Beside a long-cold campfire, Wei noticed it again—
a blade of wild grass tied into a tight knot.
It was Chun's habit.
Whenever she grew nervous, her fingers would twist the nearest blade of grass and knot it without thinking.
He brushed the stem with the pads of his fingers, gently, as if touching a trace she had left behind.
Then he stood and surveyed the ground around him.
The earth was trampled into chaos, footprints layered over one another in the dust. Yet near the dying campfire he managed to pick out two lighter sets of tracks.
One large, one small.
The larger stride was steady.
The smaller one wandered slightly, uneven.
Something pressed tight against Wei's chest. He dropped to his knees beside the tracks and studied them carefully—and soon noticed something else.
Scratched into the yellow earth with a stone were a word.
—Tianjing.
The handwriting was neat. It was unmistakably Chun's.
Wei stared at the words for a long time.
His fingers slowly settled over the marks.
The strokes were fresh, as if written not long ago—yet they were not hurried.
His fingertips traced along the lines.
The final stroke of jing stretched unusually long.
It did not look like part of a word.
It looked more like—
a mark slashed out in haste.
Wei lifted his head and scanned the surroundings, then lowered his gaze again to the characters.
Tianjing…
He repeated the word silently, again and again, unable to grasp its meaning.
Yet he had the faint sense that the final stroke
was not written carelessly.
Zhang San and Li Si met again inside the stronghold. Neither of them looked pleased.
They had assumed there would at least be something left in the chieftain's treasure store. But after searching the place from end to end, they found the chests empty, the shelves bare. Even the overturned cabinets on the ground held nothing but a thin layer of dust.
Li Si swore under his breath. "Those bastards cleaned the place out completely."
Zhang San, however, frowned thoughtfully. He opened his palm.
A few broken pieces of silver lay there.
"This was in the boss's pocket. Why didn't they take it?"
Li Si thought for a moment, then lowered his voice. "Brother… do you think maybe some of our own people survived? Came back later and stripped the place?"
"That's possible." Zhang San's eyes narrowed at once as he began scanning the area.
The gesture made Li Si uneasy as well. If those supposed survivors were really hiding nearby, the first thing they might do upon seeing the two of them return would be to silence them.
Just then a sudden yi-yi-ya-ya sound drifted over.
Both men turned at the same time.
Wei was crouched on the ground, pointing at something, making urgent, muffled noises.
Frowning, Zhang San walked over and followed the direction of Wei's finger.
Then he froze.
A word had been scratched into the dust with a stone.
"Tianjing?"
"Who wrote this?" Zhang San asked in a low voice.
A flicker of fear crossed Wei's face. He shook his head—whether because he did not understand or simply did not know.
Li Si rubbed his chin and stared into the distance.
"Tianjing? Could it mean… Tianjing City?" It was the largest city in southern area.
He looked up at Zhang San, lowering his voice further.
"You think those killers came from Tianjing?"
Zhang San was silent for a moment before nodding.
"Very likely," he said. "Look at how they worked. Clean kills. Even the boss was taken down with a single strike. Men who've never seen blood don't move that neatly."
The more he spoke, the more convinced he became. A trace of confidence even crept onto his face.
At that moment, Wei suddenly leapt to his feet.
It was as if something had occurred to him. He hurried toward a nearby stone wall.
Zhang San shot Li Si a glance and jerked his chin.
Li Si immediately understood and followed quietly behind.
Wei stood before the wall, head lowered, staring at the ground—but inside his mind raced.
The reason those characters had caught his attention was the handwriting.
It was Chun's.
Yet it was subtly different from the three characters she had written earlier on the ground—Two-Dragon Mountain.
Those words had been written hastily, the strokes crooked, clearly left in panic and danger.
But Tianjing was different.
Every stroke was firm, deliberate, pressed deeply into the earth—as though someone had meant to leave a clear mark.
As though…
she were sending a message.
Yet strangely, the final stroke suddenly became hurried, dragging far longer than the rest.
Wei's heart gave a sharp jolt.
Unless—
that stroke had not been meant for the word at all.
But to…
point a direction.
Unable to state it openly, she had used the stroke itself to indicate where to go.
Wei immediately crouched down and began searching carefully along the base of the wall.
Wild grass grew everywhere here, tangled through the cracks of the stone and nearly covering the ground.
Large bits of junk were piled carelessly among the weeds—an old wagon missing a wheel, abandoned wooden frames, sun-cracked lumps of dried clay.
But amid the grass he suddenly spotted a faint depression.
Like a footprint.
Wei's breathing quickened at once.
Following the faint trace forward, he took a few slow steps—then abruptly stopped.
In a sudden motion he thrust out both hands and tore aside a thick clump of weeds.
The grass parted.
A dark opening appeared beneath it.
The hole was small and almost perfectly hidden by the grass. Without looking carefully, no one would have noticed it at all.
When Li Si saw it, he could not help blurting out, "Ah!"
Zhang San rushed over at once.
The two men nearly moved at the same time, grabbing Wei by the shoulder and shoving him aside.
They did not bother with anything else. Both leaned forward to peer inside.
The darkness within the hole was thick as ink. A cold breath of air slowly drifted out.
Zhang San's eyes widened more and more. Even his voice began to tremble.
"Well I'll be damned…"
He swallowed, forcing his voice low, though the excitement was impossible to hide.
"The kid actually found a treasure cave!"
He stared again into the pitch-black opening, his hands trembling with excitement.
"All these years… and we never even knew this place existed."