“Xianwang.”
Yao Cuo interrupted her and pulled her to the side of the narrow passage in the rock wall. He glanced inside and saw Yuzi indeed waiting not far away, so he said to her, “Can we talk alone here for a bit?”
Yuzi shrugged to indicate it was fine, then slowly dragged her steps aside to let the two of them pass before walking back into the rock cave.
Rustling sounds came from inside, as if she was opening the equipment pack. Yao Cuo didn’t dare go too far, fearing they might be overheard, so he lowered his voice and said, “We can’t travel with them.”
When Gu Xianwang saw Yuzi, she recalled their earlier conversation. Upon reviewing it, she realized she had failed to ask many questions, such as what Fallen God Fragrance was, what Cave Lord meant, and who that jadeified corpse with the core inside the Cave Lord was.
These were the very reasons they had come here, yet she hadn’t had a chance to probe into any of it. That conversation had clearly been a game of wits between the two sides, but she had been completely sidelined.
Only now did she belatedly realize her own naivety.
Her earlier talk with Yao Cuo had also been rushed, and they hadn’t aligned on many details. Seizing the moment, Gu Xianwang asked, “Did you discover something from Chak and Old Dog?”
“And that gunshot this morning wasn’t from us. We don’t have a gun. Before that, we’d been assuming you’d been attacked, and that Long Li had even contacted you via walkie-talkie.”
Yao Cuo said in surprise, “They used up the last few iron sand bullets from that old gun back in the karst cave. That guy named Chak is extremely good at bluffing. Because it was too cumbersome, he tossed the gun after finding Granny. All along the way, he’d been following far behind you. He said Long Li was very alert and would notice any noise, so they’d been moving slowly and never showing themselves.”
“As for the walkie-talkie, I saw they did use it, but what I heard was that woman named Sara calling out to Old Dog for rescue. The signal in this sinkhole is poor—intermittent and unclear—but it seemed to be saying something about the east side.”
Gu Xianwang: …
The cave had no wind and should have felt stiflingly hot, but inexplicably, Gu Xianwang’s entire back broke out in chills.
From the moment Long Li turned on the walkie-talkie that morning to every exchange that followed, Gu Xianwang had been right there—it couldn’t have been faked. The signal on their end was weak, but the voice, tone, speaking style, and personality all perfectly matched Chak and Old Dog.
Yet now Yao Cuo was telling her they hadn’t made any calls at all?
Even the transmissions they’d received on their walkie-talkie had been Sara’s pleas for help, not Long Li’s.
In other words, even for their old teammates, they hadn’t detected anything wrong with the signal from the fake Sara.
Was that even possible? Unless it was a trap they’d premeditated together—they’d recorded audio in advance, prepared other ammunition, and…
Just to deceive the two of them? Impossible.
If it wasn’t premeditated, then there had to be a third walkie-talkie. Long Li and Old Dog hadn’t communicated directly at all; every conversation had come through that third device.
The owner of that walkie-talkie knew everyone on the team intimately—not just imitating their voices, but their tones, intonations, and every tiny reaction. He had even fooled Long Li.
From the moment of that morning gunshot, the trap had already been set.
“So you were lured to Hanging Head Forest too?”
Yao Cuo said, “Chak originally wanted to sneak over and scout the situation. He said Sara wouldn’t normally separate from Long Li, so she must have found the entrance to the altar on her own and fallen into the trap.”
“Wait,” Gu Xianwang frowned. “How did Chak know Sara and Long Li had separated?”
Yao Cuo paused, looking at her with a serious expression. “Xianwang, I don’t know what happened on your journey that made you develop some trust in that woman named Long Li, but listen to your Senior Brother—she’s not trustworthy. You absolutely cannot get too close to her.”
“Just because her surname is Long?”
Yao Cuo said, “No. Xianwang, they barely talked along the way, but your Senior Brother isn’t a fool. Chak never used any special equipment from start to finish, so why was he so confidently tailing Long Li? I think they have a way to track her location. Those incidents in the karst cave were completely self-directed and self-acted.”
Gu Xianwang fell completely silent. With so many clues—true and false all jumbled together—nothing she had seen could be taken at face value, and nothing she had heard could be trusted as truth. She had previously suspected that the person who knocked out Ye Chan and kidnapped the Tour Guide was the same one who had attacked Sara and the others. But now it seemed Yuzi had a clear objective, and there was no reason for her to save them only to hide the Tour Guide away separately.
So who was it? Who was pulling the strings from the shadows?
Suddenly, a flash of insight cut through her swirling thoughts like a beam of white light—that photographer, Mountain-Seeking Traveler. Could he have been hiding in this sinkhole the whole time?!
Yao Cuo started to say something more, but Yuzi cut him off. “Hey, you two figure it out yet?”
Gu Xianwang steadied her nerves and gave a short reply. They emerged from the narrow passage to find Old Dog and Sara replenishing their food and water. The pair looked noticeably more energetic already, but Chak—who had just been cleared of the leeches clinging to his body—showed no signs of stirring. Even their own team seemed to have little hope of the jerk waking up anytime soon to stir up trouble.
Sara shot her a glance. “So, what’s the verdict?”
Gu Xianwang replied, “No verdict needed. We said we’d cooperate, so we cooperate. But given your track record, I’ve got one condition: Chak and Old Dog stay bound.”
Yao Cuo stood right behind her, his expression darkening. After all his pleading, this woman was still dead set on charging ahead, straight into the tiger’s den. He’d gotten a firsthand taste of Chak’s fighting skills—moves forged in a hundred battles, dirty tricks that had no place in the ring. Street brawling, maybe, or even battlefield scraps.
Against an opponent like that, tying his hands was what—insurance? And were those other two women any less dangerous? Hardly. Outnumbered as they were, it amounted to nothing.
He tugged at the hem of Gu Xianwang’s shirt.
She ignored him.
Long Li gave a noncommittal shrug and turned to Old Dog. “What about you?”
Old Dog merely shrugged in return. He was already tied up anyway. “Doesn’t matter to me.”
Sara squatted between them with a gleeful smirk, looping another rope through the knots binding their wrists to tether them together. It was short enough to keep Chak confined to a two-step radius around Old Dog. “Haha, sorry to put you out, Old Dog. This guy’s not waking up anytime soon—you can carry him.”
With Long Li’s position clear, Gu Xianwang didn’t push her luck. She turned to Yuzi. “So, can you tell us your plan now? If it involves murder and arson, sorry—we’re out.”
Yuzi let out a bark of laughter. “If I wanted murder and arson, I wouldn’t need you lot. It’s simple: we each get what we want. I want to utterly destroy this village. You want the Heavenly Book in the altar. I’ll get you inside; you do whatever you need to.”
“Without the altar, the village is like a beast without a heart. That’s destruction right there.”
The real question wasn’t her goal—it was whether it could actually work.
Long Li asked, “Is there a path from here to the altar?”
Yuzi jerked her head toward the narrow passage. “Let’s go find out.”
With that, she snuffed out the torch and produced an old metal flashlight from who-knows-where. She twisted it on and plunged in first.
Long Li and Gu Xianwang exchanged a quick glance, brushed the dirt from their pants, and stood. Under Yuzi’s lead, their makeshift team followed close behind, taking point.
Gu Xianwang and Yao Cuo brought up the rear. For one thing, they had a clear view of everyone ahead; for another, it left room for private conversation if needed.
She hadn’t brushed off Yao Cuo’s advice out of arrogance or blind trust in Long Li. From Hanging Head Forest all the way to tumbling into Leech Pit, she’d taken stock of the surrounding terrain. Even if they managed to climb out of the pit, there was nothing ahead but another sheer drop.
No altar. No obvious path. And with the mysterious holder of that third walkie-talkie still out there, striking out alone hardly seemed like the smarter play.
Yao Cuo, though, was clearly nursing some trauma from his earlier capture. He stuck half a step ahead of Gu Xianwang, eyeing the others like a wary guard dog.
The narrow passage soon steepened dramatically. Judging by the terrain, they had to be below Leech Pit now—burrowed under the sinkhole’s soil layer. Gu Xianwang figured they’d pop out another tunnel soon enough and pick a path through the woods toward the altar.
But never in her wildest dreams had Gu Xianwang imagined that Yuzi would lead them even deeper toward the earth’s core.
And here, concealed within, lay ancient and magnificent stone stairs.
When they first emerged from the rock tunnel, Gu Xianwang had assumed this rammed earth cave—resembling a mine shaft—was something Yuzi had excavated herself over the years to evade the villagers. Yet as she examined its vast scale and the precise, uniform construction, she grew convinced that no single person could have accomplished it alone.
Deprived of the torches’ fierce glow, the old hand-held flashlight proved woefully inadequate. The rammed earth cave was narrow enough for only two people side by side, forcing their group into a long, strung-out line. That faint beam barely reached the two stragglers at the rear. Gu Xianwang didn’t depend on light, so the darkness didn’t trouble her; what truly grated was the oppressive stuffiness. Even with torches blazing back in the rock cave, she hadn’t felt this suffocating heat. Here in the tomb passageway, though, it seemed as if oxygen might give out at any moment.
Sara fanned herself vigorously with one hand and grumbled, “Hey, girls, is this path even going anywhere? Why’s it getting harder to breathe the deeper we go?”
Gu Xianwang peered forward along the jumble of overlapping silhouettes and immediately spotted the tall, upright figure leading the way. Long Li appeared to sense something off as well. She reached out to touch the nearby rock wall, and Gu Xianwang instinctively mirrored her on the opposite side.
Ice-cold. Uneven. Dense. And utterly devoid of any air vents.
Yuzi seemed oblivious, marching ahead without a care. Sara held her tongue for a full two minutes, but by the third, her patience snapped. She opened her mouth to let loose a tirade—just as the flashlight up front clicked off. The tomb passageway plunged into total darkness, and all footsteps ground to a halt.
Before anyone could speak, the light flickered back on. But the sight it revealed this time was worlds apart from the moment before.
What had been a straight tomb passageway was now a dead end. Gu Xianwang stared in shock at the stone wall that had materialized from thin air, a massive stone door sealed tight at its very center.
