An unnamed desolate valley in northwestern Shangzhou.
It lay roughly eighty li from Chang'an City as the crow flew, beyond the Capital Prefecture's boundaries and deep within Shangzhou.
The mountains here were steeper and more treacherous, crisscrossed with ravines and shrouded in dense woods. People were exceedingly scarce.
An almost dry stream wound along the valley floor, concealing a naturally formed fissure that served as a cave entrance.
The entrance was narrow, but another world opened up inside.
Deep within the cavern, in a stone hall that had been widened and renovated by hand, dim animal-fat lamps flickered, illuminating more than a dozen figures standing or sitting within.
A faint, sickly-sweet scent mingled with herbs and spices hung in the air.
Their clothing varied, but most were dressed as Han Chinese, though their features were more sharply defined. Only the old woman seated in the stone chair at the head of the hall wore a shaman's robe covered in bone ornaments and colored strips of cloth. She held a strange wooden staff topped with a wolf skull.
Her face was withered and deeply wrinkled, yet her eyes were extraordinarily bright. She was the leader of this infiltration party, Granny Wuya, one of the Witch God Cult's highly revered Golden Tent Shamans.
The atmosphere in the hall was heavy.
Everyone's gaze was fixed on the corpse covered in coarse hemp cloth on the floor at the center of the hall-Batur, the Wolf Guard commander who had gone to Zhongnan Mountain to seize the treasure and never returned.
Beside the corpse knelt a lean, powerful Turkic man named Ashina Lu. He was Batur's deputy and one of those ordered to meet him.
His chest heaved, and his breathing had yet to settle. Clearly, he had raced all the way back.
"Reporting to