Zanxing

Chapter 121 - Tiger's Lair (2)

If I had chosen a wolf-tooth club back then, perhaps the outcome would be different now.

The sound of the wind roared in her ears. The tiger's den was extremely deep and long, and it was very dark inside. Yanxing couldn't see anything, only hearing the sounds of Gu Baiying and the others following behind. Tian Fangfang called out, "Junior sister, are you still there?"

Yanxing: "...I'm here."

After all, the Golden Flower Tiger was just a fierce beast and couldn't withstand the pursuit of the cultivators. It became angry as it ran, suddenly swinging its tail and clamping down with its jaws. Yanxing felt the Panhua staff gradually bending and urgently shouted, "Hurry up, I can't hold on!"

Just as she finished speaking, a silver spear shot forward, cutting through the darkness of the cave with a streak of silver light, aiming directly at the Golden Flower Tiger's eye. Immediately, a roar echoed through the cave, and Yanxing felt the pressure on the staff lighten as the tiger's jaws released.

Caught off guard, Yanxing was thrown out. The cave was pitch black and filled with rocks. She was thrown around, disoriented, not knowing the time or place. In the darkness, she felt a hand pulling her up, and Gu Baiying's voice sounded in her ear, "Get up!"

"Martial Uncle?"

She was about to speak when she suddenly heard Mu Chengxiao shout, "Watch out, it's going to breathe fire!"

As if to confirm his words, a tongue of fire shot out, illuminating the dark cave.

Only then did Yanxing see that the sides of the cave were densely packed with human and beast skeletons, some of which were very old. It seemed she had tripped over these bones earlier, not rocks. These were likely the Golden Flower Tiger's prey and behind them...

She glanced back and felt a chill run down her spine.

It had been too dark earlier, and she had been carried around by the tiger, not knowing where she was. Now that she could see clearly, she realized that she and Gu Baiying were standing just half a step away from a black abyss.

The darkness was so deep that no light could be seen as if it extended thousands of miles down. It was dark and eerie, like another sky beneath the earth, or a lurking beast waiting to devour them.

The Golden Flower Tiger let out a long roar and suddenly spewed fire from its mouth. This fire was different from ordinary flames, extremely hot and boiling. The skin near the flames felt like it was being scorched into smoke. As the fire spread through the cave, the entire cave was engulfed in blazing flames. The golden, faintly glowing tail of the tiger swept across, and Yanxing was caught off guard, pushed back by the gust of wind—

She heard Tian Fangfang's shout, "Junior sister!"

And Men Dong's panicked cry, "Martial Uncle!"

Below her was a bottomless abyss, the wind roaring in her ears, mingling with the red flames. Yanxing felt her body sinking, yet it also felt like she was flying. The whole world turned upside down, not knowing whether she was going up or down, whether she was stopping or running.

A long time passed.

She felt something furry moving on her chest, and her whole body ached with a dull pain. Yanxing touched her chest and pulled out an illumination talisman.

The talisman burned at her fingertips, and Yanxing heard a groan from beneath her. Looking down, she saw she was lying on Gu Baiying, who had probably been used as a human cushion. His face looked unusually grim.

Startled, Yanxing quickly got up and asked, "Martial Uncle, are you alright?"

Gu Baiying, sitting up with her help, rubbed his arm and said irritably, "Not dead yet."

That's good. Yanxing breathed a sigh of relief. When she was swept into the abyss by the Golden Flower Tiger's tail, she hadn't expected Gu Baiying to follow her down. If she had been alone here, facing all this, it would have been quite despairing.

She stuck the illumination talisman on the wall, and Mimi called out, sounding anxious. Yanxing looked around and was stunned.

They were in a stone chamber, square and flat, about the size of a small woodshed, with nothing inside.

No doors, no windows, no light. If it were any narrower, Zhan Xing would have suspected it was a coffin.

But she and Gu Baiying had clearly fallen from the cave. No matter what, they shouldn't have ended up in this place. There was no exit, so how did they get in?

"How are you?" Gu Baiying asked her.

Yanxing replied, "I'm fine." Just as she finished speaking, Gu Baiying pulled something out of his Qiankun bag and threw it in front of her, "Put it on."

Yanxing looked down and saw that the Tianji robe had already lost half a sleeve to the Golden Flower Tiger's bite and had been further scorched by the flames. Although it could resist some magical attacks, the robe was now in tatters, looking quite unseemly.

She didn't refuse and draped Gu Baiying's clothes over herself. His clothes were a bit too large for Yanxing, so she used her hair tie as a belt to tighten them.

"Martial Uncle, how did we end up here?" Yanxing looked around. "Wasn't the Golden Flower Tiger trying to burn us to death?"

The Golden Flower Tiger was a fire-loving beast, and the fire it breathed had intelligence, able to follow its target. When they fell, the cursed tiger had breathed fire, and Yanxing thought she was doomed.

"It was Yinli's scales that protected you," Gu Baiying glanced at her. "The merman belongs to water, and water counters fire."

Yanxing suddenly understood. She hadn't expected the silver scales Yinli gave her to be useful here. She looked up at the ceiling, which was a smooth stone wall, and murmured, "I wonder how senior brother and the others are doing..."

"You still have the mind to worry about others?" Gu Baiying sneered. "Think about how to get out of here first."

The stone chamber seemed seamless as if it had been hollowed out from a single piece of stone, and they were trapped inside.

Yanxing stood up and walked to the walls, knocking around. "No matter what, there must be an exit here, otherwise we wouldn't have been able to get in. There should be a mechanism to get out. Let's look for it, we will definitely find it."

Gu Baiying was less optimistic. He sat where he was, his voice cold. "I've already scanned with my spiritual sense. There's no mechanism here."

"Maybe your spiritual sense is wrong," Yanxing said dismissively. She wasn't blindly optimistic, but generally, falling into a cliff and finding a secret chamber often indicated a fortuitous encounter. She looked at her palm, and the red mark hadn't changed.

In the original work "At the Peak of the Nine Heavens," Mu Chengxiao indeed found new opportunities in the secret realm, but there was no Golden Flower Tiger. This beast, which shouldn't have existed in the original work, had brought her here.

The tree wants to be still, but the wind won't stop. She had tried not to change the main plot of the original work, but the plot seemed to always push her towards a strange and dangerous path.

She really didn't know if this was a good thing or a bad thing.