Ye Chan was dumbfounded. She turned her head back with a completely blank stare and said in a daze, “Did… did it just nod?”
Yao Cuo had seen it too, but he refused to acknowledge it. “Impossible. It was probably just itchy somewhere.”
He racked his brains, still unable to accept the idea. He struggled to protest, “Even if it’s some divine beast with a big brain, high intelligence, and a long lifespan, that’s still impossible. It can’t understand us! We’re speaking Mandarin! There’s a huge language barrier!”
What a joke!
They had no idea what lay behind this stone door, yet they were being forced to drink this ancient black sludge—one sip each from a brew so murky they couldn’t even see what was inside. Even if the door opened afterward, they might not survive long enough to step through. And if they got lucky and it only gave them the runs, did this place look like it had a restroom anywhere?
Gu Xianwang softly asked Long Li, “What do you plan to do?”
“There will always be a way.” Long Li’s furrowed brow eased slightly as she handed the wine jug to her. “Before that, we need to wake Sara.”
Earlier, at the base of the cliff wall, Long Li had given Sara’s injuries a quick check. She had plenty of scrapes and bruises on the surface but no damage to her tendons or bones. She must have swallowed a lot of water, leaving her unconscious the whole time. Long Li had hoped to let her rest longer, but conditions didn’t allow it now. Once they entered the altar, they couldn’t spare the attention to look after her.
Long Li hooked her arms under Sara’s armpits and hauled her up into a sitting position, tilting her head so her mouth and nose pointed downward. Then she struck the heel of her palm against Sara’s back several times. Finally, the black water pooled in her stomach came gushing out. Sara hacked and coughed for ages before clutching her mouth and nose, finally stirring awake.
She looked around at the familiar faces. A glance to the side—was she still dreaming?
“…Cough… Damn it, am I not awake yet?”
Long Li arched a brow. “You’re awake. This isn’t a hallucination.”
Sara kept a straight face for a moment, then stealthily extended one finger toward the Submerged Jiao and mouthed the words, “When I fell in the water, I saw this thing down below!”
Long Li nodded. “I’ll explain everything here later. You’re safe for now. Tell us what happened before.”
“Damn, it pisses me off just bringing it up. Talk about capsizing in a ditch.” Sara got fired up the moment she started, but she quickly hunched over, clutching her ribs. She’d taken a nasty blow there when she’d tumbled out of the ground fissure earlier—nothing else hurt much.
“That woman slipped us some kind of hallucinogen somehow. The whole way, my head was swimming with illusions. I’m guessing you all had it the same. Hell, even now I can’t tell what was real and what my brain cooked up.”
“Anyway, when I finally snapped out of it, I was alone in a ground fissure. No one else around. I crawled for a good six or seven hours before hauling myself out, only to flip right into that Blackwater Gully below. So damn unlucky. If I weren’t tough as nails, I’d be down there on the bottom with those bones by now.”
Gu Xianwang said in surprise, “There are bones underwater? A lot of them?”
“Tons,” Sara replied. “Packed tight, and some were human skulls.”
She paused, then added, “They felt all crumbled up when I touched them. Probably washed in from somewhere and piled up here.”
Ye Chan said, “The person who saved you is way too weird. If they wanted to kill you, why not just leave you there?”
Sara saw that Ye Chan was still full of pep and lost a bit of her edge. She snorted. “Hah, if that little head of yours could unravel her schemes, it’d be a miracle. The old fox and the old dog are probably still in her clutches right now. That woman’s got a mad obsession with men—totally unhinged about it.”
Seeing Long Li’s confusion, she smacked her lips. “You didn’t hear her ranting before? All that crap about a lone man and woman traveling together to some godforsaken wilderness—must be sneaking around behind closed doors, putting on this holier-than-thou act. Makes you want to puke, blah blah blah.”
Ye Chan said, “Doesn’t this person have some mental problems?”
Gu Xianwang pressed her lips together, suddenly realizing who those words had targeted. Could that be why she and Senior Brother, along with Long Li, had been tossed into the underground palace?
Long Li pondered briefly before asking, “Which spot did you climb out from in the ground fissure?”
Sara pointed toward a break on the east side, near the end of Blackwater Gully. They’d drifted from there to here—at least a kilometer or two of swimming.
From the underground palace to the spot where Sara had emerged from the ground fissure, the path had run entirely beneath the mountain, but it had steadily progressed toward the altar. This made Yuzi’s goal crystal clear. Even if she’d let personal grudges color how she handled some of them, she undoubtedly had a larger plan in the end.
Long Li stood and took a fresh look at the stone arch gate towering more than ten meters high. There was no doubt in her mind—this was the true path into the altar.
Gu Xianwang shared the same guess. One arm cradling the Golden Crow and the other holding the wine jug, she fixed her gaze on the dark liquid faintly visible at the jug’s mouth. If this wine had been left behind by the Witch Clan thousands of years ago, it meant no one had ever opened this stone door before. The fact that they had left both the wine jug and the Submerged Jiao behind suggested the mechanism was designed to welcome a very specific visitor.
Those worthy of such a welcome with wine could hardly be enemies. As Yuzi had pointed out earlier, any Long Family members who showed up would be left for the Submerged Jiao to handle.
Perhaps other Witch Clan members had been scattered abroad back then. They had established this altar here while waiting for another group of their kin to arrive for a reunion.
But those kin never came.
Gu Xianwang mused that if she had been the one to set up the stone door’s mechanism, she would have prepared for every contingency: first, should anything befall the Submerged Jiao, the trap would serve as an absolute filter; second, if the awaited guests truly arrived, it would cause them no harm by mistake.
The puzzle lay in how a single jug of wine could possibly identify the right Witch Clan member.
Drink it, and find out.
The thought bubbled up in her mind unbidden.
Gu Xianwang stared at the wine, her field of vision narrowing until she felt pinned in place by the idea—
Just as she moved to raise her wrist, a hand with prominent knuckles clamped over the jug’s mouth. With a flick of the fingers, the jug returned to its owner in an instant.
Gu Xianwang pressed her lips together and lifted her eyes with a trace of displeasure, only to meet Long Li’s upraised neck. The clay jug tilted in her grasp as she swallowed lightly, draining it in one long pull.
No one had seen it coming. Everyone stared in stunned silence. Sara gaped, then stammered, “L-Long, what the hell got into you? No, seriously, what were you thinking? Taking out the enemy at a thousand-to-five-thousand cost to yourself? That’s not like you at all!”
Gu Xianwang blinked, a surge of inexplicable irritation flaring in her chest. Keeping her voice low, she snapped, “Are you really that sick of living?”
Having drained the jug, Long Li set the clay vessel back in place and dabbed at the corner of her mouth. She eyed Gu Xianwang. “And what about you? What were you just thinking?”
Caught red-handed, Gu Xianwang doubled down. “I was only pondering the mind behind this mechanism.”
Even so, she couldn’t resist stealing a glance at Long Li’s face.
Ye Chan blurted out in alarm, “Sister Long, how are you feeling? Stomach hurting? Head spinning?”
Long Li shook her head, motioning for her to return the wine cup to its spot as well. Then she drew Sara’s dagger and sliced lightly across the base of her palm. Clenching her fist over the cup, she let fresh blood drip steadily until it brimmed full.
The instant the clay cup filled, its base sank down. Long Li flicked her hand toward the ground, splattering an arc of leftover blood. She watched as the disk slid back into position and rotated the remaining 180 degrees in the direction it had jammed before, returning to its starting point.
She turned to face the Jiao’s head and intoned gravely, “Half a jug of wine, returned with one cup. Now, open the door.”
The Submerged Jiao’s eyelids narrowed slightly, its nostrils flaring as its long whiskers swayed through the air, as if scrutinizing or sensing something.
After a long moment, it suddenly flipped backward into the water. The black tide erupted in a roar, and green scales flashed back into view. Gu Xianwang spotted a massive iron chain coiled around the creature’s tail, thick with black rust, dragging inch by inch from the depths.
A deep tremor rumbled through the ground beneath their feet, like countless hinges grinding into motion. With a thunderous boom, the stone door finally lifted upward. A fierce gust whooshed in from nowhere, and in the same instant, the ring-shaped ghost candles lining both sides burst into flame.
Sara had moved past mere surprise into outright suspicion. “Long, how did you crack the mechanism’s clue?”
Long Li tilted her head slightly, a fleeting, bewitching glint in her eyes—one Gu Xianwang had never seen before.
She shot back, “What do you think?”
Sara’s face twisted through shock to bewilderment, then settled into a forced nonchalance. She tugged at her lips. “If I knew, I wouldn’t be asking.”
From its perch on the cliff edge, the Submerged Jiao shook its head and snorted a breath, as if shooing them along.
“Luck, I suppose,” Long Li replied with a cryptic smile. “The door’s open now. No point wasting more time.”
The exchange felt eerily like their encounter with the Marrow Bee back in Hanging Head Forest—both sides dancing around barriers too delicate to breach, things left unsaid. Gu Xianwang had no idea how much trust truly existed between Long Li and this organization. For the moment, she could only swallow her questions.
She had meant to leave the Golden Crow outside the door, but the Fat Bird clung to her desperately with its slender claws. With no other choice, she brought it across the threshold with her. The moment the group passed through the stone door, the Golden Crow poked its head out and flapped its wings toward the rear. Gu Xianwang had just remarked inwardly that this little creature was surprisingly spirited—a flicker of affection just beginning to form in her eyes—when a resounding boom echoed from behind.
The stone door had slammed shut.
The flames in the circular Immortal Crane Candlestick swayed side to side, suddenly burning through their fuel. Cut off from the outside air, the fires shifted from a deep vermilion to an eerie emerald green.
Enveloped in this ghostly green glow like will-o’-the-wisps, the Witch Clan altar—sealed away for a thousand years—finally unveiled a glimpse of its secrets. The breathtaking spectacle before them left Gu Xianwang too stunned to speak.
There stood an enormous stone tree that seemed to scrape the heavens, carved straight from the mountain’s heart. Gazing upward, its vast canopy spread like coral reefs embedded in the stone walls. The trunk soared endlessly toward the ceiling, at least a hundred meters tall; the mountain’s rocky peak formed the very crown of this divine tree.
They took only a few steps forward when the ancient candle waxes—all stored here for who knew how long—burned out at once. Wisps of white smoke faded into nothingness, plunging the cavern back into suffocating darkness.
From the base of the stone tree, countless crystalline protrusions extended like roots, linking all the way to the cavern floor. The crystals nearest the stone walls were flawlessly smooth, veined with a mosaic of colors like fine gemstones. In the oppressive gloom, they cast a faint phosphorescent sheen that barely reached the group’s calves, making them appear like half-manifested specters freshly summoned from the void.
The scene felt utterly dreamlike. Gu Xianwang instinctively hugged the Golden Crow closer, drawing reassurance from the warmth of its feathers to anchor her sense of reality. She peered at the towering walls encircling them, their surfaces rugged as crocodile hide. Upon that shadowed, leathery expanse, it seemed a giant had once sat cross-legged, using the stone itself as a canvas for etchings and drawings.
Gu Xianwang spotted massive human figures carved at either end of the divine tree, colossal forms that stood between earth and sky. From the tree’s base, she couldn’t make out the details, but she could vaguely discern a sword at the figure’s waist and a long serpent coiled around its neck.
Flanking the human figures were myriad birds and beasts, the carvings growing ever more intricate the closer they came to the figures’ feet.
Gu Xianwang scrutinized every detail with meticulous care. The longer she looked, the more a fire seemed to blaze in her chest. At first, she attributed it to the awe inspired by the altar, but the scorching heat soon spread through her entire body—like a torrent of hot blood surging upward from her abdomen and racing through her throat. She frowned, swallowed hard, and clenched her teeth against the onslaught. But after that single gulp, a far worse reaction erupted.
She coughed violently, her limbs going abruptly limp. In an instant, she crumpled to her knees. Clutching her mouth and nose in panic, Gu Xianwang felt blood pouring ceaselessly from between her fingers—drip… drip…
It spattered onto the translucent crystals.
