Far ahead, Han Yu spotted massive claw marks carved into the wall—deep and recent. The cave trembled faintly again, not from collapse... but from sothing moving.
Sothing big.
Han Yu slowly stood up, brushing dust from his robes.
"Well," he said aloud, "no one’s ever made a na for themselves taking the easy road."
He readied his glaive, eyes narrowing as he stepped forward into the unknown.
Han Yu stayed low as he moved deeper into the cavern, one hand clutching his glaive and the other holding the faintly glowing talisman. His steps were light, careful, and deliberate, each one echoing just a little too loudly for his liking in the wide, enclosed space.
He stopped before the claw marks he had glimpsed earlier, kneeling down and running his fingers across them. They were massive—each gouge was at least the width of three fingers, and they had cut deep into the stone as if it were butter.
Han Yu frowned.
"Too clean to be old," he muttered under his breath checking the dust build up in the gaps. "But not fresh either... maybe a day or two?"
There were no blood stains, no hair, no scent trails, but there was enough to confirm that the creature had passed through recently. That fact alone made his shoulders tighten.
He stood and moved further in, keeping close to the walls as he looked for more signs—and he found one a few paces later.
A pile of dry dung.
His nose wrinkled instinctively, but he moved in, poked at it with the butt of his glaive, and observed its dryness.
"Definitely beast dung... large size, undigested bone fragnts... huh," he mused. "No sll either. This is weeks old."
A small smile tugged at his lips. His ti as a servant, cleaning up the animal pens, was finally proving useful in the worst way imaginable.
"At least I know it hasn’t been sitting here recently..."
He sighed in relief. That ant he likely wasn’t about to get a fireball to the face in the next ten seconds.
As his guard relaxed just a fraction, Han Yu turned his attention to the glowing red veins that ran across the cavern walls and floor like molten roots. They pulsed faintly, almost like they had a heartbeat, and gave the area a soft, ominous warmth.
Curious, Han Yu crouched and pried off a small fragnt from one of the glowing veins using his glaive’s edge. It popped off with a bit of resistance, the piece barely larger than a fingernail. He rolled it between his fingers.
It was warm—noticeably so. Like holding a sunbaked stone at the peak of sumr.
"Fire-elental ore?" he wondered aloud. "Or... so kind of residual energy?"
The stone fragnt continued to glow for a few seconds in his palm, a dull crimson hue, but then—
pfft.
The glow vanished. The stone lost all warmth and crumbled to dust like dried clay.
Han Yu blinked, brushing the residue off his hand.
"...Weird."
He picked at the vein again but quickly noticed the sa pattern in the wall itself—small cracks forming around where he had pried the piece loose. The energy inside the stone seed to dissipate the mont it was separated from the larger network.
"Must be connected... like a leyline. A natural fire-elental formation or a channel of so kind?" he hadn’t studied these things enough to understand or identify them.
’Perhaps if Li i were here, she’d know what they are.’ He thought to himself.
He even had half a thought about taking so samples with him, but then he rembered they turned to dust soon after, so it was not an option.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t stable.
He glanced around cautiously. If this place was built around such unstable energy veins, it would explain the frequent tremors and how easily the caverns had collapsed earlier. That also ant if sothing triggered a full eruption of energy...
Han Yu paled slightly.
"Alright, no touching the glowy rocks. Got it."
He stood and carefully moved forward, following the winding path of the glowing veins. Every now and then he would stop, check for prints, dung, or disturbed dust. His pace was slow but steady.
He didn’t know where he was.
He didn’t know what else was down here.
But if a Beast was anywhere in this cavern system...
Then he was in the wrong place.
Still, a creeping sense of unease crawled down his spine, and it wasn’t from the lack of light or the strange warmth in the air.
There was sothing wrong about this place.
Sothing probably ancient.
And awake.
So ti later...
Han Yu’s boots scraped against the rough stone as he trudged forward, the air around him growing increasingly dry and lifeless. The cavern had narrowed and expanded erratically over the last two days, forming a maddening labyrinth that seed to twist upon itself.
What had once felt like a straightforward path was now a disorienting maze of identical tunnels and stone formations. He kept marking his way with faint scratches of his glaive, but even those were beginning to feel like a desperate gesture against the growing dread in his chest.
He hadn’t seen a single beast. No reptiles, no insects, not even a squeaking rat. The absence was eerie.
And he felt it.
Not just the weight of solitude—but sothing worse. Sothing watching.
"Just rock and stone," he muttered, voice hoarse from lack of moisture. "Maybe so cursed rock and stone, but still..."
Even his sarcasm felt brittle now.
The mission was clear: spend up to a year gathering intel on the Mist Eye Sect’s activities near the border territories, particularly around Broken Fang Ravine and beyond. Infiltration if possible. Observation at the very least.
But Han Yu was now six days into this and hadn’t even made it out of the cave system. His detour—unplanned and increasingly perilous—was eating into precious ti. Every mont trapped down here ant less ti in the field, less ti gathering intel, and less ti to find a Fireborn Beast for its ashes before the mission clock ran out.
Even worse—he was out of food.
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