hold on—if there were really that many victims, what became of the bodies? The ancient tomb housing the mountain demons held no human remains. Where had all the people gone? These killers moved with such practiced efficiency; they had to have a flawless system for disposal. By now, Gu Xianwang’s anxiety had crested to a fever pitch. She even began to wonder whether Master and his group had ever reached the Dragon Lair at all—or if they had been ambushed and slaughtered by that band back during the thunderstorm a few nights earlier, right there in Golden Hook Town.
Hold on—Gu Xianwang frowned and stepped closer to the unsettling rock formation of the Knife Ladder. Judging by the varying number of teeth on it, those people must have been hung headfirst from top to bottom, filling one layer before moving to the next. And on the side of a rocky outcrop on the second layer, she looked up and spotted a fake tooth molded from chewing gum hanging among them. If not for the accidental glint of metal peeking from inside, it would have been impossible to notice.
Was this… a tracker?
The red thread was brand new and still dry, suggesting the fake tooth hadn’t been up there for long.
Could it be Long Li? Or… the work of those shadowy figures pulling the strings from behind the scenes?
Without thinking, Gu Xianwang reached up and plucked the tracker free. She peeled away the outer layer of gum and examined it closely for a good while but couldn’t find any power switch. After a moment’s thought, she simply stomped it flat with her foot and swept the shattered remnants into her pocket. Then she climbed back out of the rock cave.
This wasn’t the entrance to the Dragon Lair. So where had the Rat-Walkers gone?
Gu Xianwang had just crawled out when she heard shouting from below. She couldn’t tell if it was Ye Chan at first and feared the people from Golden Hook Town had already arrived with the Mountain Demons to surround them. She leaped down two or three steps at a time. Upon landing, she saw that both Ye Chan and Xiao Sanxiao were gone. Only the distant grass was rustling closer and closer. She crouched low, gripping her dagger tightly as she coiled to strike.
“Who’s there?”
No sooner had the words left her mouth than a head popped out from the grass. It was Ye Chan. She let out a startled yelp and immediately turned back to shout, “Did Master catch him?”
From far off came Xiao Sanxiao’s reply: “That damn bastard ran off!”
“What happened?”
That was exactly what Ye Chan wanted to know. She’d watched her climb up, but in the blink of an eye, she’d come back down covered in water and mud, her face scratched bloody. Hearing the Mountain Demons drawing nearer, though, she didn’t dare waste time. “Right after you went into the cave mouth, I heard some creepy noises nearby. When I went to check, I saw someone tossing two backpacks under the tree where Master was sleeping. I thought it might be Sister Long at first, so I chased after them. All I caught was a glimpse of a man’s back—ragged clothes and all. He looked just like that tramp we saw in the Mist Mirage before. So I called Master over, and we both tried to corner him, but the guy bolted like lightning. Gone in a flash.”
“Backpacks?”
“Yeah, those two.”
The style, the design… Gu Xianwang hurried over and squatted down for a closer look. On the waist buckle of one backpack, she spotted a special engraving. It wasn’t a number or a letter—more like some bizarre radical at first glance. But she’d seen it before on the second floor of the Red Pavilion. Long Li had told her it was called the Suzhou Code, also known as the Flower Code. It was a unique form of counting chip; when combined, they could represent specific numbers.
Every member of the Rat-Walkers had a unique number, and their gear was marked to match with these Suzhou Codes.
Gu Xianwang frowned as she yanked open the zippers on both backpacks. Ye Chan jumped in alarm, half-expecting some shady origin with hidden traps or poison inside. But when the zippers parted, what spilled out was a stack of clothing. Hiss—not ordinary clothes, either. They looked just like diving suits.
Ye Chan caught on in an instant. “Could this be gear the Rat-Walkers left behind? Diving suits… You don’t think they dove into the lake from here, do you?”
The more she thought about it, the more it made sense. She clapped her hands excitedly. This was right up her alley—she didn’t have many hobbies, but she loved ocean diving. She’d gone to the Philippines on her own during freshman summer break to get her AOW certification, and by now she’d burned through thirty-two tanks as a solid amateur enthusiast.
But there was still a problem. “No air tanks, though. Where are those?”
The two were deep in discussion, completely oblivious to the fact that Xiao Sanxiao hadn’t made a peep for a while. Then the grass nearby rustled again. They assumed the old man had finally circled back. But when they turned, a familiar black gun barrel was aimed straight at their heads. Sister Xun had one hand gripping Clinic Brother—his wrists bound with zip ties—and the other steadily holding the Box Cannon that had been in his hands earlier. She grinned at them.
“What a coincidence, little ladies. We meet again.”
The sight of the gun made Gu Xianwang’s mind go blank with a buzz. In that moment, she understood: the old man had seen the situation turn sour and bolted first.
She was still in a squat, slowly rising to her feet. Sister Xun had a gun, sure, but the situation was different now. They had the advantage in numbers—not entirely helpless.
“Hold your horses,” Sister Xun said, pressing down the gun muzzle with a seductive smile. “Those people aren’t far off. If I lose my cool right now and make some untimely noise, it won’t be good for you or me, right?”
Gu Xianwang kept a cold expression as she held her hands out level at her sides. “Since you know it’s untimely, why not start with some gestures of sincerity?”
The Clinic Brother was clearly out of it. Even with his hands cuffed by her, he could barely stand. Sister Xun didn’t spare him a glance. She shoved him casually to the ground and stepped half a pace aside, revealing two gas canisters behind her.
“I’ve got sincerity in spades,” she said with a smile. “See, your big sis here is soft-hearted and open to reason—nothing like those backwoods thugs. They want blood; I just want cash. What do you say? You’ve survived this long, so you’re no fool. Care to cut a deal?”
Gu Xianwang smiled as well. “Deals are all about sincerity. It’s not out of the question. But if Sister Xun truly wants to bury the hatchet, why not begin by explaining how you found us?”
“Same old story.” She shook her head, her attitude softening this time. She rummaged in her pocket for a moment before tossing several pieces of bark—cut with a small knife—in front of the two of them. “Recognize these?”
Gu Xianwang gathered the bark scraps and unfolded them one by one. Each bore the same carved mark: small letters, but etched deeply into the wood. In the forest, she surely would have spotted them. “L.”
This was… Long Li’s marker.
Sister Xun arched a brow. “At first, I figured you lot were dead weight, dumped in Golden Hook Town to rot. Turns out she went ahead to scout the dangers for you. But thanks to her little signs, I found the real entrance to the Dragon Lair.”
Gu Xianwang frowned. Long Li had vanished that night, clearly to keep them out of harm’s way. But she must have sensed something off about Golden Hook Town. Just in case, she’d left these trail markers—a second option for them. She knew her well and knew she wouldn’t just sit idly by, so that’s why—
Yet she herself hadn’t noticed any markers last night. Judging by the number of bark pieces, she should have spotted at least one after the ambush by the Golden Hook Town crew. In reality, she hadn’t. Was it because she’d been too exhausted and desperate, too focused on running? Or had Sister Xun actually collected all the markers before they even arrived, located this place ahead of time, and held off diving in just to lure them into the trap—then use the two of them to probe the way forward?
Long Li’s markers had been so cleverly concealed that only her Eye Technique could have picked them out. How had Sister Xun found them with such precision amid the chaos of that rainy night?
The boss, the deal, that locating transmitter… It all felt eerily familiar, just like Sara and her crew’s style. In that instant, Gu Xianwang’s mind raced, and the name Mike Hex sprang to the forefront. If it was him, then Long Li’s movements had been compromised long ago. It also meant their surveillance on her was far more intense than she’d ever realized.
She stood up, tossed her dagger aside, and shrugged. “I get it. Now—let’s talk about that deal.”
