With a casual flick of his small hand, Xue Kui's ice spear shot like an arrow and struck a wild boar in the plains, perfectly true.
Sitting atop a rock with his head propped on one hand, he watched the hunting team butcher the boar and load it onto the cart.
Ever since the day he broke Big Brother Shi Chen's arm, Xue Kui had taken his place in the hunting party to cover for him.
Emergency stores were plentiful, but daily food still needed to be gathered.
With Xue Kui along, the team's work sped up dramatically. They no longer had to tiptoe around monster territory.
"Brother Xue Kui," a hunter said respectfully, "we have enough for today. Let's head back."
Even if Xue Kui looked and acted like a child, no one who'd watched him drop a monster with a thrown Cryo spear could treat him like one.
"When will Big Brother Shi Chen recover?" Xue Kui asked, voice listless. He wasn't only concerned about the injury.
He was tired of this job.
He followed his battle instinct gladly—but that instinct was picky. If a fight wasn't satisfying, it disgusted him.
He hated hunting weak prey. To put it plainly: he hated *this*.
And he'd have to keep doing it until Shi Chen recovered.
"Take responsibility for the mistakes you make." That was Guizhong's lesson when she heard what happened.
What surprised her was that she'd prepared to lecture the rebellious yaksha for a long time— But after looking at her with complicated eyes, Xue Kui accepted it quickly.
"No exact time," the hunter said, rubbing his bearded chin. "Last time he broke his leg, it took over three months. This one's better, but… probably another month."
"So…" Xue Kui's hair drooped like wilted vegetables. "No way to make him heal faster?"
"It's a shame," the hunter muttered, half to himself. "If we had medicinal herbs, he'd recover quicker. But no one dares pick them now."
Xue Kui's tuft of hair snapped upright. "Why not?"
"Herbs for bone injuries grow in a cave in those woods." The hunter pointed toward a distant forest. "But for a while now, that cave shakes now and then like it's about to collapse. People who went in to investigate nearly got hurt—stones fly out from deep inside for no reason."
"The herbs near the entrance are already picked clean. Deeper inside… no one can push through the flying rocks."
Xue Kui blinked, then grinned.
"We're basically at the gate. You can make it back on your own, right? I'll go take a look." "Brother Xue Kui, you're—"
Before the hunter could finish, the yaksha was already gone, a white blur vanishing into the trees.
The hunter lifted a hand as if to stop him, then lowered it with a sigh and led the team home. In the woods, Xue Kui darted through shadows, light-footed and fast.
Traveling alone like this reminded him of the days before he joined Guizhong—wild and free. Blending into mortal life was nice.
But now and then, running loose like this gave him a fresh thrill. Of course, he didn't forget why he came.
Soon enough, faint tremors traveled through the earth. So the hunter hadn't lied.
Xue Kui crouched, palm on the ground, eyes shut as he traced the source of the shaking. Then he found it: a wide cave mouth yawning in darkness.
Without hesitation, he walked in. His pale blue eyes glimmered faintly, letting him see the cave's interior with ease.
A yaksha unable to see in darkness would be the strange one.
As he examined green plants clinging to the stone—wondering if they counted as medicinal herbs—the cave began to tremble again.
Xue Kui frowned.
This trembling didn't feel natural.
Inside the vibration, he sensed something hard to describe—a rhythm, and an emotion. That rhythm felt faintly similar to the aura on Morax's stone pillars.
And that emotion… was it… a sigh?
Xue Kui scratched his head. Why would he think that?
If it really was a sigh causing this, then the thing doing it had to be enormous. Yaksha were keenly sensitive to living auras—yet he sensed no life here at all.
Feeling uneasy, he still condensed an ice spear in his hand and advanced deeper, careful and alert.
His ear twitched—he caught the whistle of something cutting air. His spear flicked, batting away flying stones one after another. He lowered his body and sprinted forward.
Ducking, weaving, he watched the stones shoot past and frowned. They didn't feel hostile.
But they weren't natural either.
It was almost like slimes gathered around places rich in elemental power, driving other creatures away from the center.
Comparing stones to slimes felt wrong, but—
Xue Kui's thoughts wandered for a heartbeat, then snapped back. It wasn't that he lacked caution.
It was that the cave truly didn't feel dangerous.
The deeper he went, the harder it became to breathe. He sensed the surroundings— Geo energy here was overflowing.
A normal creature reaching this point would probably already be eroded to death.
In that case, the flying stones… were indirectly protecting outsiders from wandering in and being harmed?
After turning a corner, Xue Kui stopped, staring at a rock wall in thought. There was no path forward.
The Cryo around him had thinned to the point of discomfort.
But the densest Geo energy was clearly behind this wall—so what came next was obvious. Xue Kui lifted his spear, eyed its tip, and coated it in Cryo, reshaping it into the form of a hoe. Satisfied, he raised the ice hoe and swung.
…Hm?
It wouldn't dig.
As he examined his tool, confused, a violent tremor—not like the earlier mild shaking—rippled through the cave, so strong even Xue Kui struggled to keep his footing.
His eyes widened.
The "rock wall" in front of him… began to move.
Slowly, it slid aside.
When Xue Kui saw the truth of it, his mind blanked for a moment. What filled his vision wasn't a wall at all—
But shattered stone, formed and sustained by pure Geo energy.