A sound like a muffled clap of thunder rang out. Guo Changcheng automatically glanced at the sky only to see that it was empty of the moon and stars. The sound of thunder continued, but no lightning split the darkness overhead. Then he realized that the “thunder” was coming from underground.
The skeleton soldiers all stopped in their tracks. Their teeth clacked in a strange harmony, as though they also knew how to fear and were shaking with it. Even the youchu on the ground were motionless. They lay down in different positions, ears pressed to the ground, listening to something.
Chu Shuzhi’s instincts screamed at him that something was terribly wrong. He was a decisive fighter, and equally decisive when he fled. Without wasting his breath on explanations, he came flying down from the wall and grabbed Guo Changcheng by the collar. The wind crammed Guo Changcheng’s scream back down his throat. A second later, Chu Shuzhi soared right back up and landed on the roof. Guo Changcheng couldn’t help but look down, only to see that the ground seemed to have turned into a huge pool of marsh gas, so black that it was impossible to see the bottom. Thick smoke billowed within the cracks in the earth.
The weird youth who’d been troubling them suddenly ripped off his human skin, revealing the huge monster underneath: a high-level youchu. Following his lead, all the youchu’s voices rose in unison, letting out a long wail toward the sky.
Without a single glance back or a pause for breath, Chu Shuzhi dragged Guo Changcheng to the entrance of the resort. He found their car, yanked the door open, and threw Guo Changcheng inside. He slammed his foot on the gas, and they were off like a shot.
Guo Changcheng was still fighting to breathe properly. “What was that?”
“I don’t know,” said Chu Shuzhi solemnly.
Still confused, Guo Changcheng asked, “Then why are we running?”
Chu Shuzhi drove as if the car were an airplane, rocketing along so fast that the entire frame shook. It seemed almost as though its wheels were no longer on the ground. In an eerie tone, he said, “If we don’t run, you won’t see tomorrow’s sun, dumbass.”
“Then what about Director Zhao and the others?” Guo Changcheng craned his neck, looking behind him. “Will they come back? I need to call them.”
But as everyone knew, there was rarely cell signal during a disaster. Guo Changcheng couldn’t even dial 110.
Chu Shuzhi spun the steering wheel, sending them into a giant turn. The tires gave an earsplitting screech.
The resort’s location had been chosen for its scenic mountain background and the hot springs. This particular mountain rose about a thousand meters above sea level. For safety reasons, the road winding up it was closed at night. Chu Shuzhi rammed the car right through the barricade, driving desperately for the peak; escaping somewhere higher up seemed to be instinctual.
After managing to calm down slightly, he recalled that, back when Buzhou Mountain had fallen, all the races were said to have climbed a certain primordial mountain in search of protection. The fragments of legend lodged in his memory seemed to be guiding him.
Guo Changcheng peered out through the window. At the foot of the mountain, not a single light was on in the resort. It seemed like a yawning mouth waiting to swallow everything up.
Suddenly everything went blurry as sheets of rain cascaded down the glass. The pounding of the rain blended with some kind of furious roaring, thick with evil. Guo Changcheng shivered violently.
Fast as a tornado, Chu Shuzhi drove to the top of the mountain. The very peak was inaccessible by car; it was reachable only via a thin man-made stone path that led to an unsafe-looking little suspension bridge. It had railings, but it was slippery from the rain—it looked horribly treacherous. And there, at the very top, was a cave full of stalactites. During the day, you had to buy a ticket to enter, but now, in the dead of night, it was unattended.
“Bring your baton,” Chu Shuzhi told Guo Changcheng. “There’s food and water in the trunk. Take as much as you can. Director Zhao should have left a backup lighter there too. Let’s go!”
They gathered everything together as quickly as possible. Guo Changcheng kept his head down and ran after Chu Shuzhi, so it wasn’t until they were already inside the cave that he looked back and realized there was a cliff with a thousand-meter drop below the bridge’s crude railings. His legs nearly turned to jelly. He couldn’t even imagine how he’d managed to run across.
Chu Shuzhi found that he too had no signal. It was just the two of them, cut off from the world, accompanied only by the steady pitter-patter of the rain as they hid within the cave. He peeled off his drenched shirt and took a seat, half-naked. He waved away the food and water Guo Changcheng tried to push toward him and took a glance outside. “I’d say something major has happened,” he muttered.
Throughout the night, the two of them took turns standing guard. Guo Changcheng got up in the second half of the night and insisted on taking his turn. It seemed unnecessary to Chu Shuzhi, but he looked at the little baton that never left Guo Changcheng’s hand, and then he leaned against the frigid wall of the cave and closed his eyes.
Guo Changcheng forced himself to stay awake, keeping watch over the mouth of the cave. He sat upright, never loosening his grip on his baton.
Eventually, he felt that daybreak had to be approaching, but the sky to the east stayed stubbornly dark. The whistle around Chu Shuzhi’s neck suddenly blew a few times, and Guo Changcheng rubbed his eyes firmly, switched the flashlight on, and dropped a few more cows’ tears into his eyes. He peered outside and saw a silhouette floating in all the wind and rain. It seemed to be a young woman, clinging to the railings of the precarious little suspension bridge!
Chu Shuzhi had woken up at the first sound of the whistle. He looked outside. “Mmh. A young female ghost.”
Guo Changcheng sat up straight, flipping his notebook open. “I recognize her. I saw her ID and the photo her family brought.”
“Give me a bottle,” said Chu Shuzhi.
Soul bottle in hand, the Corpse King walked out of the cave. But perhaps he had an air of ruthlessness about him and a somewhat cruel appearance. Before he could get near her, the girl began screaming as though she’d suffered some terrible shock. “Stay back! Don’t come near me!”
Buffeted by the wind and rain, the railing creaked from her swinging. She looked dangerously close to falling off.
Chu Shuzhi had no choice but to stop in his tracks. He didn’t know what the girl had seen before she died, but it seemed like it wasn’t a pretty memory. Even as a ghost, she was frightened and skittish, like a bird startled by an arrow. Chu Shuzhi shot a look back at Guo Changcheng, who approached and carefully stepped onto the bridge.
The bridge was only meant to hold one person at a time, and was deathly slippery underfoot from the rain. Neither of them was particularly heavy, but Chu Shuzhi still felt like it was trembling and swaying under Guo Changcheng’s footsteps.