Xi Yi turned around at the sound.
He was still holding only the nearly extinguished torch, with nothing else in hand.
Sha Yi knew all too well that finding a dry branch in such a torrential downpour in the open was nearly impossible, so she wasn’t particularly surprised. Instead, she pointed to the considerable amount of resin on the nearby tree and spoke to him earnestly.
Her grasp of the ancient language was somewhat clumsy, and her vocabulary was quite limited. As a result, she had to repeat herself three or four times, accompanied by gestures, before Xi Yi fully understood. He then mimicked her actions, scooping out some resin as well.
However, his expression didn’t match his actions—he looked bewildered and somewhat confused, as if he believed a liquid couldn’t possibly be used for burning.
Sha Yi didn’t explain. She simply motioned for him to try it while continuing to gather resin herself.
They needed enough fuel to sustain the torch because the forest was dimly lit and fraught with danger. Fire could effectively deter certain threats. Moreover, if resin could serve as fuel, even in heavy rain, the torch wouldn’t extinguish easily as long as it was slightly protected beneath the dense layers of leaves.
The problem was that the resin wasn’t easy to collect, especially the hardened bits. Left with no choice, she took Xi Yi’s bone knife to scrape it off. Just as she had removed most of the resin from the tree bark, she heard Xi Yi’s voice behind her.
It was a sound mixed with surprise and delight—apparently, he had reached a positive conclusion from the resin’s burning performance.
Sha Yi didn’t turn around. Instead, she found a leaf nearby to wrap the collected resin in. When she finally glanced back, she caught sight of an eerie yet familiar ochre metallic glint and immediately froze.
Noticing her reaction, Xi Yi paused his task of adding resin to the torch and leaned over, asking softly with a hint of confusion.
He was asking her what she had seen.
Sha Yi suddenly realized that their communication had grown increasingly smooth. Though there were still moments of confusion and repetition, compared to their earlier struggles of speaking entirely different “languages,” they could now understand each other much better without excessive gesturing. Many of his words, she could grasp instantly.
Thinking this, she pointed to the charred cluster of trees struck by lightning on the slope below and whispered, “Do you see that thick vine? The ochre one, extremely long, coiled around all the lightning-struck trees. When we were in that shelter, the area around the settlement had the same thing.”
Most of her words were spoken in the ancient language, though she skipped a few terms whose pronunciation she wasn’t sure of. If she had defaulted to her mother tongue, it would only have made it harder for Xi Yi to understand.
Fortunately, she managed to convey the general idea, and he seemed to grasp her meaning without needing repetition or gestures. He immediately headed down the slope.
Sha Yi knelt where she was, watching him go. After a moment of silence, she couldn’t help but call out softly, “Xi Yi, be careful…”
Again, she used the ancient language, but this time, her pronunciation was surprisingly fluent. Xi Yi turned at the sound, staring at her in mild astonishment before breaking into a delighted grin.
Sha Yi flushed with embarrassment under his gaze, further mortified by his teasing laughter. Unable to help herself, she scolded him under her breath and grabbed a small clod of dirt at her feet to toss at him.
Xi Yi playfully blocked it, laughing even harder.
Seeing that her protests were futile, Sha Yi simply ignored him and turned back to fiddling with the resin in the leaf bundle.
Xi Yi chuckled a while longer before finally turning to search for the thick vine down the slope.
After wrapping the resin securely in the leaf and adding some to the torch stuck in the ground, Sha Yi waited for a while but saw no sign of Xi Yi returning. Growing anxious, she turned to look just as he was climbing back up the slope.
Xi Yi must have yanked out the entire thick vine because he was practically buried under its metallic ochre mass. This time, the vine wasn’t as large as the one she had seen among the ruins of the forest settlement, but they looked identical.
When Xi Yi reached her side and dropped the pile of thick vines, she realized that they didn’t grow from the soil. Their roots weren’t concentrated at one end either—instead, they were evenly distributed along one side of the vine, resembling the habits of parasitic plants. Most likely, they relied on dense, suction-cup-like tendrils to latch onto tree trunks and absorb nutrients.
However, she couldn’t help but suspect the vine’s danger. It had appeared around two separate clusters of lightning-struck trees. Before this, when the giant tree by the river was struck, it had been alone, and she hadn’t seen any trace of such a vine nearby.
Now, she couldn’t understand why it appeared around lightning-struck trees. Based on what she had seen in the forest settlement, she suspected it had lightning-attracting properties. But if that were the case, what benefit did it gain from the trees being struck? Moreover, did it possess any resistance to lightning itself?
Xi Yi clearly didn’t recognize the vine either. He examined it repeatedly but found nothing unusual. During his inspection, however, Sha Yi noticed that despite being as thick as an arm, the vine was surprisingly soft and smooth to the touch.
Baffled, she couldn’t make sense of it and eventually signaled for Xi Yi to toss it aside.
Seeing her lose interest, Xi Yi casually flung the vine away. But as he did, it happened to slide across the bone knife in her hand, slicing open its surface.
A stream of translucent liquid dotted with green specks spilled out.
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