Chapter 246: Imminent Disaster

After thinking it over for a moment, I decided we couldn’t let Old Qian and Han Zhuo keep eating like this. Even if it were real mutton, eating like this would definitely cause problems. I quickly conferred with He Yu, and we decided to use the hemp rope in the shop to tie up the two crazed men first. He Yu would stay behind in the shop to keep an eye on them while I scouted the nearby area to see if there were any other discoveries.

Old Qian and Han Zhuo’s eyes were bloodshot. When they looked up from their bowls, they startled He Yu and me, rope in hand. Neither of them was usually much of a physical threat, but their strength had suddenly become immense. It took everything He Yu and I had, along with three full layers of rope, to bind them tight and drop them onto the floor. Neither had even swallowed the rice in their mouth, yet they were still flailing about, trying to get back to the table and keep eating.

He Yu suddenly grew nervous. “This is getting really eerie. How did eating something make them lose their minds? I can’t handle staying here by myself. Xiao Yao, hurry back.”

Staying here was no solution; I needed to figure out what on earth was happening to Old Qian and Han Zhuo as soon as possible. After giving He Yu a couple of quick instructions, I left the shop alone. I planned to search starting from the main street, so I circled back along the route in my memory. But as soon as I reached the corner, I found that the scene on the main street had undergone a massive transformation.

When we first entered the city, the shopfronts on both sides of the street were empty, but now their doorboards were all wide open. Not only that, behind all the wooden vendor carts stood puppets with painted red cheeks, upturned smiles, and ghastly white faces. Standing or crouching, their faces were coated in a ghastly white paint that was truly unsettling to look at.

I didn’t deliberately go over to inspect them, switching to another street instead as I kept heading toward the edge of the royal city. Ever since we entered the royal city, we could clearly see a corner tower ahead. Only a quarter of it was exposed, while the rest was hidden in thick white mist. Yet no matter how long we walked, we never got any closer; the corner tower seemed to remain floating in midair. The King of Gune had hollowed out the mountain to build his tomb, so logically, the edge of the royal city had to connect with the raw mountain walls. This wasn’t the deepest part of the royal tomb; the place housing the coffin should be adjacent to the corner tower. If that floating corner tower was a real structure, hugging the mountain wall would inevitably lead me to it.

After walking for another ten minutes, I finally caught sight of a few patches of exposed rock wall covered in droplets of water. I moved closer, wiped off a handful of water, and held it to my nose to sniff it. It smelled like snowmelt. We had walked for so long that I had no idea where we’d ended up, but this was probably groundwater flowing down subterranean veins from melting snow atop the mountains. It was icy cold. For some reason, when I raised my head again, my whole body felt much lighter and my breathing became clearer. Perhaps this water would be of some use to Old Qian and the others.

I looked back and was about to pull out my empty canteen when I realized the scene behind me was no longer what it had been. Where was the magnificent royal city? Behind me was a massive cavern overgrown with weeds. Hidden among the clumps of grass grew dense clusters of green, stone-like plants. Long-stemmed pink flowers bloomed from the centers of these strange plants. Some of these green stones had grown enormous, over a meter wide and covered in sharp barbs, looking like a type of cactus.

Seeing that something was wrong, I realized we had fallen into the King of Gune’s trap. The Gune Kingdom hadn’t been particularly wealthy, so how could it have a royal city paved with gold? The King of Gune had used illusions to construct a city, and these green stones growing from the ground were almost certainly hallucinogens. I immediately quickened my pace, unscrewed my empty canteen, and wiped up the water seeping from the rock wall with a clean handkerchief before wringing it into the bottle.

After filling the bottle, I placed the damp handkerchief over my face, stepped around the green plants on the ground, and pushed through the weeds toward the main street in my memory. Before I even reached where the shop should have been, I was stunned to see that half of the green stones on the main street had been sliced in two with sickles, and a huge swath of them had been uprooted entirely. The memory of that black-clad team instantly flashed into my mind, and I secretly cursed—this was bad.

I turned and sprinted back toward He Yu and the others. The moment I caught sight of the masked men, I managed to pull up short and ducked into a nearby patch of grass. Lying flat on the ground, I saw at least ten flashlight beams cutting in different directions ahead. By their light, I saw those men dressed in black pulling He Yu and the other two down from a giant green stone. It turned out that what we had taken for shopfronts were actually individual fuzzy green plants growing out of the ground.

He Yu was still trapped in the illusion, his mind hazy and unaware that a gun was pressed against his skull. The other two were in even worse shape; Old Qian and Han Zhuo had passed out cold, lying there like dead fish at the mercy of their captors.

Tension gripped my heart. My breathing almost stopped, and sweat broke out on my hands and feet. For a moment, I had no idea what to do. The enemy simply had too many people, and three of our lives were in their hands. I had seen how ruthlessly these people killed. They seemed to lack any humanity whatsoever; to them, killing was just two simple movements, chambering a round and pulling the trigger, simpler than killing a fish.

Just then, I heard someone who had circled around from a distance say, “Looks like it’s just the three of them.”

The leader swept his flashlight around the area. As the beam swung toward me, I immediately buried my head. Then I heard their leader say, “These three aren’t important. There’s a clever one among them who carries the Gan Clan bloodline.”

Another man asked, “Could that kid from the Gan Clan have already found a way out and run?”

The leader slowly shook his head. “As long as these people are still here, he won’t go far. It’s been half an hour. For all we know, he might have already spotted us and is crouching nearby, watching.”

His words broke me out in a cold sweat, and my mind became a tangled mess. This leader actually knew my identity. Whose side were they on? If their true target was me, I could only pray they would spare He Yu and the others.

While I was still torn about what to do, the leader spoke again. “Since these people are useless, dispose of them.”

At his command, the men raised their rifles. Seeing them move so fast, I didn’t even have time to think before scrambling to my feet. The grass rustled violently, and the leader spotted me instantly. Several men rushed over and pinned me to the ground, stripping me of the rifle that was my only means of self-defense. He Yu and the others were still trapped in hallucinations, so the leader simply ignored them and walked toward me.

My arms were pinned behind my back, and I lay face-down, unable to move an inch. Even craning my neck as far as it would go, I could only see their hands. These strange figures were wrapped tightly from head to toe in black cloth, not a single patch of skin exposed, as if deliberately concealing any identifying features.

“Who are you? Why have you been following us? Why did you kill our people?” I asked from the ground.

None of the men in the group answered me. Only the leader, a short distance away, took a few steps toward me. “Simply because you belong to the Five Masters. We are going to exterminate everyone associated with the Five Masters. Drag him over here and let him die with his friends. Chen Si will be heartbroken when he sees your corpse.”

The men immediately hauled me up off the ground. A sudden flash of insight hit me, as if I had just remembered something vital. I jerked my head up to stare at the leader. “Tian Xiao? Did you kill Tian Xiao?”

As I spoke, they threw me onto the ground before the leader. They didn’t answer. Two men stepped over and hauled me up again. Suddenly, a cold sensation pressed against the back of my head as one of them rammed the barrel of my own rifle against my skull. I writhed uncontrollably, trying to break free from the other two holding me. “Wait! Wait! Who sent you? At least let me die knowing the truth!”

“Plenty of people die without knowing why. Do you think everything in this world is so clear-cut?” The leader took a few steps toward me and kicked me hard in the chest. A metallic, bloody sweetness welled up in my throat. The kick knocked me over, and I was pinned down once again. In the commotion, I caught a fleeting glimpse of the leader’s black glove pulling up slightly, exposing a thin, long tattoo on his wrist. What it was exactly, I couldn’t tell in that split second before the barrel was pressed against me again.

The men then pulled Han Zhuo at random from He Yu’s group, dragging him by his collar to less than half a meter in front of me. Before I could react, a gunshot shattered the air near my ear. When I opened my eyes, they were smeared with blood. Han Zhuo had been shot in the head, collapsing to the ground without a sound. My face, chest, and hands were covered in the blood that splattered when the bullet tore into his body. Staring at his corpse, my mind went completely blank.

Immediately after, the cold gun barrel was pressed against my head once more. My sweat turned ice-cold in that instant as I realized this situation was unlike anything before; disaster had truly struck. Yet I still didn’t know who they were. The gunman’s finger slowly tightened on the trigger, and I could almost hear the sound of the bullet about to fire.

Bang!