Chapter 60: Door of Life

Gu Xianwang panicked. In pulling her leg back, she yanked hard and unexpectedly dragged the female corpse’s head right up with it. The corpse’s pale face stretched taut across its features from the tightened scalp, giving it the look of a plucked fox.

For an instant, in those crescent-moon slits of eyes, Gu Xianwang could have sworn she glimpsed the corpse’s pitch-black pupils darting.

Yao Cuo noticed she hadn’t kept up and doubled back in a hurry. “What’s wrong? Come on, move!”

The moment he spoke, Gu Xianwang felt the stubborn strands of hair coiled around her ankle suddenly go slack. She yanked her leg free and stepped through the stone door, shaking her head. “It’s nothing. Probably just saw wrong. Let’s go.”

Sara was up ahead, blazing the trail. She’d talked a big game earlier about hauling the female corpse out, but Long Li hadn’t picked up on it, and Sara sure as hell wasn’t volunteering to lug something that heavy all the way out of the fire cave. Right now, staying alive was the top priority.

Ye Chan trailed dazedly after Long Li, mumbling under her breath. Her mind was clearly a million miles away—nothing mattered anymore except memorizing every last one of those pictographs. The sky could come crashing down, and she wouldn’t bat an eye.

Gu Xianwang pushed to the front and found the group stalled out. It sure wasn’t Sara hanging back for her; something had to be wrong.

“Cough cough… What’s going on?”

Long Li quickly scanned the possible routes and pointed to the path along the outermost edge of the leaf crown, farthest from the rock wall. “This way. The inner stone’s given out already. Most of the spilled gasoline pooled on those other three sides. Stick to the edge and climb—whatever you do.”

With that, she half-dragged, half-hoisted Gu Xianwang onto a side stone branch. The bandages she’d wrapped around her hands earlier came in clutch now. This flank had taken less direct fire, but the entire Fusang Stone Tree had been baking in the intense heat for over ten minutes. The stone scorched her palms at damn near fifty or sixty degrees—no wonder Sara’s earlier attempts had ended in failure.

It was the only way forward. Gu Xianwang didn’t dare slow the others down. She pressed on, climbing four or five meters, and confirmed the route worked. Glancing back, she saw Senior Brother Yao, Ye Chan, and Sara already following suit. But Long Li? She hadn’t budged—instead, she’d backtracked a short ways and was staring fixedly toward the stone door.

Fire didn’t wait for anyone.

Thick smoke roiled, palms blistered with heat, and the rock cavity’s sweltering temperature frayed every nerve. Gu Xianwang couldn’t hold back. “Long Li, get up here now!”

Had she stayed silent, Sara wouldn’t have even realized Long Li was lagging. Everything else was expendable, but that Bronze Sword was the trip’s one and only prize. Sara whipped her head around—and caught a black flicker on the far side of a distant stone pod leaf.

In that split-second daze, Long Li launched herself upward. Two strides, and she’d blown right past Sara. This wasn’t climbing; it was pure monkey vaulting. Sara knew it would happen like this—ground her teeth in fury. Why did she always worry about the others? In this crew, who was the most likely to buy it first if not her?

Long Li streaked by, her shout echoing right after. “Pick up the pace! Something’s on our tail!”

“Huh?”

Sara figured she’d misheard. With all this smoke, those bees couldn’t possibly track them, could they? Her gut churning from the delay, she risked another quick glance back. What she saw froze her solid: Directly above that flickering stone pod, perched on all fours atop the pointed stone leaf, was a woman.

That white silk robe, that impossibly tender face—who else could it be but the female corpse they’d dragged from the cocoon?

Ye Chan heard a crisp, perfectly enunciated curse in Mandarin. Sara blasted past overhead like a rocket—that speed, that form. Shame she wasn’t gunning for the Olympics.

Only after Sara’s feet vanished from view did Ye Chan snap to half a second later. Hadn’t Sister Long just warned something was coming? No wonder Sara bolted like that.

Ye Chan didn’t dare look back. Trembling, she called out to Yao Cuo, who was accelerating without a word. “Senior Brother Yao…”

He glanced down, going rigid all over again. His face flushed deathly pale, eyes bulging as he shook his head and mouthed, “Run! Go!”

Ye Chan was on the verge of tears. She had just barely managed to process all 387 pictographs on the stone platform, leaving her in a state of total mental and physical collapse. And now they wanted her to hurry up and run? Run where? What on earth had she done to get dragged into this godforsaken place? These past few days had felt like pushing a cart up a flight of stairs—one obstacle after another.

Ye Chan’s heart sank. She figured she might as well lie down and wait for death. But the moment her hands and feet slowed, something yanked at her ankle. She looked down on instinct and saw a long strand of black hair coiled around her shoe. She kicked her leg sideways, revealing the owner of that hair right below her—the female corpse, clinging tightly to the stone branch at the tail end of their group. She seemed puzzled as to why the person ahead had stopped, so she looked up curiously. Her eyes met Ye Chan’s, and she tugged the corners of her mouth into a smile.

Ye Chan: …

“Mommy!” She froze for half a second, then slammed her foot into the woman’s face and scrambled upward with the frenzy of someone who’d been shot full of adrenaline.

No way—she couldn’t die here! She still had all that precious textual data stored in her head! She had to deliver it to her advisor! Write her thesis! Submit it to the Archaeology Journal!

~~~

Gu Xianwang hadn’t expected the female corpse to actually be alive rather than some hallucination on her part. As the lead climber, she was already pushing herself to the limit, but the higher they went, the hotter the stone branches grew. It was no longer just a matter of temperature—she could see that a section of the canopy on her right, near the stone wall’s edge, had collapsed, the stone having cracked and burst from the heat.

This proved that the Fusang Stone Tree’s material couldn’t withstand high temperatures. Whoever had poured the gasoline from above must have known that and chosen fire as their weapon. There was nothing flammable in the cave—who would ever think to use it?

The lack of combustibles was a blessing in disguise, letting them hold out in the thick smoke this long. But even without lethal carbon monoxide levels, these ten minutes had stretched them to the brink of human endurance. Gu Xianwang carefully picked her route upward. The delay drew immediate shouts and curses from below.

Sara: “What’s the holdup up there? Hurry it up, cough cough… That witch is right on our tails!”

Gu Xianwang felt the pressure from Sara’s urging, but she had spotted an inconspicuous crack snaking downward along the stone face to her left. To gauge its path, she had no choice but to pause. Caught between threats above and below, impatience got the better of her, and she vomited up a mouthful of blood.

The blood came without warning, pattering down the stone and alerting those beneath her. By the time Gu Xianwang glanced sideways again, Long Li was already at her side. But with her vision not as sharp as Gu Xianwang’s at the moment, and facing a stretch of stone branches on the verge of collapse, Long Li didn’t dare make a move either.

She had been about to tell Gu Xianwang not to rush her decision—she would turn back and deal with the female corpse herself. But before the words could leave her mouth, Chak’s roar echoed from nearby: “Hahaha—this is fucking thrilling, Captain Long. Never thought we’d run into each other here.”

Gu Xianwang started in alarm and looked over to see Chak racing toward them along a parallel stone branch. The two locked eyes across the void, and Chak’s expression was one of utter mania as he crowed with delight: “That last scrap wasn’t nearly enough fun, little miss. Don’t run—let’s throw down right here. Way more exciting!”

What a raving madman from head to toe.

She never would have imagined Chak surviving after being tied and suspended high in the air, breaking free from the encirclement of Yelang people, marrow bees, and raging flames. It defied belief. But Gu Xianwang had no time to ponder it now. The man moved like a golden baboon, his climbing speed nothing short of astonishing—enough to rival even Long Li. In the blink of an eye, he was right upon them.

Sara spat a curse in shock: “Chak, if you want to die, do it by yourself—don’t drag us down with you!”

Chak paid her no mind and lunged across the gap, reaching for Gu Xianwang’s hand. Long Li saw his intent in an instant: he meant to settle the grudge they’d forged back in Hanging Head Forest before they could escape the mountain, letting the wildfire erase all traces.

She threw up her arm to block him, wrenching his wrist in a counter. In the split second their hands met, two sharp cracks rang out—crack, crack—and the stone beneath them shattered with a thunderous boom. The pair plummeted downward amid a shower of rubble—

In that instant, Gu Xianwang felt her heart stutter to a crawl. Suffocation and choking ash engulfed her. She stared numbly at the hand she hadn’t reached out in time, and in the corner of her vision, a familiar silhouette appeared amid the fractured cavern.

Fortunately, the craftsmen who built this Stone Tree hadn’t cut any corners. The interior of the Leaf Crown was dense with branches and limbs. Although Long Li had plummeted suddenly, she quickly steadied herself just a meter below, hanging from a horizontal branch with both arms outstretched. She shouted up to Gu Xianwang, “You all go on ahead. I’ll be right behind you.”

Her movements were incredibly agile, and Chak wasn’t far behind her. Gu Xianwang felt uneasy in her heart and wanted to wait a moment longer, but then she heard Ye Chan and Yao Cuo cry out in alarm from behind.

“Hurry, hurry, hurry! Get going! That millennium old zombie is catching up!”

With no other choice, Gu Xianwang steeled herself and called back, “I’ll wait for you at the exit!”

Long Li looked up at the sound of her voice and flashed her a smile. In the endless blaze of firelight, her eyes sparkled like a river of stars. “Got it.”

Her decision made, Gu Xianwang wasted no more time. She summoned every last ounce of strength she had and accelerated upward. They were now only seven or eight meters from the top of the Leaf Crown. This section of the stone surface had been burning the longest—there was no such thing as safe ground here. They could only climb as fast as possible, taking each step on faith and luck.

The smoke had choked her so badly that her brain was starting to feel oxygen-starved. Earlier, she’d strained her eyes peering through the white haze, and now everything looked blurry. All she could hear from behind was constant shouting.

One moment it was something like “The zombie’s grabbing my foot!” The next it was “The zombie touched my back!” At first it was Ye Chan calling out, but then Yao Cuo suddenly yelled, “That thing vanished!” Followed by a brief, eerie silence.

Gu Xianwang had no attention to spare for anything else right now, but she was still terribly worried about Senior Brother. As the saying went, the toughest part was always the last stretch of the journey. She absolutely couldn’t let anything happen to him here. Before she could even glance back, a startled curse cut through the white smoke—it sounded like Sara.

“What happened?” she called out urgently.

Yao Cuo replied, “No idea… cough cough cough… We, we can’t see a thing right now.”

Gu Xianwang’s heart sank, but she didn’t dare linger in one spot for too long. She pressed on, climbing upward. She hadn’t gone another two meters when the stone branch she reached for suddenly snapped. In the next instant, an entire section of the stone surface collapsed beneath her.

The collapse kicked up a massive cloud of dust and debris, which actually dampened the flames a bit. Gu Xianwang stared in stunned silence at the bizarre sight before her. The entire circular mound within a five-meter diameter of the treetop canopy had caved in—a five-meter drop now separated them from the only path to the top of the stone. It was as if the heavens themselves were playing a cruel joke. The break had halted just a step in front of her, but that chasm yawned between them and escape.

It wasn’t that they weren’t meant to die—it was just that death would come a little later.

Only now did she get a clear look. The “exit” at the top of this stone peak wasn’t a bunch of cracks; it was a full-blown rectangular rock cave, like a courtyard open to the sky, with one curved side. No wonder the fire had burned so fiercely inside with so little fuel—from this opening, it would have been easy to pour in gasoline or fan the air.

She had now reached the highest point of this mountain altar. At last, she could make out the two massive carved human figures and take in the entirety of the four surrounding cliff faces amid the sunlight and drifting smoke. The flames below the tree were dying down, but at the same time, she felt the stone surface she clung to swelling rapidly from within.

There… was no way out anymore, was there?

In this bone-deep despair, that familiar wave of exhaustion washed over her once more. Gu Xianwang blinked, feeling a thin trickle of liquid seep from her nostril. The moment she glanced down, it was as if the world flipped upside down. In the span of a single dazed instant, her body pitched forward into the collapsed void—

The wind whistled fiercely past her ears, and for a fleeting moment, she even felt light as a feather. Death was but an instant, after all. Gu Xianwang suddenly felt a pang of sorrow. She wouldn’t be able to keep her promise to Long Li, even though she’d always tried to be a woman of her word.

Abruptly, a long rope shot down from the exit overhead, overtaking Gu Xianwang in a flash. At its end dangled a metal claw. The moment it detected her, green lights flashed rapidly along its length. It swiftly wrapped around her entire body, the claw locking automatically before yanking her upward.

As it jerked her to a halt, Gu Xianwang blinked in shock and twisted her head to look. The exit was backlit, revealing only a shadowy silhouette—she couldn’t make out who it was. At the same time, several more ropes whipped down, snagging Yao Cuo and Ye Chan. The ropes had tremendous strength; they didn’t seem to be operated by human hands. She hadn’t told anyone else about this trip, so could the ones grabbing them be from Long Li’s organization?

Amid the panic, Gu Xianwang scanned desperately for Long Li, but she didn’t spot her. Instead, on a distant ledge along the rock wall, she caught sight of Yuzi. That woman had been so close to the marrow bee earlier, right in the crosshairs of a whole squad of Yelang archers. And yet, even after the altar fire brought down half the Stone Tree, she stood there unscathed.

No, who was she talking to?

Standing in the rock crevice behind her—could it be a person?

…

“The vision of hell might not be its true form, but the scorched earth left behind after the real hell has burned away.”

Yuzi turned her head. The man stepped out from the crevice, that signature roguish grin plastered across his face. She let out a soft hum, boredom settling over her amid the altar’s ashes.

It felt like she had done everything—and yet nothing at all. Like she had exacted her revenge, but it was all just an illusion.

The Yelang people she despised had all perished before her eyes. The altar was gone. The village would never be the same. In this moment, she seemed to have forgotten the one thing she had truly wanted from the start. What was it, exactly?

She had liked A Yan. She had wanted to be with him. Later, when Granny Chang betrothed him to Aqiu, Yuzi hadn’t been resentful. Just a touch jealous.

But people weren’t all equal. Aqiu was Granny Chang’s granddaughter, and A Yan was the finest hunter of their generation among the Yelang. Of course they should be together. A perfect match—a golden boy and a jade girl.

She had given up. And because she had given up, she poured all her attention outward. Uncle Jiake had learned Han Chinese and even ventured beyond the mountains, so she badgered him to teach her the language, to share tales from the outside world. Uncle said there were skyscrapers out there, but the people had wicked hearts, rotten to the core. A little girl like her would be ruined for sure.

She hadn’t quite believed him back then. If the outsiders were all bad and the villagers all good, then why hadn’t their village built any skyscrapers?

From that day on, she yearned to leave. To see it all for herself—with her own eyes, judged by her own heart.

Later, she met a man in the mountain woods. An outsider.

He was traveling, but they fell in love at first sight. He showed her photos from the world beyond and spun tales of fascinating people and places. He promised to visit her village and seek Granny Chang’s blessing.

But from the moment he set foot in the ancient stockade, everything spiraled into chaos.

She had been too naive. She hadn’t grasped how ironclad the village laws were. They belonged to the village—life or death, they couldn’t leave.

Yuzi could barely recall the crime they accused her of. She only remembered the searing agony of the gu worms devouring her from within, and that man in the sinkhole, tending to her with awkward but unwavering care.

What had her original wish been?

Maybe it didn’t matter anymore.

“I don’t care what hell looks like. I just want to go to those places you told me about. I want to see the skyscrapers.”

A clear smile lit up the man’s dark face. He shrugged. “Of course. We’ve waited this long for today, haven’t we?”

Yuzi brushed off her pants and stood, arching a brow at him. “Whose clothes did you swipe? There’s a hole ripped under your arm.”

He wore simple Yelang cloth garb. He swung his arm, exposing the jagged tear from a knife wound in his armpit. “Mine got torn up. Grabbed this one on hand.”

Yuzi gave a helpless laugh. “Fine. Once we’re out, I’ll stitch it for you.”

With that, she ducked deeper into the crevice.

A few steps in, she realized he hadn’t followed. Glancing back, she saw him still staring at the altar, lost in thought—his expression a blend of admiration and regret.

What was there to regret now?

“Come on, Little Hei. Let’s go.”

As the smoke and dust drifted away, Hei Wa turned. “Right behind you,” he called out brightly.