Fang Zhen slowed down.
Faintly, he saw the light of torches about two hundred meters ahead.
He stopped, and Avera hopped off the front seat.
Fang Zhen took out a pair of binoculars and peered toward the dots of firelight ahead.
In the magnified view, he saw seven or eight people, dressed mainly in sea-blue, waiting before a cliffside cave.
The central figure of the group was a man of about forty, wearing a blue coronet and dressed head-to-toe in sea-blue. He was standing motionlessly at the cave's entrance, waiting.
The cliffside cave looked like the horizontally split maw of a beast, ready to swallow a person whole at any moment.
Fang Zhen lowered the binoculars and handed them to Avera.
Avera took them, her curiosity piqued. She looked through them, and an expression of surprise bloomed on her face—not because of the people holding torches, but because of the binoculars themselves.
