(°ヘ°) Want another bite?
For a certain troublesome little girl who had always loved eating, drinking, and having fun, hurrying along was absolutely out of the question. Maybe eating, drinking, having fun, and sleeping in were the things she loved most—the things that gave her life meaning?
As for all the other nonsense, like finding that Tiger Vanguard or tracking down the Yellow Wind Monster to take his relic, that was just incidental.
Yes, just incidental!
Otherwise, she wouldn't have waited until the evening of the third day after meeting that Rat Scribe to finally arrive at the mountain valley where the hidden, forgotten temple known as Crouching Tiger Temple stood, deep in the desert of Yellow Wind Ridge, a place of "a thousand miles of Yellow Wind and ten thousand miles of sand, with not a soul for eight hundred miles around."
However, for all that it was called Crouching Tiger Temple, the place was the exact opposite of what its name suggested.
There was none of the might of a tiger roaring through the mountains, nor any of the solemn splendor one expected of a temple. Only a cloud of gloom woven from death, black mist, filth, and silence hung over the whole temple, making anyone who looked at it from afar shudder with unease and apprehension.
Of course, that didn't apply to one troublesome little girl and her "monkey" Tibbers.
In any case, the girl and the monkey paid no mind to the rat demons who seemed to have been ordered to hide in the distance and spy on them. After casually killing a few bat spirits that swooped down from the cliff without knowing what was good for them, they soon reached the gates of Crouching Tiger Temple.
The entrance to Crouching Tiger Temple wasn't large—in