Chapter 47: Catching Fish

Yao Cuo had no idea whether he’d fallen asleep or passed out.

By the time he woke, his nose was stuffy, his head pounding, and not a single inch of him didn’t ache. Fortunately, someone had already stripped off his soaked jacket and dried it out, or he’d have surely caught a cold stewing in it.

“Hiss…” Rubbing his temples, he sat up and took the bottle of water Gu Xianwang offered, downing it in one go. “Where are we now?”

“Still at the exit of the Earth Palace Heavenly Gate. You’ve been out for about fifteen minutes. How do you feel?”

“Not bad.” Yao Cuo’s eye sockets felt sunken, his stomach rumbling like thunder, so he amended: “Actually, pretty rough. Starving and parched—I’m basically a mummy at this point.”

Gu Xianwang smiled. She knew what that meant: cards on the table, no more pretending. This Senior Brother had been a cheeky troublemaker since childhood, the kind who drove cats and dogs alike up the wall. All grown up, he’d tried to play the gentleman, but ended up a muddled mess—two-faced between strangers and friends, hollering for whatever he lacked. Now that they’d all stared death in the face together, their bond ran deep. Why keep up the charade? Just be real.

The equipment pack was sorted, wounds patched, and they’d even knocked back a couple of hefty swigs of booze—like the legendary hero who’d slain a tiger on Jingyang Hill. Gu Xianwang handed Yao Cuo a protein bar and broke the bad news: “This is the last of our rations.”

“We’ve still got two bottles of vodka, though. You could use that for calories if you want.”

“You know my tolerance.” Yao Cuo scratched his hair, chewed through half the bar, and pocketed the rest. “If you get hungry, hit me up.”

~~~

Once they’d rested up, the three ascended the steps. Only then did the true vista beyond the underground palace reveal itself.

They’d already been deep in the sinkhole, descending from the Leech Pit into the depths below. But the underground palace sat even lower than they’d imagined—perhaps an entire multilayered structure swallowed by the earth.

Their exit was a fissure, complete with steps crafted specifically for that mechanism. Beyond it loomed the mountain wall, a vast circular cavern cradling this subterranean forest at its heart. The ceiling’s opening was modest, but peer out from it at just the right angle, and you’d spot soaring cliff faces like pillars holding up the sky.

There truly were mountains beyond mountains, people beyond people. Context was everything.

Yao Cuo gaped in shock. “This cave forest… it can’t be inside that sinkhole we came from, can it?”

A sinkhole beneath a sinkhole—an exceedingly rare formation, even on a global scale.

This spot was likely crater number one, punched out by a small meteor thousands of years ago, with the larger number two outside as a secondary pit from the shockwave. Underground forests thriving in such enclosed caverns? Across the nation, only Guangdong’s Tongtian Luo was known, hailed as “China’s Premier Cave.”

Apart from Tongtian Luo, America’s Arecibo Great Funnel boasted a 322-meter-wide mouth and 70 meters of depth. Gu Xianwang sized up their cavern: maybe thirty or forty meters deep, with a base diameter pushing three to four hundred meters.

The light was dim, yet the woods grew thick. Gu Xianwang surveyed the surroundings and pointed to a distant cave wall. “Not just the cave under the sinkhole—the altar’s here too.”

No arduous search required; it had practically gift-wrapped itself. The altar’s stone carvings were impossible to miss, even with just a corner poking through the trees.

There, embedded in the mountainside, loomed the massive Stone Gate Statue—a door! Another damn door! Yao Cuo was developing a phobia.

And he couldn’t wrap his head around it. “So the altar’s carved into the mountain? Another karst cave?”

Gu Xianwang shook her head. “No clue what’s behind it. No sign of the others yet. The altar’s right out in the open—why not find a spot to camp, scope things out, and move once we know more?”

Long Li glanced at the sky. “Agreed. It’s nearing dusk outside. The mountain folk haven’t dragged Ye Chan in yet, so they’ll probably wait till tomorrow. Judging by the underground palace’s position, Sara and her group are likely on the level above. Yuzi didn’t set all this up for nothing. Let’s see her next play.”

She parted the underbrush and plunged into the forest, guided by the trickle of water. Soon they found a stream, its waters sparkling pure—like a flirtatious beauty flaunting her perfumed kerchief, beckoning these three cracked-lip Rat-Walkers: Come drink me, my darlings.

Yao Cuo couldn’t hold himself back. He lunged forward to the gravel beach and scooped up a handful of water. Before he could even slurp it down, that sweet, silky stream water slid straight into his throat.

Gu Xianwang hadn’t had a chance to stop him. “Aren’t you afraid of getting parasites in your gut?”

Once he’d confirmed the taste was fine, he simply opened his mouth wide and drank his fill. “Silly. Parasites won’t kill you, but thirst will.”

Gu Xianwang walked closer with a sigh of exasperation. “What I meant was, we have water purification tablets in the pack.”

Yao Cuo’s hand froze mid-scoop. “…You could’ve said that earlier.”

“Should we set up camp right here?” Gu Xianwang asked, glancing back over her shoulder.

Long Li noticed the sparkle in her eyes—she must have spotted something good. “Fish in the water?”

“How did you know?”

They were all starving now, so a glimpse of fresh ingredients felt no different from striking gold. But then Gu Xianwang paused, reconsidering. “Don’t we have to avoid making a fire?”

The word “don’t” lingered on Long Li’s tongue as she swallowed hard. She spotted a massive banyan tree with a dense canopy and said, “If you can catch some fish before nightfall, then you can light one.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Great!”

Yao Cuo had rarely seen Gu Xianwang this genuinely thrilled. It wasn’t that she was beaming from ear to ear or anything so obvious. No, as her senior brother, he could just sense that quiet, irrepressible delight radiating from her. Back in the day, any number of wealthy opera fans had sent lackeys backstage with armfuls of Chanel bags and Hermès scarves. His junior sister wouldn’t spare them a single glance—just a casual word to send them back, without so much as an extra syllable.

When had he ever seen her this eager to kick off her shoes and socks?

Gu Xianwang rolled up her pant legs and slapped his shoulder. “What are you standing around for? Come on, help me catch some. You aren’t going to eat?”

…

Who was he kidding? At this point, it wasn’t just fish—even if someone handed him a wriggling nest of grubs, as long as he could blanch them in boiling water, he’d swear they tasted like a gourmet stir-fry.

Yao Cuo kicked off his shoes and socks in record time and waded in barefoot. It was late August, but down in this sinkhole, the air stayed cool and shady. Especially in a stream like this one, half-exposed above ground and naturally filtered through layers of rock—the water glided over his skin like cool silk.

With one arm still out of commission, Gu Xianwang couldn’t grab the fish herself. She relied instead on her razor-sharp eyes and precise directions. The little fish in this underground stream seemed utterly naive, too; they didn’t scatter when people approached. There were so many of them, packed densely together. Block off one end, and the silly things would drift lazily toward the other—like they had no idea there was a phrase in the world for “luring them into the trap.”

Yao Cuo yanked off his T-shirt and used it as a makeshift net. Then he piled up pebbles on either side of a rushing inlet, forming a channel about as wide as his fist. He positioned the shirt right at the outlet.

Gu Xianwang spread her arms wide like an old hen and herded the fish downstream from above. The school of fools shuffled along like grandpas out for a leisurely stroll, bunching up as they clambered over the shallow slope—straight into the arms of their predator, whose eyes gleamed with hunger and whose shirt still held the warmth of his body.

“Ha!” Yao Cuo scooped up a full armload of water and wriggling fish. He hastily knotted the shirt corners and hoisted it high, grinning ear to ear. “Looks like my fish-catching skills haven’t gone rusty after all.”

He bounded out of the stream in three quick steps, hopping as if the water had been scalding. Pure cotton drained fast, but he bounced and squeezed until he’d wrung out more than half the bulging load of water. Only then did he spread the shirt open in a patch of grass well away from the channel.

“How’s that? How’s that?”

Gu Xianwang grinned too. “Not bad at all.”

“You bet!” He jutted out his chin. “That’s gotta be two or three pounds at least. Sure, they’re all small fry, but these little groupers used to be everywhere in the countryside back in the day—you could grab handfuls without trying. They’re a rare sight now.”

Yao Cuo was thoroughly pleased with himself. “Meat’s a bit sparse, but what we’re after is that pure fresh flavor, right?”

Whatever the taste, it was a gift from Mother Nature. Gu Xianwang wrung the water from her clothes and walked over to Long Li, who had just finished hollowing out a spot under the tree. “Here you go—the fish are caught. So, Captain Long, what’s the plan?”

Catching the teasing lilt in her voice, Long Li played it mysterious and didn’t answer right away. She shushed them, went to the stream to wash her hands thoroughly, and only then produced a large sheet of freshly shaved tree bark under their curious stares.

“For small fish like these, how about a soup?”

“With… with that?”

Gu Xianwang stared in astonishment at the cleanly scraped white bark. She seriously doubted it wouldn’t burn right through over a fire—she hated to waste their precious catch on something like that.

“Mm.” Long Li crouched down, folded up the four corners of the bark, and secured the edges with clips made from twigs. In moments, she had fashioned a neat little square pot.

“Don’t worry, it won’t burn through anytime soon, but don’t make it too big, or the water won’t boil properly.” She sized up the pile of fish and suggested, “We can boil most of them into soup and roast just a few over the fire. Sound good?”

Gu Xianwang shrugged. “I’m just here for the food. No complaints from me.”

Yao Cuo eyed the fire pit Long Li had built with keen interest. “Digging a hole like that keeps the smoke from drifting out?”

What he called a pit was really a rudimentary earthen stove. The air inlet was narrow, sloping down into the ground to form a tight duct, which opened into a hollowed-out chamber at the bottom serving as the firebox. The mouth of the furnace was roughly twice as wide as the inlet. This whole contraption was known as a Dakota Fire Hole.

Long Li sparked her lighter to ignite the kindling, then laid Gu Xianwang’s waist knife across the furnace mouth like a grate. She set the bark pot atop the blade. “Mm. The extended air inlet keeps the flames steady and cuts down on smoke. It doesn’t block it entirely, but with the big banyan tree’s canopy overhead for cover, no one from a distance will spot our fire until full dark.”

Yao Cuo nodded in understanding, flashing her a thumbs-up. “Sis, you really know your stuff.”

By the time the soup bubbled to life, they’d polished off two rounds of roasted fish. These stream groupers might’ve been small, but their taste held nothing back against their ocean cousins. Yao Cuo slurped and hissed through the heat, singing their praises. “Hiss—East Star Grouper’s got nothing on this. Peak of earthly delights!”

Gu Xianwang ate with refined poise, but her hands moved like lightning—especially with hunger gnawing at her this fiercely. She silently wolfed down three little fish to settle her stomach before snapping back to reality and frowning at Long Li. “Why are you just roasting them and not eating?”

The excuses were the same as always: not hungry, not thirsty, not tired. She had no intention of letting Long Li talk her way out of it. Instead, she thrust the skewer of freshly roasted fish—its charred, fragrant aroma wafting up—right at her. “You’re not made of iron. Eat up.”

“Wouldn’t want it looking like the two of us are teaming up to bully you.”