“Witch Clan!?” Ye Chan lunged forward, her fingers tracing the lines etched into the rock shell. “Bird-headed, human-bodied… yeah, it really looks like it. Back in the earliest days, before Witch Official culture fully declined, the gods they worshipped were rarely in human form. From the Classic of Mountains and Seas to the Songs of Chu, the deities described in those texts resemble wild beasts far more than people.”
“Do you know this? Qu Yuan was actually a Great Witch Official from the Chu State during the Spring and Autumn Period—a true heir to orthodox witchcraft, with an exceedingly noble bloodline. Take the Mountain Ghost he wrote about: it’s called a ghost, but it’s really a kind of deity. In those days, the divide between gods and humans wasn’t as rigid as it is now. The witches of Chu served the divine with song and dance, honoring every living creature as sacred.”
Ye Chan’s gaze followed the wall paintings from one panel to the next, and the more she saw, the more convinced she became that this cave had once been a dwelling and ritual site for some ancient branch of the Witch Clan.
Gu Xianwang, however, grew more perplexed the longer she looked. She turned to Long Li. “Is the altar you’re searching for connected to the Witch Clan?”
Long Li paused to consider. “The clues we have aren’t all that detailed.”
In other words, they were feeling their way forward, one step at a time.
“Then how did you know these carvings depict gods from Witch Clan worship?”
Long Li replied coolly, “I know a little about it.”
The answer left Gu Xianwang unsatisfied. She fell silent for a moment, her mind drifting back to Long Li’s earlier mention of the Nüwa Cocoon. Nüwa herself—human torso, serpentine tail, wasn’t she?
“I’ve got it!” Ye Chan called out suddenly from up ahead. “Look at this—doesn’t it look like an altar? They carved images of the gods right into the cave walls for their rituals. If it’s an altar, then a bronze ding down below makes perfect sense!”
Long Li shook her head at that. “No. Witch Clan sacrifices always took place in open spaces, to bridge the heavens and the earth. Ancient witch rites demanded song and dance; the Nine Songs are actually Nuo chants—call-and-response performances between male and female witches. But the Central Plains scorned witches, and over time, those origins faded. Scholars like Zhu Wang dismissed them as ‘barbaric Chu customs, crude in verse and debased with profanity and lust’—nothing but ignorant posturing from self-proclaimed orthodox authorities.”
“Exactly, exactly! Sister Long, you really get me!” Ye Chan rushed over, her eyes brimming with hot tears, and plunged on. “During the Spring and Autumn Period, the Central Plains had already solidified their orthodoxy, but Chu State clung to its primal customs. The Chu folk believed in spirits and reveled in sacrifices, where humans and ghosts mingled freely. They held that all things possessed souls; after death, one ascended to the heavens only to return as part of the earth’s deities. That’s why they had rituals like drumming on funeral urns while singing in grief. It was all deeply intertwined with their culture!”
“But the Central Plains people didn’t understand. They saw those wild practices and branded the Chu as savages, accusing them of obscene rites that dishonored true gods. What a load of rubbish!”
Gu Xianwang listened to the two of them playing off each other and couldn’t help finding it a little comical. “So this place is a relic from the Spring and Autumn Period?”
At those words, Ye Chan wilted a bit. “Well… not necessarily…”
So they were still in the dark? Gu Xianwang felt a wave of helplessness.
Long Li spoke up abruptly. “Suppose there really is a ding beneath this rock wall, and these stove horses and ghost-head bats habitually stash their scavenged food right here—what does that tell you?”
What? Gu Xianwang blinked in confusion and ventured a guess. “A petri dish?”
Long Li nodded. “You’re close.”
Gu Xianwang: “?”
“It’s a food chain,” Long Li said.
“Huh?” Ye Chan was completely out of her depth.
“Every creature’s prime directive is survival. These protruding cave crickets and ghost-head bats are unnaturally massive, which defies their typical survival tactics. Let’s assume evolution is at play. There’d be two prerequisites: first, the air here differs from outside; second, abundant food supplies paired with minimal predators.”
Ye Chan mulled it over. “We don’t have gear to test the air, but food… uh, those corpses down below?”
Far more substantial than the scraps and tiny bugs your average cave cricket would scrounge.
Long Li inclined her head. “Precisely. Protruding cave crickets feed on carrion, and ghost-head bats prey on protruding cave crickets.”
A chilling realization struck Gu Xianwang. “…You’re saying someone’s been feeding these things—forcing them to evolve.”
“Correct.”
Cold sweat beaded on Ye Chan’s brow. “When you put it that way, it sounds exactly like refining gu.”
The words hung in the air, and two pairs of eyes snapped onto her.
Confine venomous creatures to a vessel, let them slaughter one another until a lone survivor emerges—that’s gu. It matched everything they’d witnessed far too closely.
And the gu king? What form would it take? Where was it hiding?
Ye Chan swallowed hard, mustering a dry laugh. “It couldn’t be, right? This is 2014, after all.” But then she recalled the gu lodged in her own body, and her voice trailed off.
Long Li said, “Just now, I checked the enclosure at the base of the rock wall. There are definitely traces of intaglio carvings.”
She shone her flashlight onto the Black Mud Pool six or seven meters off to the side. Sure enough, faint lines were visible where it met the black mud.
Gu Xianwang peered at it. “Looks like some cloud patterns and animals.”
Long Li pointed them out one by one with her flashlight beam. “Bird-headed with a deer’s body, snake tail, and leopard spots—that’s Wind God Feilian. This single-footed earth dragon covered in feathers must be the Rain Master. After that come the Divine Ox and the three-legged Golden Crow striding through flames.”
The procession stretched out long, almost like a band of mountain sprites and wild monsters out on a group excursion.
Ye Chan couldn’t make it out clearly, but hearing Long Li’s description suddenly sparked a realization. “Chi You?”
Long Li nodded. “Exactly.”
Gu Xianwang struggled to keep up with their line of thinking. “What do you mean?”
Ye Chan explained, “According to the myths, Wind God and Rain Master were the deities who fought alongside Chi You in his war against the Yellow Emperor. The Divine Ox and Sun Bird were the totems revered by his tribe. Viewed this way, it really looks like a migration scene.”
“From what modern historical records show, Chi You lost to the Yellow Emperor back then but didn’t die. The Nine Li Tribe followed him on a migration southwest from their original homeland around Shandong, passing through Guizhou and Western Hunan before reaching Yunnan. Many of today’s ethnic minorities are actually descendants of the Nine Li.”
Long Li turned to the puzzled Gu Xianwang and elaborated further. “There’s another legend that Chi You was a disciple of the Ancestor Witch of Spirit Mountain—the true founder of witchcraft among humankind.”
Gu Xianwang finally pieced it together. “So everything we’re seeing here was very likely built by Nine Li descendants who stayed behind during Chi You’s southern migration?”
Ye Chan nodded eagerly, over and over. “It’s possible! Highly possible! This is a priceless relic!”
Nine Li descendants?
Long Li stared at the distant carvings, her gaze darkening.
“But right now—”
Gu Xianwang’s words cut off midway as a sharp swish sliced through the air. Long Li reacted with lightning speed, yanking both women back a stumbling step with one arm each.
A thud followed, and a slender bamboo arrow buried itself in the ground right behind where Gu Xianwang had stood a moment before.
Long Li snapped her head up, tracing the arrow’s path to lock onto two figures in the rock tunnel across the Black Mud Pool.
She blasted them with the flashlight’s beam, throwing massive shadows across the rock wall. The bowman, arrows slung across his back, threw up a hand against the glare, then darted sideways and unleashed three arrows in quick succession.
Swish-swish-swish—
The bowman’s arm strength was tremendous, his aim dead-on like a veteran hunter’s. The shots weren’t aimed at Long Li but straight at Gu Xianwang and Ye Chan—clearly prioritizing the ones who looked weaker.
Spooked by the first attack, Gu Xianwang had her guard up. She tumbled and rolled through the trio of arrows, dragging Ye Chan with her and somehow dodging them unscathed.
Their only weapons were knives, leaving them helpless against ranged fire for the moment—nothing but targets.
Ye Chan stared blankly at the bamboo arrows lodged in the rock crevices. These were no toys. “Hey, we’re real live people here!”
“They’ve been playing for keeps from the start.” They should have realized it sooner—this was no-man’s-land.
Gu Xianwang gritted her teeth and scanned their surroundings. The rock tunnel was far too narrow for cover; heading down wasn’t viable. Their options were retreating to the tunnel they’d come from or charging ahead to close the gap with the bowman.
“Miss Long, please take Ye Chan back to the rock cave and hunker down!”
She hefted Yao Cuo’s fifty-liter heavy-duty backpack with one hand, jamming it into the crook of her elbow as a shield, while gripping her waist knife in the other. She poised to circle the mud pool along the rock tunnel and charge.
Ye Chan blinked, suddenly glimpsing a whole new side of Fairy Sister—this woman went berserk without a care for her life!
“No, no, no, Sister Gu… y-you can’t—this is way too dangerous!”
She reached out to grab her, but another arrow whistled from across like a death sentence. It startled Ye Chan into a shudder; her legs buckled, and she dropped to a seated position.
Now she was fully exposed in the bowman’s line of fire, back pressed to the rock wall. He’d been waiting for exactly this—a burst of three arrows rocketed toward her vitals.
The cold iron arrowheads caught the flashlight beam, flashing silver streaks through the air. The whistling grew into roars and shrieks. Ye Chan’s mouth hung half-open, her body locked rigid as if death’s scythe hovered at her throat. All she could manage were faint tremors.
In that instant, a black backpack thrust out from the side with a muffled thump, blocking one arrow. At the same time, a pair of long and short knives slashed down from either side, slicing the two long arrows clean in half. The heads veered off course from the impact, clanging twice as they grazed her shoulder and slammed into the thick rock face before ricocheting away.
Those knife strikes were an operation at the absolute limit. One second later, and Ye Chan would have met her end right there.
Long Li grabbed Ye Chan and said sternly to Gu Xianwang, “He still has at least eight arrows left in his backpack. Wait a little longer—don’t be reckless.”
Gu Xianwang hoisted her backpack up to shield the three of them, her voice a hushed whisper. “I know. That man’s got a leg wound; he won’t hold out much longer. If I were him, I wouldn’t wait until my arrows ran dry. He could bolt at any moment.”
Ye Chan couldn’t fathom her dogged pursuit. “Wouldn’t it be a good thing if he ran?”
Gu Xianwang’s tone turned icy. “The person he grabbed is the tour guide.”
For some inexplicable reason, the tour guide looked utterly dazed, making no attempt to resist. Instead, he shuffled along woodenly in the man’s wake.
“That man was one we caught in the village,” Long Li continued. “Something must have gone wrong with Sara for him to slip away like that.”
Long Li had only meant to warn Gu Xianwang that the man likely had more tricks up his sleeve beyond his bow and arrows. But to Gu Xianwang’s ears, her words carried an entirely different implication.
“So all your careful scheming led you straight into this Gu-Raising Cave for a hunt?” Gu Xianwang said. She recalled their pitiful state—abandoned in the Abandoned Village, stripped of everything—and let out a cold sneer. “Clever move.”
Long Li had no time to explain. For now, she could only drag the other two aside to weather the barrage.
“Miss Gu,” she said, “I know you don’t trust me right now. I get that you feel a strong sense of duty. But you’re just an ordinary person, after all. Some dangers can’t be fended off by one pair of hands alone.”
The attacks from afar seemed to halt for the moment. Gu Xianwang peeked over the top of her backpack—and an arrow whistled through the air, lodging with a sharp zip at the end of her pack’s zipper.
The man had already dragged the tour guide back to the mouth of a Rock Tunnel on the other side. He looked ready to make a break for it.
Gu Xianwang whipped her head around. “Miss Long, I don’t know why, but every time I start to let my guard down, you manage to remind me just in time. You and your companions really are cut from a different cloth. You can face your friends’ deaths with cool detachment, but I can’t. My Senior Brother is still lost somewhere in this godforsaken Karst Cave, defenseless and alone.”
She shrugged one shoulder, swinging her smaller pack from her back to her chest. Then she shoved the larger one in front of Ye Chan. “Hold it tight yourself. And keep your head down!”
With that, she kicked off the ground and shot forward, body hunched low, swift as the wind.
