In an instant, the air grew thick and heavy, silence falling over everything.
Gu Xianwang realized what was happening. The bird Long Li had caught wasn’t some ordinary myna—it was the head bird.
The principle of capturing the ringleader first held true across all kinds of groups.
Suddenly, a myna in the distance burst through the leaves and soared into the sky, letting out a piercing series of chirps—cheep-cheep-cheep. At once, the distant shouts echoing from the cliffs changed pitch, now laced with a low, mournful woo-woo, like the bellow of a cow horn being blown.
Sara got it. “Damn, these creepy birds have different calls for different things. They’re tipping off those mountain folk.”
Long Li dropped the head bird’s corpse and strode to the front. “Come on. Stick close together—don’t spread out too far. They won’t risk attacking us now.”
The law of the jungle reigned eternal in the natural world. Even birds raised and trained by humans carried that deep-seated instinct to seek profit and shun harm. By killing the head bird, Long Li had sent a crystal-clear warning. Here and now, there was only one predator at the top—she was it. Every creature below her in the food chain scattered.
The four of them hurried along. Gu Xianwang glanced sidelong and confirmed it: the flock of mynas only dared to circle and trail them from afar, launching no more attacks.
She eased up a little, but that cow horn blast from before still gnawed at her. Were those mountain folk really out of tricks already? If bird swarms were all they had, why had Old Dog warned them against mounting a rescue?
Crunch crunch. The path they followed wound through broadleaf trees, the ground carpeted in a thick layer of dead leaves that hid the soil and moss underneath.
Gu Xianwang noticed the terrain dipping lower than before. Puddles dotted the area here and there, and a careless step could sink a whole shoe. She fretted that the leaves might be concealing bigger marshes—if anyone plunged in, the murky water would be crawling with water lice and leeches, nothing but trouble.
Sara seemed to share her concerns. As they walked, the four began to fan out instinctively, picking their way around the edges of those potential bogs.
By five-thirty, the mountain mist had thinned, opening up their view. The crisis from earlier felt like a fading memory, the adrenaline draining from their bodies. Gu Xianwang’s neck wound throbbed like fire where the bird had bitten her.
She touched the spot gingerly. The scab had bubbled up with fresh blisters. Fearing they hid fly gu worm eggs just like the tour guide’s, she started to turn and call for Ye Chan to take a look. But then she spotted a myna landing slyly in the distance, its spindly claws hopping across the leaf litter like it was hunting earthworms.
What a sudden change. With the head bird dead, had these mynas reverted to plain old birds, content to forage?
Suspicion prickled as she watched. More mynas fluttered down, facing one another beak-to-beak, cocking their tiny heads. Abruptly, they all pecked at the ground. Their beaks snagged something and yanked.
A grinding clatter rose from underground, like gears turning. Gu Xianwang’s heart clenched. She felt the tremor underfoot an instant before dozens of razor-sharp iron spikes erupted from the puddles. Arrayed in tight ranks, they were spaced so that anyone who fell would be skewered by two at once. Gu Xianwang moved fast, but not fast enough—one punched through the sole of her shoe, slashing a gash.
It bored halfway through the cowhide bottom, shredding her tough cargo pants along the way and carving a half-centimeter-deep bloody line down her leg. The spikes rose waist-high; only a lucky shift in her balance had kept them from gutting her.
A scream rang out. Gu Xianwang gritted her teeth against the pain and looked. Long Li had Ye Chan by the collar in a feat of acrobatics, hauling her back. Ye Chan was arched backward like a drawn bow, teetering on the brink of impaling herself on the spikes ahead.
In saving her, Long Li’s backpack had taken a direct hit, pierced clean through. She whipped off the straps in a flash, yanking the pack free without a glance. Her eyes swept the scene like a hawk’s. “Square-dance around the spikes!”
What?
Gu Xianwang hadn’t puzzled it out when a whooshing gust whipped up. Branches on the sturdy trees nearby shuddered, and massive log-like limbs—thick as battering rams—swept in from the side.
Sara yelped. “Holy shit!”
She darted between a pair of spikes. Four half-foot-thick wooden beams barreled through the gaps in the spike row, sweeping left to right. No sooner had they passed than four more spear-tipped logs came crashing from the front at the same rhythm. They crossed in a brutal grid, each set leaving about five seconds’ gap, the wind roaring like a savage beast. The four dodged frantically left and right amid the spikes, scrambling for their lives.
What a vicious trap. The iron skewers stood as high as a person’s waist, and the wooden stakes were positioned at exactly the right height to smash into an ordinary person’s hips. Even if someone dodged the skewers, any slight delay in their reaction—even if they managed to crouch down—would still send them flying from the impact.
Moments later, the stakes’ momentum slowed as inertia faded, and they collided from two directions with shocking force. Amid their chaotic swinging, they thudded against each other. The four women hurriedly flattened themselves to the ground, heedless of the filthy puddles beneath the layer of dead leaves, and crawled out along the edge of the iron skewers.
Bird flocks settled on branches all around, flapping their wings and squawking raucously, as if they were watching a show and mocking the women for getting what they deserved.
At last, they crawled out of the Iron Skewer Array and collapsed onto the ground, panting heavily. Ye Chan had the weakest combat ability of the group, but her luck was outrageously good. The fly gu worms hadn’t bitten her, the myna flock had flown right past her, and Long Li had dragged her bodily through this deadly gauntlet of skewers and stakes.
Gu Xianwang, meanwhile, hadn’t even reached the edge of the altar. She was covered in wounds from head to toe—black bruises and red gashes, new injuries layered atop old ones that had torn muscle and cracked bone.
The cut on her leg burned like fire, now slathered in mud from that filthy puddle. She could only imagine the bacteria and viruses breeding in it.
Long Li spotted the wound and pulled the last of the vodka from her pack. She squatted down beside her. “We need to wash this. The mud here’s too dirty.”
Gu Xianwang hung her head and glanced at Long Li’s hand. The bite from the Gu Witch had healed completely, the skin smooth as new. Her left hand still bore its bandage, which looked a bit comical—and rather unnecessary.
“Hey, Long!” Sara called out. “Don’t you have a conscience? I’ve got a hole in my back!”
Long Li didn’t look up. “Quit faking. You carry your own meds.”
Tch. Being seen through like that took all the fun out of it. So what if she was careful with her life?
Sara rolled her eyes, fished a packet of antiseptic hemostatic powder from the inner pocket of her jacket, and tossed it to Ye Chan. “Here, sprinkle this on for me.”
Ye Chan blinked. ?? Are we close or something?
Long Li trickled the vodka slowly from the top of the wound downward, rinsing away the mud. When she reached below the knee, she paused. A leech had burrowed into the gash, its body swollen fat from feeding.
Gu Xianwang saw it too. Long Li reached for her lighter to burn the thing off, but before her hand got close, the leech dropped free on its own. It writhed once in the mud before dissolving into black sludge.
Gu Xianwang froze, her throat tightening as she stared at her leg, at a loss for an explanation.
Long Li said nothing. She still passed the lighter over the leg as a precaution, then finished rinsing the wound with the vodka.
There wasn’t much bandage left. After wrapping the gash on her thigh, they had to leave the calf open.
Long Li hesitated, then unwound the bandage from her own hand and rebound Gu Xianwang’s leg with it.
“It’s clean,” she said. “Don’t worry.”
Gu Xianwang pressed her lips together and gave a slight nod.
Oddly, once they stopped moving, the birds went quiet too. Even the roars echoing from the surroundings had faded away at some point.
The forest was unnaturally still.
After catching their breath, they each took a sip of water. Sara spoke up. “So, what now? Head toward them? By this point, the Old Fox should be good and dead.”
Gu Xianwang eyed the distant flock of birds, chattering among themselves. Her thoughts were a jumble. From the morning’s encounters, it seemed she only drew the gu worms themselves—like these black-feathered mynas. Though trained by the mountain folk and ferocious enough, they were ordinary animals at heart. The same went for yesterday’s venomous ants and the python; their attacks weren’t targeted solely at her.
In other words, the strange scent of the Forbidden Witch Bone attracted things within a fixed range.
But figuring out exactly how that range was determined would require more clues.
Long Li didn’t rush to answer whether they should press on or turn back. Instead, she said, “Do you all remember that mural at the entrance to the karst cave?”
“Huh?” Sara looked baffled.
“The mural?” Gu Xianwang frowned slightly. She knew it all too well; she’d pored over photos of it endlessly, until the image was burned into her very bones. “You mean the hunting ritual mural?”
Long Li nodded faintly. She brushed away a layer of leaves with the back of her hand, then used a stone to scratch a straight line into the soft soil.
She tapped the stone’s tip at the line’s center. “This is where we found the bronze plate.”
Then she marked a spot directly below the center. “This is the karst cave exit.”
Finally, she sketched a rough grid at the bottom of the diagonal from the exit to the center. “And this is the Iron Skewer Array where we are now.”
She paused there, glancing up at the sky. The woods were sparser here, opening into a clearing from which they could see faint rays of morning light touching the high cliff-top overhead.
Then she extended her arm straight upward, marking two points directly above the matrix. “This should be where Old Dog and Chak started.”
Once she finished drawing, she asked, “Do you see anything?”
Sara rolled her eyes. “Just points and lines. What is there to see? Other than that we’re still a long way from Old Fox?”
Long Li glanced at Gu Xianwang. “If we factor in the Forest Stone Statues’ positions.” At the top of the central line connecting Old Dog and Chak’s marks, she drew a parallel line. Then, between their own matrix and Old Dog and Chak, she added a vertical one.
Gu Xianwang blinked, struck by how oddly familiar the diagram seemed the more it took shape, as if she’d encountered something like it before.
Ye Chan slapped her thigh in realization. “Isn’t this half the Luoshu?”
“Huh?”
“The Hetu Luoshu! You seriously never seen it? It’s also called the Turtle Scripture—part of that whole I Ching Eight Trigrams stuff, the root of yin-yang and five elements divination. Come on, read a book sometime. Knowledge enlightens the mind.”
Gu Xianwang caught on. The Luoshu—she’d once spotted a chart of it hanging in Master’s room. “But how does it connect to the wall painting in the karst cave?”
Long Li patiently traced the full diagram with her finger. “An encirclement hunt. The karst cave shows a record of sacrificing the hunt’s spoils to the Ancestral Tree afterward. In ancient times, hunting was a grand military rite. For royalty or clans alike, it went far beyond mere foraging, carrying profound symbolic weight.”
“Training troops, ritual offerings, appeasing the divine.”
“This looks like the Luoshu, but it’s really a go board. Go was once called River Luo, and matches were likened to encirclement hunts.”
As she spoke, her eyes drifted to the flock of birds perched on distant branches. “Go pieces come in black and white. Black stones resemble crows, white ones egrets—so the pieces themselves are known as crows and egrets.”
