Chapter 117: Trust Crisis

What the hell?

For a second, I thought I’d misheard. My mind buzzed with a sharp shock. Lu Ayao was saying my blood could cure the corpse poison in his system? This joke wasn’t funny at all. If my blood really could cure corpse poison, it wouldn’t make any sense if I weren’t hauled off to some medical research institute to be dissected.

Despite my internal skepticism, my body reacted instinctively. I reached behind me for my knife. My reasoning was simple: regardless of whether it was true or not, saving him was the priority. If there was even a shred of a possibility, I had to try it first.

However, He Yu was faster, pressing his hand down on mine. “Wait a second. When did you get so reckless?”

He immediately turned to stare at Lu Ayao. “Old Lu, Gan Ji doesn’t have any kind of special constitution. His blood should be the same as ours. I’ve never heard of human blood curing corpse poison. Are you sure that just letting him bleed will neutralize the poison?”

Chen Canghai also frowned. He had personally witnessed me falling from that high stone pillar earlier and clearly didn’t want to see me lose any more blood.

I knew they were looking out for me. While crawling through the tunnel, I had already passed out for a while due to extreme stress and blood loss. Then, while still weak, I’d been forced into a round of battle with an infant corpse. Just moments ago, I’d been beaten by Qiao Sangui’s shameless lackeys until blood gushed from my nose.

I had only just managed to stop the bleeding, and now I was expected to bleed again.

Lu Ayao seemed lost in thought, his head hanging silently without a word. I suspected he wasn’t entirely sure about this either. So many things here were bizarre and supernatural; survival often meant chasing a mere possibility.

But if I let Lu Ayao suffer just because I was afraid of a little bloodletting, that certainly wasn’t my style.

I gently pushed He Yu aside. “It’s fine. I feel great right now. We don’t have anything to treat corpse poison anyway. Since Old Lu mentioned it, I want to try. Even if it doesn’t cure it, easing the symptoms would be a good thing.”

“It’s just a little blood. I’ll just smear it on the wound, not drain myself dry. Don’t worry, it’ll be fine,” I added, holding the knife and patting He Yu to reassure him.

I moved to roll up Lu Ayao’s sleeve over the wound. Beneath the skin near the injury, dark veins had already begun to spread. Fortunately, the toxin wasn’t spreading quickly. There were still some traces of my blood on his arm from when I’d accidentally brushed against him earlier.

He Yu looked at me with a complicated expression, but he didn’t stop me again. Instead, he shifted his position, stepping over Lu Ayao to the other side to help me roll up the sleeve and fully expose the wound.

I gripped the blade like a kitchen cleaver, trying to find the right angle. On one hand, I had no medical experience and was terrified of nicking an artery and causing a massive hemorrhage. If that happened, both Lu Ayao and I would be finished right here.

On the other hand, I had absolutely no self-harming tendencies. Cutting myself was a genuine challenge for me.

Finally, I handed the knife to He Yu and held out my left hand to him. “I can’t do it, my legs are a bit shaky. You do it. Just avoid the artery, cut wherever else you need to.”

He Yu looked at me like a heartless butcher eyeing a pig on his chopping block. He weighed the knife in his hand a few times and said, “Get some gauze. Hold it under the wound. If any extra blood drips down, we can reuse it.”

I looked back, and Chen Canghai efficiently rolled up several layers of gauze and handed them to me.

I braced myself. He Yu brought the knife down quickly, slicing a specific spot on my palm with practiced speed. His technique was remarkably seasoned. I watched as the blood welled up and began to flow, and before I even felt the pain, it was already dripping into Lu Ayao’s blackened wound.

A wound infected with corpse poison must have been excruciating. The muscles in Lu Ayao’s arm began to spasm almost instantly. It seemed to be having an effect. He Yu quickly gripped his arm tightly, while Chen Canghai moved fast to pin down his shoulders.

As the blood began to overflow, He Yu stopped squeezing my hand. I wrapped my palm in gauze and turned to look at Lu Ayao. He was drenched in sweat, his muscles trembling uncontrollably from the pain. Yet he gritted his teeth and didn’t make a sound; the only noise in the robber’s tunnel was the sound of heavy breathing.

Chen Canghai and He Yu held him down for a full twenty minutes before the pain from the wound finally began to subside. Taking advantage of Lu Ayao’s numbness from the pain, He Yu quickly swapped positions with me and expertly set Lu Ayao’s dislocated right wrist back into place.

We helped him lean back in a wider section deep inside the tunnel to rest. The three of us turned off our extra flashlights and leaned against the tunnel walls, panting. We left only one flashlight on for illumination.

“Not bad, Dr. He! I didn’t realize you were a man of such hidden talents!” I teased.

He waved his hand shamelessly. “Student Gan, don’t say that. Ah, yours truly has only picked up a bit of the basics. Setting bones or checking a pulse now and then is nothing extraordinary—nothing extraordinary at all!”

“Don’t get cheeky. Call you fat and you start panting^[1],” I laughed.

He Yu’s smile faded. “But seriously, your blood actually seems to work on Old Lu’s corpse poison wound. I can guarantee that a normal person’s blood would never have that effect. Tell me the truth, did your grandfather feed you something special when you were a kid?”

I snorted. “How is that possible? I’m just like anyone else. When I was little, I was the easiest one in the family to raise. I wasn’t a picky eater at all. My grandfather didn’t know anything about herbal medicine, let alone feeding me strange things.”

“Then how do you explain your blood? It’s not like you’re a walking ginseng root,” He Yu wondered.

“You bastard,” I reached out and swatted him. “You’re the walking ginseng root! If Lu Ayao hadn’t said anything, I wouldn’t have known my blood could do that either.”

I quietly turned my eyes away to look at the unconscious Lu Ayao. I wasn’t sure if it was just my imagination, but the color of his wound seemed to be slowly fading.

In truth, I was the one who should be most baffled by my blood’s ability to neutralize poison. This “special ability” actually frightened me, because I felt like something was wrong with my body, and that these issues were what caused my blood to be different from everyone else’s.

So when did this change begin?

It might have been the mycelium that had bound me earlier. Those filaments had tiny hairs on them, and I didn’t know their exact function. Our theory about them being hallucinogenic was just a guess, and I couldn’t be sure there weren’t other possibilities. For instance, back in Shennongjia, I had accidentally eaten some of that fungal mass while hallucinating.

But that fungal mass tasted different from the white mycelium here. I vaguely remembered that what I swallowed back then was so bitter it could make a person cry on the spot, whereas the mycelium here just tasted like ordinary mushrooms.

On top of that, because I had been unconscious several times, there were complete gaps in my memory. If someone had secretly fed me something during those periods, I would have been none the wiser.

I rubbed my leg and took the opportunity to remove the splint Tian Xiaoqi had made for me. I fashioned a new one with fresh gauze and tied it securely.

“I think once Lu Ayao wakes up, we need to have a serious talk with him,” I said solemnly. “We came in completely in the dark, but we can’t leave just as ignorant. At the very least, we need to know who the master of this underground palace really is.”

Chen Canghai sat there with his eyes closed, resting. All three of us were exhausted, and our conversation gradually died out. After a while, I was sitting there on the verge of nodding off when He Yu shifted closer to me.

He hooked his finger under the gauze covering my palm and peeled it back to take a look. Seeing that the bleeding had stopped, he finally breathed a sigh of relief. He patted my shoulder and said softly, “It’s good the bleeding stopped. I didn’t really want you to draw blood earlier. I know you want to save him, but in a situation like this, we have no choice but to consider the implications.”

Having been together for so long, I naturally understood that He Yu was truly looking out for me. In a place like this, weakness was the greatest danger, and blood loss meant potential weakness. I also realized that among us, He Yu was the only one who saw the reality of our relationships with such clarity.

He knew a great deal, but in this regard, he chose to keep his mouth shut.

He Yu glanced at me, then propped himself up and moved past me to sit beside Lu Ayao. He lifted his clothing to show me. There were many wounds on his arm, and it was hard to tell which were new and which were old.

“If it were just corpse poison, he shouldn’t be this weak. What actually caused him to lose consciousness is a combination of unhealed old wounds and fresh ones flaring up. The Lu Clan has a custom of soaking their children in medicinal wine from a young age, so the corpse poison spreads through his system slower than it would in an ordinary person. Holding out until we get out shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Xiao Yao, do you understand why I’m telling you this?” He Yu paused, covering Lu Ayao back up, and continued.

“After leaving Shennongjia, he went somewhere else and was seriously injured. That’s why he teamed up with Han Jian to gather information and recover. But he never mentioned any of this to us. I think you might be placing too much importance on him. Have you considered what would happen if those three copper coins didn’t exist? If you risked excessive blood loss to save him now, but he still chose to pursue his own goals in the end, what would we do?”