Lin Qiao stopped short when she heard what Duan Juan said, and then she kept moving forward. She felt that the latter's idea wasn't entirely impossible! She did make an underground gorilla obey her and managed to communicate with it with zombie roars. But, before she could try to do that to an underground creature from this area, she had to find one.
Duan Juan and the others didn't know what Lin Qiao was thinking about. They made a few jokes with each other while following her forward.
At that moment, the ground started declining. Lin Qiao had been detecting the changes of the surrounding scents and vibes. She would stop walking and spend a short while observing if she sensed anything strange about the surrounding scents or the wind.
After the fork road, the ground had been inclining downward all the way while the meters tall tunnel was growing narrower and narrower. The slope became steeper and steeper, and the air temperature started dropping drastically.
Duan Juan shone her flashlight on the ground. The rock was moist, and the air contained high moisture. "Why is the air temperature so low? The ground is moist. Be careful, don't slip!" She followed behind Lin Qiao and turned back from time to time to tell the others to be careful with their heads and feet.
Lin Qiao abruptly stopped walking as she raised a hand to signal for the others to be careful.
Seeing that, the others stopped as well and looked at her. She had stopped moving, meaning there might be something dangerous in front of her.
Lin Qiao spent a short while looking around and said, "Let's go!"
Next, she made a few steps forward and leaped.
People walked to the spot where she leaped down from and found a pool down below, about ten-meters in diameter, looking like a large well. The water surface was perfectly still. No one could tell where the water was sourced from. The water was either from the upper area or the lower area.
She raised her head and looked up. Nothing up there looked strange, as it was just a flat rock roof. The water surface reflected the light of the flashlights like a large mirror, dimly illuminating the roof. The bottom of the pool couldn't be seen nonetheless.
Around the pool was a large, dry area, on the other side of which was a cave. Lin Qiao walked to the cave and looked inside. Then, she came back to the pool and looked around it. She felt the temperature drop as she approached the pool. The water in the pool was probably icy cold; she couldn't figure out why though.
"It's so cold here! We saw a boiling river earlier, and now a cold pool. The underground world is really beyond my imagination." Kong Qingming came down to the lake and couldn't help but murmur.
They stood by the cave and looked down into it, seeing a large river that was ten times larger than the boiling river they saw just now. The water was flowing slowly, seemingly very clear. The river was at least two-hundred meters wide. On the rockfaces on both sides of the river were a large number of caves. They shone their flashlights upwards but couldn't see the top of the space.
A dim light shone out of the water and brightened the area slightly.
As people were gathering outside the cave and looking down, an enormous, dark figure slowly rose from the bottom of the river before slowly sinking back down. As the dark figure emerged, the peaceful water surface immediately rippled. As it sank back to the bottom, the water surface quieted down again.
"Something is in the water!" Everyone instantly grew alert.
The dark figure was tremendous. The river was about two-hundred meters wide, and the dark figure was about thirty meters wide and tens of meters long. It moved across the bottom of the river like a fish as it dove into the deeper parts.
Based on their experiences, the people on the scene felt that the creature in the water would not be easy to deal with.
Lin Qiao looked around. The upper stream and lower stream of the river had the same width, and the flowing speed of the water remained the same in different sections of the river. Judging by those facts, she figured that the river was deep. The dark figure which emerged from the water just now made her feel that there might be another world underwater.
She spent a short while staring at the river surface and confirmed the vague but not good feeling that she had been having. The river might not be dangerous for her, but it could be lethal for the people behind her.
"Follow me and stay away from the river! What's in the water can be very dangerous." She turned her eyes away from the river and warned her people before nimbly leaping forward.
She didn't leap far. Instead, she clutched the rocks that stuck out of the rockface with her claws and landed her feet on the rock as well. Like a professional rock climber, she agilely moved downward. About three meters away from the water surface was a large cave, from where Lin Qiao sensed a kind of wind. The others followed behind her and nimbly climbed down, soon landing in the cave.
There were a lot of caves and tunnels caused by wind and water erosion, added with other mysterious things underground. Nature sometimes created unimaginable works indeed.
Lin Qiao saw a faint, light-green light from the end of the cave once she got in. She had no idea what it was, but could say for sure that it was definitely something special.
A faint, special type of energy could be detected from that area. With her back toward the others, she fixed her eyes on the green light and waved at the other people, signaling for them to not to make any reckless moves.
Right at that moment, the green light died and the other end of the cave fell into darkness.
Lin Qiao narrowed her eyes as she stepped back to the entrance of the cave and glanced up. Then, she spent a few seconds sensing the surrounding vibes. She could still vaguely sense the presence of the group of Huaxia people, especially that woman! She sensed a strong scent from that woman.
She slightly furrowed her brows, then lowered her head and walked back into the cave.
"Don't we need to find a way to get rid of them?" Lei Cheng, who had been silent the whole time, abruptly asked Lin Qiao a question.
"Be patient!" Lin Qiao waved at him and said with a low voice. After that, she walked further into the cave. The cave was large inside; its entrance was only about three meters tall, but the inner space was much taller and wider. The ground in the cave was lower than the ground outside, so the space in the cave was larger than it seemed.