Chapter 32: Driving Away

“Oh, so?” Sara raised an eyebrow.

Ye Chan’s eyes darted as she pieced it together. “So this sinkhole is actually a giant chessboard, and we’re all just pieces on it? The hunting map isn’t a historical record but a prophecy? Come on, that’s a little too out there, isn’t it?”

A prophecy?

Gu Xianwang didn’t buy it. “It might not be a prophecy. The traps here are ancient, yet they’re maintained with incredible precision. And those birds—training them takes real effort. If the goal was just protecting the gold mine, everything in the karst cave would’ve been enough. Why bother remodeling the entire sinkhole?”

She paused to think, then added, “If it was the ancients who did it—specifically, the Witch Clan people who migrated here—where’d they get all that iron? Sure, maybe they mined and smelted it themselves, but with their gu, their wealth, and their natural defenses, what did they have to fear?”

Sara shot her a sidelong glance and let out an inexplicable chuckle.

Gu Xianwang frowned. “What’s so funny?”

Sara shrugged. “Nothing. I laugh when I feel like it. Gotta envy you—charging in blind like that. Ignorance is bliss, huh?”

The words stabbed right at Gu Xianwang’s insecurities, dripping with contempt and scorn. No matter how you sliced it, they left a sour taste.

Gu Xianwang shot back, “We’re all in the same boat now. If you know something, spit it out. No need for the passive-aggressive crap. Pissing me off won’t earn you a bonus.”

Sara laughed it off. “I don’t know jack worth sharing. Well, if you insist…”

She leaned in with a taunting smirk, cupping a hand to her mouth as she whispered just loud enough for Gu Xianwang to hear, “Stick close to Captain Long if you want to keep breathing.”

Gu Xianwang: “…”

Ye Chan blinked in confusion. “What are you two on about? So hush-hush.”

Long Li seemed lost in her own thoughts. A moment later, she spoke up abruptly. “The gold mine’s a front. The real prize they’re guarding is the sinkhole altar. We’ll only find out who their enemy is once we get inside.”

Gu Xianwang glanced over. Long Li’s gaze was still distant, like she hadn’t quite returned to the present.

The two statements felt miles apart, and Gu Xianwang couldn’t trace the logic connecting them in Long Li’s mind. Still, she sensed a faint, invisible thread pulling it together—enemy. Who was this enemy? Was it to stop the Yellow Emperor’s forces from hunting down Chi You’s remnants?

Unlikely. Even bitter feuds faded after thousands of years. Both Yellow Emperor and Chi You were long gone. Why would the Yelang descendants keep these mechanisms running? Clan tradition alone?

Or maybe this so-called “enemy” still lurked after all these millennia, launching fresh incursions?

Her musings were cut short by two sharp whooshes from the distant woods. A blinding streak lit up the sky, exploding in a puff of smoke.

At the sight of the red signal flare, Sara froze. “Shit, did Old Fox already snag it?” She checked her watch—the timing was off. From disaster to done deal that fast?

Moments later, a second flare burst behind it. Green this time.

Long Li reacted at once. “They’re in trouble.”

Everyone carried the company-issued three-color signal flares—one set each. Red meant mission accomplished, awaiting extraction. Yellow signaled impasse—retreat immediately. Green called for backup: trouble ahead.

In the blink of an eye, three flares had popped off over there, running through every color.

For Chak and Old Dog, this was uncharted territory.

Sara’s smirk vanished, her face hardening as she muttered to herself, “Guess this damn place really does have teeth.”

Gu Xianwang asked, “You’ve got signal flares, so won’t your outside team spot them and come running?”

The question carried an obvious edge of probing. Sara rolled her eyes and ignored her.

Long Li explained, “Our gear’s provisioned for three days. No one from the perimeter climbs up early.”

Ye Chan pictured it and shook her head. “What if the whole team’s wiped out? You just wait three days till everyone’s cold?”

Sara snapped, all irritation, “You think we’re playing house? You sign up, you own the risks. Head on a swivel—no one’s coming to save your ass. Tch.”

Somehow, that just sparked a flicker of sympathy in Ye Chan’s eyes.

“That being said, how much do you all even make? Why not consider getting a proper job?”

All right, she got the glare again. Ye Chan scratched her nose, then suddenly heard that cow horn blast echoing from the surrounding cliff walls once more. This time the rhythm was unique, sounding just like a cavalry charge.

The black-feathered mynas all around perked up at the sound, flapping their wings and spiraling into the sky as if juiced on adrenaline, their numbers so vast they nearly blotted out the heavens.

Gu Xianwang frowned. “Are they marking our position?”

True or not, this black whirlwind was already growing downright eerie.

Sara stood and urged them on. “I don’t think we can stay here any longer. Let’s just head for the Old Fox.”

Ye Chan scrambled to her feet and glanced toward the spot where the signal flare had burst earlier. The fog had finally cleared almost entirely. With the sunlight breaking through, the sinkhole began to warm, the air so crisp and fresh it bordered on intoxicating—almost like oxygen overload.

Her body felt heavy and achy, but her steps were strangely light and floaty.

Gu Xianwang steadied her with a gentle hand. “What’s wrong? You’re swaying.”

Ye Chan patted her cheeks. “Nothing. Just feeling a little drowsy.”

“This is no time to—”

Long Li cut in abruptly. “No, it’s the flock stirring up the air.”

Sara blinked midway through her words, extending an arm to test the wind, still baffled. “They’re not seriously going to whip up a mini tornado with their wings and blow us away, are they?”

Gu Xianwang drew a deep breath and soon felt a pressure building in her skull. “The oxygen levels here really are higher than normal.”

Just then, the cow horn calls from the cliffs cut off sharply, replaced by hoarse roars from men—somewhat like the chants of a Maori war dance, laced with incomprehensible dialect. The primal cries evoked beastly howls, sending an inexplicable chill down their spines.

Ye Chan shivered, spooked. “Shouldn’t we circle around from another direction? What if there’s an ambush over there?”

They didn’t have to wait for the what-if. A frantic barrage of “caw caw caw” screeches erupted from the birds overhead. They looked up and bolted.

The sky darkened as the vast flock of black mynas tucked in their wings like falling bombs, plummeting straight down. Their razor-sharp beaks gleamed in the sunlight like a storm of arrows or a spiked lid crashing over them.

The birds had climbed over ten meters high earlier, now hurtling down with the full force of their weight. These four had no helmets; a single hit and those beaks could punch right through their skulls. It would be over in a blink.

Ye Chan ran for her life, matching Long Li’s pace with grim determination. She barely needed to focus to hear the whistling dives slicing the air behind her. It felt like charging through a hail of bullets—slow even a fraction and she’d end up Swiss cheese.

The problem was, these “bullets” weren’t coming horizontally but from directly overhead. She finally got why her grandparents’ generation always reminisced about ducking into air-raid shelters during the war; anything dropping from above ratcheted the lethality up exponentially.

Long Li hit the clearing first and plunged into the dense forest. This was the shady side, with minimal sunlight, so the trees towered high, their canopies interlocking like a vast awning.

That kept the mynas from diving from above. Even if they pursued into the gloom, they’d have to weave through the twisting branches. Just that sliver of breathing room slashed the danger for the group.

They burst in one after another, gasping for breath.

Gu Xianwang slowed, wiping sweat from her brow. She glanced back; the flock hadn’t followed in force. Only a few stragglers perched on the outermost trees, flapping and screeching at them.

Tree shadows loomed everywhere. The newborn sunlight was thoroughly blocked, save for thin rays slanting through narrow gaps in the foliage. Those beams pierced the clinging mist wrapped around the leaves, tracing uneven paths of light.

Gu Xianwang found herself momentarily awestruck by the sight. From behind her, Ye Chan exclaimed in delight, “It’s the Tyndall phenomenon!”

On the sinkhole’s shady side, the vines and ferns grew even denser than in the woods they’d passed earlier—big ones coiling around smaller ones. Every few steps demanded ducking through gaps or scrambling over obstacles.

Sara had no heart for admiring the scenery. She trudged along the uneven vine roots for a bit before suddenly halting and turning to Long Li. “Long, something feels off to me. Did we run into this forest ourselves, or did that flock of damned birds chase us in here?”

Long Li had been the one leading the way as vanguard, but the situation had been too urgent at the time. Even without factoring in Old Dog Chak’s position, she would still have picked this woods as their best spot to take cover. Looking back now to puzzle out whether they’d chosen their path or been lured down it was no easy task.

It meant conceding that these birds weren’t just capable of sending signals—they had the tactical smarts to encircle and flush out prey. They knew exactly where to spring traps, where to launch those suicidal dives, and how to use the same blunt attack tactic over and over to force people into picking a specific escape route and terrain.

Could a bunch of wild myna birds pull that off?

Long Li shook her head. “Hard to say.”

Gu Xianwang stepped up beside her and offered a possibility. “Birds are still just birds—they can’t have human-level intelligence. Maybe we should think about this from the mountain folk’s point of view.”

Long Li tilted her head. “How do you mean?”

Gu Xianwang explained, “Have you ever trained dogs or animals like that? I talked to some old hands from a traveling circus once. They said even with clever critters like monkeys, you have to break every command down into its smallest steps. Reward them for nailing one part, then another, and finally stitch it all together under a single cue.”

Sara was a real dog person, so she didn’t snap for once. “Yeah, like teaching a dog to roll over. First you get ’em to drop flat, then flop to one side, and only then slap on the ‘roll’ command.”

Gu Xianwang nodded. “Right.”

Sara arched a brow. “And?”

Gu Xianwang went on, “So every move those birds made probably lines up with some signal coming from the cliffs. But I can’t imagine any reward worth putting a command ahead of their own lives. Self-preservation is hardwired into every living thing.”

Ye Chan cut in out of nowhere. “Oxygen poisoning.”

Sara blinked. “What?”

Long Li got it right away. “The air. That circling order the flock got—it wasn’t aimed at us. It was for the birds themselves.”

A chill ran down Gu Xianwang’s spine. This theory was downright creepy. Had the person training those birds planned from the start to exploit the sinkhole’s supercharged oxygen down below? Make the flock lose their minds and slam into suicide dives from the sky?

If that was true, then what was the point of all this elaborate scheming? Luring them straight into this stretch of woods?

Gu Xianwang barely registered the rest of their words. She gripped her knife hilt on instinct and swept her gaze around. Everything looked fine: insect buzz, distant birdcalls, dappled shade, wispy fog, slanting sunlight, tangled vines, loamy earth…

Wait. The earth.

Gu Xianwang frowned and fixed her eyes back on that patch of soft black soil beneath the tree roots.

Tufts of bright green moss stretched from the roots clear to the nearby rocks. The soil looked rich and nurturing, like a pampered rice paddy—regularly fed manure and turned over, the kind of spot where anything would thrive.

She stared without blinking. There, in the tiniest details, crumbs of topsoil were pulsing in perfect rhythm: arch, arch, with intervals that varied—some long, some short.

Sara figured she was lost in thought and waved a hand in front of her face. “Hey, what gives? You’re not gonna puzzle this out by staring into space. Come on, move it.”

That gesture sent Gu Xianwang’s gaze dropping to the ground as if knocked loose. In a flash, she spotted it—the soil right under their feet had the same faint, almost imperceptible quiver.

It was so subtle that no one could feel it through their boot soles. Gu Xianwang’s heart lurched. She glanced ahead on reflex. “Long Li.”

Long Li paused and turned, not even getting a word out, when the ground gave way beneath her. It was like some hidden barrier in the soil had vanished in an instant, plunging her legs into a bottomless void.