Song Meiyu gagged so hard she almost inhaled the water. "I think it's in my mouth!"
He Yuying, floating miserably beside her, coughed and spat out a mouthful of the red liquid. "If it is blood, it's very expired."
Linyue blinked slowly, water streaming down her face. In a voice flat as ever, she muttered, "At least the landing was soft." She was clearly trying very hard to find joy in this nightmare and failing.
Shen Zhenyu, meanwhile, just sighed and continued to hold her like a soggy princess. His expression was unreadable, though his aura screamed deep, spiritual suffering.
Then Song Meiyu let out another gasp. "There's something in the water! It touched my leg!" She kicked wildly, nearly smacking He Yuying in the face.
"That was my leg!" He Yuying snapped. "Stop trying to murder me by accident!"
Song Meiyu gasped even louder. "Oh no, what if the judgmental cabbage is aquatic?!"
At this point, no one even tried to think about the judgmental cabbage anymore. Their brains had officially resigned.
He Yuying paddled toward a nearby rock, every stroke filled with despair. He flopped onto it and muttered, "This is it. This is how we die. In soup. Red soup. Tragic."
For a moment, nobody said anything. The four cultivators bobbed in eerie silence, surrounded by crimson water that now lived in their sleeves, boots, and possibly their souls. One by one, they dragged themselves onto solid ground, collapsing in various wet-pile-of-fabric positions. Robes clung to them. Hair stuck to faces. Everything squelched. The moment they were finally out, a single, unified sigh escaped their mouths.
Shen Zhenyu was the first to stand fully upright. He stood tall, soaked to the bones, hair dripping into his eyes, and still somehow looking mildly dignified. He quickly scanned the group, checking each of them with a serious frown.
Linyue: alive, soggy, unimpressed.
Song Meiyu: tangled, traumatized, muttering about mouthwash.
He Yuying: emotionally finished, spirit probably halfway to the afterlife already.
Conclusion: no missing limbs, no obvious injuries, just dripping clothes, drowned pride, and very, very bad moods.
Song Meiyu groaned and twisted her skirt with both hands, sending a dramatic splash of red water across the cave floor. "What is this place?! The map didn't even mention a blood pool! I'm starting to think this map is a scam!"
Linyue didn't bother answering. She looked down at herself. Her robes, once a soft elegant color, were now a deep, alarming red. Her sleeves clung to her arms, her hair stuck to her cheek in damp strands, and she smelled…
She sniffed once.
…Rotten fish.
Wonderful.
Meanwhile, He Yuying stood off to the side, arms hanging limp, eyes completely vacant. His soul looked like it had already left his body. He mumbled, "Should've found the judgmental cabbage… should've stayed with the cabbage…" With the expression of a broken man, he wrung out one sleeve. A thick stream of reddish water squirted out with a sad little squelch.
Song Meiyu was still in full dramatic meltdown. "Do you know what this does to my hair? Do you know how long I worked on that bun?! I had five pins in there! Five!" She jabbed furiously at the soggy strands now drooping down her shoulders.
Linyue ignored her. She stepped to the very edge of the pool and narrowed her eyes. The "pool" they had fallen into wasn't really a pool at all. It stretched forward into the darkness, long and winding, more like a river. A river of… something red. Definitely not wine. If it was wine, she should be drunk by now.
Shen Zhenyu noticed it too. He stepped forward, boots sinking into the shallow edge of the river with a soft squelch. He lifted one arm, motioning the others to stay back. His voice was low and serious. "There's no other path. We follow the river."
Song Meiyu's face twisted in horror. "You mean… we walk in it?"
He Yuying groaned, already soaked to the soul. "At this point, I'll crawl through it if it gets us out of here."
Linyue tugged at her dripping sleeves, which slapped wetly against her wrists. Her voice was flat, calm, and full of quiet doom. "Let's go. Before I start smelling worse."
And so the red-stained, thoroughly soggy cultivators shuffled forward, one squishy step at a time, following the mysterious red river.
The deeper they went, the worse it smelled. Thick. Heavy. Like the stench had decided to punch them all straight in the nose and then crawl into their lungs for good measure. Breathing became a punishment. And then they saw them.
Bodies. Skeletons. Piled near the sides of the river, twisted into unnatural shapes. Some were little more than bone, gnawed thin and yellowed. Others still had skin, waxy and gray, clinging to their frames as if time had been too disgusted to finish its work. A few floated face-down in the water, hair drifting like weeds.
And then there were the walls.
Skeletons lined them in eerie formation, as if arranged by a cruel, meticulous hand. Cracked ribs jutted out. Empty sockets stared down. Some still clung to scraps of clothing—a tattered cloak here, the shredded remains of a child's dress there. Tiny bones lay scattered near the edge, small hands reaching toward freedom they had never found.
There were also the ancient ones. Skeletons so old they seemed more like dust sculptures than remains. Bones thin as parchment, skulls smooth and brittle from centuries of damp and decay. A few were missing jaws. Some were missing everything below the waist. One unfortunate soul was nothing but a ribcage and a single arm stretched pitifully toward the ceiling.
There were probably hundreds. Maybe more. Hard to count when every step risked landing on a skull, a rib, or a hand. The crunch would be unforgivable.
Linyue slowed near one fragile pile and studied it with sharp eyes. The skeleton looked so frail it might collapse if someone so much as sneezed too hard nearby. She didn't sneeze. She respected the effort it took to be that old and still kind of upright.
Behind her, Song Meiyu's whisper broke the hush. "That one looks like it's reaching for help."
He Yuying squinted, unimpressed. "No. That one looks like it's reaching for snacks."
Linyue closed her eyes briefly.
Shen Zhenyu said nothing, but his shoulders were tense. His gaze swept over the endless remains, each pile a quiet story of suffering. This wasn't quick death. This had been slow. Deliberate.
Who had they been? A village swallowed by plague? Refugees who had stumbled into the wrong shelter? Or had something in this cave taken them, one by one, dragging them into the dark to join the others?
Shen Zhenyu's face darkened into a frown. His eyes were sharp, scanning every shadow, calculating every step as if danger might crawl out of the walls at any moment.
The silence pressed in, heavy and suffocating, until He Yuying muttered again. "If one of these skeletons moves, I'm leaving all of you behind."
Song Meiyu gasped softly. "That's cruel."
"No," he corrected. "That's survival."
She looked around with wide, horrified eyes at the endless bones scattered and stacked in twisted shapes. "What have we gotten into? Is this… is this a graveyard? A tomb? A catacomb? What happened here?"
"Massacre," Linyue replied simply. "Probably."
That ended the conversation for a beat.
He Yuying walked with one hand on his sword, lips barely moving as he muttered to the corpses. "Please don't wake up… please don't wake up…"
None of them wanted to go farther, but stopping here—surrounded by hundreds of skeletons staring with empty sockets—was worse. So they pressed on, one cautious step at a time, feet squelching in red puddles, doing their best to ignore the eerie audience of bones and bloated limbs.
About halfway down the river of death and despair, Song Meiyu's voice cut through, far too casual for their surroundings. "You know what," she said brightly, "actually, the Dream Star Leaf only exists in stories. No one's ever really found it."
The group stopped walking. Or maybe just emotionally paused.
Song Meiyu continued cheerfully, as if this wasn't the absolute worst time to drop such news. "It's said to give eternal youth and immortality! That's why so many people look for it. When Master Yin Xue got the map from that traveling merchant, she was super excited."
Linyue slowly turned her head. Her expression stayed calm, polite even, but there was a subtle twitch in her brow that suggested she might consider tossing Song Meiyu back into the blood river.
He Yuying groaned. "So, we're wandering through a haunted cave and ancient blood canal… for a myth?"
Song Meiyu puffed up her chest. "Well, myths exist because people witness and retell them!"
Linyue blinked once, her voice flat. "Or because people lie. Loudly. For centuries."
Shen Zhenyu tilted his chin toward a half-collapsed skeleton hanging crookedly on the wall. "Or maybe no one found it because they turned into that."
He Yuying didn't miss a beat. "Great. We're next. Should I pick a scenic spot for my skeleton? I'd like a nice view of the blood river."
That shut them all up. Even Song Meiyu had nothing to say. The silence pressed in again, heavy with the weight of crushed hope and bad decisions. But turning back was impossible. So they trudged on, shoulders heavy, boots squelching.
Eventually, the red river narrowed. A lot. Until it ended entirely at a massive, damp wall of stone. At first glance, it was a dead end.
Linyue stepped closer, peering down near the bottom of the wall just above the red waterline. A small gap. Not much bigger than a foxhole, but just wide enough for someone to squeeze through with the right combination of desperation and flexible joints.
The four of them stared at it in silence. No one said anything, but their faces all screamed the same thought: Absolutely not.