Chapter 50: Serial Number

Ye Chan had nearly drifted off to sleep—she was truly exhausted, probably more than in her entire life combined from trudging these past few days over winding, pothole-riddled paths. What time was it even? Tying her to a tree like this—was that any way to treat someone!?

But with no one around, at least she didn’t have to worry about this furious woman suddenly slashing her throat. Better catch some rest while she could; every wink was a victory.

Her eyelids had barely drooped halfway when shouting erupted from nearby. She cocked her head and listened closely—hey, that sounded like the voice of the woman who’d captured her. Yep, unmistakable, with that bizarre dialect.

Why so shrill? Could it be… no, it couldn’t be, right?

Tears of excitement welled in Ye Chan’s eyes. The enemy of my enemy is my friend—come on, stranger from afar, spot me here!

“Mmm! Mmm mmm!!!”

She gathered her breath from her dantian, thrashing and bellowing for all she was worth. The hemp ropes bound her tight; she itched to kick off the ground and hop like a rabbit.

~~~

“You hear that?” Long Li asked suddenly.

Gu Xianwang had just finished tying up their captive and made her sit still. “What?”

“Sounds like voices.”

Aqiu’s voice wasn’t as robust as before, but her constant stream of muttered complaints still bubbled up now and then. Gu Xianwang’s mind was a whirlwind; she shook her head.

Yao Cuo had it even worse—like an endless loop of foreign-language audio droning in his ear. If this nagging announcer hadn’t come armed with a knife, he might’ve dozed off from sheer annoyance.

Long Li’s brow furrowed faintly. She took a few steps toward the sound, more convinced than ever that faint voices were carrying on the wind.

“I’ll go check.”

Gu Xianwang tossed her the Female Archer’s waist knife. “Hurry back. Stay safe.”

“Got it.” Long Li snatched the hilt and melted into the dense sea of grass.

Ye Chan gave it everything she had, but she felt like she might suffocate through this tightly crammed rag stuffed in her mouth. Where was everyone?

She was starting to lose hope when the grass clump to her left rustled sharply. The tip of a waist knife poked out first. Ye Chan nearly burst into tears—finished, utterly done for. The heavens themselves had it out for her. Who was this? Why couldn’t they take down even one person!

“Woo woo woo! Mmm!” Please, I haven’t had my fill of life yet!

The blade gleamed coldly in the moonlight. Then a long leg stepped forward. At this range, Long Li would’ve had to be deaf not to recognize the muffled whimpers. Silhouetted against the moon, her face was shrouded in shadow. Ye Chan squinted—it was her ever-cool Sister Long!

“Mm!—”

She started to wail in relief, but Long Li held up a hand to shush her. Ye Chan was no fool when it came to self-preservation; feelings could wait—survival came first.

Once the ropes were off, Ye Chan didn’t even bother stretching her limbs. She spun around, yanked the sodden rag from her mouth, and flung it into the underbrush.

It was drenched in her saliva. Thank goodness Sister Long hadn’t pulled it out first—that would’ve been mortifying beyond words.

“You okay? Any injuries?”

Tears shimmered in Ye Chan’s eyes, her face alight with bliss. Listen to that voice, gentle as a spring breeze. Savor that heartfelt concern. Who else, surrounded by enemies in a battlefield crawling with peril, would worry about you? Would save you?

Ah, my Sister Long!

Long Li: “…Ye Chan?”

“Huh? I’m fine, totally fine!” She grinned like an idiot and did a little spin. “See? Good as new.”

“Right, and Sister Gu? She’s alright?”

Long Li gave a slight nod and led her back. “Yeah. We’ll talk when we get there.”

~~~

Gu Xianwang patted down the Female Archer thoroughly. Besides the waist knife, there was a dagger tucked at her waistband. Nothing else—no tools of any kind.

No walkie-talkie, no phone. Modern gadgets seemed scarce in these parts.

She set Senior Brother to watch the woman. Otherwise, those bloodshot eyes tracked her every move, unblinking and sharp as daggers, sending chills down her spine.

Anyone would’ve gotten the creeps.

Rustling from the grass drew her over to meet them. She hadn’t expected Long Li to actually bring someone back.

“Ye Chan?”

“Sister Gu!”

Ye Chan couldn’t help herself. She launched forward and threw her arms around her in a full-body hug. Wow—warm, soft, pure bliss.

Gu Xianwang pried her off and gave her a quick once-over. “You alright? Did that Female Archer grab you?”

Ye Chan nodded, then suddenly remembered something. She mysteriously rummaged in her pocket and, after a moment, pulled out a folded dried lotus leaf. She held it up in front of the other two. “Quick, eat up! I went to a lot of trouble to steal this.”

She carefully unfolded one corner of the leaf to reveal a whole glistening roasted chicken leg, presenting it like a hard-won treasure.

Gu Xianwang blinked in surprise. “Where’d you get that?”

“Oh, you know how we got separated in that forest earlier? I was totally out of it back then, all groggy and confused. When my head finally cleared a little, I realized I was blindfolded and being dragged off somewhere—I had no idea where. It felt like we’d been walking forever before they shoved me into a room and locked me in.”

“That must’ve been their mountain stronghold. All around were those bamboo huts we’d seen before. They had me all trussed up and dumped there for no reason. After a while, this old granny came in, peered into my eyes, muttered something I couldn’t understand, and then a whole group of them left.”

“Not long after that, some dopey-looking guy brought me half a roasted chicken, along with water and rice. I figured it was my last meal.” Her eyes sparkled as she recounted the tale. “You should’ve seen it—he tried to stand there watching me eat at first, but I tore into him good, and he scurried off to squat by the door. Hmph, bet he was terrified of my vibe.”

Gu Xianwang: “…” Or more likely, terrified of her nonstop chatter.

“Anyway, it took everything I had to hold on to this chicken leg!”

Long Li told her to tuck it away for now. The three of them headed back to camp, where the female archer spotted Ye Chan and leaped to her feet in excitement. Yao Cuo hurriedly held her back and pushed her down to sit again.

He looked pleasantly surprised. “Xiao Ye? How’d you manage to get out?”

Doing the math on the time, they hadn’t laid eyes on each other since splitting up in the karst cave.

Ye Chan was thrilled too—for one thing, this woman really had been taken down by Sister Long and Sister Gu; for another, Senior Brother Yao had escaped the clutches of those fiends; and third…

“Oh… you guys brought a chicken too.” A live one, no less. Smart thinking.

The fat bird whipped its head around, shot her a furious glare, and took to the air!

Then…

Ye Chan: “Hey! My chicken leg! Nooo! Let go! How can you turn on your own kind like that?!”

Gu Xianwang: …

Long Li: …

Yao Cuo: …

In the end, Ye Chan collapsed to her knees in a daze. Her precious chicken leg—the one she’d risked her life to snag—hadn’t gone to a single soul. The fat bird had gobbled every last bit!

Gu Xianwang patted her shoulder in sympathy at the sight of her pitiful, on-the-verge-of-tears expression.

“Forget it. Call it compensation for the bird’s big hero moment tonight.”

Ye Chan wailed in misery. “What hero moment?”

Once they’d filled her in on all the close calls and ambushes from before, Ye Chan let out a deep sigh of admiration. She stared at the so-called divine bird, now stuffed to the gills and flopped on its back under the moonlight. Fine, whatever could belly up like that to bask in the moon glow was no ordinary creature.

The group huddled close and got down to business. “We should head into the altar at first light tomorrow. This female archer probably slipped out on her own, but the mountain folk will notice Ye Chan missing by morning at the latest. It’ll only be a matter of time before they come hunting us down here.”

Yao Cuo asked, “What about her? We bringing her along?”

Gu Xianwang glanced at Long Li, who shook her head. “No telling what we’ll run into inside the altar. She’d just slow us down. Since she made it here, the other mountain folk won’t be far behind. We’ll leave her with the water source after we go—it’ll hold her until rescue shows up.”

Gu Xianwang nodded in agreement, and with the plan more or less set, they still had a little time before midnight. They could squeeze in some more rest. She turned, only to find Yao Cuo looking unusually grave.

“What’s up?”

Yao Cuo explained, “Seeing Xiao Ye jogged my memory. Right before we got separated in the karst cave, I caught something weird on video with my phone.”

“Then everything went to hell so fast, it slipped my mind.”

Ye Chan slapped her thigh. “That’s right! You were all hyped up about it back then, Senior Brother Yao. So what was it?”

Yao Cuo winced and rubbed his fingers together, his tone heavy. “It was on the belly of one of those cave crickets. I spotted a serial number.”

“At first I thought I was hallucinating. It was bizarre—like it’d been branded on by some machine, right there on the bug’s stomach. The lettering was tiny; you had to be at just the right angle to even notice.”

Gu Xianwang froze. “A serial number? Just that one?”

“Not sure.” Yao Cuo shook his head. “Sigh, I actually snapped a photo with my phone back then, but things got too chaotic, and I have no idea where it ended up. From what I remember, I only saw the one.”

Ye Chan pouted. “Damn, this is precision breeding? Raising gu worms and marking each one individually?”

“No.” A chill laced Gu Xianwang’s tone. “Perhaps… there’s someone else.”

She turned to Long Li, suddenly recalling how the other woman had inspected the Ghost-Head Bat back at the Black Mud Pool. “Did you see a numbered gu worm too?”

So she hadn’t been surprised by the fake walkie-talkie signal. She didn’t trust Yuzi one bit. And she’d long anticipated even deeper enemies lurking in this place?

Long Li nodded. “Yes. Before I ran into you all, I was attacked, and that’s when I spotted a spider with a number branded on its abdomen. At first, I thought it marked some specific specimen, but later I realized it wasn’t.”

“I suspect these numbered gu worms were deliberately introduced into the existing populations.”

Ye Chan nodded along, half-getting it. “Introduced… and then what? What’s the point? Are they running hybridization experiments on the gu worms or something?”

“It might actually be some kind of experiment,” Gu Xianwang said. “Or perhaps that person seeded their own cultivated specimens into every gu worm population, making them… immune to attacks.”

Her analysis had reached this point, and the eerie image conjured by her speculation already sent a shiver down her spine. In a daze, she seemed to glimpse a shadowy, indistinct silhouette—a lone back weaving through the twisting karst caves, thick with hidden perils. He patiently nurtured his gu worms, then lay in wait…

He might smile, or fall silent, or brood in thought. He was like the king of this forsaken realm, peering down on the mountain folk who fancied themselves its guardians. In idle moments, he wandered amid the bloodthirsty swarms, casually snapping photos of the carefree world beyond the caves.