Volume 1, Chapter 64 – Surfacing

Inside the Illusory Realm, Huang Qian took point, Cao Chuan and Bai Xiang right behind him, leading the remaining Chilong Army troops at a run toward the earlier cave mouth.

It wasn’t far—barely a few hundred meters. Even so, the way there made their hearts pound: the ground was almost carpeted with bug corpses and torn flesh.

Most of it was from the nymph-beetles, but in a few spots, human remains lay under the bug carcasses.

And this was still outside, wasn’t it?

If out here Liang Wenbo was already failing to shield the students, wouldn’t going into the cave mean getting wiped out?

Huang Qian and Cao Chuan traded a look and, without meaning to, quickened their pace.

Attacks like sound tides and sound waves do very different damage in the open compared to confined spaces.

You don’t need to be an adult to grasp that—what kid hasn’t cupped their hands to shout at a playmate to focus the sound? Life is full of examples like that.

Surely Liang Wenbo wasn’t so unlucky as to never meet a sound-tide attack before entering the cave?

If he’d run into it even once, he wouldn’t have obediently crawled inside. All they could do was pray that was the case.

Reality was cruel. Huang Qian reached the rise by the cave first; one glance downslope and he wrenched his head away.

Bai Xiang hurried up and looked down. What met her eyes was a mass of bug corpses piled in the basin, mixed with shredded remains of Qizhou University students.

As for the cave mouth… it was buried under a collapse of rubble. Likely the swarm had crowded in and, unable to break through Liang Wenbo, had been driven to unleash “Shenming,” bringing the whole tunnel down.

That was worse than they’d feared. The Benling group would have taken the Shenming sound-wave head-on—brains ringing and bleeding—and in the next instant faced the cave-in.

Didn’t they just get buried alive?

“Quick… clear it.” Huang Qian waved his men on, though his voice sounded drained.

As things stood, even if Liang Wenbo lived, heavy casualties for the Benling party were a foregone conclusion.

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A top-nine-tier faction—those never played nice.

All the more with the Chilong Circuit in Qizhou’s jurisdiction, and Qizhou as Benling Dojo’s recruitment pool… If they really laid blame afterward, unless the State Chancery was dead set on shielding Huang Qian, his post as Commandant was basically finished.

That was exactly what Huang Qian was thinking as he stood on the slope and glanced at Bai Xiang beside him: at least he hadn’t come away empty-handed—he’d met a talent like her.

To be blunt, in all his years, Bai Xiang was the most exceptional person Huang Qian had seen with his own eyes.

Even counting hearsay, the heirs of the great Sword Daos didn’t necessarily match her talent and potential.

He had high hopes for her future, and thinking back on that lesson in the woods, he wasn’t completely bleak about what lay ahead.

He was about to say something when a tremor ran underfoot.

On reflex, Huang Qian sprang aside.

Peering forward again, he stared— the depression below was sinking like quicksand, swallowing bug remains, rubble, and even the rescuers in one gulp!

Ssshhh…

Clatter…!

The collapse lasted only a dozen seconds or so. Soon, once the debris had slid to the bottom, a passage slanting the other way—seemingly leading deeper into the Illusory Realm—was laid bare.

“Well I’ll be…?”

Huang Qian yelped, then ignored the drop and leapt down. He helped up a fallen soldier first, then felt along the grotto wall himself, probing.

In a moment, Cao Chuan and Bai Xiang descended as well. Looking up at the two, Huang Qian said, “They must have had quite a few left—looks like they followed this down into the depths…”

“The geology here is odd,” Cao Chuan said, taking in the cave. “Loose soil above, yet rock-hard caverns below.”

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It didn’t add up.

Bai Xiang didn’t see it that way.

She knew the place’s background. It was an artificial Demon-Breeding Ground to begin with; anything unreasonable could be chalked up to “man-made.”

“At this point, there’s nothing for it but to see it through,” Huang Qian said through his teeth. “I’m taking people in. You can choose to stay.”

“Lord Fang ordered Chuan to give the Commandant his full support,” Cao Chuan said, stepping forward with a shake of the head. “Chuan has no reason to shrink back here.”

Bai Xiang said nothing, simply stepped out like Cao Chuan, making her stance clear with action.

“Good, good!” Huang Qian was delighted. “I thought I’d come south to semi-retire… didn’t expect to explore the demon realm with the two of you!”

He wasn’t one for chatter. Once he’d decided they were still rescuing people, he immediately mustered every soldier fit to move and led the push deeper into the caverns.

This cave ran deeper and wider than the one at the entrance, and its branching paths were far more complex.

After half an hour, Huang Qian frowned, staring at the wall in the center of an intersection, lost in thought.

Someone had chalked an X there in white—one of the marks they’d made earlier to avoid getting lost.

Seeing it again meant they’d looped back.

“Then we take the other way!”

Refusing to accept it, Huang Qian pressed on.

Five minutes later, they stood at another fork, staring silently at the same mark on the wall.

This won’t do.

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Cao Chuan frowned.

At first it had been manageable: scattered bug corpses and bloodstains showed which way Liang Wenbo’s group had gone.

But later the signs vanished, and they blundered about like headless flies.

Wasn’t this damned place a little too complicated?

This wasn’t a tunnel at all—it was an underground palace maze!

Just then, the usually taciturn Bai Xiang spoke up.

“Commandant.”

“May Xiang try taking the lead?”

Huang Qian looked at her and nodded with scarcely a pause.

Who led hardly mattered—they were guessing in the dark anyway. Why not test the so-called ‘newbie protection’?

‘Newbie protection’ meant that with many dangerous or luck-heavy tasks, handing them to a first-timer often worked out better than letting a veteran do it.

It was pure folk superstition—street wisdom at best. The fact that Huang Qian was down to banking on it said plenty about their bind.

So the team swapped guides. Bai Xiang took the point and led the rest onward through the underworld halls.

Five minutes like that.

Ten.

Fifteen.

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They didn’t see a single repeated mark along the way.

Everyone watched Bai Xiang’s back, their looks growing more astonished.

Well I’ll be damned!

Was ‘newbie protection’ real?

Bai Xiang knew they’d wonder, but it was something she could brush off as luck—she had no intention of telling the truth.

As for that truth—

Naturally, from the moment they entered, she’d sensed a familiarity in the way these winding tunnels were laid out.

Take that long, broad straightaway from a moment ago—it read like a stairway to the heavens.

Or the straight stretch after the turn—narrow and flat, just about the width of a certain bluestone path.

Deeper in, the maze’s forks held hidden rules: they mapped neatly onto the Shenming Dojo’s cloistered layout, every little lane matching a module in the dojo’s floor plan.

Of course, that cloistered pattern alone couldn’t fill an entire underworld. But if you knew the pattern well enough—lived and walked in it daily—you’d notice that the tunnels that seemed unfamiliar were just the same Shenming cloisters, flipped, mirrored, and reoriented.

The same blueprint—reversed, inverted, shuffled, and welded together.

That was the maze’s underlying design.

Naturally, Bai Xiang could lead them true.

And she was close to grasping why Chai Jingyuan and Chai Xuan had visited the Shenming Dojo back then.

And how they’d pilfered things right under Bai Shengju’s nose without anyone being the wiser.