The seam in the western wall opened into a crooked passage so narrow that Lin Tianren had to turn his shoulders to move through it, and Xia Qing went ahead of him with one hand trailing the stone, reading it as she walked.
"Nothing watching this path," she said quietly. "No old formation laid across it. Only the rock."
They came out, after several minutes, into a small bowl of stone no wider than a courtyard, warmed by a seep of water that rose from a crack in its floor and ran in a thin steaming thread toward the far wall. The silver-veined grass grew thick around that water, far thicker than the patch at the entrance, each blade shot through with threads of pale metal. The fragrance was strong enough to taste.
Lin knelt and studied it before touching it. Then he harvested with the care he'd learned in the last two days, cutting above the roots so the plants could regrow, taking what he could use and leaving what he couldn't. A bundle of it went into the Golden Spirit Vessel, and he sealed the lid.
From somewhere beyond the bowl's far wall, through a gap in the stone he hadn't noticed, came the muffled sound of two voices arguing and the scrape of boots on rock. The two participants from the entrance, he guessed, working through the main passage and still not looking in this direction.
"We could wait for them to leave," Xia Qing whispered.
"Or we could leave first." He rose. "I have what I came for, and anything more costs time we don't have."
They went back through the seam the way they'd come. Behind them, the voices faded.
---
Time was the thing pressing on him as they climbed back toward open ground. He felt it in the way he'd learned to feel the three presences drawing at his reserves, a constant, patient pull.
Two days since his first pill. Six days since the tournament began. The first stretch had gone to an illusion he hadn't recognized as one until he walked out of it, and the rest to searching for Gu Chen, reading the mountain's wounds, and finally refining a single Low Grade Basic Tier Healing Pill that he wasn't sure would earn him a single point worth counting.
He looked down at the vessel in his hand.
*If I keep going like this, I might not even make the top twenty.*
He had no idea what the others were doing. Some of them had surely found valuable herbs by now. Others might have formed groups and taken control of the richest valleys. The permanent cultivators could have refined several different pills already, with decades of knowledge to lean on, while he held one.
*One pill. After six days.*
He couldn't keep wandering. Searching for ordinary herbs and making ordinary pills would never carry him past people with more experience and better resources. He needed a plan.
And he needed Gu Chen.
"Lin Tianren?"
Xia Qing was watching him with a faint, curious frown. "You've been staring at that ridge for a long time."
"We need to find Gu Chen," he said. "As soon as we can."
Her expression sobered. "You're still worried."
"Of course I am." He looked north. "And it isn't only worry. We've spent too long on our own, and the more we split our attention, the further we fall behind. If we're going to compete properly, we need to be a team."
He took a breath and laid it out. "Once we find him, we can divide the work. You read the formations and mark the dangerous ground. He handles anyone strong we can't avoid. I gather herbs and refine."
Xia Qing considered it, then nodded. "That makes sense. Finding him should be first."
"Then let's start."
They moved on, and Lin slowed after a few minutes, turning something over before he spoke.
"You and Gu Chen have known each other since you were children."
"Since we were small," she said. "Our families are neighbors."
"Then tell me something. If he were in a situation like this, with no one to ask and nothing to fall back on, where would he go? What would he be doing?"
She didn't answer right away. He let her take her time. After several steps she said, "He doesn't like wandering without a purpose."
"That sounds right."
"If he came into this mountain, he'd go looking for strong opponents. He's always believed that fighting is the fastest way to improve." She glanced toward the northern slopes. "And he doesn't like open ground unless he has a reason. He prefers places where the terrain does half the work, where his opponents can't spread out around him."
"Why?"
"Because he knows he can't win on strength alone against several people. When we were younger, he challenged three older disciples in a narrow training corridor. He couldn't beat all three at once, so he used the walls. They never managed to surround him." She smiled, faintly. "He came out of it badly hurt, and still insisted he'd won."
Lin laughed softly. It sounded exactly like the person who had held a tunnel mouth against sovereign constructs because someone had asked him to.
"Then we look for hard terrain," he said. "Narrow valleys, passes, places where several people might end up fighting."
"There's one place that comes to mind. Blackstone Ridge."
She pointed north. "Steep cliffs, narrow passages, a handful of natural platforms where you can fight without being surrounded. I noticed the shape of it when we first started exploring."
"You've never been there?"
"No. But if Gu Chen wanted strong opponents in ground that favored him, that's where I'd look." She paused. "And the northern valley those two mentioned at the entrance. I think it drains out of that ridge."
The two threads came together in his mind and held. "Then we go there."
It was not an easy road.
The land grew rougher the further north they went. Boulders the size of houses blocked the obvious paths, and steep slopes forced them onto longer routes that doubled back on themselves. They camped that night beneath a ledge under Xia Qing's small ward, took turns watching, and rose before dawn to go on.
Xia Qing stopped from time to time to read the formations in the stone. Lin watched the ground, for herbs and for the marks other people left, and the marks were plentiful. Patches of vegetation had been stripped bare, or trampled in the middle of fights.
"Someone's been through here," Xia Qing said, kneeling beside one of them.
Lin knelt too and touched a broken stem. The root was still moist. "A few hours, no more."
The ground around it was a tangle of footprints, overlapping too much to count. "Do we follow them?"
"No." She shook her head. "These lead east, toward the valley. Blackstone Ridge is north."
"Then we keep going."
By the afternoon the trees thinned, and the ground gave way to dark, jagged stone. Faint traces of spiritual energy hung in the air, and now and then, from somewhere far off, came the thin sound of fighting.
Lin stopped beside a large boulder. "Wait."
There was a deep mark on its face. It wasn't a footprint. Something heavy had struck the stone with real force, cracking it in a spreading web.
"Someone fought here," he said.
Xia Qing examined the cracks. "Look at the direction." She pointed to a second damaged stone some distance away. "The blow came from that side."
There was more damage ahead: a few snapped branches, a shallow depression in the earth, a long scratch across a dark rock.
*Could it be Gu Chen?* He didn't let himself settle on the thought. Plenty of participants carried weapons capable of leaving marks like these. But the direction was right, and the direction was worth following.
"Let's follow the traces," he said.
The signs grew more frequent as they went. A tree had been severed clean through, the cut so smooth it looked polished. Beyond it, scattered fragments of stone lay across the path, and Xia Qing crouched beside one of them.
"This is fresh."
"How many fought?"
"I can't say exactly. But at least two spiritual signatures." She closed her eyes and listened to what the stone remembered. "One much stronger than the other. The weaker one is scattered, as though whoever it belonged to was driven backward again and again."
Lin looked up the passage ahead. "Gu Chen?"
"Possibly." She opened her eyes. "I can't confirm it."
The passage narrowed until the two sides of the mountain almost met. A sheer wall rose on their left, and on their right a rocky slope fell away into shadow.
"This matches what you described," Lin said.
"If he came to Blackstone Ridge, he may well have come through here."
A scrap of fabric caught his eye, wedged between two sharp stones, and he lifted it free. It was torn along one edge and scorched nearly black at the margins. He turned it over in his hand. The cloth underneath was grey.
Xia Qing took it and studied it. "Someone's robe."
"Do you recognize it?"
"No." She gave it back. "We all wear the same grey. A scrap of it isn't enough to tell whose."
He set it back where he'd found it. He wasn't going to mistake every clue for proof, though something about the passage insisted that a serious fight had happened here, and not long ago.
At its end the passage opened into a wide, rocky basin.
They entered it slowly.
The first thing Lin saw was the damage. A section of ground had collapsed into a shallow crater ringed with broken stone. Sword marks crossed the cliff beyond, and one of them was deeper than the rest. He walked to it and traced its edge with his eyes. It was clean and narrow, a cut made by a blade with great sharpness and a great deal of concentrated spiritual energy behind it.
"Someone with real sword control fought here," Xia Qing said, joining him.
"How strong?"
"Stronger than any ordinary participant." She studied another mark. "These strikes weren't random. Whoever made them knew exactly how far and how hard they were cutting."
There were no bodies in the basin. No Golden Spirit Vessel lying forgotten on the stone, no discarded weapons. Whoever had fought here had already gone, but the traces were fresh enough that the battle couldn't have ended long ago.
Near the crater's lip, he found a different kind of cut.
It was short and blunt, a downward stroke with the hilt dropped near the hip, ending hard against the stone as if the blade had struck a wall. He had seen it before, on the bark of a tree two days earlier.
*Same hand,* he thought. *Or the same stubbornness.*
He walked toward the northern trail, and at the base of a boulder he found a patch of grass crushed flat beneath a foot. Beyond it, faint prints led toward the upper ridge, and as he crouched beside them, something in his chest tightened.
The prints were uneven. The right heel dragged, and the weight fell on the outer edge of the foot.
"He's hurt," Lin said. "Same as the tracks on the stone shelf. The right heel."
Xia Qing knelt beside him and looked for a long moment. "It could be the same person."
"It could."
"Gu Chen?"
He stood. "I don't know." He looked up the trail. "But we're closer to something."
A faint breeze passed through the basin, and with it came a sound from above, thin and sharp: metal striking stone.
He lifted his head. Xia Qing had heard it too.
Their eyes met. Neither spoke.
They started up toward the ridge together, following the faint traces left behind, and somewhere beyond those rocks someone might still be fighting. If Lin's guess was right, the person they'd been searching for might finally be within reach.
**[Tournament Day: 7]**
**[Participants Remaining: Unknown]**
**[Host's Current Alliance Status: Xia Qing — Provisional | Gu Chen — Missing]**