Li Wei and Fang Hua crawled first into the narrow gap between two large logs at the bottom. Zhao Lin was already curled up in the deepest corner, his hands tightly covering his head while mumbling incoherently, begging his father for help. Lin Mei followed, pulling Xin Yan with her to press against the wooden wall.
Xinghe carefully lowered Yun Hai to the ground, then entered the last gap alongside Han Dong. Xinghe immediately pulled the phone from his hood and pressed the power button to turn off the flashlight. Darkness once again enveloped the area around them, the only light being the faint blue glow of the planet.
"Cover your mouths. Do not make a sound," Xinghe whispered very softly into the ears of Han Dong and Yun Hai. He held his own breath, trying to suppress the rhythm of his heartbeat.
The sound of wet footsteps crept closer to the pavilion area. Their numbers felt incredibly vast. Xinghe's group could hear the soles of feet treading on the blue stone ground just outside their hiding place. A pale hand crawled over the wooden log Han Dong was leaning against. The long, wet fingers moved to grope the rough wood surface with random movements. Han Dong covered his own mouth with both hands.
His eyes widened as he stared at the horrific hand just centimeters from the top of his head. The atmosphere was extremely tense; everything moved slowly. Then, the phone in Fang Hua's pocket vibrated. The metal device emitted the shrill notification sound of a low battery alarm over and over. Its sound pierced loudly through the deadly silence.
Fang Hua jumped from the sudden panic. Her hands shook violently as she tried to reach into her pants pocket to turn off the notification. Her rough movements caused her to drop the phone onto the pile of gravel beneath her. The phone screen automatically lit up brightly from the impact, shining directly onto Fang Hua's face and allowing some of the light to pierce through the wooden gap.
The creatures outside responded to the light and sound instantly. A giant-sized pale hand struck the pile of wooden pillars from the outside. The thick, solid black wood was shattered through the middle in one powerful blow. Wood splinters flew, hitting the faces and bodies of Xinghe's group.
"Run! They know we are here!" Xinghe shouted, pushing the wooden log above him so it wouldn't crush Yun Hai.
There was no time to hide any longer. Their shelter had been blown wide open. Several pale hands immediately reached into the gap, trying to grab whatever moved around the light of Zhao Lin's phone.
The group scattered out from the side of the pavilion. Panic erased any remaining logical plans in their heads. They ran in a hurried circle, using the pavilion's foundation as a temporary shield to avoid the ambush of those long hands.
"Toward the furnace! We're going back up to the furnace!" Li Wei screamed, his tears already flowing down his dirty cheeks.
They ran with all their might toward the formation of eight plain crystal pillars where the bronze cauldron had landed. The nine giant corpses still lay stiffly around the landing area. The bronze furnace stood firmly in the center, with its metal base tightly closed. The crystal floor that had brought them down earlier was not at the bottom.
"Open! Open the door!" Zhao Lin pounded the thick metal base of the furnace with both hands blindly. He kicked the bronze legs covered in green rust. "Raise the floor! Bring me inside!"
Han Dong joined in, striking the bottom of the cauldron using a stone he had picked up. "Please work! Whatever this thing is, turn on now!"
Chu Xinghe stood beneath the base of the furnace, looking straight up. There was no open gap. There was no glow from the autumn or spring light discs. This furnace was completely inactive. "This furnace is not going up," Xinghe said, his voice filled with a very bitter confirmation of reality. "We have no control to open it."
The sound of wet footsteps dragging across the rocks was heard closing in from all sides. Hundreds of those three-meter-tall strange creatures had surrounded the eight-pillar area from the direction of the pavilion and the valley. They blocked the way back to the woodpile and all the open land. Fang Hua screamed loudly. She covered her face with both hands, unable to bear the sight of the horrific forms of the strange creatures.
The glowing blue veins across their thin bodies appeared brighter, pulsing rapidly. As the front line of the creatures lunged forward with outstretched arms, Xinghe's group broke apart. The mammalian survival instinct made them run away from each other without a clear sense of direction.
"Do not scatter!" Xinghe shouted in warning, but his voice was immediately drowned out by the echoing screams of his friends' terror.
Li Wei ran toward the tail of one of the dead giant dragons, trying to climb the hard black scales to find a high position. Han Dong pulled Lin Mei's wrist, forcing the girl to run with him along the left side of the cauldron. Xin Yan and Yun Hai kept close to the furnace's iron wall, moving sideways while crying.
The pale creatures surged forward instantly. Their long arms swept across the stone ground. One of the creatures managed to catch Fang Hua's ankle. The girl fell face-first, hitting the ground. She was dragged away over the blue stone, her screams tearing through the air as she called her friends' names.
Zhao Lin, who was running aimlessly to the right, was confronted by three large creatures at once. He tried to turn back, but a wet hand tightly gripped the back collar of his clothes. The creature lifted Zhao Lin's body into the air as if he were a light ragdoll.
"Let me go! My father can pay anything! Let me go!" Zhao Lin struggled frantically, his feet kicking the empty air hysterically.
Han Dong tried to fight back as two creatures blocked the path of him and Lin Mei. The school athlete landed a solid punch toward the center chest of the first creature. However, the pale flesh absorbed the punch like a clump of wet sponge. The second creature's hand grabbed and gripped Han Dong's neck, choking him until the youth's body was lifted and his face turned red.
Lin Mei screamed, hitting the long arm choking Han Dong with both hands. Suddenly another creature grabbed Lin Mei's hair from behind and slammed the girl's body flat onto the ground. Chu Xinghe saw the destruction of the formation in front of him. He ran around toward Xin Yan and Yun Hai, intending to pull the two girls up onto the relatively high foundation of a nearby crystal pillar.
However, a large arm struck his back hard from a blind spot. Chu Xinghe's body was thrown violently and hit the blue stone ground. A sharp pain immediately spread through his shoulder and chest bones. His lungs were forced to expel the remaining air suddenly. A hand with an extremely cold temperature gripped Chu Xinghe's ankle tightly. He was dragged backward roughly away from the pillar area. His thick clothes were torn as they scraped sharply against the uneven stone surface.
"Xinghe!" Xin Yan shouted from afar. The girl was about to run after him, but her steps stopped stiffly as two pale creatures stood blocking her path with stitched mouths that moved about.
Chu Xinghe was dragged with his back to the cauldron. His eyes stared at the black planetary sky without stars. Overwhelming panic began to erode the calmness he had maintained all this time. He struggled, using his still-free left leg to kick the long arm of the creature dragging him repeatedly, but the creature's hand grip locked his leg as strong as iron pliers.
Xinghe forced his body to flip into a face-down position. He forcibly dug his ten fingers into the blue stone ground, trying to find any grip or opening to stop the momentum of the dragging. His fingernails broke and bled, scratching the stone surface with a painful screeching sound.
As his index finger scratched a flat rock fragment that protruded slightly from the others, he felt structured, artificial grooves there. These grooves did not feel like a natural fracture, but rather structured carved lines. Xinghe endured the pain in his shoulder and forced his eyes to look down between his hands. Between his bleeding fingers, the flat stone surface featured ancient character carvings.
The strokes of the characters emitted a very thin blue glow, barely visible if the thick layer of dust on top had not been roughly swept away by the friction of Xinghe's body. Xinghe struggled to see; it was not the same as the Jiaguwen beneath Guangzhou. It was a script from an origin language that was very specific and old.
Four characters stood independently. His brain, accustomed to translating the structure of ancient manuscripts, immediately assembled the phonetic pronunciation of the characters on its own. Chu Xinghe had no clue what that string of characters meant for this dead planet. However, in the midst of despair as he saw his friends being captured, choked, and dragged toward the mercury pool valley, he chose madness!
He took a deep breath through his mouth, ignoring the sharp pain in his chest cavity and the numbness in his ankle, then shouted that pronunciation as loud as his vocal cords could hold the air. His voice cracked and vibrated loudly, echoing against the stone pillars of the dead planet.
"Wàngǔ Xiān Dì!" The cry took to the air. The air around the temporary stop area suddenly felt frozen. Something chilling happened in an instant. The spear-tall creature that was dragging Xinghe's leg backward immediately froze. Its strong pale hand gripping Xinghe's ankle became extremely stiff, released its grip, and was pulled back slowly.
Across all corners of the pillar area, hundreds of creatures who were dragging Fang Hua on the ground, lifting Zhao Lin's neck into the air, and choking Han Dong stopped moving at the exact same second. Their closed mouths vibrated softly, emitting a very low-pitched humming sound that sounded like worship.
One by one those pale creatures withdrew their hands. They released their grips from the humans' bodies. Their movements lost all previous aggression. The spear-tall bodies backed away with steps filled with excessive reverence. They then dropped to their knees upon the expanse of blue stone. They bowed their heads deeply until the skin of their foreheads touched the rough surface of the ground.
Zhao Lin fell with a thud onto the ground after being released just like that. He coughed, greedily inhaling the thin air while clutching his bruised neck. On the other side, Han Dong collapsed beside Lin Mei. They both trembled, not daring to breathe loudly seeing hundreds of giant creatures prostrating around them.
Chu Xinghe panted on the ground. His broken fingers were still pressed against the flat stone carving. He slowly lifted his head. The creature that had been dragging him was now kneeling just one meter in front of him, bowing so deeply.
"Xinghe... what did you say just now?" Han Dong asked in a voice that was nearly gone. He crawled slowly toward Lin Mei, his eyes never leaving the backs of the prostrating creatures.
Chu Xinghe did not answer immediately. He stood up with great difficulty, enduring the pain in his shoulder. "I only read what was written on this stone."
"Wangu Xian Di?" Xin Yan approached with hesitant steps. She stood beside Xinghe, staring at the rows of hundreds of bowed pale backs. "What does it mean?"
"The Immortal Emperor of All Ages," Chu Xinghe whispered. He stared at his blood-stained hands. His red blood dripped onto the blue carving on the ground, making the glow of the characters even brighter. "That's not just a name. It's a title of authority. It seems this planet, that pavilion, and all these creatures are subject to that one name."
"Whoever he is, thank you because he made these monsters stop trying to eat us," Li Wei crawled out from behind a dead dragon's scale. His face was wet with cold sweat. "But why are they just staying quiet? Are they waiting for us to do something?"
"Do not move suddenly!" Chu Xinghe ordered. "Move slowly back beneath the furnace."
They moved with great caution, like walking over a bed of cracked glass. Chu Xinghe led the way, enduring the ache in his shoulder. Behind him, Xin Yan supported Yun Hai, who was limping. Han Dong guarded Lin Mei and Fang Hua even though his neck also hurt, while Li Wei dragged Zhao Lin, who was still weak from being choked.
Hundreds of pale creatures remained in a prostrating position. They did not budge at all. Their eyeless heads were pressed against the blue ground, creating a bizarre and horrific sight. Once they reached the area exactly beneath the belly of the bronze cauldron, Li Wei immediately slumped to the ground. His breath came in gasps. "Yun Hai, did you hear that? They are making sounds."
"Yes, I hear it. They are praying," Yun Hai whispered. She touched her bleeding knee. "When I was first pulled earlier, I felt them also constantly mumbling, but I couldn't understand it."
The mumbling of those hundreds of creatures sounded very strange. Their voices resonated with the blue rocks, creating a vibration felt directly by everyone. Li Wei hugged his knees tightly on the ground, his eyes not daring to look out from the boundary of the bronze cauldron's shadow where they sheltered.
"How long will they keep prostrating like that?" Li Wei asked with a trembling and hoarse voice.