Chapter 52

Zhu Ming discovered that Yin Yu was actually quite useful.

She could serve as both a laborer and a strategist. At the very least, when facing English questions, she no longer had to rely on blind guesses!

However, after being carried for a while, Zhu Ming grew tired of it. She jumped down to walk on her own. The two of them opened quite a few treasure chests, their positions constantly shifting.

Moving forward for a stretch, Zhu Ming, with her sharp eyesight, keenly spotted sand in the corner of a wall.

The sand had been arranged into the shape of “W4!”. Wenren Tu was telling her this was the fourth door she had passed through alone since they separated, and the exclamation mark indicated she had encountered something special.

Zhu Ming disrupted the “W4!”, rearranging it into “W4√”. If Wenren Tu passed through here again, she would receive Zhu Ming’s response.

Time ticked by, and as expected, Zhu Ming and Yin Yu encountered that strange “whoosh” sound once more.

“If you went up against it, would you be confident in defeating it?” Zhu Ming asked.

“No,” Yin Yu replied simply.

“Why?”

“The rules dictate it.”

Just like the maze entity itself, you simply couldn’t use your own abilities to destroy it.

Zhu Ming stopped asking, but she noticed a problem.

This “whoosh” sound was much more frequent than on their first day entering the underground labyrinth. There wasn’t just one of these things; their numbers might even increase as the days went by.

What exactly was it… Wenren Tu had described it like a ghost clad in armor, majestic and terrifying, certainly not an elegant existence like the Six-Armed Goddess.

Zhu Ming thought for a moment, then said, “I want to know what it really is.”

“How do you plan to do that?”

Zhu Ming closed her eyes and pondered for a long while. “Let’s wait a bit longer. Wait until the bell rings and the lights dim.”

At that time, everyone would tacitly give up on opening chests and choose to head back.

Yin Yu had no objections.

Zhu Ming continued forward, opening more treasure chests. Perhaps because she had opened so many, she discovered that the maze was designed with many hidden traps, and triggering them depended partly on luck and partly on skill.

For instance, the large pit the Stone Giant fell into on the first day was actually triggered by the maze’s shifting positions. Many of the bricks at the maze’s intersections were painted with half a decorative pattern, which also served as markers for the boundaries of moving areas. When the patterns aligned and connected, a trap would be triggered instantly.

A pattern forming a circle triggered a deep pit; a pattern forming a square triggered a stone wall.

The latter was far more unlucky and also much rarer, because if one was unfortunately trapped in a dead end, unless they used Yin Yu’s ability, no one could escape.

…

Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump—

The bell rang, reminding participants that it was five o’clock, it was getting dark, and it was time to head back. The ambient light dimmed a notch instantly.

Whoosh—

Zhu Ming calmly looked to her rear flank. That familiar sound had come from there.

Before the bell rang, she had already thoroughly scouted the nearby terrain. Now, she and Yin Yu were standing in a dead-end corridor. Beside them was an unopened treasure chest, and right at the intersection was a pitfall trap.

Now, they just had to wait for the prey to walk into the trap.

She just didn’t know if she, the hunter, would succeed in the hunt, or be killed by her prey instead.

Closer, it was getting closer and closer.

The next time the whoosh came, a gust of cold wind hit them head-on. In that instant, Zhu Ming seemed to see a massive, giant monster.

Its appearance in her vision was very brief. Zhu Ming stared fixedly at its attire and position, and her expression suddenly turned terrible.

In her original plan, she intended to trap this monster using the pitfall trap, then instantly shift her position and use the trap’s partition to kill it.

But the monster couldn’t fall into it at all.

Although it was only for a fleeting second, Zhu Ming still saw the round platform beneath its feet. Just like the Six-Armed Goddess, it moved while standing on a platform. And this platform was wide and expansive, directly covering the pitfall trap!

No wonder it made that kind of sound when moving. But this was just too unfair.

In just an instant, the monster turned transparent and vanished again. Though she couldn’t see it, Zhu Ming clearly sensed a lethal danger slashing towards her.

Yin Yu was just about to open the treasure chest according to the plan when Zhu Ming slapped her hand down, pressing Yin Yu’s hand along with it.

Immediately, she hugged the treasure chest and rolled away on the ground, dodging the cold energy the monster had slashed out.

But the monster’s attacks were very fast, left and right, one after another. Zhu Ming eventually couldn’t dodge in time and was sent flying against the wall with a hit.

Crack.

She heard the sound of bones breaking. An uncontrollable stream of hot liquid overflowed from her mouth.

Yin Yu stood outside the intersection, already out of the monster’s attack range. She didn’t pull Zhu Ming out.

She just stood there, quietly, indifferently watching everything unfold before her eyes. She watched Zhu Ming get heavily injured by that powerful monster with the same expression as if Zhu Ming had just scraped her skin a little.

.

She had known it would be like this.

As Zhu Ming slid down from the wall, the monster’s next attack was imminent, yet she fell into an eerie calmness.

It was as if she had split into two parts. One part was madly burning with anger, fear, and all the intense emotions generated at this moment, while the other part was so calm it was almost cold-blooded. Even though she herself was the one in the battle, it generated no superfluous emotions.

In that instant, she seemed to grasp Yin Yu’s inner heart. Perhaps, in some aspects, the two of them were similar.

Look, she knew very clearly that while she felt angry and hurt by Yin Yu’s cold indifferent observation, she also calmly understood that no matter how agreeable Yin Yu had acted before, she was always that Yin Yu, the unshakable Yin Yu.

From the very beginning, when Zhu Ming decided to see this invisible monster with her own eyes, she knew she absolutely couldn’t rely on Yin Yu.

She had to have her own escape route, unless she wanted to become a pile of mud, groveling and begging Yin Yu for mercy. But she had an intuition that the moment she did that, Yin Yu would directly let her die.

After all, Yin Yu only wanted her to live, to become stronger—not that she must.

Which was just as well.

She hadn’t trusted Yin Yu that much anyway.

In that split second, the monster’s outline seemed to trace itself out in the air before Zhu Ming’s eyes. An indescribable, unexplainable intuition made her subconscious take action.

Dragging her injured body, she suddenly leaped forward and to the left.

Then she scraped against the wall and awkwardly rolled to the ground.

BOOM—

A huge crash sounded behind her.

Without looking back, Zhu Ming ran forward, clutching her ribs and bending over.

An indescribable feeling kept spreading within her. Before she leaped, she had sensed certain trajectories, like a profound fate, telling her that the monster’s next attack wouldn’t be a blade slash, but a ramming charge.

And that was exactly what happened.

She couldn’t see it, yet it felt as if she had.

Without the slightest hesitation, without looking back, Zhu Ming ran towards Yin Yu’s gaze and directly jumped into the deep pit.

Holding that unopened treasure chest, she rolled her eyes upwards and flipped a middle finger towards the sky.

The monster was helpless.

It slid by with a whoosh, losing its target.

Zhu Ming slumped weakly inside the pit. The jump rattled her body so much it nearly fell apart, worsening her injuries considerably. Her lungs seemed to have been injured, as more bloody froth bubbled up from her mouth and nose.

It was a bit troublesome. She put down the treasure chest, lay flat at the bottom of the pit, and pressed a hand under her ribs, not daring to move for a moment.

It hurt so much.

When the corridor returned to silence, a moment later, Yin Yu walked to the edge of the pit. She looked down at Zhu Ming inside and asked, “Want to come out?”

Zhu Ming responded with another middle finger.

Yin Yu wasn’t annoyed. She directly appeared beside Zhu Ming and sat down with her at the bottom of the pit.

Yin Yu said gently, “You’re badly hurt. Your bones are injured. This isn’t something that will heal so easily.”

Zhu Ming trembled as she opened her mouth: “Bu-bu-bullshit.”

Yin Yu smiled, teasing her, and added, “I can help push your bones back into place. But it will hurt a little.”

Zhu Ming finally opened her eyes. This person, battered and stubborn, now also held tears of pain in her eyes. But she glanced sideways at Yin Yu without making a sound, slowly lifted her own hand, felt her own bones, and forcefully pushed them back into place as if the injury was on someone else’s body.

Actually, it was very inconvenient, very awkward, and the effect wasn’t good.

It hurt exceptionally, so much that tears kept streaming down Zhu Ming’s face, yet she remained silent.

The smile on Yin Yu’s face gradually faded. She gently moved Zhu Ming’s hand away and said, “Let me do it.”

Somehow, she managed to control Zhu Ming’s muscles and bones, directly restoring them to their original position. However, while the alignment was fixed, the injuries remained.

“Mingming is so brave,” Yin Yu coaxed.

“Are you done yet? Do you think I’m a child?” Zhu Ming cursed her with a hoarse voice. “Stop putting on an act for me.”

Yin Yu seemed thoughtful. “That’s true. Seven years have passed, and Mingming has grown up. To have become so formidable, so strong… it’s reached a degree I never expected.”

Zhu Ming sneered. “How do you think I spent these seven years?”

“I heard you were found by the Zhu Family and became the Eldest Miss. It sounded very impressive, though you didn’t seem to live much at the main household.”

Zhu Ming’s facial muscles twitched slightly as she said mockingly, “You phrase it so nicely. You sure know a lot.”

She closed her eyes wearily, not wanting to see Yin Yu’s face, nor engage in conversation with her. She simply commanded unkindly, “Take my clothes off.” She didn’t want to move an inch right now.

Yin Yu asked, “Do you need me to close my eyes?”

Zhu Ming replied with dripping sarcasm, “As you please. It’s not like you have those worldly desires anyway, right?”

“True enough.”

Zhu Ming didn’t want to burn her clothes off again. She was in too much pain right now and feared she couldn’t control herself.

Ordering Yin Yu around was a way to vent her anger, but this time it didn’t seem like a good idea. Yin Yu’s hair was very long, and brushing against her body tickled strangely. Tensing her body hurt her wounds, but not tensing up… well, damn it all if she didn’t want to laugh. Goosebumps rose all over her skin.

She endured it, endured it some more, and finally, it was done.

But she hadn’t expected that after helping her undress, Yin Yu would also lift Zhu Ming’s head and place it on her own lap.

Not without malice, Zhu Ming thought about just burning her and being done with it. Unfortunately, Yin Yu’s ability could block the flames; her petty spite couldn’t burn through.

Zhu Ming closed her eyes, feigning sleep, as flames covered her body to heal her injuries.

The woman lying on her lap was as quiet as if asleep. Yin Yu produced a damp handkerchief from thin air and meticulously wiped the ashes from Zhu Ming’s face.

That fair, pretty face gradually emerged. Zhu Ming said gloomily, “Stop wiping. I feel like you’re prepping me for my funeral.”

Yin Yu chuckled but still helped wipe her hands and feet. The pathetic thing was Sun Ningning’s shoe size didn’t match hers—she couldn’t wear them, so she’d left them for Sun Ningning.

Zhu Ming had been walking barefoot this whole journey, which was actually the main reason she let others carry her.

The light overhead grew dimmer and dimmer. After watching for a while, Yin Yu said, “The lights are about to go out.”

After a session of healing, Zhu Ming had forgotten the pain now that the wounds were better. She began to stir restlessly again, itching to take another risk. “When the lights go out, pay attention to the situation. See if we should stay underground or go up top. I suddenly remembered that at night, the tunnels aren’t sealed off; you can still enter and exit. The dungeon never said you can’t come at night. Hmm… I’m actually quite curious what the maze becomes after the lights go out.”