Chapter 42: Underground Palace

The sensation of falling was nothing like what Gu Xianwang had expected. There was no whistling wind around her, nothing like plummeting through empty air; it felt more like sinking into the sea. She might as well have been encased in glass, every sound muffled and hazy, like light through frosted panes. In a daze, she sensed waves surging just beyond her body, the damp, salty tang threading through the air in faint wisps.

Storm clouds gathered, massive waves swelled—she was drifting toward some nameless abyss of the deep sea.

Suddenly, a violent thumping echoed in her ears. Gu Xianwang’s head throbbed with agony. Frowning, she slowly pried her eyes open.

Darkness. A dim haze clouded her vision. She tried to lift her hand, only to find her arms bound tightly to her waist. Her whole body was wrapped like a silkworm in a cocoon, the dense, soft material against her skin almost indistinguishable from real silk.

Fortunately, the layer encasing her was thin and tore easily. Gu Xianwang groped around her surroundings—it felt icy cold, and tapping it produced a stony ring, though it wasn’t very thick. She seemed to have been placed upright inside a rounded stone cocoon.

The knocking she’d heard in her half-conscious haze had vanished; perhaps it had been a hallucination. Gu Xianwang pressed her palm to the stone’s chill surface, letting the coolness steady her nerves—

First things first: how had she ended up here?

Leech Pit. Rock Tunnel. The door. The fall… Yes, the fall.

She took stock of her body: soreness, numbness, swelling, and pain in equal measure, like the grueling training days of her childhood. But mercifully, no broken bones.

No one tumbled from a height straight into a sealed stone cocoon. Gu Xianwang figured she’d been set up. By whom? Chak? No—if it had been him, there’d have been no such elaborate deceptions. He’d have finished her with a single blow.

That left Yuzi.

If Yuzi was behind it, Gu Xianwang probably wasn’t her only target. The whole team might already be in her clutches. How she’d pulled it off was a question for later; right now, she had to escape this airtight prison before the oxygen gave out.

Gu Xianwang scrutinized the curved edge intently but found no cracks or seams. Even the tightest coffin lid left some trace of a join, yet her fingers detected nothing as she traced every inch.

A naturally formed stone cocoon? Impossible.

From the moment she’d lost consciousness to being sealed inside—thirty minutes at the shortest, half a day at most—what material or technique could encase a person in a flawless stone shell that quickly? Amber, maybe? But even amber needed time to set properly.

Panic crept in. Gu Xianwang pressed her back flat against the stone, drew up her leg, and unleashed a full-force kick at the curve’s thinnest point—

The three kicks left her knees throbbing, but her sturdy ox-tendon boot soles held firm, cracking a small fissure in the stone.

Elated, she heard that knocking again from outside—like voices speaking.

The words were indistinct, and she couldn’t be sure they were friendlies, so she held her tongue. One more kick ought to do it. She felt for her knife hilt—still there. Braced and ready, she struck the crack once more.

With a thud, her leg punched straight through the hole. The fracture spiderwebbed outward along the shell. A few savage elbow strikes later, she’d bashed open a gap tall enough for half a person.

She was just crouching to wriggle free when a hand thrust in from outside. It seized the stone shell and snapped off the inch-thick slab before her with a sharp crack, peeling it away like a banana skin.

A faint gleam pierced the darkness. Long Li clasped her hand and gently eased her down from the stone cocoon.

Her feet splashed into water, shallow enough to lap at her ankles, sloshing noisily with every shift. Gu Xianwang stepped back, instinctively pulling her hand away. She stared at her palm, a flicker of puzzlement in her eyes.

Long Li looked uninjured, though flecks of white silk still clung to her clothes. The stone cocoon opposite hers had its lid half-torn away, suggesting she’d broken out from the inside as well.

“You okay?”

Gu Xianwang nodded and glanced around. “I’m good. Where are we?”

Long Li replied, “Looks like some kind of underground palace for storing water.”

Darkness cloaked everything. In the shallow pool at their feet, faint greenish-yellow fireflies darted erratically from one spot to the next, winking in and out. Stone pillars rose haphazardly all around, spaced so unevenly that some gaps were too narrow for even a person to squeeze through.

Gu Xianwang glanced toward both ends. The terrain here resembled a school playground—semicircles at either end connected by a rectangular expanse roughly twenty or thirty meters long. The stone pillars were mostly clustered where the rectangle met the curves.

“Used for storing water?” She’d never heard of an underground palace serving such a purpose, but far more pressing at the moment was: “Where are the others?”

Long Li shook her head. “I woke up around the same time as you. When I came to, I was sealed inside a stone cocoon. I tried breaking out, but these things can only be shattered from within; they’re impervious from the outside.”

Gu Xianwang paused in surprise. Right—along the stone walls on both sides, embedded in the stele walls at regular intervals, stood the stone cocoons, upright and suspended in midair. Their surfaces gleamed smooth. They resembled…

At best, elongated teardrops. At worst, exclamation points missing their dots.

In stark contrast to these hideous stone cocoons, the pillars flanking the stele walls and the intricate linear motifs between them were all exquisitely wrought. At first glance, the entire underground palace struck an odd, discordant note, every element within it clashing jarringly with the rest.

She counted them off. “Four more stone cocoons.”

Excluding Yuzi, the tally matched their group perfectly.

But what in the world was going on? How had they been whisked from the rock cavity’s stone stairs straight into these underground palace stone cocoons?

Long Li nodded and approached her own cocoon. She stacked shards of broken stone into a low stool rising just above the water’s surface—a place to sit and catch one’s breath. “All we can do now is wait for them to wake on their own. Come rest here a moment.”

The equipment pack Long Li had carried earlier was gone as well. Gu Xianwang asked, “Have you already explored this underground palace?”

“Mm. No entrances or exits anywhere—just the water inlet hole below, and the only skylight sealed over with hardened paste.”

For an instant, Gu Xianwang wondered if she’d misheard. No entrances or exits?

In other words, even Long Li’s sharp senses had confirmed it: this place had a way in, but no way out.

So why linger here for their teammates? To greet them with a collective death?

Long Li noticed Gu Xianwang standing frozen and let out a sigh before settling onto her improvised seat. She leaned forward, dipped her hand into the water, and stirred gently, sending ripples lapping outward. Cupping a handful, she let it trickle from her palm. As the droplets pattered back down, splashing echoed from the shadows all around. Gu Xianwang whipped her head around; where the sounds arose, pinpricks of fluorescence bloomed, as if veiled in crystalline emerald.

In that momentary glow, the eyes of the foreign women carved in relief upon the stone pillars kindled with a soft white radiance, like pearls that shone in the night. Drawing nearer for a closer look, Gu Xianwang saw that each pair of eyes held nacreous orbs akin to the lustrous lining of shells. In darkness, they merged seamlessly with the stone, but the faintest light coaxed them to life in brilliant reflection.

Her fingers brushed lightly over the serpents coiled about the necks of those carved women from alien lands. Half wistful, half awestruck, she murmured, “Could all this truly be the Witch Clan’s handiwork?”

The Witch Clan—what sort of people were they? What ties bound them to the Nine Li, or to the Yelang Kingdom?

As she paced, her foot snagged on something beneath the surface. Bending down, Gu Xianwang fished it up, expecting one of those glowing minnows. Instead, she hauled forth a long, translucent membrane, like discarded snakeskin.

Gu Xianwang: …

Her throat tightened; she nearly flung it away. Revulsion roiled through her, but she steeled herself. For in the dim glow near the water’s face, she spied the stagnant pool—dead water of untold vintage—adrift with countless such silken strips.

“Is this… human skin?”

Long Li remained seated, elbows braced on her knees, her face shrouded in gloom, a faint, ambiguous smile playing upon her lips. “Likely. Those glowing specks at your feet are glowfish. They dwell eternally in lightless abyssal pools. Pretty to behold, but scavengers of carrion all. Given their numbers here in the underground palace, I’d wager plenty of bodies lurk below.”

Gu Xianwang’s brows knit faintly. “Aren’t you worried?”

“About what?”

“Sara. Old Dog. Chak. Or Ye Chan. Every second we dally here risks one of them dying.”

“And… what’s your plan?”

Gu Xianwang stepped closer. “We try something. Whatever happens, we give it our all before we go. These stone cocoons are airtight; the air inside won’t last. If they don’t wake soon, they’ll suffocate.”

Long Li regarded her, then rose slowly. “Very well. Let’s try it together.”

Gu Xianwang secretly let out a breath of relief, but she still felt a vague sense of unease in her heart. So, as she walked, she asked, “Do you think it was Yuzi who brought us here? How did she manage to do it from that tunnel all the way here?”

“I’m guessing that after we came out of the rock cave below the Leech Pit, we were dosed with some kind of hallucinogen. Do you still remember that torch? Thinking back on it now, the smoke after it went out seemed too thick, mixed with a strange powdery smell. Then, when we entered the tunnel where the air was so stagnant, we fell for it soon after.”

“Yeah, that matches what I guessed. I think Yuzi was just pretending to be mysterious at the door to stall for time.”

“Xianwang, have you thought about why she left just the two of us behind?”

“Ah?” Gu Xianwang froze for a moment, then quickly changed the subject. “I… we might have just woken up earlier.”

“If there’s no one else in the Stone Cocoon, what do you think the reason could be?”

Gu Xianwang pursed her lips. Her gaze shifted downward as she stared at the lightless water surface. After a long pause, she said, “I don’t know.”

She knew that what Long Li really wanted to ask about was her purpose in coming here—her background, her constitution, and her curse.

Long Li continued, “Along this whole path, it seems like every Gu Worm has been drawn to you.”

Gu Xianwang grew a bit annoyed. She looked up and retorted, “Then what about you? Was it you who wiped that blood on my back? Why did the Blood Marrow Bee Leech on my body stop attacking me once it got your blood? What method did you use to kill the Fly Gu Worm in the Water Dungeon? And how did you save me from the Cave Lord?”

She fired off the questions in one rapid breath, her chest heaving with agitation, her eyes growing hot. Yet in her heart, a sense of cathartic relief welled up.

“What exactly makes your organization so impressive? Isn’t it just about having people, equipment, and weapons? You… you get to be mysterious, so why can’t I? You’re their captain—what does that have to do with me?”

Long Li’s expression remained impassive as she tilted her head slightly. She asked, “Are you suspecting me?”

Gu Xianwang lowered her eyes and let out a self-mocking chuckle. Suddenly, she hooked her toes through the water, sending up a splash. She followed up instantly with two punches aimed straight at Long Li’s face. Caught off guard, Long Li took a solid hit to the side of her face and turned her head away. Gu Xianwang showed no mercy as she pressed in with a knee and an elbow strike right against Long Li’s body.