Mizue’s kimono was akin to the petals of a bud, and the moment it dropped to her feet was when she began to bloom like a rose, her topaz-colored quaint little feet acting as the stamen1.
Lily and Shimizu expressed slight admiration. Mizue’s life and responsibilities had forced her to make the choice of participating in this treasure hunt despite her age and identity, and this embellished her originally imperfect body with the perfection of patience, perseverance and dedication possessed by a lonesome adult woman.
Mizue was now dressed in just white undergarments and entered the pond with faintly blushing cheeks.
She squatted inside the pond and bathed conscientiously.
However, no change occurred even after some time passed.
“It didn’t work?” Lily felt puzzled.
“Maybe it’s just an ordinary pond,” Shimizu added.
“Or that it requires everyone to bathe in the pond.”
As Lily and Shimizu had sweated out a lot, they decided to try bathing in the pond despite their unwillingness.
The duo disrobed their outer garments and entered the pond while still dressed in chest binding undergarments and stripped out of their minidresses once they were inside the water before setting them aside.
The water felt a little cool and pleasant to the touch for Lily and looked especially clear, so she believed there wasn’t anything wrong with it.
An aged, masculine voice reached Lily’s ears at this moment, “It’s not her…”
“Who is it?!” Lily covered her breasts vigilantly but saw no one else in the cavern.
The echoes of rock movements sounded from nearby, so Lily, Shimizu and Mizue dressed up properly and made for that direction, in the middle of which Mizue paused to bend over and look at the spirit candle inside the stone lantern.
Lily thought she discovered something, so she questioned her, “What’s the matter?”
“Um… Miss Lily. C-Can I take this spirit candle away?”
“That’s… up to you,” Lily felt flummoxed about how to respond.
Mizue took the spirit candle and blew it out before stuffing it inside her bosom2 before following Lily and Shimizu ahead. The trio came to the open-spaced region again and discovered that a passage had opened up on the opposite wall, while the guardian samurai had returned to just normal armors leaning against the cavern’s walls.
The trio moved forward vigilantly because of the strangeness of the situation, but the armors didn’t react to them.
After entering the passage and moving forward for a while, a 100 m wide chasm of unfathomable depths came up in front of the trio. However, the chasm had at least three ropes running across it.
Lily tested the toughness of the ropes with her blade sheath and discovered that they were quite flexible despite possessing rugged durability, which made it a lot more troublesome for them to walk across it because of the erratic gusts blowing through the chasm.
“We can hang upside down on these ropes by hooking our legs around it and pull ourselves to the other side with our hands,” Lily suggested.
Shimizu expressed some hesitation, “The method you mentioned might be the best way to cross the chasm, but a posture like that is a bit immodest in my opinion, Lil’ Sis.”
“Safety first, Sis. It’s not like there’s anyone else here,” Lily reasoned, “The gusts from below worry me a lot since it will be disastrous if we fall into the chasm.”
“Alright. Let’s do as you say, then.”
“How about you, Miss Mizue?” Lily questioned her.
“Yes…” Mizue rubbed her thighs together subconsciously, “Don’t look at me like that. I-I was once called the genius of my dojo… although it’s a bit embarrassing to mention this now.”
“Let’s do it as I said, then.”
Lily crouched down and grabbed the rope before moving forward slowly and grabbed the rope with her legs as she flipped over below it.
Shimizu also followed her actions and grabbed the rope similarly.
As for Mizue, although her skills had rusted compared to before, she still had a pretty decent foundation and possessed quite a flexible and balanced body.
The trio pulled themselves along the rope like this by using the best qualities of their womanly bodies, lightness and flexibility, to their fullest.
Lily could’ve been faster, but she still maintained the same speed as Mizue.
A powerful gust blew up from below all of sudden at this moment and wildly rocked the ropes they were holding.
“Kyah!” Followed by Mizue’s scream, the rope slipped out of her hands, leaving her on the brink of plunging down into the chasm.
The rope wasn’t in Lily’s proximity, so it made it difficult for her to reach Mizue. However, she still reacted quickly and took out Crescent Moon to support Mizue’s body from below.
“Hold onto it!” Lily shouted at her.
Mizue was still able to react in the middle of her descent, so she clenched onto Lily’s sheath with her thighs the moment she landed on top of it and grabbed the tip of Lily’s sheath with both her hands.
The rope swayed once and Mizue found herself hanging head down in midair while clenched onto Lily’s sheath with the bottomless chasm below her.
Just a single look at the dark chasm below made Mizue weak in the thighs.
“Don’t be afraid! Clench harder!” Lily shouted.
“Okay!” Mizue shouted back and clenched Lily’s sheath desperately with her thighs while tightening the hold of her hands as well3.
However, Mizue’s hair and dress had overturned because of gravity and flashed her flawless buttocks that were clutching onto the dark sheath between them.
“Hold on, Miss Mizue. I’ll pull you over in a moment,” Lily assured her.
“Huh? B-But…”
“Enough. Just keep clenching if you wish to live.”
“Okay!” Mizue clenched the hardest she could while blushing all the way up to her neck.
“Are you fine, Lily?” Shimizu asked worriedly.
“I’m fine. This bit of weight is nothing compared to Yasutsuna’s weight,” Lily pulled forward with one hand while carrying Mizue with her other hand.
“Ngh…” Mizue quivered as the sensations produced in her by the movements of Lily’s sheath made her recall the pleasure she hadn’t felt in years and left her in a messy, blushing state that made her feel like never letting go of Lily’s sheath even if she wanted her to release it from her thighs.
Lily and Shimizu finally climbed onto the other side a few moments later and Lily then pulled Mizue up.
Lily tried to pull her sheath out yet found herself unable to do so because the quivering Mizue was still clutching onto it with her all.
Left with no other choice, Lily kneeled down and slapped Mizue’s butt cheek gently, “Alright, Sister Mizue. You’re safe now, so you can release… Sister Mizue? Are you okay?”
Mizue had a dazed look, so it made Lily wonder if she had been frightened out of her wits.
Lily thus had to wait a few ten seconds until Mizue recovered her wits and let go of her sheath embarrassedly.
Mizue felt so embarrassed that she didn’t dare to look the duo in the eyes. As a married samurai woman, it was quite embarrassing for her to show such a silly sight in front of girls in the prime of their youth.
“Let’s go,” Lily returned her sheath back to her waist and turned around to walk forward.
Mizue remained seated on the ground momentarily and looked at Lily’s back longingly.
“It would’ve been nice if my husband was as amazing as her…” Mizue sighed faintly from loneliness and stood up to follow after Lily with flushed cheeks.
The trio heard a commotion from ahead after walking for a while.
“An eldritch aura!” Lily sensed a powerful eldritch aura from ahead.
The trio moved forward cautiously and found the light from the end of the passage turning brighter along with the loudness of the noises.
The moment they exited the passage, the trio found themselves inside of a several hundred-meter wide cavern. A hole bordered by an ancient ring made of wood existed inside this cavern and it was connected to the passages on the cavern walls via wooden bridges and ladders.
At a glance, it seemed that hundreds of samurai had exited from the passages and were in the middle of watching something inside the hole by standing on the wooden ring.
A cold and long wind blew up from the depths of the hole and this made Lily feel that the hole was incredibly deep.
The hole just had a round stone platform in the center that was less than 10 m wide. A bunch of iron chains ran diagonally from the circular wall and were nailed to the round stone platform that was suspended in the middle of this unfathomably deep hole. At the back of the round stone platform existed two streams of water that cascaded down from the roof of the cavern and converged towards a raised region that was in the shape of an altar to form two muscular, gigantic and lifelike loinclothed men made of water with ugly features who carried a wooden chest motionlessly.
“It’s the treasure!” Lily exclaimed with her eyes fixed on the chest.
“It’s the treasure! We’ve found it!” As luck would have it, the blonde dandy actually exited from one of the nearby passages with a kunoichi and a samurai woman and shouted while pointing at the monstrous and gigantic water men.
“Just watch me as I take the treasure! Hmph! How dare that old woman has the nerve to ditch me! I’ll make sure she regrets it all her life!” Yajiro arrived in front of the waist-thick iron chain where the winds were so strong that it made him almost lose his footing.
A lot of samurai had begun descending the chains to reach the round platform now.
However, Lily noticed that some samurai just stood on the wooden ring calmly even then, so she refrained from taking any rash action as well.
Yajiro didn’t dare to show off again and began to crawl down the iron chain while holding onto it seriously.
The fastest samurai had reached the round platform by now.
“Dammit! They’re going to take the treasure away,” Shimizu grumbled.
“Calm down, Sister Shimizu. Let’s see how it goes for them,” Lily placated her.
The samurai at the front looked at all the samurai who were closing in towards the platform via the iron chains and leaped towards the water men who were carrying the wooden chest.
The reason he had leaped forward was because he intended to clutch onto the box.
However, one of the gigantic water men’s expression turned vicious suddenly before he kicked out with his robust, water-formed leg.
The muscular water-formed leg struck the samurai in the blink of an eye and sent him flying like a soccer ball, resulting in him turning into a lump of flesh after hitting the hole’s circular wall.
“What?!” All those present were surprised.
“So fast!” Lily felt a chill pass through her. The samurai just now had been at the 6th-stage Awakened level and was by no means weak. However, a simple kick from the water man had turned him into mincemeat. The water man’s kick was much faster than the swiftness of Lily’s blade and even she was unable to gauge the power behind it accurately. Although Lily couldn’t sense any spirit power from the water men, she believed that even she would’ve died without a doubt if she received the terrifying kick from earlier.
“Just what are these water men? How come they are so terrifying? Fortunately, it looks like they’ll just continue holding up the wooden chest unless they’re disturbed,” Lily surmised.
The other samurai stopped descending the chains after this incident, but as it was much harder to climb them than descend them because of the winds, they were forced to hold onto the chains dazedly.
“Look, Lily. The water streams have become smaller,” Shimizu pointed out.
Lily observed that the two water streams cascaded down to the sides of the altar at the back of the round platform to form a complex grid of water channels that remerged to form the two water men.
However, the water actually flowed through the two water men as well. Lily noticed that the water flowed into the water men through one of their feet and flowed out of them through their other feet before cascading down into the chasm below the altar through the channels on it.
The water streams cascading down from the roof continued to become smaller.
Lily’s bosom heaved up and down intensely as this meant that the scramble for the treasure would begin the moment the water streams stopped cascading down!
