Xie Zhaolin followed Teng She to a hidden crack in the cliff.
She pushed aside thick vines and found the narrow fissure led into a cave hollowed into the rock. Carefully, she sent out three bird-type yin souls to scout, and ordered Dian Diao to stand guard in the rear.
Only after she confirmed it was safe did she step into the cave.
A damp, chilly smell of rot hit her, and the interior was much more spacious than she expected, its walls pocked with holes of every size. Soon she found the passage connected to another mouth, and then another, until she realized the caverns threaded together like an underground maze.
She paused, running her fingertips along the strange patterns on the stone and thinking it through. The tunnels branched in a radiating pattern, like a magnified subterranean hive. She pulled out a blank jade slip and began sketching a simple map, marking each fork as she went.
Some passages were so narrow you had to squeeze sideways, others wide enough to walk shoulder to shoulder. What kept catching her eye were the odd black crystals growing on the walls, exuding the same aura as the Blackwater Waterfall. She carefully cut a few samples and sealed them in a jade bottle for later study.
"Teng She, do they know where the exit is?" she asked softly.
Teng She lifted its head and pointed its tail toward a right-hand tunnel. Xie Zhaolin followed that way and found the path sloped downward, deeper into the earth.
After an incense stick's worth of time, she reached the bottom of the abyss. The terrain here was nothing like the spot with the transport array. Instead she stood on a wide open plain ringed by towering stone pillars that made a natural barrier. After checking there were no recent signs of the giant lizard, she let out a breath.
She soon came to the place where she'd fought the beast. Surprisingly, the creature wasn't there, only deep claw marks and some shed scales remained. Her heart leapt, and she crept further in.
A dark pool appeared ahead. She held her breath and moved to the edge. The water was black as ink and perfectly still, nothing stirring. She circled the pool, even sent Teng She down to probe the bottom, but found nothing. Reluctantly she led the beasts deeper.
She split Shuang Ling and Xue Xiao to search while she followed a dried riverbed. An hour later, her robes were soaked with seepage from the black rock. This area was larger and far more complex than she guessed, filled with sinkholes and ponds that made it easy to get lost.
She couldn't afford to linger. Even if the giant lizard wasn't nearby now, it could return any moment. If it found an intruder in its domain, the consequences would be dire.
"Retreat for now." She ordered the beasts to fall back, and Teng She guided them quickly along the route they'd come. At every junction she carefully wiped away traces of her presence.
Only when they were back at the cliff top did she let herself relax. The yin souls she'd sent to inspect the transport array returned with images stored on a spirit-stone. The array was damaged, and the three claw marks were clear. But when she inspected the shadows near the array, her pupils contracted—she caught sight of a huge silhouette slowly shifting in the gloom.
The giant lizard had indeed been guarding the transport array, apparently waiting for her to walk into a trap.
"What a cunning beast." She tightened her grip on her sleeve. It was sharper than she thought, not only destroying the array but lying in ambush.
Since it was sitting by the array, that actually gave her the freedom to keep searching the abyss floor. Over the next three days she and the beast souls turned the place inside out, scouring every sinkhole, every side stream, every pond, but they found no sign of the legendary bloom. It was as if that spiritual plant never even existed.
Then an idea struck her, and her eyes drifted toward the transport array. The lizard had never left the array's vicinity. A normal beast would have patrolled its territory, not sat in one spot forever.
Unless the treasure was inside the lizard.
Many rare treasures and miraculous plants have guardian beasts. Some high-level beasts even swallow a spirit plant and keep it inside to cultivate it. If that was the case, everything made sense. The lizard was guarding the treasure, not setting a trap for her.
Her pulse quickened. To test the theory, there was only one way. Kill the lizard.
She didn't know how much the beast had recovered, but she knew delay favored it. She couldn't let it recover fully. A frontal clash wouldn't work, that was already proven. She needed another path.
Her eyes traced the knot of caverns on the wall and an idea sparked. She relayed it to Teng She and had it control nearby yin souls to search. They led her to a new nook that overlooked the array from about thirty zhang above, a perfect spot she could never be reached from below. From there she could harass and chip away at the giant lizard from range.
She gathered baleful qi and spirit power, fitted three poisoned arrows to a bow, and loosed them at once. The black-glinting shafts streaked through the air, the corrosive pills on their tips detonating when they struck, spraying toxin into the lizard's unhealed wounds. It roared in fury. When it saw her high above, its rage only grew, but it couldn't reach her, so it slammed the rock in a blind attempt to shake her loose.
Xie Zhaolin smiled faintly and formed a defensive barrier at the cave mouth. A pale blue shield spread, sealing the entrance. "Just harass it from afar," she ordered.
Shuang Ling spat ice-blue foxfire, Xue Xiao launched razor feathers, and Dian Diao released crackling lightning, all landing precisely on the lizard's wounds. Each time the beast tried to climb, she commanded Bing Jing to spray cold, freezing the rock into a slick mirror so it couldn't get traction.
After three days of constant harassment, the lizard grew visibly worse. Its wounds bled black, its movements slowed, and she figured a few more days of this and she could face it head-on.
Just as she settled in to rest and recover, a roar unlike any before split the air. Xie Zhaolin snapped awake. The lizard's fury was aimed elsewhere.