As soon as Xinhai entered the cave, he instinctively looked around. The cavern before him was extremely spacious, over seven meters high and spanning a hundred meters across.
Unlike naturally formed, orderly caves, the shape of this space was highly irregular. It had clearly been excavated over a long period from many different angles.
The walls were covered in marks of varying depths and ages—chisel marks, claw marks, and traces of energy impacts—like a weighty history book recording countless visitors.
Several chambers of varying sizes and excavation faces extended outward from the main cavern, linked by narrower passages to form a complex, small-scale underground mining network.
The cave walls displayed a rich array of colors: ocher red, dark brown, iron gray, deep green... Traces of different mineral veins intertwined, glimmering faintly under the light of naturally luminescent moss and mineral crystals embedded in parts of the walls.
The air carried a mixture of damp earth and rock Qi, mineral dust, and the faint sounds of distant digging.
When Xinhai and his group entered, the person nearest the entrance and the Pokémon beside him both stopped what they were doing and looked over.
He was a middle-aged man in a gray-brown exploration suit, wearing a dust mask over his face. Four Pokémon stood beside him: a powerfully built Rhydon clad in rocky armor, a Sandslash with a heavy shell and sharp claws, a Dugtrio with three round heads, and a muscular Machoke.
All four Pokémon were fairly strong, at least Advanced level. The Rhydon in particular had a steady, deep Qi and was already Elite level.
The middle-aged trainer's sharp gaze swiftly swept over Xinhai and the Blaziken, Gardevoir, Zigzagoon, and Krokorok beside him. His gaze lingered for a moment on the imposing Blaziken with its deep, steady Qi and the