By ten-thirty in the morning, the red volcanic gravel of Flame-Scar Canyon crunched beneath the Gu Family’s boots, smelling faintly of warm sulfur and roasted mountain pine.
Twenty-nine-year-old Gu Changsheng paused at the rim of the jagged basalt gorge and tilted the brim of his straw sun-hat back. Below them, a hundred-foot-wide canyon cut deep into the earth where ancient underground fire veins met an underground glacial river, sending thin ribbons of white steam curling into the clear spring sky.
“Whoa! Look down there, Dad!” seven-year-old Su Nuannuan pointed with her [Little Fairy Pink Watering Can] as she walked beside Little Snowball.
“The big black rocks are blowing white steam like your soup pot!
Are there dumpling monsters living inside the mountain?”
“Not dumpling monsters, Nuannuan,” Gu Changsheng chuckled, adjusting the bamboo shoulder pole carrying their three heavy picnic baskets and chilled watermelons. “Just thirty stone stove-helpers who haven’t had a proper boss in three hundred years. Keep your straw sun-hat tied under your chin so the warm wind doesn’t blow it off.”
Walking half a pace ahead on the right with his bamboo walking stick in hand, nine-year-old Gu Nian , at Rank 2 Peak, scanned the narrow stone switchback winding down into the canyon throat. Suddenly, his sharp dark eyes paused on a cluster of jagged black boulders three hundred yards up the eastern ridge.
“Dad,” nine-year-old Gu Nian murmured quietly so his voice wouldn’t echo off the cliffs, “there are six people hiding behind that tall black rock on the eastern ledge. Five of them are wearing black array-robes with copper wires in their hands, and the sixth one has white bandages wrapped around his ribs and a scarf over his jaw.”
Good eyes, Gu Changsheng smiled inwardly. At Rank 2 Peak, Nian’er spotted Lin Fan’s ambush point before Grandpa Fu even raised his spyglass.
“Those are just the canyon’s unpaid doorkeepers, Nian’er,” Gu Changsheng said casually as they strolled down the wide gravel ramp. “Don’t stare right at them, or Lin Fan might get stage fright and forget to pull the gate lever for us.”
Inside seven-year-old Su Nuannuan’s arms, three-hundred-and-eighty-year-old Grandpa Yao poked his fuzzy green head out of the [Jade-Turtle Plush Doll]’s collar. Squinted through his tiny gold spectacles at the cliff walls, and snorted under his breath:.
“Patriarch Gu, that unfilial rat Lin Fan really spent his last copper coin on this ambush! Look at the dark-iron chains threaded through the upper cliff crevices—he hired five rogue array-masters from the. Black-Blood Hall to link the canyon’s ten-ton meteoric iron gate directly to the ancient underground golem awakening rune!
The moment we walk past the stone archway at the bottom of the gorge. They’re going to drop the ten-ton gate behind us and wake up all thirty Rank 2 Peak Lava-Rock Golems at once!”
“Did he remember to oil the gate pulleys?” sixty-two-year-old Grandpa Fu asked with a frown, clicking his black-iron abacus as he inspected the cliff face with his single sharp eye. “If those Black-Blood Hall amateurs drop a ten-ton meteoric iron slab too hard and crack the stone threshold.
It’s going to take our golems an extra ten minutes to pry the door back open when we leave after lunch!”
“Don’t worry, Uncle Fu,” twenty-four-year-old Auntie Qin smiled gently, holding her linen parasol over Su Nuannuan and Gu Nian as they reached the bottom of the gorge. “With Brother Changsheng’s Earth-Fire Wok and three full baskets of hot-pot ingredients, even if we take a two-hour lunch break inside, the watermelon will still be icy-sweet.”
At the bottom of the canyon stood an ancient, fifty-foot-tall stone archway carved directly into the black volcanic cliff face, etched with weathered reliefs of a soaring ice-phoenix and a coiled earth-dragon.
Beyond the open archway stretched a vast, vaulted underground hall paved with six-foot granite flagstones—and drifting out from the far end of that hall was a faint. Unmistakable breeze of pure glacial starlight that made the [Innate Chaos Sovereign Bone] inside nine-year-old Gu Nian’s chest hum like a plucked harp string!
Stopping for a heartbeat beneath the stone archway, nine-year-old Gu Nian pressed his small right hand against his chest pocket:.
“Dad... I can feel it! Whatever Mom left for us eight years ago is right at the back of this hall!”
“Then let’s go right in,” Gu Changsheng smiled, leading Gu Nian, Su Nuannuan, Auntie Qin, Grandpa Fu, Grandpa Yao. Little Snowball straight across the threshold into the underground hall with their picnic baskets and juice flasks!
As they stepped into the lofty stone corridor, six-month-old Little Snowball trotted happily ahead of nine-year-old Gu Nian’s yellow bunny slippers, sniffing the ancient carved flagstones and giving two cheerful “Arf! Arf!” barks that echoed down the hall.
“Look, Big Brother Nian!” seven-year-old Su Nuannuan giggled, adjusting her yellow straw sun-hat with her free hand. “Even Little Snowball isn’t scared of the dark cave!
He knows Dad brought twenty braised drumsticks and a whole jar of honey-roasted chestnuts in Basket Number Two!”
“That’s because Little Snowball trusts Dad’s map,” nine-year-old Gu Nian smiled, patting the fluffy white puppy’s head before glancing up at the thick iron grooves cut into the ceiling arch above them. “Dad, the ten-ton iron gate up in that stone slot has freshly greased iron chains attached to it. Lin Fan is probably grabbing the lever right now.”
“Let him pull it,” Gu Changsheng chuckled, setting his bamboo picnic pole down in the center of the warm flagstones without a care in the world. “If he doesn’t lock the front gate, how are we supposed to enjoy our hot-pot without mosquitoes flying into the soup?”
*
Three hundred yards up on the scorching eastern ridge, hidden behind a jagged volcanic boulder. Swarms of thumb-sized canyon mosquitoes buzzed in the dry heat, eighteen-year-old Lin Fan [Luck Halo: 10%] was trembling from head to toe with deranged excitement!
His chest was still tightly bound in blood-stained linen wraps. Nine-year-old Gu Nian’s cast-iron pencil case had cracked six of his ribs at the Prefecture Arena yesterday, three of his teeth were missing. A red mosquito welt the size of a walnut was already swelling on his forehead—yet his bloodshot eyes burned with psychotic glee.
He watched the Gu Family stroll through the canyon archway below!
“Master Lin,” the gaunt, black-robed leader of the five Black-Blood Hall array-masters rasped. His fingers resting on a heavy iron release lever bolted into the cliff rock, “all five of them—Gu Changsheng, the two little brats, the alchemist woman. The one-eyed old butler—just walked past the inner boundary line carrying picnic baskets!
Not a single Pink-Apron guard stayed outside the gate!”
“BWAHAHAHA! Picnic baskets! They actually brought picnic baskets and a striped watermelon into a sealed death-tomb!”
Lin Fan laughed so hard he coughed up a fleck of dark blood onto his bandage.
“Gu Changsheng thought that just because his nine-year-old brat got lucky on the tournament stage yesterday, he could treat the ancient Flame-Scar Canyon Ruin like a suburban park!”
Gripping the heavy iron release lever with his uninjured right hand while the five dark-array masters channeled their qi into five hundred buried [Explosive Fire-Vein Stones], Lin Fan’s face twisted with venomous hatred:.
“Once this ten-ton Meteoric Dragon-Gate drops, there is no air vent and no second exit! Inside that first hall, thirty Rank 2 Peak Lava-Rock Golems forged by the ancient Sky-Flame Sect will wake up simultaneously while the underground magma troughs boil the room to a thousand degrees! Even a Rank 3 Martial Grandmaster locked inside that sealed stone furnace for two hours would be roasted into black charcoal—let alone a Rank 2 country patriarch and two grade-school brats!”
“What about the ancient treasure in the inner ice chamber, Master Lin?” one of the dark-array masters asked hesitantly.
“Jade and metal don’t melt in magma!” Lin Fan snarled. Throwing his entire weight down onto the iron release lever with a frantic roar: “Wait two hours.
Gu Changsheng and his brats are cooked into ash, then we’ll winch open the gate and loot their charred bones!
DIE, GU CHANGSHENG!”
CLANK—RUMBLE—KRA-BOOOOOOOOM!
Deep inside the volcanic cliff above the entrance archway, six massive iron counterweights disengaged at once!
With a deafening roar that shook the entire canyon floor and sent a cloud of red dust billowing a hundred feet into the air, a ten-ton. Three-foot-thick slab of solid black meteoric iron plunged down from the upper stone slot and slammed shut across the cavern entrance!
THUD-LOCK!
Twelve spring-loaded iron deadbolts the size of tree trunks snapped into the granite floor sockets, sealing the underground hall completely from the outside world!
Outside on the sun-baked ridge, eighteen-year-old Lin Fan dropped to his knees in the red dirt and howled with triumphant laughter—right before three canyon mosquitoes landed on his nose and stung him simultaneously!
*
Meanwhile, just twenty feet inside the newly sealed meteoric iron gate, not a single member of the Gu Family even flinched as the ten-ton door crashed down behind their heels.
Seven-year-old Su Nuannuan turned her yellow straw sun-hat around, blinked her big dark eyes in the sudden dimness, and tugged lightly on Gu Changsheng’s sleeve:.
“Dad! The noisy brother outside really shut the big iron door for us just like you said! It blocked all the hot dust and mosquitoes outside!”
“Very considerate of him,” twenty-nine-year-old Gu Changsheng nodded approvingly as sixty-two-year-old Grandpa Fu calmly lit two bright fluorite lanterns and hung them on their bamboo picnic poles. “Out in the canyon sun, there were too many bugs buzzing around our watermelon. By closing the wind-break door, Lin Fan just turned this front hall into a private indoor dining room.”
RUMBLE—CRACKLE—ROOOOOAR!
At that exact moment, triggered by the dropping of the ten-ton Dragon-Gate and the five hundred fire-vein stones outside. The underground stone channels running along both walls of the hundred-foot-wide cavern suddenly lit up with rivers of glowing orange-red magma!
And from thirty towering alcoves carved into the black basalt pillars along the left and right sides of the hall, sixty fist-sized eyes of burning crimson flame snapped open in the dark!
STOMP! STOMP! STOMP!
Shaking off three hundred years of volcanic dust. The flagstones trembled beneath their heavy stone feet, thirty twelve-foot-tall. Four-thousand-pound [Rank 2 Peak Lava-Rock Golems]—their obsidian armor crisscrossed by glowing veins of molten rock—marched out of their alcoves to surround the Gu Family in a tight semicircle!
Raising sixty boulder-sized stone fists into the air, the thirty ancient Lava-Rock Golems let out a synchronized, grinding stone roar that echoed off the vaulted ceiling:.
“INTRUDERS... IN... THE...
FLAME... SANCTUM... DETECTED!
CRUSH... AND... INCINERATE!”
Looking up at the thirty twelve-foot stone giants with glowing magma veins, seven-year-old Su Nuannuan tilted her head back until she had to hold her straw sun-hat with one hand:.
“Whoa! Big Brother Nian, look how tall the stone uncles are! If they help Uncle Wu dig the dandelion beds at school, one stone hand can dig a whole row in one scoop!”
Stepping half a pace in front of his little sister with his hand resting calmly on his [Fused Cast-Iron Pencil Case]. Nine-year-old Gu Nian , at Rank 2 Peak, inspected the thirty lumbering stone giants with his sharp, disciplined eyes:.
“Dad, all thirty of them have Rank 2 Peak stone shells. If Nuannuan and I smash them into gravel, Grandpa Yao says the magma veins in the floor will just glue them back together in five minutes. How do we make them stop shouting and help us carry the picnic baskets?”
Inside Nuannuan’s arms, three-hundred-and-eighty-year-old Grandpa Yao pushed up his tiny gold spectacles with his green plush turtle flipper and pointed straight toward the center of the underground hall—where a sixty-foot-tall. Eight-sided [Obsidian Array Control Obelisk] stood pulsing with ancient crimson runes:.
“Patriarch Gu! Look at that sixty-foot black obelisk in the center of the chamber! All thirty Lava-Rock Golems draw their movement commands and geothermal power from the [Master Core Rune] carved forty feet up that pillar!
Whoever overwrites the Master Core Rune on that obelisk becomes the absolute commander of all thirty golems!”
Hearing Grandpa Yao’s words, twenty-nine-year-old Gu Changsheng looked up at the sixty-foot obsidian control obelisk, then looked at the thirty tireless, self-heating twelve-foot stone giants standing around them. A broad, radiant smile spread across his face:.
“Thirty Rank 2 Peak geothermal workers that never get tired, never eat grain, thaw frozen winter farmland with their warm stone feet, and can wash ten thousand soup bowls an hour? Grandpa Fu, take out your Frost-Pine Agricultural Plowing Manual—Dad is about to give these thirty big fellows a permanent job upgrade!”
[ DING! CANYON SEALED — 30x RANK 2 PEAK LAVA GOLEMS AWAKENED! ]
* Trap Status : 10-Ton Meteoric Gate Closed; 30 Lava-Rock Golems.
Surrounding the Party!
* Grandpa Yao’s Tip: All 30 Golems are slaved to the 60-Foot.
[Central Obsidian Control Obelisk]!
* Daily Income : +190,000 DP/day -> +200,000 DP/day!