Zou Liqin was left stunned when she saw Yu Mei immediately pass out after leaving behind sentences she couldn't make heads or tails about.
However, even in the confusion, she headed to her brother's side first to confirm his state. She heaved a sigh of relief when she confirmed his breathing seemed normal. He seemed to have passed out from exertion from his injuries, the side effects of the red suckle berserker fruit, and whatever effects the river had left on them.
She did try to wake him up after confirming his body was okay, but she got no response. She moved on to He Shan, who was a couple of steps over, but just like Zou Yi, he was knocked out cold and had zero response to her calls.
Finally, she decided to try her luck with Yu Mei, but Yu Mei was just the same as the two. She seemed to have held on by sheer willpower, and once she had delivered her cryptic message to Zou Liqin, she immediately passed out.
Zou Liqin's senses were still groggy, and anxiety began hitting her when she realized she was the only person who seemed conscious.
On realizing the precarious position she and they were in, out of reflex, she hurriedly searched for the mallet He Shan had lent her, which she luckily found wasn't too far from where she had woken up from.
She hurriedly grabbed it and ran to Zou Yi's side. She crouched on one knee, shielding Zou Yi's body to her back. After carefully positioning herself next to Zou Yi, she had the time to look around.
"Where are we?" she wondered as she cautiously looked around her.
They looked like they had been sequestered in a two-hundred-meter cylindrical patch of grassland, surrounded by trees too tall for her comfort.
Zou Yi tried to see their top but could only see a blinding white light and hazy leaves. She gave up trying to find out how tall the trees were when it started affecting her vision and making her dizzy.
Swallow, cricket, bull, crane, katydid, cicada....what did she mean by this? I still can't hear a thing.
Zou Liqin silently pondered on the last words Yu Mei said to her before she passed out. She looked around, hoping to find something that could correlate with what Yu Mei told her, but all she was met with was a regular forest grove and grass.
Maintaining her position next to Zou Yi, she stared at each and every tree that was close to her. Ten minutes passed by without her gleaning anything from them. Seeing she was getting nowhere, she looked at Zou Yi and the trees, seemingly debating about something before finally gritting her teeth and leaving Zou Yi as she went to the closest tree.
As she moved towards it, her eyes kept darting back to Zou Yi, afraid something would happen to him as she moved towards the tree.
Nothing seems distinctive about it,... muttered Zou Liqin as she traced her hand upon the bark of the cedar tree closest to her. She looked around it at the undergrowth and even plucked some of its leaves, but still, she didn't manage to find any clue that remotely resembled what Yu Mei was talking about.
Besides Yu Mei's clues, she was half hoping where they were was maybe the special zone Yang Qing mentioned. She could afford to let her guard down a bit if it was. However, she hadn't spotted an image of the bullfrog that was the identifying marker of an area as a special zone.
When she was done with that one tree, she moved to another while still ensuring to keep a close eye on Zou Yi. Almost one and a half hours passed with nothing to show for her efforts.
In those two hours, she had investigated over a dozen trees, and each was more thorough than the next. She even examined each blade of grass beneath them to confirm, and when that didn't show anything, she dug up around the trees to see if the clues may have been hidden beneath the grass. The result was fruitless.
With every passing minute, her anxiety grew. She didn't find anything remotely valuable around her. Zou Yi and the rest had not woken up despite He Shan saying the side effects would last thirty minutes to an hour. The limit had long been exceeded, but they were still asleep, unconscious.
With how unnerved Zou Liqin was already, she couldn't even tell if they were asleep or unconscious or if they had been attacked by something as they were being swallowed by the river, leaving her as the only survivor.
Her breathing turned erratic along with her thoughts as she loudly muttered,
"You're in a test, you're in a test, you're in a test....." over and over like it was a meditation chant to help her calm down.
That mantra failed. Her eyes were bulging; she was shaking and pulling her hair as she walked around and around the circular patch of grass. She seemed to have reached the end of her mental tether when she plopped herself to the ground with a look of despair and eyes welled up with tears.
"You're in a test..." she softly whispered. It didn't sound like she believed it.
Despite regaining full mobility of her legs and balance, she crawled to her brother. She curled into a ball when she reached him and held his hands.
"Zou Yi, I know you always say I'm more talented than you and destined for great things, but you're the stronger one to me. I don't know if I would have survived the past five years if I had done it alone.
Before the test, I thought with what we have been through, I was finally brave enough to face any circumstance that presented itself, so you won't have to worry about me all the time, even at the expense of your well-being, and when Brother Yang Qing offered to let us take the test to join the Order, I thought to myself...this is it, a chance to show my brother that I can be brave, but look at where I am now..."
Zou Liqin's soft cries echoed around the silence of the grove, and with how hollow it seemed, the cries, despite being soft, were echoed around.
Updat𝒆d fr𝒐m freew𝒆bnov𝒆l.c(o)m