CH 63

Chapter 63: Spider of the Same Age (III)

But the breathing noise was strange... it was so faint that it sounded like the person was about to die, yet the rhythm was extremely steady.

After three soft inhales and exhales, the sound stopped, and did not emerge again.

"That might be the man we're looking for. He stopped breathing... he couldn't've just died, could he?" Xue Xian muttered, frowning.

His damn wheelchair was still outside, and he could not move by himself, so all he could do was sit on the desk and watch. But Xuanmin, standing beside him, did not hesitate and began swiftly to walk to where Xue Xian was pointing.

For some reason, ever since they'd plunged into this basement area, the lantern on the table had become much dimmer. The flame was only a small, bean-sized thing, extremely vulnerable-looking, as though it might go out any second, and naturally the room had darkened too.

From what they could see, this was a square room with stone walls, about the same width as the room they'd just been sent down from –– but they could not see where the walls ended, so they were not sure just how large and long the room was.

Xuanmin's silhouette quickly disappeared from the glow of the lamp, and, because his steps were always so utterly silent, in that moment, it seemed as though he had been entirely swallowed by the darkness, never to return.

Something made Xue Xian's heart squeeze –– it wasn't fear, as in all the years he'd lived he'd never known the feeling of fear and wasn't about to begin now. It was more like he'd sensed something amiss...

In that instant, the mechanism above their heads suddenly began to hum again.

As Xue Xian looked up, he saw a massive black shadow come down upon them and, with a clang, it locked itself into the wall and became the flooring of the room that they had just left, and this stone room's new ceiling... trapping them inside.

If it wasn't for the fact that Xuanmin had amnesia, Xue Xian would demand, Did you build this place just to mess with people? We haven't even gotten out yet, and you've sealed the exit. What are you playing at?

And if it wasn't for the fact that this was Xuanmin's home, he would blast that new ceiling to pieces!

But Xue Xian was used to all kinds of mysterious and scary happenings –– a roof sliding shut was ultimately a mere annoyance, and nothing too major. Let it be –– once they found the man they're looking for, then they'd have all the time they needed figure out how to break out of that ceiling.

So he looked away from the ceiling and gazed back into the darkness.

But in that moment of distraction, he felt as though something had changed. Something was missing...

Right, it was far too quiet. Even Stone Zhang had shut his huge mouth–– hold on!

Where was Stone Zhang?!

Frowning, Xue Xian looked around him. In the dim lantern light, there was nothing to see at all. Where had Stone Zhang and Twenty-Seven gone?

"Bald donkey!" Xue Xian shouted blindly into the dark. "Stone Zhang and Twenty-Seven have disappeared."

For a moment, he feared that even Xuanmin had vanished, too.

Thankfully, Xuanmin's calm voice came floating in from some pitch-black part of the room. But what he said was not reassuring at all: "The person hiding here has also disappeared."

"You didn't find him?" Xue Xian's brows furrowed further.

Xuanmin's white robes emerged from the shadows. He walked over to the table, picked up the lantern, and then walked back to the place where Xue Xian had heard the breathing.

The lantern was on its last legs. It strained to emit just a tiny bit more of lingering light, casting a weak glow ahead of Xuanmin's steady steps. The light did not reach very far –– it could only create a circle around Xuanmin's feet, which made it seem as though it were his white robes that were casting the light.

And the place where Xue Xian sat grew ever dimmer as he was plunged into darkness.

From the blind spot where he now was, Xue Xian watched as Xuanmin stopped walking and held the frail lantern flame up, shining it on that part of the room –– it was the long end of the stone room and, under the light Xuanmin cast, the corner could now be clearly seen.

Indeed, there was no one.

Xue Xian's hearing had never been wrong before. He was sure that the breathing noise he'd heard earlier had come from that area. Besides, the breathing he'd heard was on its last legs too, sounding just like the lantern that Xuanmin held in its hands, as though it might go out any second.

How could such a frail, dying person drag itself away from under their noses?

Xue Xian hadn't been paying attention earlier: with the sudden drop in the flooring and that breathing noise, he had completely forgotten that Stone Zhang and Twenty-Seven even existed. Now, he wondered whether they hadn't come down with them at all, and were stuck in the room above. 

And now, tallied among the disappearances, was this hidden man...

If he still couldn't figure it out now, then the head stuck at the top of his neck would have absolutely no use apart from making him look taller.

"Someone trying to hide, and so is playing us," Xue Xian said, jutting his chin out at Xuanmin. "Have you checked the whole area? Is there any flaw?"

It really was inconvenient not to have the wheelchair anymore –– he now needed to bother others for every little thing. Although he did not doubt Xuanmin's intellect, it was just disheartening to have to sit on that table in the darkness waiting for others to report back to him. Xue Xian couldn't sit still. He gripped the table beneath him and, with a push, lifted up the table in its entirety.

Soon, there was another loud clash as the table, with Xue Xian on top of it, clattered heavily next to Xuanmin.

Despite the commotion, Xue Xian still sat peacefully on the table. As the gust of wind he'd summoned rolled toward the wall, it lightly billowed Xuanmin's white sleeve; when Xue Xian halted the wind, the stone room fell silent again.

Xuanmin held the lantern and watched him with what looked like resignation, though he said nothing. He shone the light on every inch of the corner again, not letting a single cobweb escape their attention.

"There's a drop of blood here," Xue Xian said, pointing at a tiny nook near a crack. 

Xuanmin inspected it, then, as though having suddenly remembered something, he turned and shone the light on the opposite corner of the room, saying, "Here too."

He gestured at Xue Xian to wait, then strode confidently over to that other corner and studied the bloodstain there. Then he looked back at Xue Xian in the darkness and said, "He placed a spell."

Xue Xian understood. "Indeed. He couldn't escape, so now he's trying to trick us. What spell?"

He naturally did not know as much about magic spells as Xuanmin, since he rarely needed to use them, and would obviously not be able to guess what kind of spell someone had created just by a few drops of blood on the floor. When it came to that, he had to rely on the bald donkey.

"It's not a violent spell. It's more to buy time," Xuanmin said as he came back over with the lantern.

"With a stone room like this, it's hard to set a violent trap. So in what way does the spell buy time?" Xue Xian asked, frowning.

"This spell is called Nine Rings," Xuanmin calmly said as he placed the lantern back onto the table. "It's unbreakable."

"Why ever not? Does it mean that once we're inside, we can't get out?"

"Most spell designs have eight doors, and, although they're difficult to get ahold of, once you find the right door, you can leave," Xuanmin said slowly. "But Nine Rings has no door at all. No matter how powerful the person being trapped is, they can't get out, so it's often used by people making an escape. After two hours, the spell breaks itself."

Xue Xian laughed with fury. "If we have to wait two hours to get out of here, even a boiled duck will have flown away."

He had no patience to sit around here for that long. As he spoke, he raised a hand.

"Wait!" Xuanmin said, frowning.

But it was too late. The small stone room was suddenly illuminated by purple and white bolts of lightning that knocked into the four walls around them with terrifying power –– as the lightning hit the walls, they exploded with a deafening roar. 

Clearly, the dragon had become enraged. Seeing as there were no walls to a Nine Rings spell, he had decided to use brute force –– he would not stop until they broke out.

But the spell was far too cunning. Not only was the thunder that Xue Xian summoned unable to cause even a fissure in the walls, it had instead made the situation worse: with each strike, a red-hot fire burst out and rushed across the stone so that, in the blink of an eye, they had become surrounded by walls of raging flame.

The flames quickly billowed, and began to lick hungrily at Xue Xian and Xuanmin's sleeves.

But that wasn't even the worst part –– the worst part was that, with the fire, the temperature in the room shot up and hot air filled the entire room. If the fire kept raging, they would all become steamed buns.

In that moment, Xue Xian felt as though he were that small golden marble again, rolling around dazed in Xuanmin's pouch, electrified by the heat from his pendant.

As a dragon who had roamed the tempestuous skies and swum the deepest oceans for centuries, the thing that Xue Xian hated the most was sweltering heat.

As the fire roasted them alive, Xue Xian suddenly felt the table beneath him shake. He looked over and saw that Xuanmin was frowning, with his eyes shut tight and one hand gripping the side of the table.

Oh no. The effect of the dragon spit had not yet dissipated, so Xuanmin had already been feeling incredibly hot but had been suppressing it all within him, and now, with the flames around them, he was losing control –– perhaps he really would begin hallucinating. 

Immediately, Xue Xian closed his hand into a fist.

The roaring thunder suddenly disappeared, and, with it, the flames spreading across the walls gradually died down. The walls did not even retain black streaks from the burning, returning to their previous state –– it was as though Xue Xian had never summoned any thunder at all, and it was uncanny.

And even though the fire was gone, the hot air was still fucking there, steaming them both alive.

Worse, the tiny, flickering flame that had been on its last legs finally keeled over and died –– with a huff, it was gone.

Plunging the entire room into absolute darkness.

In that darkness and silence, every sound began to resound with piercing echoes. Xue Xian's five senses had already been far stronger than humans', and now the sensory overload was starting to drive him crazy: every heavy breath of Xuanmin's in the darkness came out unusually clear and close, and reverberated across the four walls to worm their way into Xue Xian's ear, so that he felt buried alive by the sound.

The heat had gone straight to Xue Xian's head, and his reaction time slowed too, so that, for a moment, he did not understand where that heavy sound of breathing or the ripples of heat were coming from.

"What is going on..." he muttered. He could feel his robes becoming sticky against his skin as a layer of sweat seeping out of every pore in his body, and it distracted him to the point where his speech was becoming slurred.

"The Nine Rings spell is named that because..." came the low sound of Xuanmin's voice, which seemed to creep up to the very side of Xue Xian's ear. "Every time you try to break out by brute force, everything felt by the people inside doubles. All in all, the doubling can go up ninefold –– nine levels."

Xue Xian said nothing. So this was the first level: it was already unbearable. By the ninth level, he and Xuanmin would have been thoroughly cooked. Xue Xian tried to think amidst his disoriented state.

He bit down on the tip of his tongue and wondered why it had to be fire, and not water. At the same time, he worried about Xuanmin's state –– from the sound of his voice just now, he did not seem well.

He needed an idea...

Never mind everything else –– first, he needed to find a way to help Xuanmin recover a bit.

He forced himself to think. They couldn't get out of the spell, that was for sure, and in the meantime, he didn't have any kind of medicine on him ––

Wait.

In his daze, he remembered one thing: he was a dragon, so obviously everything on his body was precious, and anything he cast off could be treasure to humans. He could not get hold of his scales nor his horns in his state, and could not transform into a dragon as he would fill up the entire room... and then Xuanmin would be crushed to death.

Besides, even if he did manage to obtain a scale or a horn, he couldn't just stuff it into the monk's mouth –– that stuff needed to be ground into powder, and it took forever. Apart from dragon scales and dragon horns, other substances that could heal humans included dragon spit and dragon blood...

Right –– blood.

But having learned his lesson from the dragon spit, Xue Xian no longer dared to act so recklessly. He raised a hand damp with sweat and felt around in the dark until he found Xuanmin, then patted him and said, "Dragon blood... Does blood have any annoying side-effects?"

Xuanmin was silent for a time, then said, "No."

"Good, then I'll give you some." Xue Xian breathed out a damp, exhausted sigh as he wondered where he should make the puncture. 

In the darkness, amid Xuanmin's heavy breathing, he heard the monk mutter, "Really?"

For a moment, Xue Xian froze.

Before his confused mind could even react, he had his chin be pinched by someone's hand.

He automatically moved his head toward the direction of the hand, and suddenly felt something sticky against the side of his neck.

Xue Xian's breath caught in his throat, and he twitched his fingers, wanting to raise his arm, yet they would not move –– instead they only gripped the side of the table tighter.

Something was ready to step out toward him –– all he needed was to call. And at the same time, another strange, unusual feeling tumbled through the thick soup of his dazed mind, yet ultimately found no way out.

That feeling of being touched so tenderly on his neck was so overwhelming that it seemed to block out everything else in the world, as though something was resting lightly on his skin, and only required a little bit more pressure and a little bit of time to pierce through his flesh...

"No." In that moment, Xue Xian finally realised what the strange feeling was –– with Xuanmin's aloof, distant personality, if he was in such a situation, the monk would only ask him to get further away from him. Xuanmin would never, ever agree so easily to drink his blood, and would definitely never drink it from his neck.

Suddenly, Xue Xian's overheated mind became clear. His face turned hard and he pushed the person away.

He was used to using force, and, when he was under pressure, he would often lose control over the strength in his hands. With that push, any ordinary person would crash into the opposite wall and shatter the stone to pieces –– but as this person's body slammed into the wall, it made no noise.

Instead was the noise of something small, like a marble, scattering to the floor and rolling to a stop.

And with it, everything around Xue Xian suddenly dissipated as though a cloud of smoke –– from the uncomfortable heat to the complete darkness, they all faded to nothing. With a neutral expression, Xue Xian looked around him––

He was still sitting on the desk, and the ceiling above him was very high –– that second ceiling had not come in to seal them. The lantern on the table had not died yet, either, and Xuanmin stood there next to him with his eyes closed. Even Stone Zhang and Twenty-Seven were back, lying on the floor unconscious.

Xue Xian knew what this was: each of them was plunged into their own versions of a spell, and had not awoken yet.

Xue Xian laughed coldly, then raised his claw and swiped at that dark corner where he'd heard the breathing.

There was something heavy there, and he dragged it out so that it stood before him. It was a man sitting on the floor, covered in dust and dirt, looking worn and bedraggled, and emitting the pungent smell of fresh blood.

"You can start by telling me what spell you've cast," said Xue Xian as he hooked two fingers in the air and seized the man by his throat, dragging him up. "Next, tell me whether you've ever touched a dragon bone. Then you can bargain: let me know which way you'd prefer to die."

The man was bleeding profusely from his mouth, but he still pulled his haggard face into a grin and hoarsely said, "What a shame. If it had only taken you a little bit longer... then it would have succeeded. But no worries. There are still three."

Xue Xian's face turned cold and he made to move the hand that controlled the man's neck.

The man spoke again. "You can't... You cant help them. When it comes to Heart Demons, they can only break out of it themselves. As long as one of them takes a bit longer..." the man paused, then began to laugh. As he laughed, he choked on more blood in his mouth and began to cough so hard that his entire body convulsed.