#and bff responded 'because she just makes macaroni with different sauces'

[shamera]

NaNo day 18

...I fell asleep during my writing time. 😭 did you know this hunter au is now over 12k? it is 22 pages on my document already. stopping here because it is now 5am and also this feels like a natural point to stop

today when i wake up, if i have time, i will work on this fight scene. that's if i have time, so we shall see! fight scene and flashbacks might be entirety of chapter two. dfs in chapter three. 👀

(or if i miss him too much, i go back to the time loop)

nano stats so far: 30k for mlc nonsense (+8k for love and redemption nonsense)

currently word count before bed: 38,331 / 50,000

They ran aimlessly, and Bei Yun gasped out between steps, “If you’re all volunteering to stay, please let me go! I’m like Miss Li and I can’t be of any help, I’m no good at running or hiding either, if I stay, I’d just die! Please!” He reached forward to pull at He Xiaofeng’s shoulder, prompting her to give a painful gasp as the movement jerked on her injured arm and had her crashing down mid-step while running. 

“What are you doing?” Fang Duobing demanded angrily as he noticed, stopping mid-step as well despite the burning protest in his legs, and Bei Yun cringed back apologetically as he pulled his aunt up to her feet again, noting she was so pale her skin almost glowed in the dark as she grimaced in pain. “Come on, we have to go!”

“I’m—” He Xiaofeng bit out, and then grit her teeth. “I stepped badly.”

Not merely ‘badly’, it seemed, with the way her skin dotted with sweat within moments of being pulled up. Li Lianhua came to a stop as well, and said, “She needs to leave the dungeon now, we have to run and she can’t do that anymore!”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Bei Yun called from steps away, eyes wide with panic. “I didn’t mean to— I just wanted to get her attention—”

“Both of them,” Li Lianhua said grimly, and grabbed onto He Xiaofeng’s hand. “We’ll follow behind you. There’s no time to argue, go now!”

Despite looking as if she wanted badly to argue with him, He Xiaofeng responded to the words by grabbing onto Bei Yun with the hand holding the remaining crystals and ordering Fang Duobing, “Get back safe or I will hunt you down, do you hear me, Xiaobao?!”

Then they were gone, and Li Lianhua grabbed onto Fang Duobing’s sleeve again and the two of them took off in the dark tunnel, with only a single light left shining from Fang Duobing’s shirt pocket. 

“Why did you let him go?” Fang Duobing demanded as they ran, furious at the man who injured his aunt, even accidentally. Up to him, he would have only sent his aunt away and left one more crystal for the last emergency. Bei Yun was uninjured through the entire dungeon run, and could have been a good asset still. 

“He would have done it again,” Li Lianhua said darkly between huffed breaths, “Look out!”

The swarm of darkness had caught up with them finally, closing in before then and behind. Fang Duobing could make out the shine against carapaces, the quick needle feet, and— 

“This way,” He called out, and reversed his grip to yank at Li Lianhua’s hand, pivoting sharply to race down a passageway he almost missed due to the low light, hidden between cragged rock edges and drowned in further darkness. It could be a trap, it could be a dead end, but at the very least Fang Duobing couldn’t hear more skittering from that passageway, and if they could just hide until the monsters passed, if they could catch the tail end of the swarm to kill two more to obtain the crystals, then they would be home free— 

The echoes of thousands of needle feet against stone rushed behind them, swarming the area they were just standing, although Fang Duobing didn’t turn back to look, pushing forward as fast as he could in the narrow passageway, the jagged stone walls closing in from the sides and above him until he and Li Lianhua couldn’t run side by side anymore, but had to push ahead one person at a time, with Fang Duobing leading into the darkness with the tiny light of his phone and dragging Li Lianhua behind him in a tight grip. 

The passage was closing in, smaller and smaller, and there was a grim satisfaction for Fang Duobing as he was forced to turn sideways to continue pushing forward, because at least this meant if they were ambushed here, there were be fewer monsters that could come after them, and in that case they could just kill two, all they needed were two more crystal shards! 

He could hear the monsters coming after them once more, echoing down the passageway. A little further, a little bit more and they could make a stand, if Fang Duobing stood in the front to ensure that Li Lianhua wouldn’t be hit with the poison, then he’d be able to—

“Stop!” Li Lianhua called, tugging back against Fang Duobing in attempts to pull him back, but it was too late. The passageway had been too dark to see, but suddenly Fang Duobing’s next running step hit air instead of ground, and he pitched forward into the darkness, and then the both of them were tumbling, falling, into a cavern of black. 

There wasn’t enough time for panic to set in before Fang Duobing hit the floor, softer than he imagined, but still with enough force to knock him out. 

— 

Two years previous, and a year after Fang Duobing Awakened as a Hunter only to be rejected by all the sects due to his parents’ insistence that they would ruin any sect that dared take their darling son into a profession with such a high mortality rate, Fang Duobing ran away from home and crossed paths with Li Lianhua. 

Back then, he had been soft and idealistic, sure that the world was a good and chivalrous place and the people in it good and honest. Everyone was just trying to make a living, trying to live their lives, and when he saw a group of looming men standing over someone who had already been pushed down onto the ground, he couldn’t just stand around and do nothing! 

He was a Hunter, and maybe that meant the most only in dungeons, but he had years of martial arts training and his physique was generally better thanks to being Awakened, and following the chivalry that Li Xiangyi set for Sigu Sect, those who had the power to help also had a duty to help. 

So Fang Duobing beat up those threatening men. And got taken down to the local police station because of it, sputtering and protesting all the while. 

Apparently, the men hadn’t been doing anything wrong. Apparently, they were merely bullying the travelling physician into doing an autopsy for them regarding a local thief who recently died, but also apparently they hadn’t actually crossed any lines despite the locals muttering about the gangster-like behaviour disapprovingly. 

Intimidating was not assault, the police officer informed Fang Duobing harshly. Beating them up for it, however, was.

It wasn’t until the physician came down to the station with formal charges of stalking that Fang Duobing was let go, as now it meant he really had been defending a civilian. With the very serious threat of those men continuing their harassment of the physician, Fang Duobing decided to stick around for a few days, just to make sure nothing bad came of it. 

He didn’t want to be the reason the situation escalated into violence, after all. 

Yet those days revealed that the physician had never been the victim in the first place, and that Fang Duobing likely should have been protecting those men as Li Lianhua masterfully connived them until it was revealed the thief had never been dead, merely faking, and that the entire fiasco involved documents originally stolen years ago and then resold, and then finally stolen back as the legality of ownership remained hazy to local authorities. 

Possession was nine tenth of the law, after all. 

Following that had been a chase searching for illegally distributed items taken from dungeons, and Fang Duobing’s first excursion in Li Lianhua’s converted school bus (dubbed Lotus Tower) that felt like it was half kitchen and half old apothecary with only a pull out futon for sleeping space. He appropriated the surprisingly luxurious rooftop tent as his own space (as well as Li Lianhua’s dog Hulijing half the nights), and learned to love the summer breeze and nighttime noises. 

In those first weeks tagging along with Li Lianhua from town to town, Fang Duobing felt like he saw more of the world than he ever had travelling on planes and inside expensive cars with darkened windows. He saw the countryside roll by, spoke to random strangers, and helped the elderly carry their groceries back home for them. He paid too much for handmade trinkets in night markets, and bought gift after gift for Li Lianhua’s tiny space until his apps got declined by his mother. 

He couldn’t fathom Li Lianhua’s strange and nomadic lifestyle. The man was entirely off grid, preferring small villages to big cities, and didn’t even have a phone! He had solar panels and a modern kitchen, yet the most advanced technology was a dingy laptop tucked away underneath the bed that was rarely used, while he filled his spaces with books and brochures from places he’d been. He cooked his own meals and crocheted his own sweaters and made his own hair accessories, and forced Fang Duobing to help around the bus fixing broken tiles and leaking pipes, hauling fresh water and emptying out tanks. 

Yet Fang Duobing felt like he somehow learned more about living in the first month he spent with Li Lianhua than he had his entire childhood. 

And then he might have gotten a little too enthusiastic when they drove close to one of the older gates outside a city, and Li Lianhua contacted He Xiaofeng to drag him away. 

—

It was the rumbling of the ground behind him that startled Fang Duobing back into consciousness. 

His face was pressed against dirt, and he could taste it in his mouth as he coughed and attempted to push himself up from the ground. Unlike the cave they had been in, this space was lit up, luminescent, and his eyes adjusted to see glowing plants covering the ground like grass, sparks of faint light lifting from the plants up into the air like reverse raindrops, floating lazily before fading away once it got too far up. 

Around him, the space didn’t look like where they had come from. Fang Duobing grimaced as he realised he had a strand of hair in his mouth, and spit it out hastily, then spit again and again to rid himself of the taste of dirt. His legs throbbed with his heartbeat, and his left shoulder felt heavily bruised. He had a headache as well, ringing in his ears combined with a dull numbing sensation that bled into his vision in a form of synesthesia. His hair was limp and mostly fallen out of his ponytail, matted with dirt and blood. From a head wound, he realised, as he must have hit his head hard when he fell, but the bleeding had already stopped. 

The area was so large that he couldn’t see the end of it, like a field of tall grass, all lit up, glowing and somehow emitting a dull, numbing noise that made his head feel heavy and slow. Fang Duobing shook his head, attempting to dispel the fog, yet that only aggravated his headache. 

It took him a long second for his disjointed memories to clear up. 

The sudden gate. The dungeon. The fire. The chase, and the fall. 

“Li Lianhua,” Fang Duobing breathed out, and scrambled to his knees despite the sharp pangs of pain at his movement. Everyone else was gone, and it was him and Li Lianhua left in the dungeon now, so why was he alone? He looked around frantically, but the grass was tall as his thigh, enough to easily hide a fallen person. 

They had fallen together, so he couldn’t be far. Fang Duobing attempted to stand, only to collapse under his own weight, the skin of his legs incandescent with pain now, feeling like it was smeared with burning oil, and Fang Duobing couldn’t help the long hiss of pain. He wanted to pull at the gauze, to rub off his skin, but knew better than to do so. 

It seemed that just because he had natural immunity to dungeons as a Hunter didn’t mean he was impervious to its effects. 

Another rumble of the earth beneath him had Fang Duobing freezing in place, the hair on the back of his neck tingling in a fear response. 

There was definitely something else with them in this space, and it was far, far larger than any of the monsters in the dungeon they encountered previously. 

He glanced up nervously, fearfully, still scanning his surroundings to look for Li Lianhua, but… now that he knew to look for it, he could see an incline at least ten metres away, a slope that climbed up so naturally he thought the grass might have grown taller there, but that wouldn’t make sense as the colouration was different. Between earth and flesh tone, the creature was long and curled up, with ridges and spines that protruded from the soft skin. There was a certain texture to it, like strands of rope coiled together into something bigger than itself, in the shape of something that looked between a worm and a snake. 

It was large as a house, coiled together and fast asleep. 

Fang Duobing had a slow and bitter realisation. 

The rescue teams weren’t going to find them, not even if they searched through the entire dungeon. One of the laws passed after the downfall of Sigu Sect and Jinyuan Alliance had been to forbid Hunters from destroying dungeons entirely, to ensure the stability of the gates and to accumulate materials from existing dungeons. Gates fluctuated with the amount of monsters inside the dungeon, and the only way to destroy a dungeon completely was to take out the greatest monster within it. 

In order to do that, the entire sect often assembled with alliances to other sects as well, but that hadn’t happened in ten years. No one even tried anymore. 

Fang Duobing had fallen right into the room of the dungeon boss.