Chapter 43 Witnessing

The narrow stone chamber was dimly lit and permeated with the damp, chilling scent characteristic of earth. Fine beads of moisture oozed across the walls, making it evident that they were now deep underground.

During the day, Ye Minwei had merely discovered that the ground was hollow beneath them; she had not expected to plunge straight into the depths of the earth by nightfall. As for how they had managed to slip through the thick layers of soil to reach the underworld, they were entirely clueless.

Ye Minwei and Cang Zhu stood before a crate of azure crystals, inspecting them closely. Cang Zhu tucked his hands into his sleeves, glanced around their surroundings, and remarked, "This place appears to be some kind of underground vault where someone stores azure crystals."

Ye Minwei picked up an azure crystal, held it before her eyes for a moment, and said, "This is not one of the azure crystals I distributed back at Chongdan Mountain."

While they were conversing, Axi was still scampering in circles around the chamber, sending the butterflies she had swatted at fluttering all over the floor before running back to tug on the hem of Ye Minwei’s sleeve.

In the blink of an eye, Ye Minwei and Cang Zhu found themselves standing within a stone corridor. Ye Minwei still maintained the posture of holding up the azure crystal, staring blankly at Cang Zhu.

Directly before them stood four guards holding sabers.

Fortunately among misfortunes, these four saber-wielding guards had their backs turned toward them.

Cang Zhu and Ye Minwei instantly held their breath, standing as rigidly as a pair of stone carvings erected within the corridor. The guards remained entirely unaware that three people had suddenly materialized behind them. Marching in a single file with their hands resting on their sabers and carrying oil lamps, they proceeded forward down the narrow stone passage, their figures vanishing around a corner as the firelight faded.

The moment the guards disappeared, Ye Minwei and Cang Zhu flattened themselves against the wall, hurriedly scooping up the bounding Axi in the process. Looking ahead, they saw boundless darkness to the left, while a short distance to the right lay the turn of the corridor. The pathway was narrow and winding, resembling an underground labyrinth.

Through the crack of the heavy door behind them, faint blue stones were visible, marking the very stone chamber they had just occupied.

Ye Minwei lowered her gaze to look at Axi, who still wore a carefree expression and was parting her lips in preparation for a giggle. With lightning speed, Cang Zhu reached out to cover Axi’s mouth, then turned to look at Ye Minwei with a solemn expression.

Ye Minwei nodded and said, "The reason we came here is because of Axi."

Axi seemed capable of freely traveling through different spaces; she was by no means an ordinary person.

Lowering his voice, Cang Zhu said, "Yet she possesses no cultivation or spiritual power, nor have I seen her use any spiritual artifacts. Given her tender age, it is even less likely that she is a dream master."

Ye Minwei lowered her gaze to look at Axi, her eyes filled with lingering bewilderment.

Freeing one hand, Cang Zhu flicked his fingers through a sequence of rapid gestures and sighed, "It seems that if we wish to leave this subterranean palace, we have no choice but to follow Axi."

Ye Minwei glanced at the surrounding darkness and gently placed Axi back onto the ground, keeping her hand loosely pressed over the child's mouth to prevent her from making too much noise. Axi seemed intimately familiar with the surroundings; the moment her feet touched the ground, she trotted forward merrily, and had Ye Minwei not kept a tight grip on her, she likely would have broken into a full run.

Ye Minwei and Cang Zhu followed Axi back and forth through the winding, twisting stone corridors. Throughout the journey, Cang Zhu’s fingers continued to move in a dazzling blur, as though perpetually guarding against some unseen peril.

After negotiating several turns, a series of branching pathways appeared ahead. Cang Zhu abruptly halted, grabbing both Axi and Ye Minwei. The three of them pressed themselves tightly against the stone wall like patches plastered to the masonry.

The sound of footsteps and human voices drifted from an adjacent corridor, growing progressively closer.

"Mr. Wei, will the Prince be coming today?"

"The Prince has matters to attend to, so I am overseeing things in his stead."

Cang Zhu peered down the passage to see a man in black robes, around forty years of age, walking at the head of a procession. He held a young boy by the hand, followed by seven guards. The guard closest to him carried a torch and regarded him with an expression of deep reverence. After exchanging a few brief words, the group vanished into the depths of the corridor.

He turned his head to speak to Ye Minwei. "That is Wei Jing, a retainer of the Prince of Laiyang and a dream master."

When people spoke of the two paragons among dream masters, they referred to Ren Tang and Su Zhaoqing—one having breached the twenty-ninth layer of dream ruins and the other conquering all thirty-two layers, making them logically the two most formidable dream masters of their era. Yet in discussions, people often mentioned another dream master who had only breached the twenty-first layer. Despite this, his mastery over dream arts was exceptionally formidable, and he had once sparred with Ren Tang to a standstill. This was precisely Wei Jing, the retainer of the Prince of Laiyang.

The Dream Masters Alliance had repeatedly extended invitations to Wei Jing, but he declined them, stating that to repay the Prince of Laiyang for recognizing his worth, he would only ever serve the Prince and could not pledge allegiance to another. Stationed in Qizhou for many years, he had helped the common people resolve tiger infestations and floods. When the spiritual bandits wreaked havoc, he had also rescued countless lives, earning him widespread reverence as a hero of Qizhou.

A-Yan was among those whom Wei Jing had saved. He regarded Wei Jing not merely as a benefactor but as his supreme role model, constantly proclaiming his intent to study dream arts and become a formidable dream master just like Wei Jing.

Yet now, Wei Jing had suddenly surfaced within this eerie subterranean palace housing azure crystals, a circumstance that reeked of suspicion.

"Since Wei Jing has appeared here, this must be the underground palace of the Prince of Laiyang, and those men we saw earlier are his garrison troops. The Prince of Laiyang has maintained his influence in Qizhou for three generations; I never imagined he would conceal such a vast subterranean palace beneath our feet," Cang Zhu murmured in a low voice.

Ye Minwei nodded.

Seeming to grow impatient with being carried, Axi began to struggle, demanding to be put down. Ye Minwei set her on the ground, and Axi cheerfully resumed running forward. Cang Zhu and Ye Minwei followed closely behind her, threading their way through the dim, low-ceilinged corridors. After walking for roughly the space of an incense stick, the faint, chaotic noise of a crowd drifted to their ears. Following the sound around a bend, however, they found themselves at a dead end.

To call it a dead end was perhaps slightly inaccurate; the termination of the path was not a solid stone wall, but rather a series of thick stone balustrades. The gaps between each balustrade were roughly half a person wide—narrow enough to slip through sideways—and a ruddy glow filtered through the openings.

The din of the crowd grew steadily clearer. It lacked the orderly cadence of the garrison troops they had heard earlier in the corridors, resembling instead the chaotic clamor generated by at least a hundred people. These sounds seemed muffled by some invisible barrier, rendering them indistinct yet piercing and protracted, laden with boundless terror.

Axi remained oblivious to anything amiss. She scampered over to the stone balustrades, plucked a tiny wildflower from a crack between the stones, and spun around with a cheerful grin.

Ye Minwei’s footsteps paused at the mouth of the corridor, and then she slowly advanced toward the stone balustrades step by step. The light at the end of the passage gradually sharpened, revealing the vague outline of a vast subterranean cavern.

The cavern was immense, featuring a circular floor and towering walls, with the stone balustrades situated midway up the precipice. Gazing through the gaps, one could see a stone platform jutting out from the opposite upper wall, upon which four or five figures stood loftily. Looking downward, one beheld a sea of hundreds of dark, bobbing heads, densely packing the entire floor of the cavern. Furthermore, the cavern walls were etched all over with glowing blue patterns.

Those appeared to be spiritual vein diagrams.

Before Ye Minwei could examine them clearly, all the blue patterns suddenly erupted with a fierce and blinding radiance. Caught off guard, she staggered backward. The indistinct clamor of the crowd abruptly multiplied tenfold, rising wave upon wave into shrill, heart-rending shrieks so piercing they felt like arrows shot straight into the cavern, causing her head to ring violently.

The blurred sea of dark heads in her vision suddenly dropped, melting like black snow under the scorching sun, dissolving into a gush of crimson liquid that boiled, devoured all other colors, heated to a rolling boil, and evaporated.

Then, a layer of blue substance precipitated out, vanishing amid a litter of blue fragments.

The stench of blood washed over her from all directions, with scarlet crimson and crystalline blue reflecting in Ye Minwei’s trembling eyes.

As if suddenly thawing from ice, she lunged forward. Someone seized her arm forcefully, causing them both to tumble to the ground. Kneeling on the stone floor, Ye Minwei tried to stand and press onward, but the person wrapped their arms tightly around her waist, pinning her down with all their might. They struggled fiercely against one another until the bones throughout their bodies creaked under the strain.

"Ye Minwei... Ye Minwei, calm down! Ye Minwei... Ye Yuanchuan!"

Cang Zhu shouted in a harshly suppressed voice directly into Ye Minwei’s ear. His breath hitched for a fraction of a second before he articulated each word with agonizing precision: "The Ancestor of Myriad Phenomena—they are already dead!"

"You cannot go! If you go, you will never return!"

"You cannot save them."

Ye Minwei’s body froze abruptly. She seemed as though she wanted to speak. Cang Zhu hurriedly clamped a hand over her mouth to silence her, but Ye Minwei had no intention of speaking; her waist bowed deeply inward.

She was retching.

As though struck violently across the skull—despite wearing no vision-stone—she began to retch uncontrollably. Unable to expel anything, dry heaving wracked her throat in wave after wave. Her entire body trembled violently, as if a raging fire had been ignited within her, boiling her limbs, her marrow, and her blood. Her viscera, along with that strange and suspicious soul, felt as though they were about to leap straight out of her mouth.

Unable to catch her breath from the violent retching, she devolved into a fit of coughing, her chest heaving heavily as tears streamed down her face amidst the coughs.

Cang Zhu felt the hand with which he covered Ye Minwei’s mouth grow damp; her tears slid down the back of his hand, burning like liquid fire.

The azure crystal she had brought out from the stone chamber was gripped tightly within her palm, its sharp edges slicing through her flesh and drawing blood from between her fingers.

Upon the elevated platform above the cavern, those who had witnessed everything conversed with casual indifference.

"Another failure."

"Only produced a layer of shattered residue, completely unusable."

"Tell me, how on earth do Ye Minwei and Lin Xuegeng refine those azure crystals?"

——*"I do not wish to speak of my hypothesis, because I hope it is not true."*

Ye Minwei’s words echoed within Cang Zhu’s mind. A look of unbearable pity crossed his face, and he slowly relaxed his grip on her.

Collapsing prone onto the ground, Ye Minwei propped her body up on her elbows. With wide-open eyes, she watched her own tears drop one by one onto the floor, pooling into a small puddle.

She wept uncontrollably, yet she knew not why she cried.

At that moment, a pair of hands cupped her face.

Through her tear-blurred vision, Axi’s face appeared before her.

The little girl, clad in a red padded jacket, knelt before her, cradling her face. The blinding light from the end of the corridor spilled over Axi’s back, and schools of glowing blue fish drifted into the cavern from nowhere, passing over places where the crimson blood and white bones gradually faded into nothingness.

Axi’s round, pitch-black eyes reflected Ye Minwei’s tear-streaked face.

She tucked the small wildflower she held behind Ye Minwei’s ear. Axi always loved breaking things, and the flowers she offered previously were always crushed and mangled.

Yet this tiny, pale blue blossom remained fragrant and perfectly intact.

Then, Axi raised her hands to cover Ye Minwei’s reddened, tear-filled eyes.

Axi’s hands were soft and warm. Amidst some boundless darkness, Ye Minwei heard the shouts and footsteps of the garrison troops as someone cried out demanding to know who was there.

In the span of a breath, absolute silence fell. A chilling wind and the scent of dust washed over them as Axi’s hands slowly lowered from Ye Minwei’s eyes. Ye Minwei beheld a rising morning sun ascending slowly amidst the high and low gray tents of the refugee camp.

The warm, golden sun painted all things in heaven and earth with a gentle, golden hue, as though the world teemed entirely with vitality and death had never once existed.