Chapter Ninety-Seven: The Underground Cave

Probably no one except Hua Feng and Yunmeng could understand their predicament at this moment. In the Night Return Hotel, spanning all twenty-two floors, fewer than ten human beings still remained awake and fully conscious.

Hua Feng probed silently with his spiritual sense; the feedback in the sea of awareness within him showed that many had drifted into sleep, but not all. The fashionably dressed guide was one notable exception.

At twelve-ten past midnight, the hotel lobby was an empty, dim space, with only the shift staff hovering in a half-drowsy stupor. The guide from Heavenly Path Travel appeared in the lobby wearing a light, loose sleepwear, his expression strangely altered. He was wholly unlike the loquacious human he had been in the daytime, as if an entirely different man had taken his place. Hua Feng did not know what the glowing, flickering object in his hand was. He only felt it was something that captured the gradually fading human vitality—the life-force of people slipping into lethargy—and sealed it in a bottle by some unknown method, and it seemed this had already been done before his spiritual scan began.

“Xiaomeng, let’s tail him now. I want to see what he really intends.”

“Don’t rush, Brother Hua Feng. Look—someone has already moved ahead of me.”

Only then did Hua Feng realize that at some moment, when the dragon-guide stepped into the lobby and quickly left the hotel, there was already someone following him. It seemed that person had also watched for a long while the guide and the group’s irregular behavior.

“Then we must not fall behind at all. Follow him. The enemy of our enemy is a friend—perhaps someone on the same path.”

“Right. We can’t let them take the lead.”

The two of them opened a window, concealed their forms, and with the greatest speed flew toward the guide’s location fixed by mind-sight.

Facing the faintly cool night wind, Hua Feng suddenly felt a sensation like two birds in paired flight, as if he had long been used to this way of traveling, utterly different from his former habits. To have one person who can stand beside you whenever needed is a comfort beyond measure; for many people, that sense of reliance is the wellspring of the strength that lets them face life’s endless challenges.

Each day is crowded with its own hardships and pleasures inside every heart. As those days pile up one upon another, the world quietly changes in ways that one day will reveal themselves as earth-shaking.

The guide rode his motorcycle hard all the way to the woods beside Xuanwu Lake. As he saw there were no people nearby, he parked the bike, slipped into the trees for a short distance, and then vanished in a flash, swallowed by the dancing shadows on the ground beneath the branches. The black-clad man behind him did not hesitate and disappeared shortly thereafter. It felt uncanny, almost unbelievable. Apart from the trees, the motorcycle sat where it was left, and beyond it everything else looked as if nothing at all had happened.

Hua Feng and Yunmeng, relying on the Wind-Riding Technique, followed in his wake, and in their awareness they felt the guide in his Jiaolong form descend underground.