The water dungeon was just over two meters high. Long Li could touch the opening with a single raise of her arm. Above them, it was pitch black, silent as the grave.
She picked up a pebble and mouthed silently to Gu Xianwang, “I’ll go up. You stay here.”
Gu Xianwang nodded and stepped back a few paces, deliberately splashing in the water to make noise.
Seizing the moment amid the splashes, Long Li tossed the pebble out the opening. The instant it hit the ground, she kicked off the wall, dug in with four fingers, and flipped upward, knife in hand.
She scanned the area. The stone cave was empty save for Ye Chan, who lay slumped at the entrance, unconscious.
“The tour guide’s gone.”
Long Li called down, then paced cautiously to the edge of the stone path for a peek. Seeing no one, she approached to check on Ye Chan.
She had simply been knocked out from behind. A lump swelled on the back of her head, but her breathing was steady. Gu Xianwang climbed up using the rope Long Li had tossed down, and her heart sank at the sight.
“Our packs—mine and Senior Brother’s—are gone.”
They had held all their tools, food, water, and medicine. Now, the ground offered only a bundle of rope, a half-meter strip of bandage, and the half-bottle of hemostatic powder clutched in Ye Chan’s hand.
It was disaster piled on disaster. In these deep mountain wilds without clean water or food, it was as good as suicide.
Gu Xianwang patted Ye Chan’s cheek. After a moment, the girl stirred groggily awake.
“Ow, my head… Hiss, what happened?”
Fortunately, the tinderbox hadn’t been lost. Gu Xianwang blew on it to coax a flicker of flame and gave her a melancholy look. “You were attacked.”
Ye Chan touched the lump on her head—it burned like fire. “Ah, yeah… I saw you fall… Hiss, when did Sister Long get here? Was I out long?”
She truly knew nothing.
“As long as you’re all right,” Long Li said.
Gu Xianwang managed a bitter smile. All right for now, perhaps—but without medicine or food, infection or starvation would claim her soon enough. To her, they amounted to the same thing.
She sat cross-legged and took the hemostatic powder from Ye Chan’s hand. “Long Li, come here first. Let’s bandage that wound of yours.”
Only then did Ye Chan notice Gu Xianwang’s full-body injuries. She looked far more wretched than before—like a tramp straight out of the gutter.
This must be what they meant by a beauty in distress.
“Aren’t those wounds of yours the ones that need bandaging? What happened? Where’s that guy?”
Gu Xianwang hesitated. “…Down below.”
Long Li walked over and said flatly, “Dead.” With that, she calmly inspected Gu Xianwang’s injuries.
One gash ran long and pale from soaking. It might need stitches.
“Dead…?” Ye Chan gasped in shock.
“Gu backlash,” Long Li replied. She brushed the hair from Gu Xianwang’s neck with a finger. “The hemostatic powder.”
Gu Xianwang turned her head away, ill at ease. “I’m fine. Your hand first.”
Long Li flipped her palm behind her back. With her right hand, she pried the bottle free and sprinkled some powder into the gash. “I know my own body. You’re different. A fever would spell trouble for you.”
Gu Xianwang frowned. “Different how?”
She recalled how Long Li had shoved open the stone door barehanded and somehow wiped out a cave full of fly gu worms. She really did seem different.
“Uh…” Ye Chan watched the two of them, puzzled. She had only napped a bit, and now the atmosphere felt utterly changed.
Gu Xianwang pressed her lips together, uncomfortable from head to toe. The tiny flame in her lap cast their overlapping shadows on the cave wall. Her coiled-up shadow looked fidgety and awkward, ill at ease.
“Your hand,” Long Li said. She half-knelt before Gu Xianwang, focused intently on the wound.
An outsider might think they had brought along a team medic.
Gu Xianwang reluctantly extended her right hand. From palm to fingertips, it was a mess of black-red corrosion, blistered in several large welts. She had forgotten the pain until now; looking at it made her wince.
Long Li gently straightened her fingers, her brows knitting. “Corroded. It needs disinfecting.”
Gu Xianwang bore the searing pain and forced a casual tone. “It’s fine. I can’t feel a thing. Mine’s done—now yours?”
Long Li stared at her for a long moment, then extended her hand to reveal the wound in her palm, already scabbed over.
Gu Xianwang froze. How long had it been? Was this woman part gecko, regrowing like a tail?
“Seen enough? Reassured now?”
Gu Xianwang: “…”
Long Li arched a brow, her tone laced with a hook. “Curious?”
Gu Xianwang shook her head stiffly, like a child desperately denying she had snuck a sweet.
Long Li withdrew her hand, nodded, and rose to her feet. “Then wait until you’re curious next time and come ask me.”
“…” Ye Chan stared in stunned silence. What kind of play was this? Her bad Fairy Sister teasing a little kid?
Her poor Fairy Sister now looked more like a puffed-up pufferfish. All that cool aloofness and gentle poise? Vanished without a trace.
“So… what do we do now?”
Long Li surveyed the cave and said, “We should still head through the water dungeon below. I don’t think there’s any way out from here.”
Ye Chan eyed the pitch-black mouth of the cave, her mind flashing to the fresh corpse waiting down there, and shivered. “Downward?”
Since Long Li had managed to circle over from the other end of the water dungeon, there had to be a path. Gu Xianwang nodded in agreement. “Let’s take the lower route.”
For them right now, time was life itself. They couldn’t afford any delays.
The three descended into the cave one by one. Ye Chan glanced at the chaotic water dungeon, deliberately avoiding A Yan’s corpse, and hurried after Gu Xianwang through the stone door. Glancing back, she saw Long Li stripping the bamboo bow and arrows from the body and couldn’t help but feel a surge of admiration.
Upstream from the water dungeon lay a narrow stone passageway, punctuated every so often by similar man-made stone doors. After squeezing through three of them, they came to a fork with two paths. Long Li explained that the right one was the route she’d taken, which looped back to that black mud pool. After a quick discussion, they opted for the left path in hopes of finding an exit.
The left stone path started out wide enough to walk upright, but it soon narrowed until they had to stoop. Long Li took the lead, with Gu Xianwang right behind her. The awkward bent-kneed shuffle quickly drained Ye Chan’s legs, forcing her to drop to all fours and crawl.
Gu Xianwang’s own waist and knees were aching too, but Long Li seemed to be managing with effortless ease ahead of her. Here she was, a total mess with her hair in wild disarray and no chance to fix it, while that woman strode on with her long hair flowing freely, utterly unaffected.
It was maddening.
Finally crawling out of the tomb passageway, Ye Chan let out a long breath of relief, convinced her legs had been rubbed raw.
Gu Xianwang discreetly kneaded her stiff thighs and sauntered over to Long Li as if nothing was wrong. “Have you been down this path before?”
Long Li shook her head. In the flickering light of the tinderbox, the cave ahead looked different from the ones before—more like it had been deliberately carved by hand, with clear signs of masonry. The walls weren’t the jagged rock of a natural karst cave but smoother, like a tunnel dug through the mountain’s soil.
The three pressed onward, an odd feeling growing on them with every step.
After about a hundred meters, a much taller stone door loomed into view.
It was a double door, complete with steps and a threshold, flanked on either side by guardian figures. They resembled squat stone stalagmites shaped vaguely like people, with oversized heads pieced together from stacked bits of smaller stones. The eyes and mouths were simple rings of round pebbles—nothing like the standardized guardians common in the Central Plains.
They evoked some ancient Native American carvings, almost.
This tomb-entrance door bore no plaque or inscription couplets, no writing anywhere. It felt eerie, jarringly out of place.
Ye Chan studied it closely for a long moment before speaking up. “This looks like statues left behind by the Yelang Ancient Kingdom.”
“Yelang Ancient Kingdom? The ‘Yelang arrogant’ from the old idiom?” Gu Xianwang asked.
Ye Chan nodded. “Exactly. Yelang was the first kingdom founded by the southwestern minorities. Back in the Xia and Shang eras, it was part of the Bai Pu territories, right on the border of Chu lands.”
Gu Xianwang frowned. “Wasn’t Yelang in Yunnan?”
Ye Chan shook her head. “Not entirely. The idiom ‘Yelang arrogant’ is a bit of a misreading, actually. When Emperor Wu of Han sent envoys through Dian, the Dian King asked the Han envoy, ‘How does Han compare to us in size?’ For one thing, the Dian King truly had no clue about the Central Plains. For another, Yelang really was that vast.”
“Really?”
Ye Chan grew serious. “Yes. Yelang was a slaveholding tribal alliance state, its lands sprawling across Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan. At its height, it commanded a hundred thousand elite troops. The Records of the Grand Historian notes: ‘Only Shu exports fermented bean paste, with many smuggling it to Yelang markets.’ In other words, people from Sichuan were already trading with Nanyue through Yelang back then.”
“Yelang sat on a key stretch of the Maritime Silk Road and was loaded with wealth—’every official there is rich for ten generations.’ Think modern Dubai, gold everywhere. Small wonder they wondered who was bigger, them or Han.”
First the Witch Clan, now the Yelang Ancient Kingdom—Gu Xianwang was truly at a loss to figure out just what kind of place they’d been dumped into.
“So this is a Yelang tomb?”
“Hard to say. Let’s go inside and check.”
Ye Chan glanced at Long Li, who nodded to them both. “Step back a bit.”
She raised her arms and shoved. The heavy stone door ground slowly open, a puff of dust and grit billowing out—not much, suggesting it hadn’t been sealed away for all that long.
More of those big-headed stone figures lined both sides, one every ten paces, stretching off into the distance.
This time, Long Li and Ye Chan held a tinderbox and a lighter, walking one on either side at the front. Gu Xianwang peered intently at the cave walls, which were covered in carvings. It started with a bamboo forest, then an egg appeared amid the bamboo, and a king stepped out from within.
It looked just like the historical records of the Yelang Clan.
Ye Chan grew more and more amazed the deeper they went. Further in, there were scenes identical to the cauldron engravings they had seen earlier in the Black Mud Pool. “Turns out these are people down here—so many of them. They seem to be from different ethnic groups, judging by their different attire. Look, these people are traveling together, and these others—they’re all from separate tribes.”
Everyone was migrating off into the distance.
One particular tribe appeared to consist entirely of women. They all wore long skirts and strange headdresses unlike those of any other group. Their leader looked like the clan leader, with two long snakes coiled around her shoulders.
Ye Chan noticed Long Li’s gaze lingering on that spot and leaned closer for a look. “Sword, this woman even has a sword at her waist. That’s incredible.”
In ancient times, a sword was more like a ritual artifact than a weapon. For a woman to wear one meant she held an extraordinarily high status.
They pressed on, and it seemed some of the people chose to settle in one place, founding a new tribe, while the others departed. Those who stayed rebuilt their camp and raised an altar.
Atop the altar stood an enormous tree, cloud patterns twisting through its branches. The female clan leader led her tribespeople in worshiping the great tree.
Many birdcages, resembling lanterns, hung from the tree. Before the tribespeople knelt a number of individuals, like sacrificial offerings.
“…Human sacrifice,” Ye Chan said, pursing her lips. “That was normal for the era.”
The carvings grew blurrier beyond that point. A thin layer of fungal clusters had sprouted across the cave walls, resembling freshly spun cotton candy—sticky and viscous-looking.
Ye Chan reached out to brush away some mycelium, but Long Li snapped at her, “Don’t touch it.”
She flinched and yanked her hand back.
“The mycelium in here is probably poisonous. Best not to touch it.”
Gu Xianwang cocked her head to listen. “I hear water.”
Ye Chan’s face lit up. “That means there’s an exit.”
The three quickened their steps. As they ventured deeper, the mycelium coating the rock walls on either side thickened, with clumps of white fluff even dangling from the ceiling. The tinderbox fuel gave out. Ye Chan handed the lighter back to Long Li and edged slowly to one side, hoping to spot more carvings on the walls.
Gu Xianwang’s anxiety mounted with every step. This tomb passageway felt endless. From the moment they had passed through the stone door until now, there were no marks anywhere along the path—which meant Senior Brother had never come this way.
If they were fortunate enough to find an exit here, she would probably have to lead people back to search for him… and that corpse…
“Ow!”
Suddenly, the sound of Ye Chan stumbling echoed from behind them. The other two whipped around and saw her sprawled in front of a protruding fungal cluster.
The mass was shrouded in white threads, resembling a cocoon. Ye Chan sat up, rubbing her knee, blood streaking her palm. “Damn it, what the hell? It tripped me.”
Gu Xianwang hurried to her side and spotted a patch of dark cloth exposed where Ye Chan had kicked it. Long Li held the lighter close, and the three of them finally saw clearly: wrapped inside the mycelium cluster was unmistakably a person.
