Shen Gun froze for a moment, then became overwhelmingly excited: “Beast bones! This piece is a beast bone! Seven beast bones!”

Fearing Meng Qianzi might have felt wrong, he took three steps in two and took it from her hand, rubbing it himself, then nodding repeatedly: “That’s right, that’s right, it’s this character, written this way.”

Suddenly spotting the previous piece, he quickly picked it up too. All thoughts of “ancient viruses” and “parasites” had long been cast to the winds.

This piece was completely flat, with dense bone material. Running his fingers over it, he felt no depressions. Shen Gun was stunned for a moment, then whirled back to the dragon’s body like a tornado: “Quick, quick, Little Lian-Lian, if I’m not mistaken, the beast bones are mixed in with the dragon bones.”

Jiang Lian still remembered this: “Is this related to the seven malevolent bamboo slips… something about eyes being deceived but hands recognizing them?”

Shen Gun nodded vigorously: “Yes, yes, these beast bones are special. The inscribed characters can’t be seen. Thankfully, Miss Meng caught it. My goodness, if we had only used the cavalry sword and sheath as tweezers, who would have known there were characters on it!”

By the end of his speech, he was jubilant, his face glowing with happiness. Regarding the seven beast bones, before it was just speculation, based solely on Master Ba Mei’s ambiguous prophecy and the phoenix-shaped buckle on the box, without concrete evidence. He wouldn’t have dared to proclaim it publicly, but now it was different. He had found them!

It wasn’t a wasted trip. This journey truly wasn’t for nothing! What did it matter if he suffered a bit, sliding and tumbling in the ice blood vessels? His heart was sweet.

He worked with increasing vigor to scrape the dragon’s body. His mood was visibly ecstatic; he even started humming a tune.

Jiang Lian heard him singing: “Pigs, ah, sheep, ah, where are they sent? They are sent to the people’s cooking pots…”

What kind of lyrics were these? Jiang Lian frowned, but at least he was singing about pigs and sheep, not chickens and ducks, otherwise, it might have caused some psychological trauma for Jiang Qiaoqiao.

The dragon’s body was remarkably solid. After extracting nearly twenty pieces of bone, it was completely broken and in a wretched state, yet it still somehow managed to remain standing.

The three gathered to count and identify the bones. Shen Gun’s prediction was correct: a total of nineteen pieces of bone, seven of which had inscriptions. All were pictographic oracle bone script, corresponding to seven ancient methods of violent death, such as “knife” representing slaughter and “hanging” representing strangulation.

Though they were still in a predicament with no clear way out, Shen Gun couldn’t stop smiling, as if celebrating the New Year.

Jiang Lian was somewhat curious: “With these, will your friends be alright?”

Shen Gun’s words flowed like water through an open floodgate, endlessly: “I can’t say for sure, but they’ll certainly be able to stop the damage—the seven malevolent spirits were drawn into their bodies, using their bodies as cages to temporarily contain the malevolent bamboo slips. But these seven beast bones are the source of the malevolent spirits. If they can draw the spirits back to the beast bones, they will be freed…”

Meng Qianzi frowned: “Drawing them back to the beast bones isn’t a permanent solution, is it? Didn’t they say things are only truly safe when placed in the box?”

That’s right, Shen Gun nodded: “Whether it’s the mountain gall, beast bones, or nine bells, they’re only truly like defanging a fierce beast when they’re in the box. But for this box, we still have no clue…”

These words reminded Jiang Lian, and he hurriedly told them about the suspected box he had seen through the water during their escape.

What was only “suspected” to him became a definite conclusion in Shen Gun’s mouth: “It must be. After Yan Luo brought the box in, he abandoned it here. Who would have thought it would fall into the water…”

Before he could finish, Meng Qianzi suddenly made a “shh” sound: “Listen.”

Listen to what?

Shen Gun was bewildered. His ears perked up, but he only heard the half-hanging bronze chain rattling.

He suddenly tensed: “Is someone shaking the chain? Is something… climbing up?”

Meng Qianzi shook her head and pushed the snow pheasant’s body with her hand. The snow pheasant understood, and with a flap of its wings, flew low toward the nearby area.

The first part of its flight was fine, but as it approached the hole, it suddenly seemed to hit an air current, tumbling and rolling in mid-air several times. If it hadn’t solidly rolled and fallen to one side, Shen Gun would have thought it was performing aerial acrobatics.

He began to understand: “Down there… is there wind?”

Just as he said this, he became certain because a section of the ice dragon’s body was positioned right above that hole, and many ice shavings were adhering to the dragon’s body from their scraping. These had been static, but now they were continuously rising upward.

This Kunlun Mountain was truly strange in every way. How could there be wind inside the mountain belly, and the wind coming from below…

Jiang Lian suddenly blurted out: “The ground opens its door, wind rushes toward the stars and constellations.”

Shen Gun suddenly remembered.

In the Water Ghost’s video, it was mentioned that when the Drifting Cave drifts outside, at midnight, “the ground opens its door,” meaning a small hole appears in the originally solid ground.

“Wind rushes toward the stars and constellations” meant that wind would violently rush upward from the hole, as if it could reach the stars in the sky. In the late Ming Dynasty, there was a Water Ghost named Jiang Shehu who was obsessed with finding the Drifting Cave, and he found it: it was midnight, he was riding a horse on his journey, and stopped to relieve himself. He happened to encounter “the ground opening its door.” His horse was blown into the air by the strong wind, fell back down, and died on the spot.

Calculating the time, it was indeed about midnight now. As for “the ground opening its door,” since the Drifting Cave was hidden at the mountain’s bottom, it naturally couldn’t “open the door” on the ground surface. The wind, of course, couldn’t reach the “stars,” and could only stretch its muscles and bones within the mountain intestines…

Shen Gun was about to say something when Meng Qianzi raised her hand and pressed downward, again gesturing for him to keep quiet.

Jiang Lian knew that Meng Qianzi’s “Mountain Wind Drawing” was most sensitive in windy conditions, her ability to track scents and hear sounds far exceeding ordinary people. He tugged at Shen Gun’s sleeve, indicating he should just watch and not cause trouble.

Sure enough, after a moment, Meng Qianzi said: “There’s something down there, alive, very large… enormous, but it doesn’t have much smell or make much noise.”

Something that could be described as “enormous” yet so sluggish—Jiang Lian had some idea: “Taisu? How far is it from us?”

Meng Qianzi shook her head: “Can’t really tell, three to five hundred meters, maybe even further.”

She moved closer to the hole, lowered her body, listened carefully, and added: “There’s a water sound, can you hear it? Gurgling.”

Water sound? Shen Gun didn’t hear it, but on this matter, he was most qualified to comment: “Just now, when we were in the ice blood vessels, the water below was also rising, gurgling. Could it be connected to here, rising together?”

This last question was directed at Jiang Lian.

Jiang Lian didn’t directly answer: “Just now, when we slid down the ice blood vessels for so long, the depth wouldn’t be shallow, probably more than three to five hundred meters. If the caves are interconnected, then if water rises in one place, it would naturally rise here too…”

At this point, he suddenly thought of something: “I remember, the Water Ghosts who went into the Drifting Cave mentioned that Taisu seemed to be submerged in water?”

Shen Gun corrected him: “It’s not constantly submerged. Sometimes it’s completely soaked in water, sometimes the water recedes, as if it changes water periodically.”

That’s right, Jiang Lian’s heart beat heavily: “They say the Yellow River’s water comes from heaven, and that Kunlun’s snow water is the source of all waters. There’s no shortage of water here, but the altitude is too high. When groundwater rises to a certain height and the temperature drops, it gradually freezes…”

Shen Gun exclaimed, “Ah!”With water periodically rising and falling, after the water recedes, the remnant water hanging on the mountain walls would freeze. Over a long time, it would form a thick layer of ice…”

He pointed at Duan Wenxi’s ice corpse: “Is that how Miss Duan became frozen into an ice corpse?”

Jiang Lian shuddered: “Our entry points into the mountain intestines were quite high. Those positions, although extremely cold, had no ice because there was no water inside the mountain’s belly, meaning water couldn’t reach that height. Then the two of us slid very deep, entering the ice blood vessels. Qianzi went down nine steps, also falling very deep. At this position, water periodically rises and falls, so ice is found everywhere.”

He then pointed to the bronze chain: “That’s the fishing platform, the chain is the fishing line, extending about twenty meters down. Great-Grandmother Duan was the bait, and bait naturally needs to be suspended in the water. That means when the water rises, it would at least reach Great-Grandmother Duan’s original hanging position, rising to just below this stone cover?”

Meng Qianzi understood about seventy to eighty percent of what she heard. She raised her flashlight, shining it on the ice dragon’s body, then on the stone cover: indeed, although the ice dragon was above the stone cover, there was no ice on the stone cover itself.

A fishing platform should, of course, be built above the water surface, making it convenient for “fishing.”

Thinking again about the box floating in the water, a flash of insight suddenly crossed Jiang Lian’s mind: “The box as interlocked teeth—Yan Luo entered with the box. Before obtaining the Qilin Crystal, given his character, he absolutely wouldn’t discard the box, because he couldn’t be sure if he would need to enter a second or third time, so these things were all useful. But after obtaining the Qilin Crystal, like killing the cooking dog after catching the hare, these things became a burden to him…”

Meng Qianzi’s mind stirred: “You mean he abandoned the box here?”

Jiang Lian’s throat was dry. He swallowed before continuing: “That’s right. Either he left it on the stone cover, but it’s not on the stone cover, or he threw it down the hole. When he was lowering Great-Grandmother Duan for fishing, there was water below. After the box fell in, it floated on the water. Later, when the water receded, the box also receded to a lower position.”

Meng Qianzi murmured: “Then, when the water rises, the box would… float up again?”

Could it be that for almost half a century, that box had been in this pitch-black mountain belly, constantly rising and falling with the water?

Jiang Lian nodded: “I don’t know what the structure at the mountain’s bottom is like. From what we’ve seen so far, down there, apart from the ice blood vessels, there’s this bottomless pit. The ice blood vessel that Shen Gun and I fell into had a bronze cover at the bottom, so the box couldn’t enter the ice blood vessel. But whether other ice blood vessels have covers at the bottom, I’m not so sure…”

Shen Gun interjected: “There should be. Don’t you remember the snow wildmen throwing two ice pillars at Miss Meng and the others? People can only be frozen into ice pillars when trapped at the end of an ice blood vessel, then extracted. Besides, the ice blood vessels are too narrow and winding; if the box floated in, it would likely get stuck or stranded.”

With the possibility of ice blood vessels eliminated, that only left…

Meng Qianzi suddenly became excited: “Jiang Lian said he saw the box blocked by a bronze cover, and shortly after, it sank from view. If the water is still rising, continuing to rise to just below the stone cover, could it be that the box will float up like this?”

Jiang Lian’s palms gradually began to sweat.

It would. According to their current reasoning, that box, in all likelihood, would slowly float up with the rising water, slowly drifting right under his nose.

He stammered: “Qianzi, can you help listen—is the water… still rising?”

Meng Qianzi lowered her body again, listened quietly for a while, and said softly: “It’s still rising, rising upward.”

She then asked him: “Do you want to look through the hole? Maybe in an hour or so, you’ll see that box floating on the water.”

Jiang Lian smiled, strangely afraid to go look: “No way, could it be this sudden, this easy… to find it?”

Meng Qianzi didn’t speak, just moved her body closer to the edge of the hole.

What was sudden about it? What was easy about it? For most of Jiang Lian’s life, or rather his entire life, he had been chasing after the box, ever since he threw that hastily eaten chicken leg at Kuang Tongsheng.

But when you search for something for too long, you easily get lost in the process. When the result finally comes, you can’t believe it.

Meng Qianzi lowered her head. From her position, she could see the endless darkness below.

No one spoke, as if the slightest sound might cause the development of events to deviate from its course, causing the expected outcome to vary—Shen Gun took off a sweater, carefully wrapped the seven beast bones in it, and reverently stuffed it into his backpack; Jiang Lian sat motionless, with Jiang Qiaoqiao having crawled into his lap at some point, comfortably nestled in his cupped hands, occasionally scratching his wrist with its little head.

Only Meng Qianzi sat at the edge of the hole, focusing on what was below.

The darkness that had initially been vague gradually became clear; the color that was initially hollow and ethereal gradually rippled into an almost dazzling watery brightness. Meng Qianzi adjusted her flashlight to maximum brightness, constantly scanning and sweeping across the water surface, not missing any corner.

Then, her voice trembling slightly: “Jiang Lian, come look.”

Jiang Lian’s eardrums instantly filled with a buzzing sound. He steadied himself before getting up, kneeling on one knee beside Meng Qianzi, one hand gripping her wrist that held the flashlight, holding his breath as he looked down.

He saw it.

In a place quite close to the edge, right against the side of the mountain wall, its base slightly submerged in the water, the box body gently rippling, quite inconspicuous. When the light beam slightly shifted, one could faintly see the openwork patterns on the box’s body.

Meng Qianzi said softly, “Congratulations. In your lifetime, how many times have you mentioned the box? Has it been ten thousand times? People say, what you never forget will eventually come back. You’ve finally found it.”

Shen Gun also deserved congratulations; he had found the seven beast bones.

And herself? She also deserved congratulations. She had found the body of Great-Grandmother Duan, missing for nearly half a century.

Meng Qianzi smiled.

The three of them, on this journey, had not come away empty-handed. Each found what they sought. Earlier, because of the deaths of He Shengzhi and Shi Xiaohai, she had felt this was a cursed place. Now it seemed it was also a treasure trove.