Chapter 100: Xiaoqi’s Suspicion

Before I could react, I heard a sharp crack from my knee. It was clear the anesthesia had started to take effect, because I didn’t feel any pain. Still, the sound echoed in my ears and made my teeth ache just listening to it.

Tian Xiaoqi clapped her hands and stood up, tossing me some bread from her bag. After taking a swig from her canteen, she said, “Take off the top of your wetsuit. I need to check the wound on your back.”

I froze for a second, thinking how awkward that was.

As it turned out, Tian Xiaoqi changed her face faster than turning a page. She urged me, “Hurry up! If that wound gets infected, it’ll be bad!”

I was indeed intimidated by her warnings, so I quickly started stripping off the top of my wetsuit. When He Yu and I were forced off the boat by the snake swarm earlier, it had been too rushed for us to bring any spare clean clothes.

Having crawled through caves for so long, I had pushed this single wetsuit to its absolute limit. The upper half had been shredded by a claw swipe from that infant corpse, while the lower half was now tattered almost to my thighs. I hadn’t realized it until looking down, but I felt like I had just emerged from some slum.

The wound on my back covered a large area, and much of it had stuck to the fabric. Tian Xiaoqi had to crouch down and carefully cut the material away with surgical scissors. As she worked, she asked, “Did you treat the wound yourself?”

“No. I passed out in the cave and didn’t wake up for a long time,” I answered truthfully.

Tian Xiaoqi paused, then looked at me with clear suspicion.

I didn’t understand why she harbored such deep distrust toward me, so I quickly explained everything to her. I told her how I was pushed through the trapdoor, my jumps across the stone pillars, and the infant corpse that tackled me into the abyss. Except for my speculations about that nameless cave, I recounted every single detail just as it had happened.

After listening, she rested her chin on her hand and stared at me, then glanced back at my wound. “So you’re saying… you have no idea what’s been happening outside?”

Her question left my mind completely blank.

Tian Xiaoqi looked at my expression and said, “Seeing how clueless you look, I’ll tentatively believe you’re not lying. Two nights ago, these two suddenly appearing cliffs sank to varying degrees. We suspect the timing mechanism at the bottom of the river started running again, so we conducted a wide search around the cliffs.”

She took a deep breath. “According to the rubbing, we were certain an underground palace had been built here. But despite searching for a long time, we couldn’t find anything like an entrance, only a crack just wide enough to insert an arm. We were going to keep looking, but before we could continue exploring, the cliffs began descending at a speed visible to the naked eye.”

“Sinking?” I asked.

Tian Xiaoqi nodded at me. “Yeah, the cliff face started breaking apart, rocks falling everywhere. Then we heard an explosion from the opposite side. Those two guys with you are real handfuls. They planted detonators and blew a massive fissure right into the mountain.”

I listened in stunned half-disbelief. If He Yu had blown up the mountain on his own, I wouldn’t have been too surprised. But this time he had Lu Ayao with him. Lu Ayao was dependable and cautious; he was unlikely to resort to blowing up a mountain out of nowhere. That was way too reckless.

If I calculated the time right, I must have been unconscious for about a day and a half. During that time, the position of the entire cliff face was constantly shifting. While I was crawling, falling rocks overhead had gotten much more frequent, and that deafening dull thud I heard was very likely caused by the explosion outside.

“I was originally diving down with Han Jian, but I lost my way mid-course and somehow got swept into that giant fissure. The water carried me all the way inside. This area used to sit next to a mineral vein, so there are tons of holes and crevices inside. It took me two days of crawling to reach this spot.”

At her words, I looked around at our surroundings. We were in the exact center of a natural cave. Right here stood a man-made well that had been abandoned for years. On the black stone wall closest to me, patches of exposed jade glinted from the rock.

As I munched on the bread, a realization hit me. When Tian Xiaoqi mentioned a mineral vein, she meant a jade vein! How much would all this jade be worth combined? Probably enough that I couldn’t finish spending it in ten lifetimes.

I was still mid-reverie when Tian Xiaoqi patted me on the shoulder. “Speaking of which, did you really crawl through hundreds of meters of tunnels with a wound like that?”

I felt okay at the moment, but felt a bit helpless since I couldn’t see what was going on with my back. So I asked her, “Why? Is my wound so bad I should start getting a coffin ready for burial?”

Hearing my words, Tian Xiaoqi actually paused to think for a few seconds before giving a quiet nod. “Normally speaking, after getting clawed by an infant corpse, bleeding continuously, and taking in a heavy dose of corpse poison, a wound like that would be completely fatal. You would’ve dropped dead within minutes.”

She tilted my shoulder to look closer. “Yet not only are you alive, you crawled through hundreds of meters of tunnels all by yourself, and the bleeding from your wounds even stopped. It makes no sense at all.”

I didn’t know anything about medicine; nothing she described had ever entered my universe during the first twenty years of my life. So I turned back and smiled at her. “Then just treat me as a one-in-a-million medical miracle. Either way, I really did walk all the way here alive. Maybe Heaven really is watching over me. When I get back, I’ll definitely stick to a vegetarian diet for a few days.”

My response clearly left Tian Xiaoqi bewildered. I rolled my shoulders and stood up, actually trying to deduce where He Yu and the others were right now, as well as the things I had been pondering in the tunnel earlier.

There were no corpses in the cave, which proved that whoever dug the passage had already climbed up through the well like I did. Maybe they had even stood in the exact spot I was standing in now to think. That thought made me feel chilled all over, and I couldn’t help but sneeze.

Tian Xiaoqi bent down and tossed me a vacuum-sealed bag from her backpack. Inside were clean clothes, and they happened to be men’s styles. I immediately looked up and stared at her with deeply grateful eyes.

“I took quite a few of Han Jian’s supplies. I was planning to throw them out, but you got lucky,” Tian Xiaoqi said. She didn’t spare me a single glance before turning and walking to the far side of the well, signaling for me to hurry up and change.

The upper edge of the well jutted out quite a bit, so sitting down normally covered most of my upper body. I didn’t care whether the ground was dirty or not. I sat right down and started peeling off what was left of my wetsuit, pulling the clean clothes on in no time.

Aside from the brown outer jacket being a size too big, the T-shirt underneath fit pretty well. The numbing effect in my left leg had finally worn off, and the excruciating pain felt like it was creeping into my other leg. Tian Xiaoqi made a makeshift splint for me and told me to hop on one leg as much as possible.

The two of us huddled near the stone wall and started a fire. Changing out of the damp, sweat-soaked gear left me feeling instantly refreshed, and my appetite returned in full force. After eating some bread, I pried open a can of meat and scarfed that down too, but as soon as I finished, I began to nod off.

After keeping my nerves strung tight for so long, my body was crashing from sheer exhaustion.

Tian Xiaoqi checked the time and said to me, “Rest for two hours. I’ll take the first watch, then I’ll wake you for the second.”

Hearing that, I felt a huge wave of relief. I closed my eyes, let my head drop, and fell fast asleep.