Chapter 166 - Solitary Resolve
The rain finally ceased an hour after the Puhuna had vanished into the shadows of the valley, leaving behind a heavy, suffocating silence. The torrential downpour, which had seemed intent on drowning the world, had finally spent its fury, but the landscape it left in its wake was one of ruin.
Two or three hours later, Lu Songping arrived, accompanied by a small contingent of Black Feather Guards. Their arrival had been hampered by the treacherous terrain; massive landslides had choked the valley’s entrance, forcing the elite unit to spend an agonizing amount of time clearing mud and debris before they could even set foot within the basin. The valley itself was a scene of utter devastation. The rain had extinguished the fires that had previously ravaged the woods and undergrowth, but it had also saturated the loose soil of the surrounding mountains. Every few minutes, the sound of shifting earth echoed through the mist as more silt and stone tumbled down, re-burying the paths that had only just been cleared.
Amidst this chaotic landscape, Xiao Nanhui stood on the mid-slope of a ridge, her figure silhouetted against the gray, leaden sky. She was wielding a heavy iron shovel—the same one she had used the day before to transplant the plum trees. With grim, silent determination, she drove the blade into the sodden earth, heave after heave, clearing away the muck that had buried the mountain's secrets.
She had been digging for three full hours without a moment’s pause. Though the chill of early autumn had begun to seep through the mountain air following the storm, she was drenched. Sweat poured down her face, mingling with the grime of the landslide, and her several layers of clothing were plastered to her skin, soaked through with both perspiration and the dampness of the morning mist. Her muscles ached with a dull, throbbing heat, and her hands were raw from the friction of the wooden handle, but she did not slow her pace. Every shovelful of earth felt like a battle against the mountain itself.
Lu Songping stood a short distance away, positioned beneath a small pine tree that had been tilted precariously by the force of the mudslides. He watched her in silence, his expression unreadable and cold. Further back, the other Black Feather Guards stood like statues in the morning fog. Motionless and stern, they seemed almost indistinguishable from the gnarled pines and cold stones of the valley, their presence adding a layer of oppressive stillness to the air.
"Stop digging," Lu Songping finally said, his voice cutting through the rhythmic sound of the shovel.
Xiao Nanhui did not look up. She didn't even break her rhythm. "There’s an opening here," she grunted, her voice thick with exertion and a stubborn refusal to yield. "This is where they left. They used a hidden passage. If I can just clear this entrance, we can take a team and pursue them before the trail goes cold..."
"They have been gone for hours," Lu Songping countered, his tone flat and devoid of any sympathy. "The Puhuna do not leave trails for the likes of us to follow. How exactly do you intend to catch them now?"
"Even if we can't catch them immediately, there will be clues!" she snapped, finally pausing to lean against the handle of the shovel. She wiped a streak of mud from her forehead with the back of a trembling hand, her eyes flashing with a desperate, frantic fire. "If we know which path they took out of the valley, we can send word to the provincial borders. We can set up checkpoints, alert the local garrisons, and trap them before they vanish into the wilderness entirely."
"If that is the goal," Lu Songping said coolly, his gaze shifting to the horizon, "it would be far more efficient for me to simply deploy my troops to the main thoroughfares and block the strategic passes now. That would be significantly faster than you standing here trying to move a mountain by yourself with a garden tool."
The logic of his words only served to fuel the irritation simmering beneath Xiao Nanhui’s skin. The frustration of the night’s failures, the disappearance of the Puhuna, and the sheer physical exhaustion of her labor boiled over into a sharp, jagged anger. With a sudden, violent motion, she slammed the iron shovel into a narrow rock crevice, the metal ringing out with a harsh, discordant sound.
"Lu Songping, do you truly have nothing better to do?" she hissed, her voice trembling with suppressed rage. "Why are you bothering me here? Why aren't you out searching for Ding Weixiang? Or that man, Luo He? Why must you insist on hovering over me like a shadow, reminding me of everything we've lost?!"
Lu Songping’s expression remained indifferent, clearly having adopted that same inscrutable composure that defined the high-ranking officials of the capital. He looked at her not with pity, but with a detached observation that made her feel even more isolated in her struggle.
