"Hey, are you still breathing?" Han Dong asked. Zhao Lin jolted in surprise. He immediately sat up and frantically felt his entire body. "Are we safe? Are we back on Earth? The sky is blue!"
Chu Xinghe stood up slowly. His legs trembled under the weight of his body. He looked around. The mountain slope was filled with incredibly lush green vegetation. Giant trees towered high below them. The air here felt very fresh, even too pure, making Xinghe's lungs sting slightly as he inhaled deeply.
"This is not Earth," Xinghe said, instantly crushing Zhao Lin's hopes. "Look up."
Everyone tilted their heads to follow Xinghe's gaze. In the clear blue sky, there were two suns. One was very large, emitting a golden-white light, while the second was smaller and located on the eastern horizon, emitting a reddish-orange glow. The shapes of the clouds in the sky were also strange; some formed spiral patterns that never occur naturally in Earth's atmosphere.
Zhao Lin struck the muddy ground with his fist. "Damn it! What kind of place is this now? Why can't we just go back to Guangzhou!"
"At least we didn't die in space," Lin Mei remarked. She cleaned the mud from her hair. "We have air to breathe. We have ground to stand on. This is much better than that mercury pool or the planet without a sun."
Li Wei wiped away his tears. "But we don't have food. Our food backpacks were left inside the cauldron when it opened. All the vacuum water pouches and crystal stones are gone."
The reality hit them hard. Without the food and water supplies from the pavilion's refrigerator, they had to find a way to survive purely from this alien environment. Xinghe stared toward the snow-capped mountain peak far above them. The peak looked very small from their current position.
There, wedged among the icy rocks, the giant bronze cauldron looked like a dark dot. The nine corpses of dragons and phoenixes were caught in various corners of the cliff, holding the cauldron to prevent it from sliding down. It was the only object they recognized, the only trace of their origin.
"We have to stay around here," Han Dong said. He pointed toward the dense forest below the slope. "There might be fruits or a clean water source down there. We must divide tasks to find food before night falls."
Xin Yan shook her head slowly. "I don't want to separate. We don't know what kind of wild beasts live in a place with two suns like this. If there are monsters like the ones we saw on the dead planet, we won't have a chance to fight back."
Yun Hai agreed with Xin Yan's words. "Xin Yan is right. We stay together. We move down this slope together to find temporary shelter."
Chu Xinghe was still staring intently toward the mountain peak. His intuition told him something was wrong with the position where the bronze cauldron had fallen. An object that heavy and large was wedged only by relying on the bodies of giant corpses whose positions were unstable on the snow. A faint rumbling sound came from above. The sound resembled muffled thunder. A subtle vibration traveled through the muddy ground they stood on.
"What is 그 sound?" Fang Hua asked in a panic.
Xinghe narrowed his eyes sharply. The shadow of the dark dot on the mountain peak shifted. Snow and white ice chunks began to fall from the cliff below it. One of the giant black dragons serving as the primary anchor for the cauldron slowly slid down because the ice cliff its body rested against shattered. The thick iron chains binding the dragon's neck pulled the bronze cauldron very hard. The bronze cauldron lost its balance at the peak. The giant object slipped from the sharp rocks and began to roll down.
"The cauldron is falling!" Li Wei shrieked. The nine giant corpses and the bronze cauldron rolled down the other side of the mountain peak. That side did not lead to the slope where the eight teenagers had fallen, but rather toward a gaping abyss located exactly behind the mountain range.
Zhao Lin widened his eyes in horror. All his logic about wealth and the way home immediately pointed to the only vehicle that had ever brought them this far. If that cauldron fell and was destroyed, they would be trapped forever as primitive humans on this mountain slope without hope.
"No! Wait! That's our way home!" Zhao Lin shouted hysterically. The youth immediately jumped to his feet, ignoring the pain throughout his body, and ran through the bushes climbing the slope toward the mountain peak.
Chu Xinghe did not think twice. His instinctive reaction told him exactly the same thing as Zhao Lin. That cauldron was the key. The cauldron held his grandfather's mysteries. The cauldron had carvings and mechanisms he had not yet fully solved. He could not let that object vanish into a bottomless abyss.
"Zhao Lin, run faster!" Chu Xinghe shouted while following him up the slope.
"Xinghe! Zhao Lin! Where are you going?!" Han Dong shouted from below. "You can't possibly hold an object that large!"
Chu Xinghe did not listen. He exerted the remaining strength in his legs to cut through the thick mud. His shoes sank every time he stepped, but he kept pushing his body up. Zhao Lin ran ahead of him with his breath roaring loudly, his hands reaching for long grass to help pull his body upward. They passed the line of bushes and stepped back onto the boundary of the snow area.
Chu Xinghe's chest felt as if it were burning from the inside. He ran up the slope with an incline that tortured his thigh and calf muscles. Zhao Lin fell onto his knees, coughing up blood from his mouth due to extreme physical strain, but the wealthy youth crawled back up using both hands and feet like a desperate wild animal.
"The cauldron, I have to go home, my father must be looking for me," Zhao Lin rambled with tears flowing down and freezing on his cheeks.
Chu Xinghe ran past Zhao Lin. The distance to the mountain peak still had hundreds of meters left. The rumbling sound from the other side of the mountain grew louder. The bronze cauldron continued to slide down. The iron chains clashed against each other, creating sparks that were faintly visible from behind the peak. Chu Xinghe kept climbing. Snow began to cover his shoes up to his ankles.
He slipped back several steps but immediately plunged his hands into the ice to stop his slide. He stood up again and ran. Their distance grew closer to the peak. Perhaps only fifty meters remained to be able to look toward the abyss behind the mountain. However, nature in this strange place was not on their side.
A powerful and incredibly cold wind suddenly blew from the direction of the peak. A mountain blizzard swept the snowy slope with a force equivalent to a concrete wall being pushed by force. The impact of the wind hit Chu Xinghe's chest squarely. His steps stopped immediately. He tried to lean his body forward to fight the wind, but the strength of the storm was much greater than his body weight.
Xinghe's body was lifted from the icy ground and thrown back hard into the air. Zhao Lin, who was a dozen meters below Xinghe, suffered the same fate. His body was swept by the blizzard and thrown rolling down the snow slope. Xinghe hit the ground with his back, sliding down for several dozen meters before he managed to dig his heels into a protrusion of ice stone to stop.
Xinghe lifted his head, trying to fight the blinding gust of wind. A blizzard suddenly descended, blocking his view. He could no longer run up. He could only kneel on the thick snow, pressing both hands to the ground to hold his body from being thrown further down. Zhao Lin knelt not far from him.
The youth cried loudly, striking the snow with his fists repeatedly. "Come back! Bring me back home! Don't fall!"
Chu Xinghe stared helplessly toward the mountain peak which was now covered by the blizzard. The rumbling sound from the cauldron and the nine corpses grinding against the cliff stones was very clearly heard. That rumble lasted for several seconds that felt agonizing, before finally turning into silence. There was no more sound of metal hitting stone. There was no more sound of chains being pulled.
The bronze cauldron and the nine giant animals had slipped completely past the edge of the cliff. Those giant objects plunged straight down into the dark abyss behind the mountain range. Their only connection to Earth, the only interdimensional vehicle that protected them from the sea of chaos, was now truly gone from sight.
Chu Xinghe remained in a kneeling position. The cold from the snow pierced through his pants and soaked into his knees, but he did not care at all. He lowered his head, his breath coming out in thin wisps of white smoke. Zhao Lin was still crying loudly, lamenting his fate on the snow. From below the slope, far in the muddy green area, their other friends could only stand still watching the failure of the pursuit from afar.
Chu Xinghe stood up. His knees trembled due to the despair that had crept in earlier and the exhaustion after being thrown from the cauldron and rolling down. He wiped the ice crystals frozen on his eyelashes, staring blankly at the mountain peak where the bronze furnace had previously been. Nearby, Zhao Lin was still slumped, clawing the snow with the same heartbreaking despair.
"Stand up, Zhao Lin," Xinghe said. His voice was flat, although his face showed the same misfortune. "We cannot stay here."
"The cauldron... the cauldron is gone, Xinghe," Zhao Lin looked up. Snot was frozen on his upper lip. "We have nothing left. No refrigerator, no rations, no... protection. We will die on this mountain."
"If you stay here, you will indeed die," Xinghe walked toward Zhao Lin and grabbed the youth's jacket collar, pulling him up by force. "Look down there, everyone is waiting and everyone is in despair. If you want to give up, you should just stay here and never come back with us."
Chu Xinghe released his grip on Zhao Lin's jacket collar. The wealthy youth staggered, his trembling legs nearly making him slide back on the snow. Chu Xinghe did not look back. He began to step down the slope, leaving the snow area toward the muddy green area where the other six stood frozen. Xinghe's steps felt very heavy. Han Dong was the first person to approach him when Xinghe reached the bottom of the slope.
"It really fell?" Han Dong asked. His face, full of scratches, looked stiff.
"Fell into the abyss behind the mountain," Xinghe answered. He wiped his face, which was dirty with remnants of mud and snow. "There was no sound of impact at the bottom. That means the abyss is very deep or the bottom is not hard ground."
Li Wei walked closer with sagging shoulders. "So what now? We don't even have a bottle of water. The backpack on my back earlier was thrown off when I rolled down the snow. Everything is gone."
"I still have this bottle," Lin Mei showed a dented vacuum water bottle. "But it's empty. I drank it to the last drop when we were still inside the furnace."
Xin Yan and Yun Hai approached. Yun Hai had to be supported because the wound on her knee from the blue planet had opened again due to the impact when falling. They all sat on the roots of a giant tree protruding from the ground. The tree had silver bark and wide, deep purple leaves.
"Look around you," Xinghe said while catching his breath. "The air here is very dense with energy. I don't feel tired as quickly as usual even though we just climbed the snowy slope with our lungs forced to the limit."
"You're right," Han Dong moved his shoulder. "Usually after a sprint like that, my heart would be thumping for ten minutes. But now I feel my heart rate is stable. And this scratch on my hand... look, the ice scratch from earlier has already started to dry."
"This place is not Earth," Yun Hai touched a purple leaf nearby. "Those twin suns prove we are in a binary star system. And this vegetation... I have never seen chlorophyll that produces such a deep purple color. Maybe the light spectrum is different."
Zhao Lin finally reached the bottom. He walked dragging his feet, entering the group circle with a devastated face. He did not speak. He only sat on the ground, turning his back to everyone and staring toward the dense forest below the slope.
"We need water and shelter," Xinghe broke the silence. "The large sun has already started to descend toward the west. We don't know how long the daylight is here. If night falls and the temperature drops like on the blue planet, we will die of hypothermia without the bronze furnace for protection."
"We have to go down, toward that forest," Han Dong pointed down the gentler slope. "Where there are trees that large, there is usually a water source. And maybe there are fruits that can be eaten."
"What if there are wild beasts?" Fang Hua asked with a trembling voice. "The monsters on the blue planet... what if they are here too?"
"If they were here, they would have attacked when we fell earlier," Xinghe answered. "So far all I hear is the wind and the rustle of leaves. No roars or ground vibrations."
They began to move down. Han Dong led the way, using a wooden branch he had broken as a guiding stick. Xinghe walked at the very back, watching every movement in the bushes. The terrain below the slope was much friendlier, but the humidity increased drastically.
After walking for about an hour, Li Wei stopped suddenly. "Did you all hear that?"