If she had chosen a mace back then, perhaps things wouldn’t have turned out like this.
The sound of the wind roared in her ears. The tiger’s den was deep and long, shrouded in darkness. Zanxing couldn’t see anything, only hearing the sounds of Gu Baiying and the others pursuing behind her. Tian Fangfang called out, “Junior Sister, are you still there?”
Zanxing replied, “…I’m here.”
After all, the Jinhua Tiger was merely a fierce beast and couldn’t withstand the cultivators’ relentless pursuit. It became enraged as it ran deeper. Suddenly, it swung its tail and clamped down hard. Zanxing felt her flower-patterned staff gradually bending and urgently called out, “Hurry up, I can’t hold on any longer!”
Just as she finished speaking, a silver spear shot forward, drawing a streak of silver light in the dark cave. The spearhead aimed directly at the Jinhua Tiger’s eye. The entire cave echoed with a loud roar as the tiger’s mouth loosened its grip on the staff.
Caught off guard, Zanxing was flung away. The cave was pitch-black, filled with stones. She was thrown around and became disoriented, not knowing day from night. In the darkness, she felt a hand pulling her up. Gu Baiying’s voice sounded in her ear, “Get up!”
“Senior Uncle?”
She was about to speak when suddenly she heard Mu Cengxiao shout, “Watch out, it’s going to breathe fire!”
As if to confirm his words, a tongue of flame burst forth, illuminating the dark cave.
Only then did Zanxing see the cave walls, densely covered with human and beast bones, some of them already very old. She realized that she had tripped not on stones but on these bones, likely the remains of the Jinhua Tiger’s prey. Glancing behind her…
She felt a chill run down her spine.
It had been too dark earlier. The tiger had carried her, running wildly, and she had no idea where she was. Now that she could see clearly, she and Gu Baiying were standing just half a step away from a black abyss.
The darkness was profound, with not a glimmer of light visible, as if it extended thousands upon thousands of miles downward. It was deep and eerie, like another sky beneath the earth, or a giant beast lurking in the shadows, waiting to devour anyone who fell in.
The Jinhua Tiger let out a long roar, and from its mouth, it suddenly spewed a long column of fire. This blaze was different from ordinary fire, extremely hot and boiling. The skin near the flames felt as if it would be scorched to smoke in an instant. As the fire spread quickly throughout the cave, the entire cavern was engulfed in raging flames. The golden, faintly glowing flowered tail of the tiger swept through the air. Caught off guard, Zanxing was pushed back by the sudden gust—
She heard Tian Fangfang’s shout: “Junior Sister!”
And Men Dong’s panicked cry: “Senior Uncle!”
Beneath her was a bottomless abyss, the wind roaring in her ears, mingling with the red waves of fire. Zanxing felt her body plummeting heavily, yet it also felt as if she were about to take flight. The entire world turned upside down. She couldn’t tell if she was moving up or down, or if she was standing still or running.
It seemed like an eternity passed.
She felt something furry moving against her chest, and a dull, aching pain spread through her bones. Zanxing reached for her chest and pulled out a lighting talisman.
The talisman burned at her fingertips. She heard a groan from beneath her and looked down to see that she was lying on Gu Baiying. She had apparently used him as a human cushion, and now he was grimacing in pain.
Startled, Zanxing quickly got up and asked, “Senior Uncle, are you okay?”
Gu Baiying, sitting up with her help, rubbed his arm and replied irritably, “Not dead yet.”
Relieved, Zanxing sighed. When she was swept into the abyss by the Jinhua Tiger’s tail, she hadn’t expected Gu Baiying to follow her down. If she had been alone in this situation, facing all this would have been quite despairing.
She stuck the lighting talisman to the wall, and Mimi let out a call, sounding a bit agitated. Zanxing glanced around and was stunned.
They were in a stone chamber, square and neatly arranged, about the size of a small woodshed, completely empty.
There were no doors, no windows, and no light. If it were any narrower, Zanxing might have suspected that it was a coffin.
However, she and Gu Baiying had clearly fallen from the cave above. Regardless of how it happened, they shouldn’t have ended up in this place. There was no exit visible, so how did they get in?
“How are you?” Gu Baiying asked her.
“I’m fine,” Zanxing replied. Just as she finished speaking, Gu Baiying took something out of his Qiankun bag and threw it in front of her. “Put this on.”
Looking down, Zanxing saw that her Tianji Dharma robe had previously had half a sleeve bitten off by the Jinhua Tiger and had been further scorched by the fire. Even though it could resist some magical attacks, the robe was now tattered and somewhat inappropriate.
Without hesitation, she put on Gu Baiying’s clothing. His clothes were quite large on her, so she used her hair tie as a belt to cinch it tighter.
“Senior Uncle, how did we end up here?” Zanxing looked around. “Didn’t the Jinhua Tiger want to burn us to death?”
The Jinhua Tiger was a fire-type beast, and the fire it breathed out had its own intelligence, capable of following its target. When they fell, the damn tiger had breathed fire at them. Zanxing thought she was surely done for.
“It was the Jiaoren scales from Yin Li that protected you,” Gu Baiying glanced at her. “Shark demons are of water, and water overcomes fire.”
Zanxing suddenly understood. She hadn’t expected the silver scales Yin Li had given her to come in handy here. She looked up at the ceiling, which was a smooth stone surface. Zanxing murmured, “I wonder how Senior Brother and the others are doing…”
“You still have the energy to worry about others?” Gu Baiying scoffed. “Focus on figuring out how to get out of here first.”
The stone chamber appeared seamless, with no visible cracks, as if it was carved out from the center of a solid rock. They were trapped inside this stone.
Zanxing stood up and walked to the walls, knocking on them here and there. “No matter what, there must be an exit here, otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to get in. There must be a hidden mechanism. If we search, we’ll surely find it.”
Gu Baiying, however, wasn’t as optimistic. He remained seated, his voice cold, “I’ve already scanned this place with my spiritual sense. There are no mechanisms.”
“Maybe your spiritual sense was wrong,” Zanxing replied dismissively. She wasn’t being blindly optimistic, but generally, falling into a hidden chamber like this often signified an encounter with a fortuitous opportunity. She looked at the palm of her hand, noting that the red mark hadn’t changed.
In the original work “At the Summit of the Nine Heavens,” Mu Cengxiao indeed found new opportunities within a secret realm, but there was no such thing as the Jinhua Tiger. This fierce beast, which shouldn’t have existed in the original story, brought her here.
The tree desires peace, but the wind does not cease. She had originally intended to avoid altering the main plot as much as possible, but the storyline seemed to keep pushing her towards an unfamiliar and dangerous path.
She really didn’t know if this was a good or bad thing.