The Chinese team members began clearing the ground of sharp arrows while carefully transcribing the poetic incantation found inside the stone pillar’s bell.
Mei Rujing glanced around and took a quick look at the time. “It’s still a bit too early to get off work. We can go over to their side and check it out.”
Liu Jun and Xu Zaiyuan had gone to the peachwood sword key site and had not yet returned. It wasn’t far from here.
Chu Qianli stared blankly at the ground littered with hidden weapons. These sharpened arrows had been meticulously crafted—not meant to intimidate or scare, but clearly designed to kill.
Tan Muxing noticed her distraction and asked with concern, “Is your head still hurting?”
Ever since Chu Qianli had walked through the corridor, she’d been getting occasional headaches, especially when trying to divine with hexagrams.
Chu Qianli shook her head. “It doesn’t hurt as much now. It just feels strange.”
“Strange how?”
“If they discovered the ore vein a long time ago, why didn’t they just extract it directly? Why go through the trouble of building a relic here instead?” Chu Qianli tilted her head. “And these traps really seem designed to kill—not just to ward off thieves.”
If someone unfamiliar with divination carelessly placed the key, they could end up impaled by the hidden weapons.
Originally, Chu Qianli and the others thought they just needed to place the key in the designated position, but it was clear that the predecessors had set additional traps—it wasn’t just a wide-open gate waiting to be entered.
“Sigh, I should have studied the Gate of Truth yesterday, but just being in the main hall made my head hurt when I tried to divine…” Chu Qianli said in frustration. “Something just doesn’t feel right.”
Mei Rujing saw her scratching her head in distress. “Don’t stress, or your hair will fall out.”
“Let’s meet up with them first. We can go to the main hall in a day or two,” Tan Muxing suggested.
The group set off together to the peachwood sword key site. On the way, they learned that the second bead had already dropped into the groove. Only five beads remained, and the first two had been activated by the Chinese side.
Mei Rujing commented, “They’re moving pretty fast.”
With both the Sanqing Bell and the peachwood sword successfully placed, the Chinese team was clearly working efficiently—there was a good chance they could unlock all four locations in one go.
Chu Qianli’s compass and tarot card keys were too far apart—one far south, the other far north. Driving to them wasn’t as convenient, so they planned to head out tomorrow.
Soon after, Chu Qianli and the others arrived at the destination. But at the cave entrance, they only saw Liu Jun—Xu Zaiyuan was nowhere to be found.
Chu Qianli waved and cheerfully called out, “Work’s over! We’re here to pick you up!”
But Liu Jun didn’t look happy to see them. Instead, he appeared deeply worried. “Zaiyuan hasn’t come out yet.”
Tan Muxing looked surprised. “But we heard in the car that the bead had already been dropped?”
“Yes. He even messaged me just a while ago, saying he had placed the key and was on his way back. But now there’s no sign of him,” Liu Jun frowned. “We can’t reach him through the equipment either.”
“You let him go in alone?”
“Zaiyuan said the cave was full of heavy yin energy. He worried that ordinary people wouldn’t be able to handle it. Since he had the peachwood sword, he said he’d be fine and insisted on going in alone,” Liu Jun said, clearly troubled. “We stayed in contact the whole time. Everything was fine until he placed the key. Then, on his way out, he suddenly went silent.”
Chu Qianli suddenly understood. This was just like at Tingfeng Xiyu Tower—Xu Zaiyuan had warned her that the Five Ghost Formation was dangerous and told her not to go in recklessly. The only difference was that this time Liu Jun actually listened.
Chu Qianli said in surprise, “That’s your mistake. You even took off your Taoist robe—why would you still believe him about the yin energy being too strong?”
Liu Jun looked ashamed. “Honestly, I wasn’t afraid of the yin energy. It’s just that Zaiyuan’s divinations are always accurate. I was worried that going against his advice would only cause him trouble…”
Xu Zaiyuan was always spot on with his divinations. Since Liu Jun wasn’t as skilled, he naturally often followed the former’s advice. That was likely just a kind of instinctive respect for an expert—like how Qiu Qingkong had unconditional trust in Chu Qianli’s hexagrams and sometimes didn’t even believe his own divination results.
Chu Qianli recalled how during the special selection competition, Qianmen had placed all their bets on Xu Zaiyuan’s readings. She realized, “I get it now. What he really lacks is someone like my brother—someone who’s skeptical of all this metaphysics. He’s always surrounded by people who believe in divination, and sometimes that can actually backfire.”
If she herself were constantly praised and followed by devout believers, she might one day fall from grace too.
“He is indeed highly accurate, but in the end, he’s still human. And humans have weaknesses.” Worried there might be corridor patterns inside again, Chu Qianli decided to cast a divination right at the entrance of the cave. After a moment, she let out a breath of relief. “There don’t seem to be any traps in the cave. He’s not injured—but he is trapped by something.”
Chu Qianli was originally afraid that there might be deadly traps like arrows inside the cave, but fortunately, there were none. The danger lay solely in the strange feng shui of the cave’s location.
From the hexagram’s perspective, one must stay still in the abyss to be safe, but instead they kept going in circles, causing confusion.
Tan Muxing said, “Let’s go in and find him first.”
Liu Jun immediately organized the team and, following Chu Qianli’s interpretation of the hexagram, led them into the cave to search for Xu Zaiyuan.
Inside the cave, Xu Zaiyuan stared at the unchanged stone wall and finally confirmed he was caught in a ghost wall trap. He had used too many spells in front of the formation earlier and had only just solved the puzzle using a peachwood sword. However, on his way back, he was misled by a visual illusion.
It was a sophisticated technique, with an arrangement set up on an inconspicuous cliff wall. It wouldn’t affect ordinary people—its purpose was to trap those skilled in metaphysics. Ordinary people would ignore the hidden information on the wall, but those with metaphysical knowledge couldn’t help but notice it, possibly even unconsciously accepting its suggestion.
Xu Zaiyuan was more sensitive to external information than others, and having just exhausted his energy in front of the formation, he fell into the trap easily and couldn’t escape for quite a while.
The newcomers at first thought they were on the correct path, but in fact, they were deceived by the mechanisms and were going in circles. The builder was indeed cunning and experienced, anticipating that people would lower their guard after breaking through the main formation, and so placed another trap afterward.
Those who didn’t understand metaphysics couldn’t break the main formation, while those who could were trapped by the ghost wall afterward.
Xu Zaiyuan stopped and looked at the device in his hand. The machine was completely silent, and there was no response from Liu Jun.
Liu Jun was trained—there was no way he wouldn’t respond. That left only one possibility: had he actually contacted him?
He thought he had reached out to his teammate but got no reply. Was that also a misleading illusion from the wall? Perhaps he never contacted Liu Jun at all, and was simply deceived by the information on the wall into thinking he had sent a distress signal.
“This is actually a Heart Demon Array,” Xu Zaiyuan sighed deeply. He carefully examined the cliff wall, realizing that if he didn’t decode the key information, he might not get out all day.
The cave was silent. Inner demons began to grow.
In a haze of consciousness, Xu Zaiyuan suddenly saw a familiar figure. He stood frozen on the spot as if struck by lightning.
On the other side, Chu Qianli and Tan Muxing entered the cave in search of the missing Xu Zaiyuan. She pointed in a direction according to the hexagram and instructed, “It seems to be that way.”
Others asked, “But there are several paths?”
Liu Jun said, “Search all of them!”
Chu Qianli and Tan Muxing took one of the paths together. The passage was so narrow and dimly lit that no one knew what dangers lay ahead. Tan Muxing led the way, with Chu Qianli following closely behind.
When Tan Muxing reached a fork in the path, he turned back to ask, “Which way should we go—”
His voice suddenly stopped—because no one was behind him!
The girl was gone.
Tan Muxing instantly felt a chill from head to toe. He had no idea when Chu Qianli disappeared; she was clearly with him just before they turned the corner.
Cold air swirled in the cave, with echoes bouncing now and then.
“Xingxing, I feel like we can go this way!” Chu Qianli called out cheerfully. She hadn’t received a reply for quite some time and looked up ahead in confusion. “Xingxing?”
There was no one ahead.
Chu Qianli froze for a moment, her smile fading instantly. She quickly scanned the surroundings and muttered, “Damn that Xingxing, this ruin really is sinister—it’s specifically targeting those who understand fortune-telling. No wonder the little Taoist couldn’t get out.”
Her doubts grew stronger. She realized the ruin was designed to target people with metaphysical talents. From the murals in the passage to the layout of the cave, everything was a trap specifically meant for gifted individuals.
She had been visually misled at the corner. Xingxing couldn’t perceive the extra information, but she couldn’t stop it from entering her mind and had unknowingly fallen into the trap.
Chu Qianli immediately began examining the arrangement on the cave walls. To break the formation, she had to understand the information—it required decoding the large volume of hidden messages on the walls.
Ordinary people were completely unaffected by the messages, but those with strong associative thinking were different. Fortune-telling itself was about turning the abstract into the concrete and then deducing future outcomes.
The wall’s information would strike at one’s inner weaknesses, revealing hallucinations they didn’t want to see.
Even though the hallucinations were vivid, outsiders couldn’t see them—and each person’s was different. Ultimately, it was all subconscious suggestion.
A flood of information poured in, and her vision became blurry.
Inside the cave, Yu Xin and He Zhenghe inexplicably appeared. Their faces showed none of the usual kindness or tolerance. Instead, they were frowning, faces full of disgust and reproach, saying: “Why are you so useless? You can’t compare to Shi Chen in anything.”
Chu Qianli clapped her hands joyfully: “Because I’m a good-for-nothing little waste! I thought you already knew that, Mom and Dad. Alright, alright, let’s move on to the next scene—I’m in a hurry!”
Chu Qianli was very sure that what she was seeing was fake, so she wasn’t affected by the hallucinations at all. She just wanted to get out of this ghost wall environment as soon as possible.
In the next instant, her older brother He Shichen appeared, his eyes cold and full of disgust. “Do you know how badly I want you to disappear?”
“Wow, even the illusion version of my brother is just like the real thing.” Chu Qianli instinctively pulled out her phone, amazed. “I should record this—he’s the most consistent man I’ve ever seen.”
He Shichen’s image faded, followed by total darkness all around.
A crushing pressure surged in, trying to completely break her down. Along came a suffocating sense of familiarity.
She was like a blade of grass swept away in a raging sea, completely powerless to fight back against the storm. All she could do was let herself sink deeper and deeper into the abyss.
“Is this simulating death?”
She felt as if she would fall into an eternal slumber in the darkness, never to open her eyes and feel the light again.
Chu Qianli struggled to breathe, but barely managed to hold on. She relaxed her body with the current, slowly closing her eyes.
“…But I’m actually not afraid of dying.”
The next moment, the deathly darkness vanished. She was back in the cave, and everything just now was like an illusion or a dream.
No parents, no He Shichen, no feeling of dying.
She was still in the cave—she had come to look for someone.
Chu Qianli knelt on the ground, gasping for breath. She shook her head hard, trying to shake off the influence of the wall’s information. When she looked up, she saw a very familiar figure at the corner.
Tan Muxing didn’t know when he had found her.
“Xingxing…” Chu Qianli instinctively reached out to him, hoping he would help her up.
However, Tan Muxing didn’t offer any words of comfort. Instead, he unexpectedly slapped her hand away with a crisp smack!
Chu Qianli froze, stunned. She looked up at him in disbelief, only to see an expression on his face that she had never seen before.
It was a look completely unfamiliar to her.
Chu Qianli’s breath caught, and suddenly all her strength drained away.
She didn’t speak for a long while, just quietly looked at the person in front of her. She wanted to curl her lips into a teasing smile, like she had just done earlier, but she couldn’t control the wave of disappointment rising in her chest. In the end, it turned into a complex expression.
“This really broke my defenses. Even though I know it’s fake, I still can’t take it,” Chu Qianli said in a low, dejected voice. Her eyelashes trembled. “But I know Xingxing better than Xingxing himself, so don’t do out-of-character things with his face…”
“…I’m really going to get angry.”
She had been able to stay calm in front of everything else, but this scene made her particularly upset—not because of the cold attitude of the hallucinated Tan Muxing, but because she felt this kind of subconscious projection was a distortion of who he truly was.
“Even if we didn’t know each other today, he still wouldn’t do something like that.”
Chu Qianli slowly stood up from the ground, patted the dirt off her clothes, and with a clean, decisive motion, shattered the illusion of Tan Muxing—didn’t even spare it a glance, utterly dismissive.
Others might harbor dark thoughts deep in their hearts, but Tan Muxing was absolutely not one of them. The imitation may have stolen his appearance, but it didn’t understand the essence of the original. Beyond the flashy, confusing surface, what made him precious was never just skin-deep.
The real Xingxing would rather hurt himself than willingly hurt others.
She was certain of that.
A short while later, Tan Muxing had retraced his steps, finally finding Chu Qianli in a dead-end corner. He had no idea why she’d randomly run into a cul-de-sac.
It was obvious he had hurried back—his hair was a mess, his face full of anxiety, the whole of him dusty and disheveled. But the moment he saw her, he let out a deep breath of relief.
Looking at the flustered and worried Tan Muxing, Chu Qianli finally realized why she had been fooled by the slap—it was because she expected the real “Big White Bear” to look at her with concern. Even the expression in the hallucination had been wrong.
The only explanation was that she let down her guard the moment she saw him, forgetting to scrutinize the details.
“Why are you staying here?” Tan Muxing saw she was unharmed and finally relaxed. He didn’t blame her sudden disappearance but instead walked over in large strides to check if she was injured.
Chu Qianli saw his worried gaze examining her, her nose twitched, and she suddenly hugged his arm, snuggling against him. Only then did it feel real.
The Big White Bear’s body was warm—not like a fleeting breeze, but something steady and dependable.
This was the real Xingxing.
Tan Muxing was caught off guard when she wrapped her arms around his. She was so close that he suddenly felt like he was burning up, completely at a loss and too flustered to move. His ears turned red as he stammered, “Huh!?”
But before he could be embarrassed for long, a sudden change occurred.
The next moment, Chu Qianli abruptly pulled up his sleeve, exposing his arm, and angrily bit down!
“Ah—!”
Tan Muxing wasn’t really hurt by her small teeth, but he did feel a warm, tingling sensation—soft, moist lips that made him cry out instinctively, a flush spreading across his face as he became speechless, almost collapsing on the spot.
Chu Qianli had originally intended to bite hard, but hearing his yelp, she eased up, leaving only a faint bite mark.
Now, from his ears to his cheeks, Tan Muxing was blushing furiously. He held up his arm with the small bite mark, panicked and confused: “This… what for?”
Chu Qianli knew it had been just a hallucination, but now that she was facing the real one, she still felt overwhelmingly wronged. She whined, “Xingxing yelled at me! Xingxing hit me! Xingxing even slapped my arm!”
She was using a sword from the former dynasty to punish the current Xing!
Tan Muxing, faced with her tearful accusations, was utterly baffled, his whole face blank with confusion: “???”
He had just gotten here—how could he have done all that?
![How to Escape from the Hands of Yandere [QT]](https://www.freenovels.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/images-94.jpeg "How to Escape from the Hands of Yandere [QT]")