Chapter 44: Gate

“Xianwang!”

Before Gu Xianwang could respond, Yao Cuo suddenly cried out, trembling as he jolted awake.

Sweat drenched his forehead, and his eyes were dazed. He stared at the junior sister before him for a long moment, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he finally asked, “Did we crawl out of the snake nest? What happened to your arm?”

Sure enough, Gu Xianwang patted his shoulder. “Senior Brother, it’s all right now. What you saw was just an illusion.”

Yao Cuo glanced around uneasily. “Then… what about Yuzi? And those others?”

Gu Xianwang soothed him with a gentle voice, giving a simple rundown of their current predicament. She knew Yao Cuo must still harbor deep suspicions toward Long Li, so she made a point to stress the underground palace’s airtight seal and the dire scarcity of their sole piece of equipment. It took some doing, but she finally convinced her senior brother that they had no choice but to stick together and find a way out. Only then did she circle back to the original topic.

Yao Cuo scrubbed his face with damp hands to shake off the fog, mentally sorting through the tangled chain of events until it all made sense. At last, he began to recount what he had witnessed.

“After we passed through the door, we’d been descending into that cave the whole time, right? The terrain here is bizarre—way steeper than the pass at Four Maidens Mountain. Eventually, Chak woke up ahead of us and kicked up a huge fuss, which yanked Old Dog right off the cliff face too.”

“Luckily, they snagged on a ledge. That ledge opened into a black snake nest crawling with snakes everywhere… I tried to grab you and bolt, but the moment I turned, you were gone. Just before the swarm overtook me, I faintly heard Yuzi talking.”

“What did she say?” Long Li asked.

Yao Cuo’s jaw clenched tight. In a low voice, he replied, “She said it was a test—a screening. Only survivors get to pass through the door.”

“The door?”

Yao Cuo let out a sigh. “That’s all I can recall. No idea about the rest.”

“Are you afraid of snakes?” Long Li pressed.

“Something like that,” Yao Cuo said flatly, averting his gaze.

Gu Xianwang sensed there was more to the question and chimed in, “He’s petrified of them. Once during training, a length of hemp rope spooked him so bad he nearly scrambled up the rafters.”

“Hey!” Yao Cuo’s face flushed red as he shot her a glare. Why was his own junior sister airing his dirty laundry to a stranger?

Long Li murmured in acknowledgment. “I suspect all these illusions we’ve seen tie back to our deepest fears.”

Gu Xianwang had already toyed with a similar hunch, but if that held true, what exactly was hers?

A human face? The water’s surface? Or perhaps… a counterfeit Long Li?

A sudden realization struck Gu Xianwang. “Senior Brother and I share two key details. For starters, it confirms we were heading downward after entering the stone door. Midway through, Chak did wake up and spark some chaos, leading to him and Old Dog tumbling down.”

“But the heights we perceived differ wildly. As I remember it, Old Dog and Chak plummeted straight into an abyss, the stone stairs gave way beneath me, and I never caught Yuzi’s words.”

Long Li nodded. “The illusions intensify step by step, which means the hallucinogens in the air are building up as we go.”

With that, she fished a spare high-beam flashlight from her pack and flicked it on with a click, flooding the chamber with light.

The stark white glow banished the shadows, and Gu Xianwang couldn’t help but find it amusing in hindsight. When it had just been the two of them, no one had thought to shine a light.

Yao Cuo scanned the walls on either side, then pushed himself up using his knees against the stone. “This doesn’t strike me as a water storage room.”

The three circled the stone pillars once. Gu Xianwang asked, “Why not?”

Yao Cuo’s eyes crinkled with a grin. His junior sister was perfect in every way, but she had that bookish air about her—quoting poetry about celestial maidens from ancient texts. Put simply, she wasn’t all that down-to-earth. If she ever threw herself into the grit of daily life, she’d grasp the practical logic of things in no time.

“Think about it. If this is truly an underground palace, it’s got to be at the very bottom of the whole structure, yeah? Using the basement for water storage? Leaving aside how that’d mess with the ancient foundations, let’s talk purpose. Option one: circulation for temperature control, like some primitive AC system. Option two: a man-made well.”

“First case, there’s no visible circulation path, so forget steady temps. Second case—look up at the ceiling. That single vent’s smaller than a kid’s fist. Fetching water with buckets? What a nightmare that’d be.”

Gu Xianwang figured that since Long Li had said this place was for storing water, there had to be a good reason for it. She pondered aloud, “If the underground palace is being used to store water, it doesn’t necessarily have to be for the living, does it?”

Yao Cuo blinked in surprise, staring at the glowing fish darting every which way. People always said the cold seeped in through the feet first, but right now he felt like his whole body was freezing, on the verge of shivering. “I’m done with you and your scares. These past few days I’ve seen more snakes, bugs, rats, and ants than I can count, and now you’re telling me there are other creatures lurking underwater?”

“Just a hunch,” Gu Xianwang said quickly. “Look at how randomly these stone pillars are placed—it doesn’t seem like it’s for any practical purpose. The space here is so irregular; it can only be for storage.”

The stone walls lining both sides of the underground palace were built from solid slabs of blue bricks, their surfaces free of any elaborate carvings. Even if the Yelang Kingdom and the Witch Clan placed little value on writing, one would expect at least some narrative wall paintings to have been left behind. Yet everything preserved here was disappointingly crude. Anyone with ordinary eyesight would have to run their hands over the walls to even notice—oh, there were some dots and lines etched in after all?

The three of them first circled along the right-hand wall to the bottom and back. Judging from the layout they’d explored so far, the entire underground palace formed an oval shape, not unlike a school playground. Those haphazard stone pillars clustered within a rectangular frame in the center, scattered about like the playful trails of coiling dragons and soaring phoenixes—as if some drunken craftsman had arranged them on a whim.

The curved wall at the far end had gaps between the bricks, but when Long Li tested them, every single one was firmly set. Breaking through would require hauling in at least a bulldozer.

They looped back to the starting point. What they now knew for certain was that the latter half of the underground palace had no entrances or exits—not even a skylight. That meant Long Li, in her lucid moments, must have been in the front half. With her sharp eyes, she hadn’t had time for a full scout, which could only mean… perhaps the first thing she’d seen was herself?

The thought sent Gu Xianwang’s mind into a whirl. She quickly reined in her focus and returned to the present: there had been a visual blind spot between her position and Senior Brother’s at the time, but they weren’t far apart. Long Li was probably within that range too. Moving three grown adults—especially Senior Brother, who weighed a solid one hundred fifty or sixty jin—Yuzi couldn’t have managed it alone.

Even if she’d had help, the entrance couldn’t be too far away.

Gu Xianwang peered intently, scrutinizing every detail along both walls and the ceiling. There were no cracks that could conceal a hidden exit. But people didn’t just appear out of thin air, did they? Could it be underground?

Under the flashlight’s beam, the water at the bottom looked slightly murky, though the surface layer remained fairly clear—like an unpolished copper mirror, reflecting their wavering images. Gu Xianwang turned her head aside and, using the faint refracted light, smoothed a stray lock of hair at her temple.

Halfway through the motion, she froze. “Do any of you feel like the water level’s risen?”

She remembered that when she’d woken up, the water had only reached about a finger’s width above her ankles. Now it was already lapping at mid-calf.

Yao Cuo glanced down at his feet. “Has it? Feels about the same to me.”

“Mm.” Long Li angled the flashlight beam from the side toward the water inlet hole at the bottom. In the light, the traces of surging water became clearer. “Ever since we left the center point, the water inlet holes on the floor of the underground palace have been letting water in.”

Gu Xianwang silently calculated the time from the center to their turnaround point. Cold sweat beaded on her forehead. “By that reckoning, if these water inlet holes have no cutoff line, then in another two or three hours, the water in the underground palace will be up to our waists.”

Two or three hours to reach waist height? Yao Cuo compared it to the depth of a swimming pool and figured it wasn’t so bad. He took a couple of deep breaths. “This underground palace isn’t that big. Two hours is enough time for several full searches. If there’s a way out, we’ll find it in time. Compared to the water, I think the air quality here’s the bigger issue. Feels like I can’t even breathe properly.”

He had a point. The underground palace had been built without any air vents, and who knew how long the air inside had been sealed away? It hung heavy and stagnant, laced with the fetid stench of a dead pond. Breathe shallow, and it felt like you exhaled more than you inhaled; breathe deep, and the fumes made your head throb.

Gu Xianwang quietly formed her assessment: both the water and the air were trouble. The wound on her calf burned like a knife cut from soaking in this stagnant pool, and with all the moisture in the air, her many injuries made lingering in this environment especially risky.

“You’re right. The air gets bad if you breathe it too long. We can’t waste any more time—we need to find the exit fast.”

…

She’d thought their best hope lay at the far end of the other side of the underground palace.

Unfortunately, the heavens had never been kind to her.

Yao Cuo refused to accept it. He crawled closer and meticulously scraped at every crevice etched into the wall. These doors—these relief carvings that resembled doors—had outlines with some depth to them, but their inner surfaces were still seamlessly fused with the surrounding wall bricks.

It was too bizarre. These four relief doors were the only perfectly symmetrical features in the entire Underground Palace. Each one stood two meters tall, intricately carved with strange Array Diagrams. If one stood at the central point among the four doors and looked straight up, another door was engraved directly overhead on the ceiling. The stone wall straight ahead was recessed inward, as though it had once housed something like a humanoid Arc Coffin. If forced to draw a comparison, it resembled an Iron Maiden—except the iron frame was now gone.

This time, it took only about eight minutes to search from the center to the left end. Gu Xianwang silently tallied the seconds in her head, then bent down to gauge the water level with her fingers. With a helpless sigh, she announced, “The inflow speed seems to be picking up.”

The good news was that they had scoured the entire Underground Palace without needing a full two hours. The bad news was that this damn place truly had no entrance or exit.

Whatever creatures they had encountered before—in the Karst Cave or the Sinkhole—could at least be explained by some theory or another. But this Underground Palace, little more than a Secret Chamber, was shaking Yao Cuo’s materialist worldview to its core.

“But… no matter what, we came in from the outside, right?”

Gu Xianwang met his eyes, then abruptly looked away, her heart stirring with an indescribable emotion. Senior Brother had always been the optimistic sort, open-minded from a young age. Even when beaten or punished during training, he would flash a cheeky grin—one might even call it roguish. The last time she had seen that look on his face was after his breakup with his first love, when he had downed an entire bottle of Erguotou, convinced the sky itself was collapsing.

She forced a smile. “Right. This Underground Palace isn’t all that big. We still have time. If the exit isn’t on the ceiling or the walls, then maybe it’s right under our feet.”

Deep down, they both knew that was impossible. With the Water Inlet Hole drawing water in from below, the floor tiles had to connect to some underground waterway. No structure this massive could rest on a hollow foundation.

Even so, Yao Cuo plunged into the water and probed the Water Inlet Hole with his fingers. Regrettably, the hole plunged deep; even shoving his middle finger in to the hilt yielded no sense of an edge. The tiles, coated in grime from years of pooled water, felt slimy along their grout lines. He held his breath as long as he could, flailing about for what felt like ages before surfacing with a shake of his head. “Couldn’t feel any mechanisms down there.”

Only then did he realize how much the water had risen. When he had first woken, it had only lapped at mid-thigh; now, even squatting, it came up to his waist. The fresh inflow carried fine, unsettled silt from outside, turning the water below into a murky haze. Even the glowfish’s light was scarcely visible.

At this rate, drowning wasn’t their only worry. Once the water crested their chests, it would squeeze every last bit of air from the Underground Palace. They might suffocate long before they drowned.