Chương 27: The Crane River Valley

The Jade Obelisk was larger than any single description in the journal had prepared Zero for. It rose from the valley floor in a single unbroken column of pale green stone, easily over sixty meters tall by Zero's estimation, its surface catching the morning light in shifting translucent patterns that made it difficult to look at directly for more than a few seconds at a time. The river curved around its base in a wide, deliberate arc, as though the water itself had long ago learned to give the structure room.

But what struck Zero more than the column's size was the comparative lack of anything else in the valley. He had expected, based on nothing more than the scale of the structure itself, that a landmark this significant would draw crowds. Instead, the valley floor held perhaps three or four small camps, modest and spread well apart from one another, each one clearly a single team's footprint rather than the gathering grounds of dozens.

"Fewer people than I expected," Viria said, echoing Zero's thoughts.

"The journal's author spent eleven years searching for this place and only found it through a hidden inscription," Miho said.

"If it took him that long, with dedicated effort, it stands to reason most teams haven't found it at all. The ones who have are the exception, not the rule."

"Then… why do any of them know to look?"

"The same reason we did," Zero said.

"The task itself: Locate the Obelisk, and learn a technique from its walls. Every team received that objective after they crossed the Cloud Sea. Most are likely still searching. These few simply searched well, or were fortunate." They descended into the valley along the tree line, the same cautious approach Miho's instincts had favored since the floating island, watching the distant camps for any sign of hostility before committing to open ground.

The closer they came, the more the site's true structure revealed itself. The column was not alone. Around its base, in a wide ring, stood worn stone platforms, each one carved with the unmistakable texture of imprinted technique: sword-marks and hand-prints and the long grooved scars of weapons Zero did not recognize, layered across what looked like centuries of separate visitors, each leaving some fragment of themselves behind.

A pair of cultivators from the nearest camp stood before one of the platforms, one of them tracing a hand-print groove with careful, repeated motion, the other watching and murmuring something Zero couldn't make out at this distance.

"They're working the public trial," Yukito said.

"The walls."

"As we'll need to, eventually," Miho said.

"But that's not our current priority."

They found a clear stretch of riverbank well apart from the nearest camp and set down their packs.

"First priority," Miho said, "is confirming what we actually know, versus what we're assuming. The journal said the rabbit dwells within the Obelisk, not the hunting grounds beyond it. It also referred to presenting the cores at the heart of the Obelisk. And I have a feeling that it doesn't refer to the column itself."

"Why not?" Viria asked.

"Because the column is exactly what every other team here is already investigating," Zero said, following Miho's reasoning.

"If the offering site were simply the base of the column, in plain view, surrounded by a ring that dozens of teams have presumably already explored in some fashion over however many times that this competition has used this world, that someone would have stumbled onto it by now. A complete eleven-core offering is a high bar, but the site itself shouldn't be that well hidden if it's sitting in the open."

"So the heart isn't here," Yukito said.

"Not literally, at least."

"I think… the heart is something else entirely," Zero said.

"A separate structure, maybe? Hidden, definitely, like how the inscription that led the journal's author here was hidden beneath a column, accessible only at a specific angle of moonlight. The 'heart' may be a place within the wider complex, not the column's physical center." Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more. Miho was quiet for a moment, turning this over with the particular stillness she used when a theory was reorganizing something she'd already half-assembled.

"A Dragon Gate," she said slowly. The others looked at her.

"It's not in the journal directly," she said, "but the riddle the system gave us after Shenhua called it the 'unfinished dragon'. If the offering's purpose is to summon what the dragon represents, the structure that receives it would logically share that name. A gate, not a column. Something built to open, not to stand still. A threshold, if you will."

"That tracks with the imagery," Zero said.

"Gates are crossed. Columns are just there." Viria looked between them.

"So we're looking for a second hidden thing, inside a place that's already mostly hidden."

"Yes," Miho said.

"Wonderful."

They spent the remainder of the day observing rather than searching directly, a deliberate choice on Miho's part once she'd weighed the risk of drawing attention against the value of understanding the valley's layout first.

The nearest camp, when Zero finally approached it under the pretense of trading information, belonged to a team that had seemingly lost a member, and the remaining three were weathered and clearly exhausted from both their loss, and what looked like days of repeated, unsuccessful attempts at the wall trial.

"You're new," the team's apparent leader said, a broad-shouldered man with a long scar along one forearm. He did not seem hostile, only tired.

"Don't bother with the third platform from the east. We've had two people try the hand-print sequence there and both came away with qi backlash bad enough to need a full day's recovery."

"Thank you," Zero said.

"Have you made progress elsewhere?" The man's expression soured slightly.

"Some. My second managed a partial comprehension on the sword-mark wall, north side. Didn't complete it. The marks are old, and whoever left them was operating on principles our sect never taught." He looked at Zero for a moment, assessing.

"You're not local to any of the sects, are you?"

"No," Zero said.

"We're not." The man seemed to accept this without further question, the way most people had learned to after some time.

"Good luck with the walls, then," he said.

"You'll need it. Nobody's managed a clean technique yet, not here, not as far as I've heard from anyone else who's found this place." Zero noted, carefully, that the man said nothing about cores, an offering, or a dragon. His entire frame of reference for the Obelisk was the public task and the public task alone. He returned to the others with that confirmation.

"He doesn't know," Zero said.

"None of them seem to. Whatever lies beyond the wall trial is invisible to anyone who hasn't read what we found."

"Good," Miho said.

"That's an advantage. Let's not give it away."

They spent the following morning circling the valley's perimeter, away from the column and the camps both, working from the logic that a structure deliberately hidden from casual discovery would not sit beside the most heavily trafficked point in the area. It was Yukito, eventually, who found the irregularity: a section of riverbank where the water's flow curved unnaturally, bending around something beneath the surface that the current should have, by any ordinary logic, long since worn away.

"There," he said, crouching at the bank's edge, his shadow already testing the water's edge with the particular care he used when something felt wrong in a way he couldn't yet name.

"The river shouldn't curve like that. Not against rock this soft." Zero knelt beside him and ran Identify on the riverbed itself. IDENTIFICATION ACTIVE: Obstruction (Submerged) Type: Formation-stabilized structure Status: Concealed, qi-active Note: Significant qi signature detected beneath standard sensory range. Full analysis requires closer proximity.

"Formation-stabilized," Zero said.

"Concealed deliberately. Qi-active, which means whatever it is, it isn't simply old stone. Something is still maintaining it." Miho came to stand beside them, looking at the water with new attention.

"That's it," she said.

"That has to be it." Viria peered down at the bend in the river, the water dark and unrevealing where it curved around whatever lay beneath.

"So the Dragon Gate is underwater. Lovely."

"Or under something the water has been built to hide," Zero said.

"We won't know until we look closer." The afternoon light was beginning to lower toward the western ridge, and Miho looked at the sky, weighing the day's remaining hours against the unknown risk of whatever waited beneath the current.

"Tomorrow," she said.

"At first light. We go in rested, not rushed." No one argued with that. They returned to their own camp as the sun set behind the valley's ridges, the Obelisk's column catching the last color of the day in slow, shifting patterns, and beneath the river's surface, unseen by any of the other teams scattered across the valley floor, something old and patient continued to hold its shape against water that had been trying, for longer than any of them could guess, to wear it away.