Put that way, the path behind them, with nothing unusual in sight, did seem a little suspicious. But Wu Jinliang still found an explanation. "The treasure in the mine should matter more than we do, right? It's not strange for them to put the treasure first, is it?"
Shi Chun told him quite seriously, "That purple, glittering nebula is on me."
"Huh?" Wu Jinliang was stunned. He had never imagined Shi Chun would be so bold as to steal the treasure right under everyone's noses. Incredible. He immediately reached to lift the fabric over Shi Chun's crotch. "Where is it? Where? Take it out and let me see..."
Smack! Shi Chun slapped his hand away. "Later."
Wu Jinliang withdrew his hand with an awkward grin. Glancing at the sky, he supplied his own explanation. "Right, it's dark already. Pull out something that glows, and we'll be easy to spot." Then his expression turned grave. "True. You stole a treasure they went to enormous trouble to get, and they aren't even trying to take it back. Especially when they have the upper hand in strength. That really is a little strange."
It was far more than a little strange-it was extremely strange. Shi Chun scanned their surroundings again, his face wary, convinced there was more to this than met the eye. Terror seemed to lurk in the gathering darkness around them. The less he understood, the more tightly his nerves wound.
Open fighting and killing did not frighten him. It was the unknown, the things he could not gauge, that made him nervous. A spear in plain sight was easy to dodge; an arrow from the shadows was hard to guard against. That was an enduring truth.
Just as his tension reached a certain pitch, he suddenly gave a muffled grunt. Forgetting even the saber in his hand, he clutched his head with both hands. That sensation of his skull being torn into countless pieces, of countless insects gnawing at his spinal cord, had returned.
Whether he had grown somewhat accustomed to it after the first time or the intensity was lower now, the pain did not bring him to the verge of passing out as it had before. Still, it was more than enough to torment him.
What had not changed was the strange, incomprehensible scene that appeared before his eyes again. He seemed to have entered another illusory world of light and shadow.
This world was peculiar, seemingly unaffected by any light. Neither the lamps inside the mine nor the light of the sky around him now altered its brightness in the slightest.
When he closed his right eye, he saw the normal world. When he closed his left, he saw that bizarre scene. He could not understand these visual hallucinations brought on by the pain.
Wu Jinliang could hardly miss such an obvious change. Startled, he reached out to steady him. "Chun, what's wrong?"
But Shi Chun, trembling with pain, shoved him away and rolled onto his back on the slope, panting. Then, teeth clenched and all ten fingers digging into his palms, he seemed to make an enormous effort of will and forced himself upright. He closed his left eye and turned his head shakily to scan their surroundings.
Wu Jinliang dropped his weapon and knelt to support him, reaching to check his pulse. "Chun, don't scare me. What's wrong with you?"
Shi Chun drove an elbow into his chest and forced a few words through his chattering teeth. "Shut up. Lie down. Don't block me."
Knocked over, Wu Jinliang had been about to get up again. At those words, he lowered the head he had just raised and lay back down. His eyes flickered as he watched, itching to ask what Shi Chun was doing looking around with one eye shut.
Shi Chun had simply recalled the group of people he had seen around a corner while escaping the mine after his earlier attack.
His powerful sense of unease about their surroundings collided with that image of the mine flashing through his mind. He forced himself up, closed his left eye, and tried looking through his right.
His breathing remained ragged. The gaze of his right eye swept slowly across the bizarre scene, until his slowly turning head abruptly stopped.
He had only meant to try, but he actually saw two pale, misty shapes floating in empty space. They were separate, with one slowly approaching the other.
With his attention diverted, even the pain seemed less unbearable.
He closed his right eye and opened his left. The pale, misty shapes vanished. At the corresponding locations, they were not floating in empty space at all. One was on the hill in the direction they intended to travel.
He closed his left eye and opened his right again. Comparing the two views confirmed the location. The other pale, misty shape had now joined the first.
Comparing these movements with the figures he had seen earlier inside the mine made him realize that he might truly be seeing two people lying in ambush. Why was this happening? He had no idea.
There really were two people concealed on that hill, both masked with black cloth. They, too, had spotted Shi Chun and Wu Jinliang.
Fortunately, the land here was barren and bare, making movement within their field of vision easy to notice. In wooded mountains, even a cultivator's unusually keen eyesight would have struggled to spot anyone. But it was dark now, and the distance was considerable. Unless the two passed close by, the watchers could not make out what they looked like.
The masked man who had climbed to the hilltop from behind the opposite hiding place asked the one already there in a low voice, "What's going on? Why have those two sat down to rest?"
The man already there whispered back, "How would I know?"
The newcomer asked, "So do they count as leaving this place or not?"
The first replied, "What, you think they came out here for fun and will turn back?"
The newcomer gave a quiet chuckle, evidently realizing how unnecessary his question had been.
The first man unfastened a fist-sized woven cage from his waist, opened its lid, and took out a small bird. The characters for "forty-seven" were faintly painted on its body. He tossed it toward the valley behind them.
The little bird immediately flew off through the valley.
Shi Chun's right eye saw the bird flying away, though it appeared only as a tiny pale, misty shape. Still, its form and movements gave him a vague sense of what it was, and he could roughly guess the purpose of releasing a bird at a time like this.
His eyes flickered. Having forgotten the pain, he surveyed their surroundings again, looking for any other pale, human-shaped masses of mist.
He could vaguely make out some, but they seemed far away. Switching to his left eye to compare views confirmed that they were several hills away. Judging by their positions, they appeared to be deployed along the same line as the two nearby. He switched back to his right eye and tried to look farther. He had no idea how far this vision could reach, but he saw no other misty shapes.
Meanwhile, the strange scene in his right eye was gradually fading, and his vision was slowly returning to normal.
He quickly used his cultivation to assess his body and found that he was all right. This bout of pain had not greatly disrupted his bodily functions.
After waiting helplessly beside him for a while, Wu Jinliang finally could not resist speaking. "Chun, what's going on?"
Shi Chun looked toward the hill where the men were hiding. "There are people lying in ambush on that hill."
"Huh?" Wu Jinliang turned to look. In this light, at this distance, how could he see anyone who had concealed himself? His eyes nearly bulged out, yet he could detect nothing.
"I'm ill..." Shi Chun lay down as he spoke, then caught Wu Jinliang by the ear, pulled him close, and whispered into it for a while.
Wu Jinliang nodded from time to time, then untied the bundle made from Shi Chun's clothes and draped the garments over him. Next, he used his own large saber as a bed board, placed Shi Chun on it, and carried both man and saber horizontally in his arms.
As they passed beneath the hill where the watchers hid, Shi Chun gripped his saber's hilt beneath the covering clothes, ready to draw at any moment against a sudden attack.
He was also feigning illness and weakness, hoping to lure the two into attacking.
Having survived this long in the Eastern Nine Plains, neither of them was easily frightened by a one-on-one or two-on-two fight.
But things did not go as they hoped. As they passed, the two hidden men showed no intention of striking.
Yet Shi Chun, lying in the crook of Wu Jinliang's arms and using the opportunity to watch behind them, noticed the two concealed men move out and begin following them. He immediately murmured a few words to Wu Jinliang.
Wu Jinliang promptly adjusted his course slightly. The Eastern Nine Plains were their territory, after all, and they had deliberately come here to carry out a plan, so they knew the terrain.
The two men following in secret dared not draw too close for fear of startling the snake by disturbing the grass. From time to time, they pressed a glowing fingerprint onto a roadside rock.
Before long, Wu Jinliang vanished from their sight, turning into a narrow gorge.
By the time they caught up, Wu Jinliang had already emerged from the gorge. But he had stopped, still holding someone in his arms and looking around. They did not know what he was looking for.
The two pursuers dared not go out. They took cover just inside the mouth of the gorge and watched secretly, neither emerging nor moving.
Suddenly, a swish rang out. The two turned in alarm and saw a figure spring from a recess in the rock wall. The masked man facing him hastily drew his sword.
The figures crossed. With just two ringing clangs of metal, the masked man who had fought back looked down at his split, blood-spurting chest and collapsed.
The attacker was Shi Chun. As he stood and shook the blood from his saber, the head of the other masked man, who had not even managed to draw his sword, only just fell from his neck. His body toppled sideways.
The strength of the Eastern Nine Plains' chief was no idle boast. Though his body had not fully recovered from the earlier pain, cutting down these two was still as easy as mowing weeds.
Outside, Wu Jinliang heard the clash and immediately turned. With one hand, he snatched away the clothes covering his burden and tossed them around his neck. With the other, he flipped his saber, tipping a long stone off its blade onto the ground. Dragging his saber, he rushed toward the gorge's mouth to join the fight.
What he had been carrying was not a person at all, but his own large saber, with something laid on its blade.
By the time he bounded over, there was no chance left for him to strike.
Seeing that both pursuers were dead, Wu Jinliang immediately tilted his head to signal their departure. "We've cut off the tail. We can run without worrying now. No time to lose. Come on!"
But Shi Chun picked up his scabbard, sheathed his saber, and said gravely, "We need to go back to the mine!"
"What?" Wu Jinliang's eyes nearly popped out. "Back to the mine? Did I hear you wrong?"
Shi Chun said, "These two tails weren't after us alone. They were after everyone leaving the mine."
Wu Jinliang was baffled. "What do you mean?"
Shi Chun said, "Shen Youkun didn't pursue us partly because he was a step too late and might not catch us. But the second, more important reason was that he'd stationed men around the perimeter to intercept and kill people. They certainly weren't deployed specifically for us, because he didn't know beforehand that we were inside the mine. Otherwise, we could never have escaped the excavation area."
He slung his saber onto his back again. "Only after confirming that these two tails really were following us did I realize we'd overlooked something all along."
Wu Jinliang looked as though he was struggling to follow his reasoning. "What?"
Shi Chun turned to stare at the bodies on the ground. "Shen Youkun was doing something that couldn't bear the light of day, yet so many people saw it. Could he count on that rabble to keep his secret?"
"Silencing the witnesses?" Wu Jinliang blurted, then shuddered in alarm. "You mean killing all those people?"
Shi Chun said, "Precisely because there were so many people involved, we never considered it. Looks like we locals were too small-minded. We can't compare to outsiders who've seen the world."
Wu Jinliang quickly looked around, finally realizing that the men stationed along the perimeter were there to catch any fish that slipped through the net. But he still did not understand. "Let him silence his witnesses. Why should we go back? We finally escaped danger. Don't tell me you want to save that rabble?"
Shi Chun said, "Have we really escaped danger? I took the treasure they were digging for, and our identities have probably been exposed. From now on, they won't let us go, whether we flee to heaven or burrow beneath the earth... Tell me, if Shen Youkun sends away his guards to silence the witnesses, leaving few men around to protect him, wouldn't we have a chance to wipe out all word that we ever appeared here?"