Chapter 73: Flashback

“What are you looking at?”

Gu Xianwang was standing by the piano, gazing at an old-fashioned picture frame on the wall. The frame held an enlarged black-and-white photo of two teenage girls in sportswear with their arms slung around each other’s shoulders, grinning broadly. The photo itself was a little blurry from the enlargement, but the sandy pit in the background—like an old school playground—stood out more clearly.

When Long Li approached, she pulled her gaze away. “Nothing. I just think this photo looks a bit out of place hanging here.”

Long Li let out a soft hum but said nothing more. She greeted the young man from earlier and took back the car keys.

As she headed for the door past that earlier painting, Ye Chan suddenly piped up. “Oh, right—Sister Long, you said before that you were going to give that painting to Sister Gu. Don’t tell me you’ve got a stake in this gallery too?”

Long Li pushed the door open with one hand. The copper bell tinkled as she glanced back over her shoulder. “No. I painted it.”

Gu Xianwang had actually suspected as much the moment she’d seen Long Li without her makeup. But Long Li had said she had no memories of her past. If someone lost their memories, did all the skills and knowledge they’d once learned still remain?

Lost in these thoughts, Gu Xianwang hesitated in front of the car door. Before they’d arrived, figuring this woman could be friend or foe, they’d all crammed into the back seat together. But now that she knew it was Long Li… where was she supposed to sit?

Ye Chan noticed her pause. “Sister Gu, you want shotgun?”

“Hm?” Gu Xianwang took an instinctive step closer and eyed the door handle. “I’ll sit in the back.”

“Oh, okay—then I’ll take shotgun. I nearly got carsick back there earlier.”

Bang. The door shut. Gu Xianwang sat alone in the back in silence, staring at a faint reflection in the window glass. She felt a little foolish. Wasn’t it all the same, wherever she sat?

She pursed her lips, steeling her nerves, and was just about to ask how Long Li had escaped from the altar when she nearly came face-to-face with the woman leaning back from the front seat.

Long Li held out her phone, one sword-straight brow arched slightly, as if barely suppressing a smile. “Mind putting in the home address?”

Gu Xianwang blinked. “…Ahem. Sure.”

“And the phone number—could you save that too?”

“Ah. Sure.”

Head bowed over the screen, she tapped away at the keys. For some reason—probably the different phone model—the letters refused to cooperate, and she kept hitting the wrong ones.

From shotgun, Ye Chan muttered, “I know the address. Here, I’ve already punched it into the nav for you.”

Gu Xianwang looked up to see the car’s navigation screen already acquiring a signal. Embarrassment washed over her. Right—of course Ye Chan could just input it directly. Why bother entering it on the phone too? And wasn’t this the memo app, anyway?

But Long Li was still watching her expectantly.

Once she’d finished, Gu Xianwang handed the phone back. Long Li murmured her thanks, turned forward to buckle her seatbelt—but didn’t start the engine. Instead, she dialed the number she’d just saved. After listening for a moment, she twisted around again. “This one’s switched off.”

“Oh, yeah—that SIM… I just swapped it for a new one. Hold on.” She’d only just remembered. She couldn’t find the new card’s packaging, either. “Here, why don’t you give me your number? I’ll call you.”

Ye Chan watched from the front seat, brow furrowed. When had Sister Gu turned so dim? “Hey, aren’t we in a rush? Look, I’ll add you both on WeChat first. Then we three can make a group chat. We can swap numbers properly later.”

Why the hurry right this second? It wasn’t like their perfectly alive companion was going to bolt.

With Ye Chan pointing it out like that, Gu Xianwang couldn’t very well insist—especially since she was the one pressed for time. So the three of them set up a group chat. Long Li started driving while Ye Chan fiddled endlessly with her phone—first renaming the group “Cat’s Eye Sisters,” then “Hulking Little Diamonds.” Finally, Gu Xianwang couldn’t take it anymore and changed it to: Conference Room.

【Chatterbox】: Whoa, so retro!

Gu Xianwang didn’t respond. The brief distraction had steadied her nerves, so she asked, “Long Li, how did you all manage to escape afterward?”

Ye Chan leaned in too, brimming with curiosity. “Yeah! Did you run into that black long-haired monster? Sara’s tough—she’s gotta still be alive, right?”

“Yes. That monster was the witch maiden dragged out of the cocoon—the Forbidden Witch from southern folklore, a kind of water ghost.” Long Li continued, “After you two climbed up, she caught up to us fast. She crawls at an insane speed and can control her hair to attack, which makes her a nightmare to fight. With the stone branches collapsing nonstop on top of that, we got completely pinned down.”

Gu Xianwang’s palms turned icy. “What happened next?”

“Later, Old Dog dismantled the iron chains connecting the rock wall to the stone branches and forcibly carved out a passage. We used it to enter the crevices those Yelang Villagers had opened in the mountain and drilled our way out from inside the mountain body.”

Ye Chan let out a gasp. “There really is a Forbidden Witch? If we caught one and penned her up, we could charge admission fees and make a fortune.”

Long Li shook her head. “A Forbidden Witch is essentially a mutated entity. Once exposed to the outside world, it dissolves completely in short order.”

“Mutated?” Gu Xianwang suddenly recalled her own reaction after entering the altar, and her heart tightened. “What caused the mutation? Was it radiation from the meteorite?”

But that didn’t add up. If it was radiation, everyone had been exposed to that strange fluorite ground at the time. It shouldn’t have affected only her.

“No, it was because of that cocoon.” Long Li paused, glancing into the rearview mirror. “Have you heard of primordial soup?”

Ye Chan felt a chill crawl over her skin and rubbed her arms. “You mean the ancient seawater on Earth where all organic molecules first formed?”

“Exactly. The yellow liquid inside that cocoon is an ancient biological solution remarkably similar to primordial soup.”

Ye Chan’s eyes widened. “So you’re saying this Witch Maiden turned herself into some kind of… mutated creature? What was the point? Martyrdom for science?”

“Wait,” Gu Xianwang cut in suddenly. “If the thing in the cocoon was a Forbidden Witch, where’s the other one?”

Silence fell inside the car. Gu Xianwang had already guessed the answer in her heart. She spoke slowly. “Could it be… the Cave Lord?”

From the Cave Lord’s bones that had turned to jade, to the strange fragrance clinging to its body—Gu Xianwang had always sensed some fundamental similarity between it and herself. And Long Li had brought up the Forbidden Witch back then, hadn’t she? Wasn’t that indirect proof of a connection between them?

But no, a glaring contradiction loomed here.

Long Li had said the thing she was seeking was the Nüwa Cocoon. If that meant the two white cocoons they’d seen in the altar, then the name alone suggested something profound. Nüwa was one of the creation goddesses; the cocoons’ true purpose couldn’t possibly be mere biological experimentation. Primordial soup’s role was to nurture life, not warp it. Didn’t that imply the Witch Maidens who first entered the white cocoons hadn’t done so as test subjects?

They had chosen the heart of the Fusang Tree Crown to build a secret chamber for the white cocoons—a site laden with divine significance, a place for prayer to the gods. This wasn’t some bold innovation; it was a ritual rooted in the Witch Clan’s traditions of serving the divine. The white cocoons were like the sarcophagi of pharaohs in pyramids: tools to propel a Witch Maiden along the path to ascension.

If that was true, then who could have ripped a soon-to-be goddess from her white cocoon, severed her head, and cast her into a karst cave to become the nucleus of those white fungi? Who would dare? And to what end?

Long Li said, “Maybe so.”

Gu Xianwang frowned. Long Li’s vague response felt off somehow.

Ye Chan spoke up. “If the Cave Lord really was one, doesn’t that make this a classic tale of betrayal and defection?”

“How do you figure?”

“Think about it. Out here in these backwoods mountains, there were only two groups: the Witch Clan and the Yelang Clan. The Witch Clan migrated from afar to enslave the Yelang people and make them build the altar, right? Well, if they could lord it over others, those others could fight back. Even if they couldn’t win in open battle, they could strike from the shadows with dirty tricks.”

“And there’s solid evidence for it. Don’t let these Yelang clansfolk fool you with all their talk of the God Lord and their pious displays. Why else would the mountains hold only Yelang Village folk today? Where did the Witch Clan go? They were powerful enough to crush the native mountain folk—surely they didn’t arrive with just a couple of Witch Maidens.”

Following Ye Chan’s logic, Gu Xianwang felt a chill run down her spine. “So you’re saying the Yelang people later wiped out the remaining Witch Clan members, seized their Sinkhole Altar and Gu-Raising Technique, rewrote history and faith to suit themselves, and fully supplanted the Witch Clan?”

Ye Chan nodded. “That’s my bet. The louder they proclaim their devotion, the more skeletons they’ve got buried.”

If their theory held water, what about the underground palace? Ye Chan had never set foot there, so she didn’t know they’d once puzzled out a Witch Maiden’s birth chart from its star map. Per Long Li, the palace had been built to imprison that Witch Maiden. Unless the Witch Clan had sent three of them, the prisoner who’d later escaped had to be one and the same as one of the cocoon dwellers.

Build a palace to suppress her one moment, then let her enter a white cocoon for ascension the next? That was pure schizophrenia.

Moreover, if the faith of Yelang had been fabricated by them themselves, then what role had the God Eye played in it all? It couldn’t possibly be that they had used the Three Corpses Brain God Pill to rule over themselves, could it?

For Gu Xianwang, there were far too many inconsistencies in her Guizhou trip that simply refused to add up. Truly unraveling the secrets of the past was an incredibly daunting task. For now, though, her top priority remained the clue of the Mountain-Seeking Traveler. Who exactly was he? How much did he know about the Forbidden Witch Bone? How had he taken that photograph? Did the numbered Gu Worms in the karst cave have any connection to him? All of it remained a tangled web of unsolved mysteries.

Who had deleted her post? And why had the Mountain-Seeking Traveler canceled his account?

Her thoughts sharpened in focus when she suddenly recalled the hacker who had breached the Rat-Walkers’ computer system during the Flower Fair.

“…Xianwang, Xianwang?”

“Hm?”

“We’re here.”

Gu Xianwang blinked in surprise and peered out the car window. Only then did she realize they had arrived at Five Avenues.

“Your master’s courtyard is bound to be ringed with security cameras. This car’s registered under the Rat-Walkers, so he’d spot it in a heartbeat. I can’t risk pulling up too close.”

It felt just like a clandestine handoff between Republican-era spies. Gu Xianwang murmured her agreement, unsure whether to laugh or sigh in exasperation. “Then… I’ll be off.”

“Right.” Long Li twisted in her seat. “Phone contact.”

“Mm. Phone contact.”