Secret Investigation, Discovering Mysterious Traces

Moonlight was half-veiled by clouds, and the wild grass bent flat in the wind before springing back up. Chen Wuya moved along the edge of the dried riverbed, his toes touching down with extreme lightness, every step avoiding loose stones and dead branches. Bai Zhi followed three paces behind him, shadowlike, her breathing suppressed until it was nearly inaudible.

They had already bypassed two hidden sentry posts. The first time, a startled night owl had exposed the guard concealed in the bushes; the second, they had used a gully carved out by a mountain flood to evade a frontal patrol. Now, the outline of the mine cave emerged a hundred paces ahead, its black mouth like a cleft in the earth. Guards stood on either side, draped in black cloaks, their blades still unsheathed.

"Those aren't ordinary sentries," Bai Zhi whispered, her voice nearly melting into the wind.

Chen Wuya did not answer. He merely pressed a palm to the muddy ground. Closing his eyes for a moment, he drove his true qi backward through three meridians. Misaligned Force seeped out through the soles of his feet, and faint tremors in the ground climbed up along his palm lines. This was not vibration left by wagon wheels—it was too heavy, too dull, like the echo of bones grinding against the earth as some colossal thing was dragged along.

He opened his eyes and pointed at a scree slope to the left.

The two changed course, climbing along the bottom of the gully. The soil gradually hardened, and fresh disturbances showed where grass roots had been torn apart. A dozen paces farther on, Chen Wuya suddenly stopped.

There were grooves in the ground.

Two deep, parallel tracks cut through the earth, uneven in width, their torn edges like claw marks gouged