20. Cave Diving

There was soft firelight down at the end of what Yanli could only describe as a hallway. It looked like a cave in a mountain on the outside, but once they stepped over the threshold, it was very obviously the ruins of an ancient palace. It was hard to tell if it had been built into the mountain originally, or if the mountain had simply claimed it over time.

They followed the light until they got to a large room, dominated at the back by a huge sculpture of a demon standing over a wide pool. A small, dying fire made of random sticks and branches was right inside the door. In the low light, the pool looked like it was filled with blood.

Next to it were a couple of pairs of boots and outer robes.

“No!” Yanli shouted, running to the edge of the pool. The water was thick and oily and red, and it was hard for her not to think of it as blood, however impossible that was. She stared at it in horror, then spun around. “A’Cheng! Ying’er! Where are you? Come out here right now!” She ran to the edges of the room, trying to find where they might be hiding, until A’Yao grabbed her arm.

“You know where they went, A’Li,” he said softly, pulling her back over to the pool.

She shook her head, sobbing. The “water” was motionless, nothing stirred in it. If the boys had gone in, they were still there. She yanked herself free from his hold and collapsed against the edge of the filthy pool, all of her emotions draining out of her all at once. What was it all for, if her brothers had simply thrown their lives away in the Burial Mounds? She hid her face in her hands, her whole body shaking from shock.

“A’Li, I’m…I’m not sure how we can get out of here,” A’Yao said, sitting down next to her, putting a hand on her back. “Even if I could re-create the talisman Ying’er used, we don’t have talisman paper.”

“I don’t care! I don’t care!” She yelled at the room. “I’ll stay here forever!” She glared at the demon statue over the pool. “I’ll curse you forever!” She screamed, pulling herself to her feet and pointing at it.

Strong arms wrapped around her from behind, just holding on, and she felt more than heard Meng Yao hitch a sob at her back. She grabbed his arms and pressed against him.

“Those damned fools,” he whispered. She thought with sudden, sharp clarity that he had left off the important part.

“They are our damned fools, and we’re getting them back.” She pushed away and stepped closer to the pool.

“What?”

“I’m getting them out of there. I won’t allow that thing to hold them forever. We will get them out and then go down the mountain!” She pulled off her own boots.

A’Yao stood looking at her in shock. “We’ll be dead or insane before we get halfway down!”

“We’ll be dead or insane either way! I want my brothers! If we die, we are all dying together, Meng Yao!” She pointed a finger at his face and he recoiled. She turned back and undid her belt, and started yanking off her upper robe. After a moment, she felt him gently pull on her arm, taking her hands in his.

“I’ll do it. Yanli, stop. Let me do it.”

“You don’t know how to swim,” she hiccuped.

“It can’t be too deep. I doubt I’ll even need to do more than hold my breath.” He stopped and let her cry out in anguish before continuing. “I need you here at the edge to help…to help.”

Eventually, she nodded, the horror of the situation finally settling in her bones. They were planning to retrieve bodies, and that was never easy work, she knew well from helping with flood recovery in her old life. She had watched even the strongest cultivators nearly collapse under the dead weight of pulling a body out of the water. Her staying by to help drag them out really was the best approach, no matter how desperate and scared she was.

He stripped down to his bare feet and under-robes quickly, and sat on the edge of the pool, putting his feet in with a grimace. “It’s warm,” he said, voice filled with disgust. Yanli cringed, but squeezed his shoulder.

He stood up slowly, feet seeking the bottom. He kept going down until the liquid was nearly at his shoulders before he let out a short “a-ha!” and stood free. He examined the pool while shuffling forward. “I think it has a flat bottom, I could just…walk across.”

“It might have a drain, though. Hold on.” She looked around and spotted some timber that probably used to be a door, or some other feature, and pulled at it. She handed one end to him, so he held onto it with one hand as he slowly went forward, dragging his feet for obstacles.

And then dropped straight down and disappeared.

“A’YAO!!!” She screamed. She threw off the rest of her over robes and without thinking just jumped in feet first, the way she used to jump into ponds as a very young girl.

She was not sure what she had expected other than “the worst” but instead it felt like she had been grabbed by a heavy current and was being dragged down, down, down. She stopped fighting immediately—if this was where all the others had gone, then she didn’t care anymore what deep, dark watery grave they all ended up in. She felt the temperature go from blood-warm to freshwater-stream cold, and just when her breath ran out, she was falling through the air onto a hard, rocky surface.

“JieJie!” A solid force slammed into her and she hugged back on instinct while she was still trying to catch her breath.

“A’Cheng! A’Cheng!” She called out over and over, rocking him back and forth.

“Yanli,” A’Yao said, stretching out her name in obvious relief. She felt his arms wrap around both of them. A’Cheng, at fifteen, was usually not as open to physical affection as he had been when he was younger, but in this case, simply burrowed close to both of them.

“Ying’er?” She asked quietly, frightened of the answer as she opened her eyes.

“Right here, JieJie! Kind of, uh, a little stuck!”

“Don’t move!” A’Cheng roared at him, pulling himself away even as she tried to grab for him. Instead, he bent down and helped her to her feet. “I’m bringing JieJie over. You stay there!”

She finally looked around. They were in an icy cave, frost running down the walls and a small pond of water filled with chunks of ice. The rock shelf they were on was a decent sized platform, and on one side, Ying’er was on his knees next to a pristinely white guqin, using his bodyweight to hold down the strings. There was blood all over his hands.

“Ying’er! Let go! What are you doing?” She tried to pull on his arm, but frustratingly, A’Cheng stopped her.

“He has to stay there! That thing keeps trying to kill us with some kind of fucking sound attack.”

“Language, A’Cheng!” She said instinctively, but he just rolled his eyes.

“The Lan chord assassination technique?” A’Yao asked, rubbing his arms. It was only then that Yanli realized just how cold the room was. It was brightly lit, but there was no fire. If they didn’t have golden cores, they would all be dying already.

“Never heard of that, DaGe, but it fits,” Ying’er said. He was smiling even though his eyes were scrunched up from the pain. Incongruously, a rabbit hopped over his feet. No, two rabbits. Three?

“Rabbits?” She asked, looking around. “Are those…Lan headbands?” She squinted at them, trying to decide if she had a concussion or not.

“Lan rabbits,” Ying’er confirmed with a grin. “They are so cute!” He smiled and wiggled a foot so one of the rabbits jumped up on his calf.

“So weird,” A’Cheng shook his head. “But, it means there is a way out. They couldn’t possibly stay alive down here.”

Yanli bent down and picked one up. It radiated qi, as if reflecting it off a mirror. “I’m not sure about that.” She held it up to study its absolutely adorable headband. “Definitely Lan, though.”

“I supposed that means we are somewhere in the Gusu mountains,” A’Yao said thoughtfully, before turning to A’Cheng. “How long have you been in here?”

Ying’er squinted in thought, but A’Cheng shook his head, looking confused. “Not that long. How did you even know we were gone?”

“We woke up mid-morning to an empty house,” A’Yao said with deadpan delivery and furious eyes.

“Oh, huh. Guess it’s been a lot longer than we thought. You got in the blood pool too, right?”

She nodded and A’Yao hummed his (displeased) agreement.

Ying’er sighed. “We got dumped here as soon as we put our feet in it. So, pretty much the moment we got there.”

“At least a few hours, then,” A’Yao said with a stern look at them. A’Cheng cringed, and Ying’er looked suitably chastised.

“We really meant to be back before you woke up, JieJie,” Ying’er said.

A’Yao closed his eyes and took a long, deep breath that they all knew meant he was absolutely furious. The boys flinched, realizing that they were going to be grounded possibly forever and also put on indefinite chicken coop cleaning duty, which they both hated with a passion.

Yanli put her hand on A’Yao’s arm to calm him down and refocus him, for the moment. She was not opposed to grounding the boys until they were grandfathers and perhaps even then, but currently they had other, more immediate, problems.

“Our priority is in getting out of here. Our golden cores can keep us warm for only so long,” she said. She fully intended to yell at the boys later herself, but that was for when they were all safe. The blood dripping down from Ying’er’s hands was proof that they were not safe in many various ways, at the moment.

“I think that waterway might be a way out.” A’Cheng pointed to where it looked like the cave kept going. “When I’m under the water, the evil guqin doesn’t attack.”

A’Yao looked at it askance. As the only one of them who could not swim, it was reasonable that he would not be keen to use that as an escape. Yanli took a deep breath and stepped over to the edge of the platform, inspecting the water below her.

“A’Cheng, if you buddy up with A’Yao and go first, then—”

She stopped as the water roared to life with a huge wave, drenching them all and knocking her down.

When the water subsided, a beautiful young man with golden eyes and wearing the headband marking him as a member of the Lan inner family stood in the middle of the pond, soaking wet and staring back at them in shock.