After leaving that foul-smelling Crouching Tiger Temple, Tibbers quickly caught that Rat Sīkōng and brought him back.
Then Annie didn't have to put in much effort. She used a simple little spell to forcibly enslave and control him, and the fellow who'd initially tried to refuse obediently led dozens of rat demons from around Crouching Tiger Temple to dig a tunnel outside its gates.
They planned to spend a few days on the job, trying to bypass the entrance to the blood pool and dig a passage straight to its hidden tunnel. That way, Annie and Tibbers could go around the Yellow Wind Formation and reach the place where the Yellow Wind Monster was meditating in seclusion.
As for when those dozens of rats would actually finish digging, Annie didn't want to know, and couldn't be bothered to care.
She wasn't in any hurry!
In fact, while the rats worked, she wandered all over Yellow Wind Ridge with her pet monkey, Tibbers, doing nothing useful. She was deliberately making the people secretly spying on her anxious and helpless.
See?
On the third day of wandering around, Annie and her pet monkey Tibbers found something fun in a low-lying stone grotto among the wind-sheltered gullies of Yellow Wind Ridge.
She'd stumbled across it by chance. It seemed to be some kind of strange stone man?
At any rate, he was embedded in the floor of a grotto and didn't move at all. He was nothing like the lively stone-elemental monsters outside, with their long, slender legs and habit of wandering around, so she couldn't help taking a closer look.
"??"
|˙˙)?
Of course, it wasn't just a quick glance. She practically went right up to him to examine him carefully, and occasionally reached out to tap and knock on him, not