The discussion about cultivating numbered Gu Worms eventually fizzled out unceremoniously.
The main reason it ground to a halt was that none of their guesses could be backed by precise details or solid evidence. From the moment Gu Xianwang suggested there might be some mysterious “he” involved, the conversation had veered wildly off course.
First off, how could anyone survive in a karst cave while dodging the watchful eyes of the Yelang Hunters? It was next to impossible. Second, could one person’s hand-bred Gu Worms really counter the native stock a clan had nurtured over a thousand years of effort? And finally—the most crucial point—what was the endgame?
Every scheme has a purpose. Was this person holing up deep in the mountains just to experiment with breeding Gu Worms?
It simply didn’t add up.
The core issue was that Gu Xianwang couldn’t lay all her cards on the table with Ye Chan and Yao Cuo. Ye Chan was completely in the dark about her true mission here, while Yao Cuo only grasped half the picture. At the outset, he’d thought he was just tagging along with his junior sister to scour the mountains for something that might cure his aunt’s illness.
Yes, that’s how vague it was. In his mind, the challenge was about as daunting as heading into the hills to dig up a ginseng root to build up his mom’s strength.
In the end, Long Li stood watch through the latter half of the night. Once the female archer was under her vigilant eye, she settled down considerably—either that, or Long Li had spotted something at odds with her expectations. Whatever the case, after the chaotic uproar of the first half of the night, Gu Xianwang finally managed a solid sleep.
~~~
At the first faint light of dawn the next day, well before the birds and beasts of the mountains stirred, the group roused themselves. They took turns freshening up, then divvied up their preserved rations for a proper dry meal.
Ye Chan stared at the quarter protein bar and two small dried fish in her hand, shooting an indignant glare at the still-dozing Fat Bird. Just look at the sorry state of her dear teammates’ provisions—she’d at least scored a real meal with sides and meat. Come to think of it, “Why’s this bird still tagging along with us?”
“Hey, check out its feathers. In the daylight, the color looks different, doesn’t it?”
Ye Chan waved the others over. “Doesn’t it have a golden sheen?”
Gu Xianwang stepped closer for a look and chuckled. “We’ve been blind to it. In last night’s dim light, we nearly mistook this golden bird for a barnyard chicken.”
Yao Cuo munched on a dried fish. “If it slimmed down a bit, it could fetch top dollar at a flower-and-bird market. My dad would go nuts for one.”
The Fat Bird seemed to catch the praise. It rolled over, woke up, but stayed nestled in place, striking a pose like some divine phoenix lounging on a lotus pedestal. It might as well have propped a wing under its cheek and batted its lashes seductively at each of them in turn—though its overly eager blinking rather spoiled the effect.
The group enjoyed the show for a moment, then got back to their tasks. Long Li finished packing her bag and lashed the female archer’s ropes to the Old Banyan’s protruding roots aboveground. The knots binding her had been adjusted tight; she wouldn’t wriggle free anytime soon. But if no one showed up for days, a determined struggle might just create some slack.
Aqiu had scarcely slept a wink all night, her eyes ringed with pale shadows. As they broke camp, she looked up and asked, “Where are you headed?”
No one acknowledged her.
She pressed on. “Approach the Altar from here, and you’ll die for sure.”
Then, with a bitter laugh: “Guess I’m never getting the chance to avenge my family myself.”
Gu Xianwang had already turned to go, but she paused and looked back. For all that their words failed to bridge the gap between them, she said, “As an outsider who’s barged in, I regret what’s happened here—but I’m not sorry. Maybe we’re both just doing what we believe is right. Your knife is mine now, my spoils of war. I wish you… luck escaping this place in the end.”
Out into the wider world.
~~~
Ye Chan hummed a cheerful tune, figuring this stretch toward the Altar was the most pleasant, carefree trek she’d taken lately—practically a leisurely camping stroll. No threats in sight. Pure fun: admiring the flowers, teasing the bird, savoring every peaceful second.
It was too calm. That very stillness sent an inexplicable chill through Gu Xianwang, like thunderheads massing silently, a storm on the brink, yet betraying no hint of its arrival.
She murmured to Long Li, “We’re nearing the Altar. No worries about your companions?”
Long Li strode alongside her at the front. She shot a sidelong glance and countered, “If I said no, would you peg me as heartless—somehow apart from the rest of you?”
Gu Xianwang faltered. “Earlier… that was—”
Long Li smiled and changed the subject. “In the world of opera, to perform well, you must pour so much emotion into it, don’t you think?”
Gu Xianwang hadn’t expected her to bring this up out of nowhere. She hummed in agreement. “Yes, opera means immersing yourself in the role first, then singing the melody. Though the forms vary, every performance demands utter sincerity. To bring a character to life from the script, the actor has to dive into that world herself.”
“It seems that to make the character live, the performer must surrender all seven emotions.” Long Li let out a sigh, then said softly, “But in our line of work, human feelings are like ghostly blades—every glimpse of them brings danger.”
Gu Xianwang stared at her in surprise, suddenly grasping the deeper meaning.
To her, they might have come here seeking something, but everything since the Abandoned Village still felt like a man-made catastrophe in her mind. She, Ye Chan, the tour guide, and Senior Brother were less like companions and more like fellow sufferers in the same dire straits—so they banded together for warmth, linked by this basic sense of duty.
But not Long Li and her group. This was their profession, and their professional code likely boiled down to one thing: accomplish the mission.
Realizing this, Gu Xianwang suddenly found it all absurd. Her encounter with Long Li felt like dark comedy. She grew even more curious—what exactly was Long Li searching for?
“Perhaps—”
Ye Chan called from behind. “Hey, where’d that God Bird go? Wasn’t it following us just a moment ago?”
Glancing back along their path, the bushes behind them bore a narrow trail of crushed foliage, but the dazzling golden Fat Bird was nowhere to be seen on either side.
Yao Cuo shrugged it off. “Probably went home. It’s a wild bird, after all. An injured sparrow once flew into our yard; we tried feeding it, but it wouldn’t eat. My dad nursed it patiently for two days—sigh—but it just starved itself to death.”
He shook his head with a wry summary. “Wild things just don’t trust people in the end.”
Hearing that, Gu Xianwang felt a twinge of discomfort, a real sense of regret. She’d never kept a pet before, and this was the first animal to take such a shine to her. Once might be coincidence, but twice felt like fate—especially since it had helped them. For it to vanish without a trace like this just left her feeling… empty.
But this was the Witch Clan’s altar, after all. And for her, the notion of being responsible for another life was a comically extravagant dream. That familiar shadow of melancholy flickered in her eyes for a moment before vanishing.
She turned around and strode forward.
Utterly oblivious to the fact that the person beside her was still waiting patiently for the rest of her “perhaps.”
~~~
Even before pushing aside the grass blades in front of her—still more than ten meters from the rock wall—Gu Xianwang heard the murmur of running water. A vague unease stirred in her heart, though the sound seemed sluggish and muffled, perhaps echoing from some nearby pool.
Yao Cuo spoke up first instead. “Hold on, doesn’t it sound like a stream up ahead?”
Long Li replied, “There’s likely a river channel between us and the altar ahead, but judging by the volume of the water, crossing it shouldn’t be too difficult.”
The sheer rock wall rose straight before them now, the Altar’s Stone Door embedded within it and towering more than ten meters high. Craning their necks, they could make out its majestic upper reaches. It was hard to fathom how much manpower it must have taken to craft such a door without modern tools—or how the Witch Clan had even carved out the rock face.
For some reason, the closer they drew to this ultimate destination, the sharper and more insistent the anxiety gnawing at Gu Xianwang’s heart became. She forced herself to stay calm and said firmly, “We’re short on time. Let’s press on.”
To everyone’s astonishment, the scene that unfolded before them ten minutes later was one no one could have anticipated.
At the forest’s edge, a sheer cliff plunged abruptly beneath a tangle of overgrown vines. Fortunately, Long Li’s quick reflexes yanked Gu Xianwang back just in time—otherwise, that one step forward could have spelled disaster.
The jagged rock face looked as if it had been rent in two by a heavenly axe, brutally severing the wall from the ground it should have joined. The rift stretched downward like a gash toward the planet’s core.
Peering down, they saw ripples of inky light reflecting from below the midpoint of the cliff wall. The entire five-or-six-meter-wide chasm was brimming with black water that barely let any sunlight penetrate, its depths impossible to discern.
Ye Chan gaped in shock. “This… it’s way too wide. There’s no way we can cross it.”
Yao Cuo smacked his lips. “And that water down there looks nasty—like it’s full of industrial waste. It hardly seems to be moving at all. Gotta be stagnant.”
The altar’s gate loomed right before their eyes, but a chasm at least five meters wide separated them from the opposite shore, and the landing spot over there was perilously narrow. Gu Xianwang couldn’t fathom whether this terrain had formed naturally over time or been designed this way from the beginning. If it was intentional, how could any ordinary person hope to cross?
Even a martial artist of exceptional skill would need at least a meter of clearance fore and aft—factoring in the running start and landing buffer—to leap straight over this “moat.” Yet by eye alone, the platform on the far side was barely wide enough for one person to stand without room to even bend at the waist.
Long Li scouted along the edges of the gap and returned. “No good,” she reported. “This fissure runs roughly to the middle of that side. Even if we make it across from here, the opposite rock wall offers no footholds whatsoever—it’s a sheer vertical drop.”
No bridge, no way to climb. This was a dead end.
In that instant, hope flipped to despair, and a sharp twinge stabbed through Gu Xianwang’s temples. She closed her eyes for a moment, drew a deep breath, and said, “There has to be a way. If they built the altar gate here, they must have provided a passage known only to Witch Clan members.”
Ye Chan hurried to reassure her. “Right, right. No need to give up yet. Worst case, we head back—the woman we caught last night surely knows how to get in.”
Yao Cuo squatted at the cliff’s edge, peering down and mulling it over to himself. He couldn’t make out any source for the water below. Was it groundwater welling up? What kind of water turned black like that? Could there be a coal seam hidden inside this mountain?
It didn’t carry the foul, fishy stench of stagnant water, but it hardly moved at all. Staring at it too long gave the eerie sense that some massive creature lurked beneath.
He rubbed the stubble that had sprouted on his chin over the past few days. Just as he started to rise, his gaze locked onto a drifting black shadow below.
“…Xianwang, come take a look. Is that… a person?”
Gu Xianwang’s expression grew grave. She followed his pointing finger and stared intently. The angle was tricky—one had to stand on this protruding narrow ledge and peer downward along their own side of the cliff wall. There, wedged between the water’s surface and the rock face on a jagged outcrop, bobbed the unmistakable silhouette of a human back, rising and falling with the black water.
That clothing… She felt like she’d seen it before.
When?
Gu Xianwang searched her memory, her brows knitting tighter and tighter. Suddenly, an image flashed into her mind: the brief rest after the black-feathered mynas’ attack. Someone had shrugged off their outer coat to inspect a wound.
Her undergarment—it looked just like this style.
Gu Xianwang raised her head woodenly and turned to Long Li. “Sara’s down on the cliff.”
