Treasure for All

20. A Path

"Are you okay, sweetheart?" Phoebe asked as she rushed over to help him up.

"Yeah," he nodded.

Grace-Anne then kneeled down to get a good look at the stone staircase. The open itself was about as wide and long as a large cardboard box with a descending stone staircase. Each step disappeared more and more into the dark underground, and the cold dampness cut through the jungle's humidity. Pulling out her flashlight, Grace-Anne switched it on and shined it down the staircase. Nothing out of the ordinary except for a few dead snakes, but she felt uneasy about immediately taking the steps down.

A rock sat idly next to her, and it was immediately serving as a guinea pig. She tossed it down where it could still be visible by the light beams. Landing on a stone in one of the steps, it sank down halfway, and a spear shot up from the middle of the stone. The rock was split into two pieces before falling away somewhere.

"Do any of the notes say anything about this?" Grace-Anne asked as she stood.

Hongjoong was already ahead of her and reviewing the notes on both the map and the journal.

"Yes," he nodded once he found the page. "Any of the stones with a golf-ball sized hole in the center has a deadly spear. Have your flashlights ready."

One by one, the crew switched on their lights just before descending down the stone steps, tip-toeing over each holed stone. The air seemed to grow colder and more dense, and a soft blue glow could be seen up ahead. When they reached the bottom, a foul stench attacked their noses as they turned a corner.

"If I see one more corpse," Dinah threatened, "I will kick a stalagmite."

"I don't think it's a dead body, we're smelling," Grace-Anne replied as they walked a little further. "It smells more like mud after the rain."

The sound of a river rushing could be heard overhead. Hongjoong used his flashlight to read the notes again. "The blue light tells us that's where the next piece is."

"What is that light anyway?" Mingi asked as they strolled closer to the light.

"Yeah, there doesn't seem to be any electrical fixtures down here," added Yunho.

An opening marked where the blue light was hiding, and once the crew walked in, the light turned out to be what seemed to be twinkling blue clusters sticking to the wall and reflecting off of clear quartz fragments blooming from the ground to the ceiling. With this kind of light, the crew switched off their flashlights.

"Glow worms, of course!" Dahae recognized. "Their bioluminescence gives off a sort of blue or green light."

"But where's the diamond piece?" Seonghwa reminded her as the crew looked around. "It could be anywhere here."

Jongho was about to try to move a quartz piece to investigate any nook and cranny, but Dahae stopped him with a gasp.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"These aren't just any of the regular glow worms you hear about," she explained. "These quartz's have minerals that provide this species with their nutrients, and they're aggressive if they're touched by any other living organism. Touch the crystals, and a few of them will attack."

"They're not poisonous, are they?"

"They just give you deep cuts, but the bleeding is bad no matter where the laceration is."

"Found it," Taeran declared as she looked up something in the ceiling.

Surrounded by clusters of the glowing blue, a shining fractal seemed trapped in another microvine structure surrounded by crystals. Beside it was a sort of lock code identical to a lock combination, but rusted into the ceiling.