The Baofu Mouse (Treasure Fortune Mouse) indeed lived up to its reputation as a spiritual pet scouted from the Mirror Market, it was even more capable than Yi Qinglan had imagined.
It cleverly slipped past several patrolling Daoists without missing a single hidden corner. Soon, it scampered all the way to the backyard of the Daoist temple and found a very unremarkable room that looked like the quarters of a temple servant.
The Baofu Mouse stopped running forward and only sniffed around at the door.
Yi Qinglan picked it up by the scruff of its neck. The Baofu Mouse remained obediently still, letting Yi Qinglan tuck it into her sleeve.
Although she had not encountered any obstacles along the way, Yi Qinglan did not dare to be careless. First, she carefully scouted the surroundings. The Daoists in the temple seemed to have all gone to the main hall to welcome the distinguished guests; the inside and outside of the room were cold and quiet, seemingly unguarded.
She pushed open the door, went inside, and carefully shut it behind her.
The room’s furnishings were ordinary, looking no different from a regular inner chamber. However, as Yi Qinglan listened closely, she faintly heard a rather unusual sound.
It was the sound of flowing water.
Although the sound was very faint, ever since she successfully suppressed the Ruin Fire, Yi Qinglan’s cultivation realm had improved, and she felt her five senses were much sharper than before. Thus, she trod lightly, walking around the room in an attempt to locate the source of the water sound.
She turned the furnishings in the room upside down, but there seemed to be no special mechanism; it was just an ordinary room. Yet, Yi Qinglan’s intuition told her that there must be something unusual about this place.
Ultimately, Yi Qinglan’s gaze landed on the bed.
The bed looked highly lived-in. It was messily piled with some clothes, and there were even smelly socks left carelessly on the pillow, making anyone want to keep their distance at first glance.
Yi Qinglan walked over, silently chanted a spell to summon her treasured sword, and held it vertically suspended in the air. Aiming at the bed, she thrust it downward violently.
With a soft pfft sound, the treasured sword easily pierced more than three feet deep into the bed.
Hearing the sound, Yi Qinglan’s eyes lit up. The space beneath the bed was indeed hollow!
Without hesitation, she directed her sword to chop the bed apart. To her surprise, as the bed collapsed, the floorboards beneath her feet also cracked and shattered piece by piece, revealing a large gap. Losing her balance, Yi Qinglan suddenly fell through.
With a splash, the sensation of weightless freefall quickly vanished as Yi Qinglan’s entire body plunged into water, instantly swept far away by a swift current.
There was actually an underground undercurrent here?
The waterway was extremely narrow. Yi Qinglan choked on a large gulp of water. Disregarding her dripping wet state, she quickly circulated her breath holding technique to make herself feel a bit better in the water.
This was an island in the middle of a lake, so the presence of an underground stream was not surprising. But why would it be connected to the servant’s room in the backyard of the Daoist temple? It was highly likely a mechanism intentionally set up during the construction of the temple.
Knowing something was amiss, and having faintly tasted blood in the water when she choked earlier, Yi Qinglan grabbed onto a piece of driftwood floating along the current. For the time being, she let herself drift downstream to see where this current would take her.
After about the time it takes to burn an incense stick, Yi Qinglan felt there was light ahead. Suddenly, she felt a sharp pain in her waist, as if she had bumped into something.
She casually conjured a flame to illuminate her surroundings and found that the current had brought her to a natural stone cavern. Bizarre, jagged rocks hung from the ceiling of the cave, looking mystical and unpredictable. Calculating the distance she had traveled, she should still be within the range of the lake.
After drifting for so long, Yi Qinglan could finally stand up in the water. She used her magic to dry her clothes. Pointing a finger at the water’s surface, she used her spiritual energy to force the water to part to both sides, lowering the water level in the middle. The bottom of the stone cavern was rugged and uneven, so she laid her treasured sword flat on the water to temporarily act as a simple raft, slowly parting the waves and moving forward.
There were many forks in the stone cavern, but the direction of the strongest current remained unchanged. Following the direction of the water, she slowly watched the cavern grow wider and wider.
Mingled with the sound of flowing water in the cave, Yi Qinglan suddenly heard a low sob of a human.
Although it was only a single sound, Yi Qinglan was certain she heard it clearly, it was the whimpering of a woman, echoing faintly inside the cave.
She immediately became alert and listened closely, hoping to hear another sound to determine the direction.
However, the sound never rang out again, as if it were merely an illusion.
The further she went, the more Yi Qinglan felt something was wrong. The stench of blood in the water grew stronger and stronger, and the Baofu Mouse in her sleeve also tossed and turned restlessly.
The scent must be coming from this direction. Without hesitation, she silently chanted a spell and flew swiftly toward that spot on her treasured sword.
As she went deeper into the stone cavern, the accumulated water grew deeper and deeper. The flame condensed from her spiritual energy touched the moisture on the walls and accidentally flickered out.
In the darkness, Yi Qinglan did not mind. She continued forward, casually lighting a few more balls of fire. When the flames lit up once more in the pitch-black stone cavern, a deathly pale, bloodless woman’s face suddenly magnified right in front of her.
“Ah!” This time, it was Yi Qinglan’s turn to cry out. With her sword moving according to her thoughts, she was startled and retreated a large distance backward.
The flames slowly drifted forward, illuminating the depths of the stone cavern. Yi Qinglan mustered her courage to look forward, only to realize that the pale faced woman was still alive. However, her hands were suspended by chains hanging from the ceiling of the cave, and her entire body was submerged in the water. As the water level rose and fell, her mouth and nose were submerged from time to time, she looked as though she had fainted.
With a flick of Yi Qinglan’s finger, more and more flames lit up inside the cave, illuminating the depths of the cavern. There were as many as ten to twenty people like her suspended in the water, both men and women, all in the exact same state.
This was actually a water dungeon.
A wave of inexplicable panic and worry welled up in Yi Qinglan’s heart. These people’s faces were bloated and pale from being soaked in the water, but she carefully scanned each of their faces, not letting a single one go.
But her junior sisters were not here.
The stone grotto was cold and damp, yet beads of sweat broke out on Yi Qinglan’s forehead, her heart feeling as if it were being seared by boiling oil. Without hesitation, she severed the chains on these people’s hands, moved them to a slightly higher place, and used fire to warm them.
Some of them gradually regained consciousness. Realizing that a savior had arrived, they reached out their hands to firmly grab Yi Qinglan’s clothes. One by one, they mumbled in hoarse, raspy voices, saying things she couldn’t quite make out, their eyes filled with utter pleading.
Yi Qinglan had no time to comfort them; she only asked if they had seen women like Lin Wanying and Fang Shuyue.
But they looked at each other, showing bewildered expressions, and shook their heads, saying they hadn’t.
What was going on? Could the guard’s information have been incorrect?
At this moment, Yi Qinglan suddenly felt a strong pull from behind. Turning around, she saw a woman whose body was extremely bloated and frail. She looked as though she had once been very fat, now that she had thinned down, the skin on her body was still loose and saggy.
“Ah woo, ah woo…” The woman cried and screamed, grasping her tightly without letting go. It took Yi Qinglan a long time to recognize that this woman was actually one of the blood slaves who had been imprisoned in the dungeon with her back then.
At that time, after Yi Qinglan kicked down the cell door, most of the people fled immediately. However, a few scattered women chose to remain in the cell for the sake of food, and this woman was one of them.
She listened for a long time before she could decipher what the woman was saying.
It turned out that after Yi Qinglan left, the guards came back and saw that everyone had run away. Flying into a rage, they whipped the remaining few of them several times to vent their anger, leaving them bloody and battered.
The woman rolled up her sleeves to show her the wounds on her arms, the agonizing scene of torture in the prison was still fresh.
Afterward, the guards did not let them stay in the dungeon. Instead, they took them away, while also gathering more people to lock up together in this water dungeon. They no longer drained their blood as they did before, and she did not know what they were planning to do.
In her semi-conscious state, she had heard the guards mention that they seemed to want to use their physical bodies as firewood to refine some magic treasure with some spiritual roots.
With the rising and falling of the tides, she had lived a life worse than death here. Her sleeping hours were longer than her waking hours, and she could always hear the distant, deep roars of some unknown beast in her dreams.
She did not know how much time had passed like this. She had thought there was no hope of survival, but she did not expect that upon waking up this time, she would see the heroine from the dungeon again. Overjoyed, the woman resolved that she could not let this opportunity to escape slip away.
Since things had come to this, saving the people first was the priority. Yi Qinglan steadied her mind and commanded her treasured sword to hover in the air. With a flash of profound light, the sword suddenly expanded to several times its original size, leaving everyone dazed.
“Ah!”
Just as she was preparing to transport everyone out first, a high-pitched, thin shriek of a woman suddenly rang out, piercing the silence of the cave.
The woman’s body twisted bizarrely, writhing left and right, seemingly trying desperately to shake off something on her.
“A snake!” someone pointed at the woman and shouted, their trembling voice laced with terror.
With a swift swing of Yi Qinglan’s sword, a long, winding, slender object suddenly leaped off the woman’s body. It was sliced into two sections and flung into the air, instantly emitting a heavy, rancid stench.
“It really is a snake!” “There’s one here too!” “Ah, ah, ah, heroine, save me!”
As the snake on the woman was cut down, more and more people discovered that there were even more snakes in the water. The swarm of snakes slithered rapidly, wrapping around their bodies. They couldn’t be pulled off, and they slowly tightened their grip, seemingly wanting to snap their limbs.
Scream after scream rang out in succession.
This is bad. I don’t know if these snakes are poisonous. Yi Qinglan sat cross-legged and silently chanted a spell. Her treasured sword hovered in the air with imposing power. In an instant, it split into countless sword shadows. From the hilt to the tip, every sword erupted with a layer of blood colored flames, illuminating the cave almost as bright as day.
Yi Qinglan suddenly opened her eyes, and the swords charged violently toward the swarm of snakes.
Upon seeing the fire, the snakes shrank back in fear, slithering away to avoid it. But before they could escape, most of them were already burned to ashes. The remaining few barely managed to slip into the water and disappear.
This place was not safe to linger. Yi Qinglan ushered these people onto the sword and immediately flew off, controlling the sword.
The sword carried the group of people steadily forward, surrounded by floating flames, which greatly increased their sense of security. Before long, they were about to reach the exit of the cavern.
Yi Qinglan stood at the tail of the sword to steer it. The woman from the dungeon earlier suddenly approached her, her body trembling uncontrollably.
“What is it?” Yi Qinglan looked down and asked.
The woman gritted her teeth, her tone uncertain. “I… seem to hear the roar of a wild beast.”
Hmm? Is there one? Yi Qinglan focused her hearing, but the cave was empty, with only the sound of people breathing together and the flowing water.
“Really!” Seeing that she didn’t believe her, the woman’s pale face crumpled, making her look even stranger. She swore solemnly, “When I was in the water dungeon, every time I heard this sound, the water level in the cave would rise, and then, then I would faint.”
She pinched the corner of Yi Qinglan’s clothes, staring straight at her. “Heroine, you must believe me, I am not lying to you!”
Could there really be some demonic beast inside this cave? Just as Yi Qinglan was pondering this, she suddenly felt the sword beneath her wobble violently.
The people on the sword were startled, not knowing what had gone wrong. In the panic, several people almost slipped off, but Yi Qinglan quickly caught them.
“Don’t panic, everyone!” Yi Qinglan furrowed her brows and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, a spiritual light flashed in her eyes as she scanned the surroundings.
The stone cavern remained in its original state, quiet without much change.
Could it be…
Yi Qinglan suddenly thought of a possibility. But before she could react, the treasured sword cap-sized like a boat flipping over on the water’s surface.
The flames were instantly extinguished, plunging the cave into pitch darkness. The people on the sword were all thrown into the water, splashing and struggling like dumplings in a pot. Seeing this, Yi Qinglan quickly summoned her sword back to carry them up one by one. However, she saw the water surface churning and surging violently, bubbling like a geyser. The waves grew larger and larger, suddenly parting down the middle as a giant, long bodied beast resembling a huge python burst out from the water.
An ugly, foul-smelling head of a beast that looked like a demonic dragon suddenly reared up from the water, stopping right in front of her eyes. It let out a deep, powerful voice carrying both water vapor and formidable majesty:
“It’s you again, cultivator!”
The demonic dragon roared in fury, the water vapor sprayed from its mouth making it seem like it was raining inside the cave, soaking Yi Qinglan’s clothes.
It turned out that the depths of this cavern were connected to the pool where the demonic dragon resided beneath the Crystal Palace of the Mirror Market. What was in the mirror was merely an image, but this place was the demonic dragon’s true lair.