Where to go from here

"Blasting the mountain?"

Fatso's eyes widened immediately upon hearing this. This guy is also a tough nut, not realizing that my wound had just stopped bleeding? He just tossed me aside, and the movement made my wound hurt like hell, my whole body felt numb. I was about to scold him when Fatso beat me to it and started berating Qingyi: "Have you lost your mind? Who comes up with the idea of blasting a mountain? We brought detonators in case we got trapped inside an ancient tomb and needed to blast our way out to survive! Now we're safe, the mission is complete, why the hell would you want to blast the mountain? Don't you know the organization's rules? We are strictly forbidden from causing any conflicts with government departments during a mission, and now you want to blast the mountain? The detonators I have are not filled with ordinary black powder for blasting stones, but with high explosives. Once they go off, half of the Qinling Mountains will hear it. What if it alarms the nearby villagers and they call the police? What if we get caught? Not only will we be punished for breaking the organization's rules, but dealing with the officials will also become a nightmare. Even if we set aside the mountain blasting, just being charged with tomb raiding is enough to get us all in deep trouble, we could end up in prison for life!"

"We can't worry about that now."

Qingyi frowned and said, "I joined the organization to deal with these calamities, not for the reward, but to maintain the order between the yin and yang realms. That's the purpose of the organization! As long as the Cursed Dragon Land exists for one more day, there will be no peace in the Qinling Mountains. Don't forget, there are many more filthy things in the Ten Deadly Tombs. If we don't destroy the Cursed Dragon Land, given time, these things will definitely grow in power. Then, the area around the Qinling Mountains will become barren. It's better to deal with the Cursed Dragon Land now and let them wander around the Qinling Mountains. I estimate that soon, there will be a large number of ghost soldiers coming up from the underworld to capture them!"

"Did you just inform the underworld about the situation here with the Taoist talisman?"

Fatso's eyes bulged out upon hearing this: "The Taoist master is awesome, directly communicating with the underworld, taking on the responsibility of maintaining the order of both realms!"

"The Ten Deadly Tombs and the Cursed Dragon Land should never have appeared in the living world!"

Qingyi frowned and said, "This is originally a negligence of the underworld. They should clean up their own mess. If not for..."

He stopped abruptly, as if he had some reservations and didn't want to continue, and quickly changed the subject, urging Fatso to go blast the mountain, promising to take all the consequences upon himself and explain to the organization later.

Fatso reluctantly crawled into the mountain at the dragon's head position. We couldn't help with this kind of thing, we could only wait at the foot of the mountain.

Actually, Fatso is an amateur at this kind of work. Blasting mountains should be the job of the Mountain Movers and Ridge Unloaders, as I've mentioned before, both of these tomb-robbing schools are actually private thieves in the folk. They don't have much technique in their work; it's all brute force. In ancient times, they used tools to rob tombs, but now they've turned to high technology, learning about blasting points and such, blasting open ancient tombs to rob them of their treasures. Fatso is a Touch Gold Captain, and this kind of work is purely amateur for him, so it took a long time. It wasn't until dawn that he came down with a bunch of fuses. I asked him if everything was set up properly, and he patted his chest and assured me that there was no problem. He had placed a detonator on every strange rock in that stone forest. Once the fuse was lit, it would surely blow everything to smithereens.

I was speechless when I heard this. If you flatten the entire mountaintop, can this place still be called a dragon vein? The feng shui would be completely destroyed, and the true dragon vein would be forcibly changed into a false dragon vein. But that's not a big deal, a false dragon vein is still better than the Cursed Dragon Land. I checked the "Secret Techniques of Serving the Ball" again for the introduction to feng shui, and finally confirmed that the worst Fatso could do was to destroy the feng shui of the dragon vein, and it wouldn't cause any other problems, so I nodded in agreement.

However, because Fatso had rigged too many detonators, we definitely didn't dare to stand at the foot of the mountain when the blasting happened. If the detonators on the mountain went off, the whole mountaintop would be flattened, and with rocks flying everywhere, standing at the foot of the mountain would be asking for trouble. We could easily be hit by a flying rock and that would be the end of us. We had survived so many dangers, and no one wanted to die at this critical moment. So we discussed and started to retreat. Because of Fatso's plan to blast the mountain, Qingyi had to carry me, the injured one. We retreated a good two or three miles before finally stopping, finding a place to wait for Fatso to blast the mountain. It wasn't long before we heard a huge "boom" from Fatso's direction. Even from a distance, we could see flames reaching the sky on the mountain at the dragon's head position, and the ground under our feet was trembling non-stop. This really scared us, thinking just how much high explosive Fatso had packed in those detonators; the noise was much louder than the detonators used for blasting granite in mountain openings.

After a while, Fatso came running back, drenched in sweat. Seeing us here, he yelled at the top of his lungs: "What are you waiting for? Such a big commotion will definitely alert the police. If we don't run now, are we waiting to be taken to the station for tea?"

With that, Fatso took over from Qingyi and carried me away.

We had completely resolved the problem of the Qinling Mountains, and we decided to leave this place first. However, because we had lost our supplies, we suffered a lot on the way. We ate what Rosa hunted from the forest. To avoid the police, we traveled at night and rested during the day. We spent more than ten days wandering in the Qinling Mountains before we finally saw the Guangyuan Village we had come from. Our car had been stored in this village. Fatso sneaked into the village to scout and came out to tell us that the police had never come. I was so angry I wanted to strangle him on the spot. It seemed that our mountain blasting hadn't alerted the police at all. It was just Fatso being paranoid, forcing us to travel at night and rest during the day, messing up our internal clocks. My wound had healed poorly over these days.

But at least we saw some human habitation, which was a good thing. We stayed in Guangyuan Village that night. Zhou Jing and I stayed with the same hostess as before. When she saw me come out of the Qinling Mountains covered in wounds, she nagged me during dinner, saying I should have listened to her, that the deep mountains were not to be entered. Then she started telling me the story of a man from their village who went into the mountains and came back to make his wife scream so loud that half the village could hear it, and then he died a few days later...

I was speechless, but after escaping death, I became much calmer and didn't blush anymore. I even teased the hostess, asking her how the man's wife screamed, which made her blush and slap me, calling me a rascal before leaving.

That night, I talked with Mulan for a while before falling asleep until morning. When we left, I left a thousand yuan for the hostess and left quietly. I had been through too much on this trip, and it was good to do more good deeds.

On the way back, we drove, and after two days on the road, we finally returned to Xi'an. We found a budget hotel to stay in, agreed to rest for the afternoon, and planned to have a good meal in the evening. We had survived a great disaster and deserved to enjoy ourselves!

Since I had used Qingyi's medicine, the wound on my chest had healed quickly and seemed to be no big deal, so I didn't go to the hospital. I sorted out my things and lay down to sleep. But before I closed my eyes for long, Fatso came in without saying a word and drove Zhou Jing and Heizi out. Seeing this, I was a bit puzzled and asked Fatso what was up.

"It's all because I'm worried about you, kid!"

Fatso patted my shoulder and said, "Actually, I came to ask what your plans are for the future? Now that the Qinling Mountains issue is resolved, have you thought about your own path?"

Fatso's question really stumped me, and I couldn't help but lower my head in silence.

Indeed, where should I go from here?